The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  When her breakfast tray was brought in she sent it away untouched and continued to lie in her darkened room. She knew that when she got up she must send back the pearls; but there was no longer any satisfaction in the thought, and she lay listlessly wondering how she could best transmit them to Van Degen.

  As she lay there she heard Mrs Heeny’s voice in the passage. Hitherto she had avoided the masseuse, as she did every one else associated with her past. Mrs Heeny had behaved with extreme discretion, refraining from all direct allusions to Undine’s misadventure; but her silence was obviously the criticism of a superior mind. Once again Undine had disregarded her injunction to ‘go slow’, with results that justified the warning. Mrs Heeny’s very reserve, however, now marked her as a safe adviser; and Undine sprang up and called her in.

  ‘My sakes, Undine! You look’s if you’d been setting up all night with a remains!’ the masseuse exclaimed in her round rich tones.

  Undine, without answering, caught up the pearls and thrust them into Mrs Heeny’s hands.

  ‘Good land alive!’ The masseuse dropped into a chair and let the twist slip through her fat flexible fingers. ‘Well, you got a fortune right round your neck whenever you wear them, Undine Spragg.’

  Undine murmured something indistinguishable. ‘I want you to take them –’ she began.

  ‘Take ’em? Where to?’

  ‘Why, to –’ She was checked by the wondering simplicity of Mrs Heeny’s stare. The masseuse must know where the pearls had come from, yet it had evidently not occurred to her that Mrs Marvell was about to ask her to return them to their donor. In the light of Mrs Heeny’s unclouded gaze the whole episode took on a different aspect, and Undine began to be vaguely astonished at her immediate submission to her father’s will. The pearls were hers, after all!

  ‘To be restrung?’ Mrs Heeny placidly suggested. ‘Why, you’d oughter to have it done right here before your eyes, with pearls that are worth what these are.’

  As Undine listened, a new thought shaped itself. She could not continue to wear the pearls: the idea had become intolerable. But for the first time she saw what they might be converted into, and what they might rescue her from; and suddenly she brought out: ‘Do you suppose I could get anything for them?’

  ‘Get anything? Why, what –’

  ‘Anything like what they’re worth, I mean. They cost a lot of money: they came from the biggest place in Paris.’ Under Mrs Heeny’s simplifying eye it was comparatively easy to make these explanations. ‘I want you to try and sell them for me – I want you to do the best you can with them. I can’t do it myself – but you must swear you’ll never tell a soul,’ she pressed on breathlessly.

  ‘Why, you poor child – it ain’t the first time,’ said Mrs Heeny, coiling the pearls in her big palm. ‘It’s a pity too: they’re such beauties. But you’ll get others,’ she added, as the necklace vanished into her bag.

  A few days later there appeared from the same receptacle a bundle of banknotes considerable enough to quiet Undine’s last scruples. She no longer understood why she had hesitated. Why should she have thought it necessary to give back the pearls to Van Degen? His obligation to her represented far more than the relatively small sum she had been able to realize on the necklace. She hid the money in her dress, and when Mrs Heeny had gone on to Mrs Spragg’s room she drew the packet out, and counting the bills over, murmured to herself: ‘Now I can get away!’

  Her one thought was to return to Europe; but she did not want to go alone. The vision of her solitary figure adrift in the spring mob of transatlantic pleasure-seekers depressed and mortified her. She would be sure to run across acquaintances, and they would infer that she was in quest of a new opportunity, a fresh start, and would suspect her of trying to use them for the purpose. The thought was repugnant to her newly awakened pride, and she decided that if she went to Europe her father and mother must go with her. The project was a bold one, and when she broached it she had to run the whole gamut of Mr Spragg’s irony. He wanted to know what she expected to do with him when she got him there; whether she meant to introduce him to ‘all those old Kings’, how she thought he and her mother would look in court dress, and how she supposed he was going to get on without his New York paper. But Undine had been aware of having what he himself would have called ‘a pull’ over her father since, the day after their visit to the opera, he had taken her aside to ask: ‘You sent back those pearls?’ and she had answered coldly: ‘Mrs Heeny’s taken them.’

  After a moment of half-bewildered resistance her parents, perhaps secretly flattered by this first expression of her need for them, had yielded to her entreaty, packed their trunks, and stoically set out for the unknown. Neither Mr Spragg nor his wife had ever before been out of their country; and Undine had not understood, till they stood beside her tongue-tied and helpless on the dock at Cherbourg, the task she had undertaken in uprooting them. Mr Spragg had never been physically active, but on foreign shores he was seized by a strange restlessness, and a helpless dependence on his daughter. Mrs Spragg’s long habit of apathy was overcome by her dread of being left alone when her husband and Undine went out, and she delayed and impeded their expeditions by insisting on accompanying them; so that, much as Undine disliked sightseeing, there seemed no alternative between ‘going round’ with her parents and shutting herself up with them in the crowded hotels to which she successively transported them.

  The hotels were the only European institutions that really interested Mr Spragg. He considered them manifestly inferior to those at home; but he was haunted by a statistical curiosity as to their size, their number, their cost and their capacity for housing and feeding the incalculable hordes of his countrymen. He went through galleries, churches and museums in a stolid silence like his daughter’s; but in the hotels he never ceased to inquire and investigate, questioning every one who could speak English, comparing bills, collecting prospectuses and computing the cost of construction and the probable return on the investment. He regarded the nonexistence of the cold-storage system as one more proof of European inferiority and no longer wondered, in the absence of the room-to-room telephone, that foreigners hadn’t yet mastered the first principles of time-saving.

  After a few weeks it became evident to both parents and daughter that their unnatural association could not continue much longer. Mrs Spragg’s shrinking from everything new and unfamiliar had developed into a kind of settled terror, and Mr Spragg had begun to be depressed by the incredible number of the hotels and their simply incalculable housing capacity.

  ‘It ain’t that they’re any great shakes in themselves, any one of ’em; but there’s such a darned lot of ’em: they’re as thick as mosquitoes, every place you go.’ And he began to reckon up, on slips of paper, on the backs of bills and the margins of old newspapers, the number of travellers who could be simultaneously lodged, bathed and boarded on the continent of Europe. ‘Five hundred bedrooms – three hundred bathrooms – no; three hundred and fifty bathrooms, that one has: that makes, supposing two-thirds of ’em double up – do you s’pose as many as that do, Undie? That porter at Lucerne told me the Germans slept three in a room – well, call it eight hundred people; and three meals a day per head; no, four meals, with that afternoon tea they take; and the last place we were at – ‘way up on that mountain there – why, there were seventy-five hotels in that one spot alone, and all jam full – well, it beats me to know where all the people come from …’

  He had gone on in this fashion for what seemed to his daughter an endless length of days; and then suddenly he had roused himself to say: ‘See here, Undie, I got to go back and make the money to pay for all this.’

  There had been no question on the part of any of the three of Undine’s returning with them; and after she had conveyed them to their steamer, and seen their vaguely relieved faces merged in the handkerchief-waving throng along the taffrail, she had returned alone to Paris and made her unsuccessful attempt to enlist the aid of Indiana Rolliver. />
  XXVII

  SHE WAS still brooding over this last failure when one afternoon, as she loitered on the hotel terrace, she was approached by a young woman whom she had seen sitting near the wheeled chair of an old lady wearing a crumpled black bonnet under a funny fringed parasol with a jointed handle.

  The young woman, who was small, slight and brown, was dressed with a disregard of the fashion which contrasted oddly with the mauve powder on her face and the traces of artificial colour in her dark untidy hair. She looked as if she might have several different personalities, and as if the one of the moment had been hanging up a long time in her wardrobe and been hurriedly taken down as probably good enough for the present occasion.

  With her hands in her jacket pockets, and an agreeable smile on her boyish face, she strolled up to Undine and asked, in a pretty variety of Parisian English, if she had the pleasure of speaking to Mrs Marvell.

  On Undine’s assenting, the smile grew more alert and the lady continued: ‘I think you know my friend Sacha Adelschein?’

  No question could have been less welcome to Undine. If there was one point on which she was doggedly and puritanically resolved, it was that no extremes of social adversity should ever again draw her into the group of people among whom Madame Adelschein too conspicuously figured. Since her unsuccessful attempt to win over Indiana by introducing her to that group, Undine had been righteously resolved to remain aloof from it; and she was drawing herself up to her loftiest height of disapproval when the stranger, as if unconscious of it, went on: ‘Sacha speaks of you so often – she admires you so much. – I think you know also my cousin Chelles,’ she added, looking into Undine’s eyes. ‘I am the Princess Estradina. I’ve come here with my mother for the air.’

  The murmur of negation died on Undine’s lips. She found herself grappling with a new social riddle, and such surprises were always stimulating. The name of the untidy-looking young woman she had been about to repel was one of the most eminent in the impregnable quarter beyond the Seine. No one figured more largely in the Parisian chronicle than the Princess Estradina, and no name more impressively headed the list at every marriage, funeral and philanthropic entertainment of the Faubourg Saint Germain than that of her mother, the Duchesse de Dordogne, who must be no other than the old woman sitting in the Bath-chair with the crumpled bonnet and the ridiculous sunshade.

  But it was not the appearance of the two ladies that surprised Undine. She knew that social gold does not always glitter, and that the lady she had heard spoken of as Lili Estradina was notoriously careless of the conventions; but that she should boast of her intimacy with Madame Adelschein, and use it as a pretext for naming herself, overthrew all Undine’s hierarchies.

  ‘Yes – it’s hideously dull here, and I’m dying of it. Do come over and speak to my mother. She’s dying of it too; but don’t tell her so, because she hasn’t found it out. There were so many things our mothers never found out,’ the Princess rambled on, with her half-mocking half-intimate smile; and in another moment Undine, thrilled at having Mrs Spragg thus coupled with a Duchess, found herself seated between mother and daughter, and responding by a radiant blush to the elder lady’s amiable opening: ‘You know my nephew Raymond – he’s your great admirer.’

  How had it happened, whither would it lead, how long could it last? The questions raced through Undine’s brain as she sat listening to her new friends – they seemed already too friendly to be called acquaintances! – replying to their inquiries, and trying to think far enough ahead to guess what they would expect her to say and what tone it would be well to take. She was used to such feats of mental agility, and it was instinctive with her to become, for the moment, the person she thought her interlocutors expected her to be; but she had never had quite so new a part to play at such short notice. She took her cue, however, from the fact that the Princess Estradina, in her mother’s presence, made no further allusion to her dear friend Sacha, and seemed somehow, though she continued to chat on in the same easy strain, to look differently and throw out different implications. All these shades of demeanour were immediately perceptible to Undine, who tried to adapt herself to them by combining in her manner a mixture of Apex dash and New York dignity; and the result was so successful that when she rose to go the Princess, with a hand on her arm, said almost wistfully: ‘You’re staying on too? Then do take pity on us! We might go on some trips together; and in the evenings we could make a bridge.’

  A new life began for Undine. The Princess, chained to her mother’s side, and frankly restive under her filial duty, clung to her new acquaintance with a persistence too flattering to be analysed. ‘My dear, I was on the brink of suicide when I saw your name in the visitors’ list,’ she explained; and Undine felt like answering that she had nearly reached the same pass when the Princess’s thin little hand had been held out to her. For the moment she was dizzy with the effect of that random gesture. Here she was, at the lowest ebb of her fortunes, miraculously rehabilitated, reinstated, and restored to the old victorious sense of her youth and her power! Her sole graces, her unaided personality, had worked the miracle; how should she not trust in them hereafter?

  Aside from her feeling of concrete attainment, Undine was deeply interested in her new friends. The Princess and her mother, in their different ways, were different from any one else she had known. The Princess, who might have been of any age between twenty and forty, had a small triangular face with caressing impudent eyes, a smile like a silent whistle and the gait of a baker’s boy balancing his basket. She wore either baggy shabby clothes like a man’s, or rich draperies that looked as if they had been rained on; and she seemed equally at ease in either style of dress, and carelessly unconscious of both. She was extremely familiar and unblushingly inquisitive, but she never gave Undine the time to ask her any questions or the opportunity to venture on any freedom with her. Nevertheless she did not scruple to talk of her sentimental experiences, and seemed surprised, and rather disappointed, that Undine had so few to relate in return. She playfully accused her beautiful new friend of being cachottière, and at the sight of Undine’s blush cried out: ‘Ah, you funny Americans! Why do you all behave as if love were a secret infirmity?’

  The old Duchess was even more impressive, because she fitted better into Undine’s preconceived picture of the Faubourg Saint Germain, and was more like the people with whom she pictured the former Nettie Wincher as living in privileged intimacy. The Duchess was, indeed, more amiable and accessible than Undine’s conception of a Duchess, and displayed a curiosity as great as her daughter’s, and much more puerile, concerning her new friend’s history and habits. But through her mild prattle, and in spite of her limited perceptions, Undine felt in her the same clear impenetrable barrier that she ran against occasionally in the Princess; and she was beginning to understand that this barrier represented a number of things about which she herself had yet to learn. She would not have known this a few years earlier, nor would she have seen in the Duchess anything but the ruin of an ugly woman, dressed in clothes that Mrs Spragg wouldn’t have touched. The Duchess certainly looked like a ruin; but Undine now saw that she looked like the ruin of a castle.

  The Princess, who was unofficially separated from her husband, had with her her two little girls. She seemed extremely attached to both – though avowing for the younger a preference she frankly ascribed to the interesting accident of its parentage – and she could not understand that Undine, as to whose domestic difficulties she minutely informed herself, should have consented to leave her child to strangers. ‘For, to one’s child, every one but one’s self is a stranger; and whatever your égarements –’ she began, breaking off with a stare when Undine interrupted her to explain that the courts had ascribed all the wrongs in the case to her husband. ‘But then – but then –’ murmured the Princess, turning away from the subject as if checked by too deep an abyss of difference.

  The incident had embarrassed Undine, and though she tried to justify herself by allusions
to her boy’s dependence on his father’s family, and to the duty of not standing in his way, she saw that she made no impression. ‘Whatever one’s errors, one’s child belongs to one,’ her hearer continued to repeat; and Undine, who was frequently scandalized by the Princess’s conversation, now found herself in the odd position of having to set a watch upon her own in order not to scandalize the Princess.

  Each day, nevertheless, strengthened her hold on her new friends. After her first flush of triumph she began indeed to suspect that she had been a slight disappointment to the Princess, had not completely justified the hopes raised by the doubtful honour of being one of Sacha Adelschein’s intimates. Undine guessed that the Princess had expected to find her more amusing, ‘queerer’, more startling in speech and conduct. Though by instinct she was none of these things, she was eager to go as far as was expected; but she felt that her audacities were on lines too normal to be interesting, and that the Princess thought her rather schoolgirlish and old-fashioned. Still, they had in common their youth, their boredom, their high spirits and their hunger for amusement; and Undine was making the most of these ties when one day, coming back from a trip to Monte-Carlo with the Princess, she was brought up short by the sight of a lady – evidently a new arrival – who was seated in an attitude of respectful intimacy beside the old Duchess’s chair. Undine, advancing unheard over the fine gravel of the garden path, recognized at a glance the Marquise de Trézac’s drooping nose and disdainful back, and at the same moment heard her say: ‘– And her husband?’