The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  Undine gave a quick upward look: this was what she had been waiting for ever since she had read, a few days earlier, in the columns of her morning journal, that Mr Peter Van Degen and Mr and Mrs James J. Rolliver had been fellow-passengers on board the Semantic. But she did not betray her expectations by as much as the tremor of an eyelash. She knew her friend well enough to pour out to her the expected tribute of surprise.

  ‘Why, do you mean to say you know him, Indiana?’

  ‘Mercy, yes! He’s round here all the time. He crossed on the steamer with us, and Mr Rolliver’s taken a fancy to him,’ Indiana explained, in the tone of the absorbed bride to whom her husband’s preferences are the sole criterion.

  Undine turned a tear-suffused gaze on her. ‘Oh, Indiana, if I could only see him again I know it would be all right! He’s awfully, awfully fond of me; but his family have influenced him against me –’

  ‘I know what that is!’ Mrs Rolliver interjected.

  ‘But perhaps,’ Undine continued, ‘it would be better if I could meet him first without his knowing beforehand – without your telling him … I love him too much to reproach him!’ she added nobly.

  Indiana pondered: it was clear that, though the nobility of the sentiment impressed her, she was disinclined to renounce the idea of taking a more active part in her friend’s rehabilitation. But Undine went on: ‘Of course you’ve found out by this time that he’s just a big spoiled baby. Afterward – when I’ve seen him – if you’d talk to him; or if you’d only just let him be with you, and see how perfectly happy you and Mr Rolliver are!’

  Indiana seized on this at once. ‘You mean that what he wants is the influence of a home like ours? Yes, yes, I understand. I tell you what I’ll do: I’ll just ask him round to dine, and let you know the day, without telling him beforehand that you’re coming.’

  ‘Oh, Indiana!’ Undine held her in a close embrace, and then drew away to say: ‘I’m so glad I found you. You must go round with me everywhere. There are lots of people here I want you to know.’

  Mrs Rolliver’s expression changed from vague sympathy to concentrated interest. ‘I suppose it’s awfully gay here? Do you go round a great deal with the American set?’

  Undine hesitated for a fraction of a moment. ‘There are a few of them who are rather jolly. But I particularly want you to meet my friend the Marquis Roviano – he’s from Rome; and a lovely Austrian woman, Baroness Adelschein.’

  Her friend’s face was brushed by a shade of distrust. ‘I don’t know as I care much about meeting foreigners,’ she said indifferently.

  Undine smiled: it was agreeable at last to be able to give Indiana a ‘point’ as valuable as any of hers on divorce.

  ‘Oh, some of them are awfully attractive; and they’ll make you meet the Americans.’

  Indiana caught this on the bound: one began to see why she had got on in spite of everything.

  ‘Of course I’d love to know your friends,’ she said, kissing Undine; who answered, giving back the kiss: ‘You know there’s nothing on earth I wouldn’t do for you.’

  Indiana drew back to look at her with a comic grimace under which a shade of anxiety was visible. ‘Well, that’s a pretty large order. But there’s just one thing you can do, dearest: please to let Mr Rolliver alone!’

  ‘Mr Rolliver, my dear?’ Undine’s laugh showed that she took this for unmixed comedy. ‘That’s a nice way to remind me that you’re heaps and heaps better-looking than I am!’

  Indiana gave her an acute glance. ‘Millard Binch didn’t think so – not even at the very end.’

  ‘Oh, poor Millard!’ The women’s smiles mingled easily over the common reminiscence, and once again, on the threshold, Undine enfolded her friend.

  In the light of the autumn afternoon she paused a moment at the door of the Nouveau Luxe, and looked aimlessly forth at the brave spectacle in which she seemed no longer to have a stake.

  Many of her old friends had already returned to Paris: the Harvey Shallums, May Beringer, Dicky Bowles and other westward-bound nomads lingering on for a glimpse of the autumn theatres and fashions before hurrying back to inaugurate the New York season. A year ago Undine would have had no difficulty in introducing Indiana Rolliver to this group – a group above which her own aspirations already beat an impatient wing. Now her place in it had become too precarious for her to force an entrance for her protectress. Her New York friends were at no pains to conceal from her that in their opinion her divorce had been a blunder. Their logic was that of Apex reversed. Since she had not been ‘sure’ of Van Degen, why in the world, they asked, had she thrown away a position she was sure of? Mrs Harvey Shallum, in particular, had not scrupled to put the question squarely. ‘Chelles was awfully taken – he would have introduced you everywhere. I thought you were wild to know smart French people; I thought Harvey and I weren’t good enough for you any longer. And now you’ve done your best to spoil everything! Of course I feel for you tremendously – that’s the reason why I’m talking so frankly. You must be horribly depressed. Come and dine tonight – or no, if you don’t mind I’d rather you chose another evening. I’d forgotten that I’d asked the Jim Driscolls, and it might be uncomfortable – for you …’

  In another world she was still welcome, at first perhaps even more so than before: the world, namely, to which she had proposed to present Indiana Rolliver. Roviano, Madame Adelschein, and a few of the freer spirits of her old St Moritz band, reappearing in Paris with the close of the watering-place season, had quickly discovered her and shown a keen interest in her liberation. It appeared in some mysterious way to make her more available for their purpose, and she found that, in the character of the last American divorcée, she was even regarded as eligible to the small and intimate inner circle of their loosely-knit association. At first she could not make out what had entitled her to this privilege, and increasing enlightenment produced a revolt of the Apex puritanism which, despite some odd accommodations and compliances, still carried its head so high in her.

  Undine had been perfectly sincere in telling Indiana Rolliver that she was not ‘an immoral woman’. The pleasures for which her sex took such risks had never attracted her, and she did not even crave the excitement of having it thought that they did. She wanted, passionately and persistently, two things which she believed should subsist together in any well-ordered life: amusement and respectability; and despite her surface-sophistication her notion of amusement was hardly less innocent than when she had hung on the plumber’s fence with Indiana Frusk.

  It gave her, therefore, no satisfaction to find herself included among Madame Adelschein’s intimates. It embarrassed her to feel that she was expected to be ‘queer’ and ‘different’, to respond to passwords and talk in innuendo, to associate with the equivocal and the subterranean and affect to despise the ingenuous daylight joys which really satisfied her soul. But the business shrewdness which was never quite dormant in her suggested that this was not the moment for such scruples. She must make the best of what she could get and wait her chance of getting something better; and meanwhile the most practical use to which she could put her shady friends was to flash their authentic nobility in the dazzled eyes of Mrs Rolliver.

  With this object in view she made haste, in a fashionable tea-room of the Rue de Rivoli, to group about Indiana the most titled members of the band; and the felicity of the occasion would have been unmarred had she not suddenly caught sight of Raymond de Chelles sitting on the other side of the room.

  She had not seen Chelles since her return to Paris. It had seemed preferable to leave their meeting to chance, and the present chance might have served as well as another but for the fact that among his companions were two or three of the most eminent ladies of the proud quarter beyond the Seine. It was what Undine, in moments of discouragement, characterized as ‘her luck’ that one of these should be the hated Miss Wincher of Potash Springs, who had now become the Marquise de Trézac. Undine knew that Chelles and his compatriots, however scandal
ized at her European companions, would be completely indifferent to Mrs Rolliver’s appearance; but one gesture of Madame de Trézac’s eye-glass would wave Indiana to her place and thus brand the whole party as ‘wrong’.

  All this passed through Undine’s mind in the very moment of her noting the change of expression with which Chelles had signalled his recognition. If their encounter could have occurred in happier conditions it might have had far-reaching results. As it was, the crowded state of the tea-room, and the distance between their tables, sufficiently excused his restricting his greeting to an eager bow; and Undine went home heavy-hearted from this first attempt to reconstruct her past.

  Her spirits were not lightened by the developments of the next few days. She kept herself well in the foreground of Indiana’s life, and cultivated toward the rarely-visible Rolliver a manner in which impersonal admiration for the statesman was tempered with the politest indifference to the man. Indiana seemed to do justice to her efforts and to be reassured by the result; but still there came no hint of a reward. For a time Undine restrained the question on her lips; but one afternoon, when she had inducted Indiana into the deepest mysteries of Parisian complexion-making, the importance of the service and the confidential mood it engendered seemed to warrant a discreet allusion to their bargain.

  Indiana leaned back among her cushions with an embarrassed laugh.

  ‘Oh, my dear, I’ve been meaning to tell you – it’s off, I’m afraid. The dinner is, I mean. You see, Mr Van Degen has seen you ’round with me, and the very minute I asked him to come and dine he guessed –’

  ‘He guessed – and he wouldn’t?’

  ‘Well, no. He wouldn’t. I hate to tell you.’

  ‘Oh –’ Undine threw off a vague laugh. ‘Since you’re intimate enough for him to tell you that he must have told you more – told you something to justify his behaviour. He couldn’t – even Peter Van Degen couldn’t – just simply have said to you: “I won’t see her.” ’

  Mrs Rolliver hesitated, visibly troubled to the point of regretting her intervention.

  ‘He did say more?’ Undine insisted. ‘He gave you a reason?’

  ‘He said you’d know.’

  ‘Oh, how base – how base!’ Undine was trembling with one of her little-girl rages, the storms of destructive fury before which Mr and Mrs Spragg had cowered when she was a charming golden-curled cherub. But life had administered some of the discipline which her parents had spared her, and she pulled herself together with a gasp of pain. ‘Of course he’s been turned against me. His wife has the whole of New York behind her, and I’ve no one; but I know it would be all right if I could only see him.’

  Her friend made no answer, and Undine pursued, with an irrepressible outbreak of her old vehemence: ‘Indiana Rolliver, if you won’t do it for me I’ll go straight off to his hotel this very minute. I’ll wait there in the hall till he sees me!’

  Indiana lifted a protesting hand. ‘Don’t, Undine – not that!’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well – I wouldn’t, that’s all.’

  ‘You wouldn’t? Why wouldn’t you? You must have a reason.’ Undine faced her with levelled brows. ‘Without a reason you can’t have changed so utterly since our last talk. You were positive enough then that I had a right to make him see me.’

  Somewhat to her surprise, Indiana made no effort to elude the challenge. ‘Yes, I did think so then. But I know now that it wouldn’t do you the least bit of good.’

  ‘Have they turned him so completely against me? I don’t care if they have! I know him – I can get him back.’

  ‘That’s the trouble.’ Indiana shed on her a gaze of cold compassion. ‘It’s not that any one has turned him against you. It’s worse than that –’

  ‘What can be?’

  ‘You’ll hate me if I tell you.’

  ‘Then you’d better make him tell me himself!’

  ‘I can’t. I tried to. The trouble is that it was you – something you did, I mean. Something he found out about you –’

  Undine, to restrain a spring of anger, had to clutch both arms of her chair. ‘About me? How fearfully false! Why, I’ve never even looked at anybody –!’

  ‘It’s nothing of that kind.’ Indiana’s mournful headshake seemed to deplore, in Undine, an unsuspected moral obtuseness. ‘It’s the way you acted to your own husband.’

  ‘I – my – to Ralph? He reproaches me for that? Peter Van Degen does?’

  ‘Well, for one particular thing. He says that the very day you went off with him last year you got a cable from New York telling you to come back at once to Mr Marvell, who was desperately ill.’

  ‘How on earth did he know?’ The cry escaped Undine before she could repress it.

  ‘It’s true, then?’ Indiana exclaimed. ‘Oh, Undine –’

  Undine sat speechless and motionless, the anger frozen to terror on her lips.

  Mrs Rolliver turned on her the reproachful gaze of the deceived benefactress. ‘I didn’t believe it when he told me; I’d never have thought it of you. Before you’d even applied for your divorce!’

  Undine made no attempt to deny the charge or to defend herself. For a moment she was lost in the pursuit of an unseizable clue – the explanation of this monstrous last perversity of fate. Suddenly she rose to her feet with a set face.

  ‘The Marvells must have told him – the beasts!’ It relieved her to be able to cry it out.

  ‘It was your husband’s sister – what did you say her name was? When you didn’t answer her cable, she cabled Mr Van Degen to find out where you were and tell you to come straight back.’

  Undine stared. ‘He never did!’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Doesn’t that show you the story’s all trumped up?’

  Indiana shook her head. ‘He said nothing to you about it because he was with you when you received the first cable, and you told him it was from your sister-in-law, just worrying you as usual to go home; and when he asked if there was anything else in it you said there wasn’t another thing.’

  Undine, intently following her, caught at this with a spring. ‘Then he knew it all along – he admits that? And it made no earthly difference to him at the time?’ She turned almost victoriously on her friend. ‘Did he happen to explain that, I wonder?’

  ‘Yes.’ Indiana’s longanimity grew almost solemn. ‘It came over him gradually, he said. One day when he wasn’t feeling very well he thought to himself: “Would she act like that to me if I was dying?” And after that he never felt the same to you.’ Indiana lowered her empurpled lids. ‘Men have their feelings too – even when they’re carried away by passion.’ After a pause she added: ‘I don’t know as I can blame him, Undine. You see, you were his ideal.’

  XXV

  UNDINE Marvell, for the next few months, tasted all the accumulated bitterness of failure.

  After January the drifting hordes of her compatriots had scattered to the four quarters of the globe, leaving Paris to resume, under its low grey sky, its compacter winter personality. Noting, from her more and more deserted corner, each least sign of the social revival, Undine felt herself as stranded and baffled as after the ineffectual summers of her girlhood. She was not without possible alternatives; but the sense of what she had lost took the savour from all that was left. She might have attached herself to some migratory group winged for Italy or Egypt; but the prospect of travel did not in itself appeal to her, and she was doubtful of its social benefit. She lacked the adventurous curiosity which seeks its occasion in the unknown; and though she could work doggedly for a given object the obstacles to be overcome had to be as distinct as the prize.

  Her one desire was to get back an equivalent of the precise value she had lost in ceasing to be Ralph Marvell’s wife. Her new visiting-card, bearing her Christian name in place of her husband’s, was like the coin of a debased currency testifying to her diminished trading capacity. Her restricted means, her vacant days, all the minor irritations of her life, were
as nothing compared to this sense of a lost advantage. Even in the narrowed field of a Parisian winter she might have made herself a place in some more or less extra-social world; but her experiments in this line gave her no pleasure proportioned to the possible derogation. She feared to be associated with ‘the wrong people’, and scented a shade of disrespect in every amicable advance. The more pressing attentions of one or two men she had formerly known filled her with a glow of outraged pride, and for the first time in her life she felt that even solitude might be preferable to certain kinds of society.

  Since ill health was the most plausible pretext for seclusion, it was almost a relief to find that she was really growing ‘nervous’ and sleeping badly. The doctor she summoned advised her trying a small quiet place on the Riviera, not too near the sea; and thither, in the early days of December, she transported herself with her maid and an omnibus-load of luggage.

  The place disconcerted her by being really small and quiet, and for a few days she struggled against the desire for flight. She had never before known a world as colourless and negative as that of the large white hotel where everybody went to bed at nine, and donkey-rides over stony hills were the only alternative to slow drives along dusty roads. Many of the dwellers in this temple of repose found even these exercises too stimulating, and preferred to sit for hours under the palms in the garden, playing Patience, embroidering, or reading odd volumes of Tauchnitz. Undine, driven by despair to an inspection of the hotel bookshelves, discovered that scarcely any work they contained was complete; but this did not seem to trouble the readers, who continued to feed their leisure with mutilated fiction, from which they occasionally raised their eyes to glance mistrustfully at the new arrival sweeping the garden gravel with her frivolous draperies. The inmates of the hotel were of different nationalities, but their racial differences were levelled by the stamp of a common mediocrity. All differences of tongue, of custom, of physiognomy, disappeared in this deep community of insignificance, which was like some secret bond, with the manifold signs and passwords of its ignorances and its imperceptions. It was not the heterogeneous mediocrity of the American summer hotel, where the lack of any standard is the nearest approach to a tie, but an organized codified dullness, in conscious possession of its rights, and strong in the voluntary ignorance of any others.