The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  As he sat talking in a low tone, questioning her about the music, asking her what she had been doing since he had last seen her, she was aware that he looked at her less than usual, and she also glanced away; but when she turned her eyes suddenly they always met his gaze.

  His talk remained impersonal. She was a little disappointed that he did not compliment her on her dress or her hair – Undine was accustomed to hearing a great deal about her hair, and the episode of the spangles had opened the way to a graceful allusion – but the instinct of sex told her that, under his quiet words, he was throbbing with the sense of her proximity. And his self-restraint sobered her, made her refrain from the flashing and fidgeting which were the only way she knew of taking part in the immemorial love-dance. She talked simply and frankly of herself, of her parents, of how few people they knew in New York, and of how, at times, she was almost sorry she had persuaded them to give up Apex.

  ‘You see, they did it entirely on my account; they’re awfully lonesome here; and I don’t believe I shall ever learn New York ways either,’ she confessed, turning on him the eyes of youth and truthfulness. ‘Of course I know a few people; but they’re not – not the way I expected New York people to be.’ She risked what seemed an involuntary glance at Mabel. ‘I’ve seen girls here tonight that I just long to know – they look so lovely and refined – but I don’t suppose I ever shall. New York’s not very friendly to strange girls, is it? I suppose you’ve got so many of your own already – and they’re all so fascinating you don’t care!’ As she spoke she let her eyes rest on his, half-laughing, half-wistful, and then dropped her lashes while the pink stole slowly up to them.

  When he left her he asked if he might hope to find her at home the next day.

  The night was fine, and Marvell, having put his cousin into her motor, started to walk home to Washington Square. At the corner he was joined by Mr Popple.

  ‘Hallo, Ralph, old man – did you run across our auburn beauty of the Stentorian? Who’d have thought old Harry Lipscomb’d have put us on to anything as good as that? Peter Van Degen was fairly taken off his feet – pulled me out of Mrs Monty Thurber’s box and dragged me ’round by the collar to introduce him. Planning a dinner at Martin’s already. Gad, young Peter must have what he wants when he wants it! I put in a word for you – told him you and I ought to be let in on the ground floor. Funny the luck some girls have about getting started. I believe this one’ll take if she can manage to shake the Lipscombs. I think I’ll ask to paint her; might be a good thing for the spring show. She’d show up splendidly as a pendant to my Mrs Van Degen – Blonde and Brunette … Night and Morning … Of course I prefer Mrs Van Degen’s type – Personally, I must have breeding – but as a mere bit of flesh and blood … hallo, ain’t you coming into the club?’

  Marvell was not coming into the club, and he drew a long breath of relief as his companion left him.

  Was it possible that he had ever thought leniently of the egregious Popple? The tone of social omniscience which he had once found so comic was now as offensive to him as a coarse physical touch. And the worst of it was that Popple, with the slight exaggeration of a caricature, really expressed the ideals of the world he frequented. As he spoke of Miss Spragg, so others at any rate would think of her: almost every one in Ralph’s set would agree that it was luck for a girl from Apex to be started by Peter Van Degen at a Café Martin dinner …

  Ralph Marvell, mounting his grandfather’s doorstep, looked up at the symmetrical old red house-front, with its frugal marble ornament, as he might have looked into a familiar human face.

  ‘They’re right – after all, in some ways they’re right,’ he murmured, slipping his key into the door.

  ‘They’ were his mother and old Mr Urban Dagonet, both, from Ralph’s earliest memories, so closely identified with the old house in Washington Square that they might have passed for its inner consciousness as it might have stood for their outward form; and the question as to which the house now seemed to affirm their intrinsic rightness was that of the social disintegration expressed by widely different architectural physiognomies at the other end of Fifth Avenue.

  As Ralph pushed the bolts behind him, and passed into the hall, with its dark mahogany doors and the quiet ‘Dutch interior’ effect of its black and white marble paving, he said to himself that what Popple called society was really just like the houses it lived in: a muddle of misapplied ornament over a thin steel shell of utility. The steel shell was built up in Wall Street, the social trimmings were hastily added in Fifth Avenue; and the union between them was as monstrous and factitious, as unlike the gradual homogeneous growth which flowers into what other countries know as society, as that between the Blois gargoyles on Peter Van Degen’s roof and the skeleton walls supporting them.

  That was what ‘they’ had always said; what, at least, the Dagonet attitude, the Dagonet view of life, the very lines of the furniture in the old Dagonet house expressed.

  Ralph sometimes called his mother and grandfather the Aborigines, and likened them to those vanishing denizens of the American continent doomed to rapid extinction with the advance of the invading race. He was fond of describing Washington Square as the ‘Reservation’, and of prophesying that before long its inhabitants would be exhibited at ethnological shows, pathetically engaged in the exercise of their primitive industries.

  Small, cautious, middle-class, had been the ideals of aboriginal New York; but it suddenly struck the young man that they were singularly coherent and respectable as contrasted with the chaos of indiscriminate appetites which made up its modern tendencies. He too had wanted to be ‘modern’, had revolted, half-humorously, against the restrictions and exclusions of the old code; and it must have been by one of the ironic reversions of heredity that, at this precise point, he began to see what there was to be said on the other side – his side, as he now felt it to be.

  VI

  UPSTAIRS, in his brown firelit room, he threw himself into an armchair, and remembered …

  Harvard first – then Oxford; then a year of wandering and rich initiation. Returning to New York, he had read law, and now had his desk in the office of the respectable firm in whose charge the Dagonet estate had mouldered for several generations. But his profession was the least real thing in his life. The realities lay about him now: the books jamming his old college bookcases and overflowing on chairs and tables; sketches too – he could do charming things, if only he had known how to finish them! – and, on the writing-table at his elbow, scattered sheets of prose and verse; charming things also, but, like the sketches, unfinished.

  Nothing in the Dagonet and Marvell tradition was opposed to this desultory dabbling with life. For four or five generations it had been the rule of both houses that a young fellow should go to Columbia or Harvard, read law, and then lapse into more or less cultivated inaction. The only essential was that he should live ‘like a gentleman’ – that is, with a tranquil disdain for mere money-getting, a passive openness to the finer sensations, one or two fixed principles as to the quality of wine, and an archaic probity that had not yet learned to distinguish between private and ‘business’ honour.

  No equipment could more thoroughly have unfitted the modern youth for getting on: it hardly needed the scribbled pages on the desk to complete the hopelessness of Ralph Marvell’s case. He had accepted the fact with a humorous fatalism. Material resources were limited on both sides of the house, but there would always be enough for his frugal wants – enough to buy books (not ‘editions’) and pay now and then for a holiday dash to the great centres of art and ideas. And meanwhile there was the world of wonders within him. As a boy at the seaside, Ralph, between tides, had once come on a cave – a secret inaccessible place with glaucous lights, mysterious murmurs, and a single shaft of communication with the sky. He had kept his find from the other boys, not churlishly, for he was always an outspoken lad, but because he felt there were things about the cave that the others, good fellows as they all were, couldn
’t be expected to understand, and that, anyhow, it would never be quite his cave again after he had let his thick-set freckled cousins play smuggler and pirate in it.

  And so with his inner world. Though so coloured by outer impressions, it wove a secret curtain about him, and he came and went in it with the same joy of furtive possession. One day, of course, some one would discover it and reign there with him – no, reign over it and him. Once or twice already a light foot had reached the threshold. His cousin Clare Dagonet, for instance: there had been a summer when her voice had sounded far down the windings … but he had run over to Spain for the autumn, and when he came back she was engaged to Peter Van Degen, and for a while it looked black in the cave. That was long ago, as time is reckoned under thirty; and for three years now he had felt for her only a half-contemptuous pity. To have stood at the mouth of his cave, and have turned from it to the Van Degen lair –!

  Poor Clare repented, indeed – she wanted it clearly understood – but she repented in the Van Degen diamonds, and the Van Degen motor bore her broken heart from opera to ball. She had been subdued to what she worked in, and she could never again find her way to the enchanted cave … Ralph, since then, had reached the point of deciding that he would never marry; reached it not suddenly or dramatically, but with such sober advisedness as is urged on those about to take the opposite step. What he most wanted, now that the first flutter of being was over, was to learn and to do – to know what the great people had thought, think about their thinking, and then launch his own boat: write some good verse if possible; if not, then critical prose. A dramatic poem lay among the stuff at his elbow; but the prose critic was at his elbow too, and not to be satisfied about the poem; and poet and critic passed the nights in hot if unproductive debate. On the whole, it seemed likely that the critic would win the day, and the essay on ‘The Rhythmical Structures of Walt Whitman’ take shape before ‘The Banished God’. Yet if the light in the cave was less supernaturally blue, the chant of its tides less laden with unimaginable music, it was still a thronged and echoing place when Undine Spragg appeared on its threshold …

  His mother and sister of course wanted him to marry. They had the usual theory that he was ‘made’ for conjugal bliss: women always thought that of a fellow who didn’t get drunk and have low tastes. Ralph smiled at the idea as he sat crouched among his secret treasures. Marry – but whom, in the name of light and freedom? The daughters of his own race sold themselves to the Invaders; the daughters of the Invaders bought their husbands as they bought an opera-box. It ought all to have been transacted on the Stock Exchange. His mother, he knew, had no such ambitions for him: she would have liked him to fancy a ‘nice girl’ like Harriet Ray. Harriet Ray was neither vulgar nor ambitious. She regarded Washington Square as the birthplace of Society, knew by heart all the cousinships of early New York, hated motorcars, could not make herself understood on the telephone, and was determined, if she married, never to receive a divorced woman. As Mrs Marvell often said, such girls as Harriet were growing rare. Ralph was not sure about this. He was inclined to think that, certain modifications allowed for, there would always be plenty of Harriet Rays for unworldly mothers to commend to their sons; and he had no desire to diminish their number by removing one from the ranks of the marriageable. He had no desire to marry at all – that had been the whole truth of it till he met Undine Spragg. And now –? He lit a cigar, and began to recall his hour’s conversation with Mrs Spragg.

  Ralph had never taken his mother’s social faiths very seriously. Surveying the march of civilization from a loftier angle, he had early mingled with the Invaders, and curiously observed their rites and customs. But most of those he had met had already been modified by contact with the indigenous: they spoke the same language as his, though on their lips it had often so different a meaning. Ralph had never seen them actually in the making, before they had acquired the speech of the conquered race. But Mrs Spragg still used the dialect of her people, and before the end of the visit Ralph had ceased to regret that her daughter was out. He felt obscurely that in the girl’s presence – frank and simple as he thought her – he should have learned less of life in early Apex.

  Mrs Spragg, once reconciled – or at least resigned – to the mysterious necessity of having to ‘entertain’ a friend of Undine’s, had yielded to the first touch on the weak springs of her garrulity. She had not seen Mrs Heeny for two days, and this friendly young man with the gentle manner was almost as easy to talk to as the masseuse. And then she could tell him things that Mrs Heeny already knew, and Mrs Spragg liked to repeat her stories. To do so gave her almost her sole sense of permanence among the shifting scenes of life. So that, after she had lengthily deplored the untoward accident of Undine’s absence, and her visitor, with a smile, and echoes of divers et ondoyant in his brain, had repeated her daughter’s name after her, saying: ‘It’s a wonderful find – how could you tell it would be such a fit?’ – it came to her quite easily to answer: ‘Why, we called her after a hair-waver father put on the market the week she was born –’ and then to explain, as he remained struck and silent: ‘It’s from undoolay, you know, the French for crimping; father always thought the name made it take. He was quite a scholar, and had the greatest knack for finding names. I remember the time he invented his Goliath Glue he sat up all night over the Bible to get the name … No, father didn’t start in as a druggist,’ she went on, expanding with the signs of Marvell’s interest; ‘he was educated for an undertaker, and built up a first-class business; but he was always a beautiful speaker, and after a while he sorter drifted into the ministry. Of course it didn’t pay him anything like as well, so finally he opened a drug-store, and he did first-rate at that too, though his heart was always in the pulpit. But after he made such a success with his hair-waver he got speculating in land out at Apex, and somehow everything went – though Mr Spragg did all he could –’ Mrs Spragg, when she found herself embarked on a long sentence, always ballasted it by italicizing the last word.

  Her husband, she continued, could not, at the time, do much for his father-in-law. Mr Spragg had come to Apex as a poor boy, and their early married life had been a protracted struggle, darkened by domestic affliction. Two of their three children had died of typhoid in the epidemic which devastated Apex before the new water-works were built; and this calamity, by causing Mr Spragg to resolve that thereafter Apex should drink pure water, had led directly to the founding of his fortunes.

  ‘He had taken over some of poor father’s land for a bad debt, and when he got up the Pure Water Move the company voted to buy the land and build the new reservoir up there: and after that we began to be better off, and it did seem as if it had come out so to comfort us some about the children.’

  Mr Spragg, thereafter, had begun to be a power in Apex, and fat years had followed on the lean. Ralph Marvell was too little versed in affairs to read between the lines of Mrs Spragg’s untutored narrative, and he understood no more than she the occult connection between Mr Spragg’s domestic misfortunes and his business triumph. Mr Spragg had ‘helped out’ his ruined father-in-law, and had vowed on his children’s graves that no Apex child should ever again drink poisoned water – and out of those two disinterested impulses, by some impressive law of compensation, material prosperity had come. What Ralph understood and appreciated was Mrs Spragg’s unaffected frankness in talking of her early life. Here was no retrospective pretence of an opulent past, such as the other Invaders were given to parading before the bland but undeceived subject race. The Spraggs had been ‘plain people’ and had not yet learned to be ashamed of it. The fact drew them much closer to the Dagonet ideals than any sham elegance in the past tense. Ralph felt that his mother, who shuddered away from Mrs Harmon B. Driscoll, would understand and esteem Mrs Spragg.

  But how long would their virgin innocence last? Popple’s vulgar hands were on it already – Popple’s and the unspeakable Van Degen’s! Once they and theirs had begun the process of initiating Undine, there was n
o knowing – or rather there was too easy knowing – how it would end! It was incredible that she too should be destined to swell the ranks of the cheaply fashionable; yet were not her very freshness, her malleability, the mark of her fate? She was still at the age when the flexible soul offers itself to the first grasp. That the grasp should chance to be Van Degen’s – that was what made Ralph’s temples buzz, and swept away all his plans for his own future like a beaver’s dam in a spring flood. To save her from Van Degen and Van Degenism: was that really to be his mission – the ‘call’ for which his life had obscurely waited? It was not in the least what he had meant to do with the fugitive flash of consciousness he called self; but all that he had purposed for that transitory being sank into insignificance under the pressure of Undine’s claims.

  Ralph Marvell’s notion of women had been formed on the experiences common to good-looking young men of his kind. Women were drawn to him as much by his winning appealing quality, by the sense of a youthful warmth behind his light ironic exterior, as by his charms of face and mind. Except during Clare Dagonet’s brief reign the depths in him had not been stirred; but in taking what each sentimental episode had to give he had preserved, through all his minor adventures, his faith in the great adventure to come. It was this faith that made him so easy a victim when love had at last appeared clad in the attributes of romance: the imaginative man’s indestructible dream of a rounded passion.