The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  Mr Spragg was again silent, but he left the building at Ralph’s side, and the two walked along together toward Wall Street.

  Presently the older man asked: ‘How did you get acquainted with Moffatt?’

  ‘Why, by chance – Undine ran across him somewhere and asked him to dine the other night.’

  ‘Undine asked him to dine?’

  ‘Yes: she told me you used to know him out at Apex.’

  Mr Spragg appeared to search his memory for confirmation of the fact. ‘I believe he used to be round there at one time. I’ve never heard any good of him yet.’ He paused at a crossing and looked probingly at his son-in-law. ‘Is she terribly set on this trip to Europe?’

  Ralph smiled. ‘You know how it is when she takes a fancy to do anything –’

  Mr Spragg, by a slight lift of his brooding brows, seemed to convey a deep if unspoken response.

  ‘Well, I’d let her do it this time – I’d let her do it,’ he said as he turned down the steps of the Subway.

  Ralph was surprised, for he had gathered from some frightened references of Mrs Spragg’s that Undine’s parents had wind of her European plan and were strongly opposed to it. He concluded that Mr Spragg had long since measured the extent of profitable resistance, and knew just when it became vain to hold out against his daughter or advise others to do so.

  Ralph, for his own part, had no inclination to resist. As he left Moffatt’s office his inmost feeling was one of relief. He had reached the point of recognizing that it was best for both that his wife should go. When she returned perhaps their lives would readjust themselves – but for the moment he longed for some kind of benumbing influence, something that should give relief to the dull daily ache of feeling her so near and yet so inaccessible. Certainly there were more urgent uses for their brilliant windfall: heavy arrears of household debts had to be met, and the summer would bring its own burden. But perhaps another stroke of luck might befall him: he was getting to have the drifting dependence on ‘luck’ of the man conscious of his inability to direct his life. And meanwhile it seemed easier to let Undine have what she wanted.

  Undine, on the whole, behaved with discretion. She received the good news languidly and showed no unseemly haste to profit by it. But it was as hard to hide the light in her eyes as to dissemble the fact that she had not only thought out every detail of the trip in advance, but had decided exactly how her husband and son were to be disposed of in her absence. Her suggestion that Ralph should take Paul to his grandparents, and that the West End Avenue house should be let for the summer, was too practical not to be acted on; and Ralph found she had already put her hand on the Harry Lipscombs, who, after three years of neglect, were to be dragged back to favour and made to feel, as the first step in their reinstatement, the necessity of hiring for the summer months a cool airy house on the West Side. On her return from Europe, Undine explained, she would of course go straight to Ralph and the boy in the Adirondacks; and it seemed a foolish extravagance to let the house stand empty when the Lipscombs were so eager to take it.

  As the day of departure approached it became harder for her to temper her beams; but her pleasure showed itself so amiably that Ralph began to think she might, after all, miss the boy and himself more than she imagined. She was tenderly preoccupied with Paul’s welfare, and, to prepare for his translation to his grandparents’ she gave the household in Washington Square more of her time than she had accorded it since her marriage. She explained that she wanted Paul to grow used to his new surroundings; and with that object she took him frequently to his grandmother’s, and won her way into old Mr Dagonet’s sympathies by her devotion to the child and her pretty way of joining in his games.

  Undine was not consciously acting a part: this new phase was as natural to her as the other. In the joy of her gratified desires she wanted to make everybody about her happy. If only every one would do as she wished she would never be unreasonable. She much preferred to see smiling faces about her, and her dread of the reproachful and dissatisfied countenance gave the measure of what she would do to avoid it.

  These thoughts were in her mind when, a day or two before sailing, she came out of the Washington Square house with her boy. It was a late spring afternoon, and she and Paul had lingered on till long past the hour sacred to his grandfather’s nap. Now, as she came out into the square she saw that, however well Mr Dagonet had borne their protracted romp, it had left his playmate flushed and sleepy; and she lifted Paul in her arms to carry him to the nearest cab-stand.

  As she raised herself she saw a thick-set figure approaching her across the square; and a moment later she was shaking hands with Elmer Moffatt. In the bright spring air he looked seasonably glossy and prosperous; and she noticed that he wore a bunch of violets in his buttonhole. His small black eyes twinkled with approval as they rested on her, and Undine reflected that, with Paul’s arms about her neck, and his little flushed face against her own, she must present a not unpleasing image of young motherhood.

  ‘That the heir apparent?’ Moffatt asked; adding ‘Happy to make your acquaintance, sir,’ as the boy, at Undine’s bidding, held out a fist sticky with sugar plums.

  ‘He’s been spending the afternoon with his grandfather, and they played so hard that he’s sleepy,’ she explained. Little Paul, at that stage in his career, had a peculiar grace of wide-gazing deep-lashed eyes and arched cherubic lips, and Undine saw that Moffatt was not insensible to the picture she and her son composed. She did not dislike his admiration, for she no longer felt any shrinking from him – she would even have been glad to thank him for the service he had done her husband if she had known how to allude to it without awkwardness. Moffatt seemed equally pleased at the meeting, and they looked at each other almost intimately over Paul’s tumbled curls.

  ‘He’s a mighty fine fellow and no mistake – but isn’t he rather an armful for you?’ Moffatt asked, his eyes lingering with real kindliness on the child’s face.

  ‘Oh, we haven’t far to go. I’ll pick up a cab at the corner.’

  ‘Well, let me carry him that far anyhow,’ said Moffatt.

  Undine was glad to be relieved of her burden, for she was unused to the child’s weight, and disliked to feel that her skirt was dragging on the pavement. ‘Go to the gentleman, Pauly – he’ll carry you better than mother,’ she said.

  The little boy’s first movement was one of recoil from the ruddy sharp-eyed countenance that was so unlike his father’s delicate face; but he was an obedient child, and after a moment’s hesitation he wound his arms trustfully about the red gentleman’s neck.

  ‘That’s a good fellow – sit tight and I’ll give you a ride,’ Moffatt cried, hoisting the boy to his shoulder.

  Paul was not used to being perched at such a height, and his nature was hospitable to new impressions. ‘Oh, I like it up here – you’re higher than father!’ he exclaimed; and Moffatt hugged him with a laugh.

  ‘It must feel mighty good to come up town to a fellow like you in the evenings,’ he said, addressing the child but looking at Undine, who also laughed a little.

  ‘Oh, they’re a dreadful nuisance, you know; but Paul’s a very good boy.’

  ‘I wonder if he knows what a friend I’ve been to him lately,’ Moffatt went on, as they turned into Fifth Avenue.

  Undine smiled: she was glad he should have given her an opening.

  ‘He shall be told as soon as he’s old enough to thank you. I’m so glad you came to Ralph about that business.’

  ‘Oh, I gave him a leg up, and I guess he’s given me one too. Queer the way things come round – he’s fairly put me in the way of a fresh start.’

  Their eyes met in a silence which Undine was the first to break. ‘It’s been awfully nice of you to do what you’ve done – right along. And this last thing has made a lot of difference to us.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you feel that way. I never wanted to be anything but “nice,” as you call it.’ Moffatt paused a moment and then added: ‘If
you’re less scared of me than your father is I’d be glad to call round and see you once in a while.’

  The quick blood rushed to her cheeks. There was nothing challenging, demanding in his tone – she guessed at once that if he made the request it was simply for the pleasure of being with her, and she liked the magnanimity implied. Nevertheless she was not sorry to have to answer: ‘Of course I’ll always be glad to see you – only, as it happens, I’m just sailing for Europe.’

  ‘For Europe?’ The word brought Moffatt to a stand so abruptly that little Paul lurched on his shoulder.

  ‘For Europe?’ he repeated. ‘Why, I thought you said the other evening you expected to stay on in town till July. Didn’t you think of going to the Adirondacks?’

  Flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph. ‘Oh, yes – but that’s all changed. Ralph and the boy are going; but I sail on Saturday to join some friends in Paris – and later I may do some motoring in Switzerland and Italy.’

  She laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and Moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm.

  ‘I see – I see: everything’s changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip. Well, I hope you’ll have a first-class time.’

  Their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled Undine to say with a burst of candour: ‘If I do, you know, I shall owe it all to you!’

  ‘Well, I always told you I meant to act white by you,’ he answered.

  They walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain: ‘See what one of the Apex girls has been up to?’

  Apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on: ‘Why, Millard Binch’s wife – Indiana Frusk that was. Didn’t you see in the papers that Indiana’d fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her? They say it was easy enough squaring Millard Binch – you’d know it would be – but it cost Rolliver near a million to mislay Mrs R. and the children. Well, Indiana’s pulled it off, anyhow; she always was a bright girl. But she never came up to you.’

  ‘Oh –’ she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news. Indiana Frusk and Rolliver! It showed how easily the thing could be done. If only her father had listened to her! If a girl like Indiana Frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not Undine have accomplished? She knew Moffatt was right in saying that Indiana had never come up to her … She wondered how the marriage would strike Van Degen …

  She signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking. Undine was recalling with intensity that one of Indiana’s shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in Apex had thought her lucky to catch Millard Binch, the druggist’s clerk, when Undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement. And now Indiana Frusk was to be Mrs James J. Rolliver!

  Undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little Paul.

  Moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a ‘Steady there, steady,’ that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on Paul’s lips before handing him over to his mother.

  XIX

  ‘THE PARISIAN Diamond Company – Anglo-American branch.’

  Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the phrases of a letter to his old friend Mrs Henley Fairford.

  The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady – in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged – usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who but Mrs Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?

  The dining-room of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables. He had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes. During some forty years’ perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature’s passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.

  As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival – for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not – he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom ‘society’, with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence.

  With this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest. The Comte Raymond de Chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: ‘Il n’y a pas à dire, my dear Bowen, it’s charming and sympathetic and original – we owe America a debt of gratitude for inventing it!’

  Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to complete his thought.

  ‘My dear fellow, it’s really you and your kind who are responsible. It’s the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!’

  Raymond de Chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache. ‘I should have said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast. It’s such a refreshing change from our institutions – which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society. But just as one may have an infinite admiration for one’s wife, and yet occasionally –’ he waved a light hand toward the spectacle. ‘This, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored.’

  Bowen laughed. ‘You’ve put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.’

  Chelles thoughtfully unfolded his napkin. ‘My impression’s a superficial one, of course – for as to what goes on underneath –!’ He looked across the room. ‘If I married I shouldn’t care to have my wife come here too often.’

  Bowen laughed again. ‘She’d be as safe as in a bank! Nothing ever goes on! Nothing that ever happens here is real.’

  ‘Ah, quant à cela –’ the Frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into his melon.

  Bowen looked at him with enjoyment – he was such a precious footnote to the page! The two men, accidentally thrown together some years previously during a trip up the Nile, always met again with pleasure when Bowen returned to France. Raymond de Chelles, who came of a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on his father’s estates in Burgundy; but he came up every spring to the entresol of the old Marquis’s hôtel for a two months’ study of human nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. Bowen liked him as a companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the Frenchman of his class, embodying in his lean,
fatigued and finished person that happy mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the secret. If Raymond de Chelles had been English he would have been a mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his lighter Gallic clay the wholesome territorial savour, the inherited passion for sport and agriculture, were blent with an openness to finer sensations, a sense of the come-and-go of ideas, under which one felt the tight hold of two or three inherited notions, religious, political, and domestic, in total contradiction to his surface attitude. That the inherited notions would in the end prevail, everything in his appearance declared, from the distinguished slant of his nose to the narrow forehead under his thinning hair; he was the kind of man who would inevitably ‘revert’ when he married. But meanwhile the surface he presented to the play of life was broad enough to take in the fantastic spectacle of the Nouveau Luxe; and to see its gestures reflected in a Latin consciousness was an endless entertainment to Bowen.

  The tone of his guest’s last words made him take them up. ‘But is the lady you allude to more than a hypothesis? Surely you’re not thinking of getting married?’

  Chelles raised his eyebrows ironically. ‘When hasn’t one to think of it, in my situation? One hears of nothing else at home – one knows that, like death, it has to come.’ His glance, which was still mustering the room, came to a sudden pause and kindled.

  ‘Who’s the lady over there – fair-haired, in white – the one who’s just come in with the red-faced man? They seem to be with a party of your compatriots.’

  Bowen followed his glance to a neighbouring table, where, at the moment, Undine Marvell was seating herself at Peter Van Degen’s side, in the company of the Harvey Shallums, the beautiful Mrs Beringer and a dozen other New York figures.

  She was so placed that as she took her seat she recognized Bowen and sent him a smile across the tables. She was more simply dressed than usual, and the pink lights, warming her cheeks and striking gleams from her hair, gave her face a dewy freshness that was new to Bowen. He had always thought her beauty too obvious, too bathed in the bright publicity of the American air; but tonight she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.