"And why you want it in such a hurry. I see." Moffatt reverted to the
study of his boots. "It's a lot of money."
"Yes. That's the difficulty. And I...she..."
Ralph's tongue was again too thick for his mouth. "I'm afraid she won't
wait...or take less..."
Moffatt, abandoning the boots, was scrutinizing him through half-shut
lids. "No," he said slowly, "I don't believe Undine Spragg'll take a
single cent less."
Ralph felt himself whiten. Was it insolence or ignorance that had
prompted Moffatt's speech? Nothing in his voice or face showed the
sense of any shades of expression or of feeling: he seemed to apply
to everything the measure of the same crude flippancy. But such
considerations could not curb Ralph now. He said to himself "Keep your
temper--keep your temper--" and his anger suddenly boiled over.
"Look here, Moffatt," he said, getting to his feet, "the fact that I've
been divorced from Mrs. Marvell doesn't authorize any one to take that
tone to me in speaking of her."
Moffatt met the challenge with a calm stare under which there were
dawning signs of surprise and interest. "That so? Well, if that's the
case I presume I ought to feel the same way: I've been divorced from her
myself."
For an instant the words conveyed no meaning to Ralph; then they surged
up into his brain and flung him forward with half-raised arm. But he
felt the grotesqueness of the gesture and his arm dropped back to his
side. A series of unimportant and irrelevant things raced through his
mind; then obscurity settled down on it. "THIS man...THIS man..." was
the one fiery point in his darkened consciousness.... "What on earth
are you talking about?" he brought out.
"Why, facts," said Moffatt, in a cool half-humorous voice. "You didn't
know? I understood from Mrs. Marvell your folks had a prejudice against
divorce, so I suppose she kept quiet about that early episode. The truth
is," he continued amicably, "I wouldn't have alluded to it now if you
hadn't taken rather a high tone with me about our little venture; but
now it's out I guess you may as well hear the whole story. It's mighty
wholesome for a man to have a round now and then with a few facts. Shall
I go on?"
Ralph had stood listening without a sign, but as Moffatt ended he made a
slight motion of acquiescence. He did not otherwise change his attitude,
except to grasp with one hand the back of the chair that Moffatt pushed
toward him.
"Rather stand?..." Moffatt himself dropped back into his seat and took
the pose of easy narrative. "Well, it was this way. Undine Spragg and I
were made one at Opake, Nebraska, just nine years ago last month. My!
She was a beauty then. Nothing much had happened to her before but being
engaged for a year or two to a soft called Millard Binch; the same she
passed on to Indiana Rolliver; and--well, I guess she liked the change.
We didn't have what you'd called a society wedding: no best man or
bridesmaids or Voice that Breathed o'er Eden. Fact is, Pa and Ma didn't
know about it till it was over. But it was a marriage fast enough, as
they found out when they tried to undo it. Trouble was, they caught on
too soon; we only had a fortnight. Then they hauled Undine back to Apex,
and--well, I hadn't the cash or the pull to fight 'em. Uncle Abner was
a pretty big man out there then; and he had James J. Rolliver behind
him. I always know when I'm licked; and I was licked that time. So we
unlooped the loop, and they fixed it up for me to make a trip to Alaska.
Let me see--that was the year before they moved over to New York. Next
time I saw Undine I sat alongside of her at the theatre the day your
engagement was announced."
He still kept to his half-humorous minor key, as though he were in the
first stages of an after-dinner speech; but as he went on his bodily
presence, which hitherto had seemed to Ralph the mere average garment of
vulgarity, began to loom, huge and portentous as some monster released
from a magician's bottle. His redness, his glossiness, his baldness, and
the carefully brushed ring of hair encircling it; the square line of his
shoulders, the too careful fit of his clothes, the prominent lustre of
his scarf-pin, the growth of short black hair on his manicured hands,
even the tiny cracks and crows'-feet beginning to show in the hard close
surface of his complexion: all these solid witnesses to his reality
and his proximity pressed on Ralph with the mounting pang of physical
nausea.
"THIS man...THIS man..." he couldn't get beyond the thought: whichever
way he turned his haggard thought, there was Moffatt bodily blocking the
perspective...Ralph's eyes roamed toward the crystal toy that stood on
the desk beside Moffatt's hand. Faugh! That such a hand should have
touched it!
Suddenly he heard himself speaking. "Before my marriage--did you know
they hadn't told me?"
"Why, I understood as much..."