The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  Meanwhile her demeanour to Chelles was that of the incorruptible but fearless American woman, who cannot even conceive of love outside of marriage, but is ready to give her devoted friendship to the man on whom, in happier circumstances, she might have bestowed her hand. This attitude was provocative of many scenes, during which her suitor’s unfailing powers of expression – his gift of looking and saying all the desperate and devoted things a pretty woman likes to think she inspires – gave Undine the thrilling sense of breathing the very air of French fiction. But she was aware that too prolonged tension of these cords usually ends in their snapping, and that Chelles’ patience was probably in inverse ratio to his ardour.

  When Madame de Trézac had left her these thoughts remained in her mind. She understood exactly what each of her new friends wanted of her. The Princess, who was fond of her cousin, and had the French sense of family solidarity, would have liked to see Chelles happy in what seemed to her the only imaginable way. Madame de Trézac would have liked to do what she could to second the Princess’s efforts in this or any other line; and even the old Duchess – though piously desirous of seeing her favourite nephew married – would have thought it not only natural but inevitable that, while awaiting that happy event, he should try to induce an amiable young woman to mitigate the drawbacks of celibacy. Meanwhile, they might one and all weary of her if Chelles did; and a persistent rejection of his suit would probably imperil her scarcely gained footing among his friends. All this was clear to her, yet it did not shake her resolve. She was determined to give up Chelles unless he was willing to marry her; and the thought of her renunciation moved her to a kind of wistful melancholy.

  In this mood her mind reverted to a letter she had just received from her mother. Mrs Spragg wrote more fully than usual, and the unwonted flow of her pen had been occasioned by an event for which she had long yearned. For months she had pined for a sight of her grandson, had tried to screw up her courage to write and ask permission to visit him, and, finally breaking through her sedentary habits, had begun to haunt the neighbourhood of Washington Square, with the result that one afternoon she had had the luck to meet the little boy coming out of the house with his nurse. She had spoken to him, and he had remembered her and called her ‘Granny’; and the next day she had received a note from Mrs Fairford saying that Ralph would be glad to send Paul to see her. Mrs Spragg enlarged on the delights of the visit and the growing beauty and cleverness of her grandson. She described to Undine exactly how Paul was dressed, how he looked and what he said, and told her how he had examined everything in the room, and, finally coming upon his mother’s photograph, had asked who the lady was; and, on being told, had wanted to know if she was a very long way off, and when Granny thought she would come back.

  As Undine reread her mother’s pages, she felt an unusual tightness in her throat and two tears rose to her eyes. It was dreadful that her little boy should be growing up far away from her, perhaps dressed in clothes she would have hated; and wicked and unnatural that when he saw her picture he should have to be told who she was. ‘If I could only meet some good man who would give me a home and be a father to him,’ she thought – and the tears overflowed and ran down.

  Even as they fell, the door was thrown open to admit Raymond de Chelles, and the consciousness of the moisture still glistening on her cheeks perhaps strengthened her resolve to resist him, and thus made her more imperiously to be desired. Certain it is that on that day her suitor first alluded to a possibility which Madame de Trézac had prudently refrained from suggesting, and there fell upon Undine’s attentive ears the magic phrase ‘annulment of marriage’.

  Her alert intelligence immediately set to work in this new direction; but almost at the same moment she became aware of a subtle change of tone in the Princess and her mother, a change reflected in the corresponding decline of Madame de Trézac’s cordiality. Undine, since her arrival in Paris, had necessarily been less in the Princess’s company, but when they met she had found her as friendly as ever. It was manifestly not a failing of the Princess’s to forget past favours, and though increasingly absorbed by the demands of town life she treated her new friend with the same affectionate frankness, and Undine was given frequent opportunities to enlarge her Parisian acquaintance, not only in the Princess’s intimate circle but in the majestic drawing-rooms of the Hôtel de Dordogne. Now, however, there was a perceptible decline in these signs of hospitality, and Undine, on calling one day on the Duchess, noticed that her appearance sent a visible flutter of discomfort through the circle about her hostess’s chair. Two or three of the ladies present looked away from the newcomer and at each other, and several of them seemed spontaneously to encircle without approaching her, while another – grey-haired, elderly and slightly frightened – with an ‘Adieu, ma bonne tante’ to the Duchess, was hastily aided in her retreat down the long line of old gilded rooms.

  The incident was too mute and rapid to have been noticeable had it not been followed by the Duchess’s resuming her conversation with the ladies nearest her as though Undine had just gone out of the room instead of entering it. The sense of having been thus rendered invisible filled Undine with a vehement desire to make herself seen, and an equally strong sense that all attempts to do so would be vain; and when, a few minutes later, she issued from the portals of the Hôtel de Dordogne it was with the fixed resolve not to enter them again till she had had an explanation with the Princess.

  She was spared the trouble of seeking one by the arrival, early the next morning, of Madame de Trézac, who, entering almost with the breakfast tray, mysteriously asked to be allowed to communicate something of importance.

  ‘You’ll understand, I know, the Princess’s not coming herself –’ Madame de Trézac began, sitting up very straight on the edge of the armchair over which Undine’s lace dressing-gown hung.

  ‘If there’s anything she wants to say to me, I don’t,’ Undine answered, leaning back among her rosy pillows, and reflecting compassionately that the face opposite her was just the colour of the café au lait she was pouring out.

  ‘There are things that are … that might seem too pointed … if one said them oneself,’ Madame de Trézac continued. ‘Our dear Lili’s so good-natured … she so hates to do anything unfriendly; but she naturally thinks first of her mother …’

  ‘Her mother? What’s the matter with her mother?’

  ‘I told her I knew you didn’t understand. I was sure you’d take it in good part …’

  Undine raised herself on her elbow. ‘What did Lili tell you to tell me?’

  ‘Oh, not to tell you … simply to ask if, just for the present, you’d mind avoiding the Duchess’s Thursdays … calling on any other day, that is.’

  ‘Any other day? She’s not at home on any other. Do you mean she doesn’t want me to call?’

  ‘Well – not while the Marquise de Chelles is in Paris. She’s the Duchess’s favourite niece – and of course they all hang together. That kind of family feeling is something you naturally don’t –’

  Undine had a sudden glimpse of hidden intricacies.

  ‘That was Raymond de Chelles’ mother I saw there yesterday? The one they hurried out when I came in?’

  ‘It seems she was very much upset. She somehow heard your name.’

  ‘Why shouldn’t she have heard my name? And why in the world should it upset her?’

  Madame de Trézac heaved a hesitating sigh. ‘Isn’t it better to be frank? She thinks she has reason to feel badly – they all do.’

  ‘To feel badly? Because her son wants to marry me?’

  ‘Of course they know that’s impossible.’ Madame de Trézac smiled compassionately. ‘But they’re afraid of your spoiling his other chances.’

  Undine paused a moment before answering. ‘It won’t be impossible when my marriage is annulled,’ she said.

  The effect of this statement was less electrifying than she had hoped. Her visitor simply broke into a laugh. ‘My dear child! Your marriage
annulled? Who can have put such a mad idea into your head?’

  Undine’s gaze followed the pattern she was tracing with a lustrous nail on her embroidered bedspread. ‘Raymond himself,’ she let fall.

  This time there was no mistaking the effect she produced. Madame de Trézac, with a murmured ‘Oh’, sat gazing before her as if she had lost the thread of her argument; and it was only after a considerable interval that she recovered it sufficiently to exclaim: ‘They’ll never hear of it – absolutely never!’

  ‘But they can’t prevent it, can they?’

  ‘They can prevent its being of any use to you.’

  ‘I see,’ Undine pensively assented.

  She knew the tone she had taken was virtually a declaration of war; but she was in a mood when the act of defiance, apart from its strategic value, was a satisfaction in itself. Moreover, if she could not gain her end without a fight it was better that the battle should be engaged while Raymond’s ardour was at its height. To provoke immediate hostilities she sent for him the same afternoon, and related, quietly and without comment, the incident of her visit to the Duchess, and the mission with which Madame de Trézac had been charged. In the circumstances, she went on to explain, it was manifestly impossible that she should continue to receive his visits; and she met his wrathful comments on his relatives by the gently but firmly expressed resolve not to be the cause of any disagreement between himself and his family.

  XXX

  A FEW days after her decisive conversation with Raymond de Chelles, Undine, emerging from the doors of the Nouveau Luxe, where she had been to call on the newly arrived Mrs Homer Branney, once more found herself face to face with Elmer Moffatt.

  This time there was no mistaking his eagerness to be recognized. He stopped short as they met, and she read such pleasure in his eyes that she too stopped, holding out her hand.

  ‘I’m glad you’re going to speak to me,’ she said, and Moffatt reddened at the allusion.

  ‘Well, I very nearly didn’t. I didn’t know you. You look about as old as you did when I first landed at Apex – remember?’

  He turned back and began to walk at her side in the direction of the Champs Elysées.

  ‘Say – this is all right!’ he exclaimed; and she saw that his glance had left her and was ranging across the wide silvery square ahead of them to the congregated domes and spires beyond the river.

  ‘Do you like Paris?’ she asked, wondering what theatres he had been to.

  ‘It beats everything.’ He seemed to be breathing in deeply the impression of fountains, sculpture, leafy avenues and long-drawn architectural distances fading into the afternoon haze.

  ‘I suppose you’ve been to that old church over there?’ he went on, his gold-topped stick pointing toward the towers of Notre Dame.

  ‘Oh, of course; when I used to sight-see. Have you never been to Paris before?’

  ‘No, this is my first look-round. I came across in March.’

  ‘In March?’ she echoed inattentively. It never occurred to her that other people’s lives went on when they were out of her range of vision, and she tried in vain to remember what she had last heard of Moffatt. ‘Wasn’t that a bad time to leave Wall Street?’

  ‘Well, so-so. Fact is, I was played out: needed a change.’ Nothing in his robust mien confirmed the statement, and he did not seem inclined to develop it. ‘I presume you’re settled here now?’ he went on. ‘I saw by the papers –’

  ‘Yes,’ she interrupted; adding, after a moment: ‘It was all a mistake from the first.’

  ‘Well, I never thought he was your form,’ said Moffatt.

  His eyes had come back to her, and the look in them struck her as something she might use to her advantage; but the next moment he had glanced away with a furrowed brow, and she felt she had not wholly fixed his attention.

  ‘I live at the other end of Paris. Why not come back and have tea with me?’ she suggested, half moved by a desire to know more of his affairs, and half by the thought that a talk with him might help to shed some light on hers.

  In the open taxi-cab he seemed to recover his sense of well-being, and leaned back, his hands on the knob of his stick, with the air of a man pleasantly aware of his privileges. ‘This Paris is a thundering good place,’ he repeated once or twice as they rolled on through the crush and glitter of the afternoon; and when they had descended at Undine’s door, and he stood in her drawing-room, and looked out on the horse-chestnut trees rounding their green domes under the balcony, his satisfaction culminated in the comment: ‘I guess this lays out West End Avenue!’

  His eyes met Undine’s with their old twinkle, and their expression encouraged her to murmur: ‘Of course there are times when I’m very lonely.’

  She sat down behind the tea-table, and he stood at a little distance watching her pull off her gloves with a queer comic twitch of his elastic mouth. ‘Well, I guess it’s only when you want to be,’ he said, grasping a lyre-backed chair by its gilt cords, and sitting down astride of it, his light grey trousers stretching too tightly over his plump thighs. Undine was perfectly aware that he was a vulgar over-dressed man, with a red crease of fat above his collar and an impudent swaggering eye; yet she liked to see him there, and was conscious that he stirred the fibres of a self she had forgotten but had not ceased to understand.

  She had fancied her avowal of loneliness might call forth some sentimental phrase; but though Moffatt was clearly pleased to be with her she saw that she was not the centre of his thoughts, and the discovery irritated her.

  ‘I don’t suppose you’ve known what it is to be lonely since you’ve been in Europe?’ she continued as she held out his tea-cup.

  ‘Oh,’ he said jocosely, ‘I don’t always go round with a guide’; and she rejoined on the same note: ‘Then perhaps I shall see something of you.’

  ‘Why, there’s nothing would suit me better; but the fact is, I’m probably sailing next week.’

  ‘Oh, are you? I’m sorry.’ There was nothing feigned in her regret.

  ‘Anything I can do for you across the pond?’

  She hesitated. ‘There’s something you can do for me right off.’

  He looked at her more attentively, as if his practised eye had passed through the surface of her beauty to what might be going on behind it. ‘Do you want my blessing again?’ he asked with sudden irony.

  Undine opened her eyes with a trustful look. ‘Yes – I do.’

  ‘Well – I’ll be damned!’ said Moffatt gaily.

  ‘You’ve always been so awfully nice,’ she began; and he leaned back, grasping both sides of the chairback, and shaking it a little with his laugh.

  He kept the same attitude while she proceeded to unfold her case, listening to her with the air of sober concentration that his frivolous face took on at any serious demand on his attention. When she had ended he kept the same look during an interval of silent pondering. ‘Is it the fellow who was over at Nice with you that day?’

  She looked at him with surprise. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Why, I liked his looks,’ said Moffatt simply.

  He got up and strolled toward the window. On the way he stopped before a table covered with showy trifles, and after looking at them for a moment singled out a dim old brown and golden book which Chelles had given her. He examined it lingeringly, as though it touched the spring of some choked-up sensibility for which he had no language. ‘Say –’ he began: it was the usual prelude to his enthusiasms; but he laid the book down and turned back.

  ‘Then you think if you had the cash you could fix it up all right with the Pope?’

  Her heart began to beat. She remembered that he had once put a job in Ralph’s way, and had let her understand that he had done it partly for her sake.

  ‘Well,’ he continued, relapsing into hyperbole, ‘I wish I could send the old gentleman my cheque tomorrow morning: but the fact is I’m high and dry.’ He looked at her with a sudden odd intensity. ‘If I wasn’t, I dunno but what –’ T
he phrase was lost in his familiar whistle. ‘That’s an awfully fetching way you do your hair,’ he said.

  It was a disappointment to Undine to hear that his affairs were not prospering, for she knew that in his world ‘pull’ and solvency were closely related, and that such support as she had hoped he might give her would be contingent on his own situation. But she had again a fleeting sense of his mysterious power of accomplishing things in the teeth of adversity; and she answered: ‘What I want is your advice.’

  He turned away and wandered across the room, his hands in his pockets. On her ornate writing-desk he saw a photograph of Paul, bright-curled and sturdy-legged, in a manly reefer, and bent over it with a murmur of approval. ‘Say – what a fellow! Got him with you?’

  Undine coloured. ‘No –’ she began; and seeing his look of surprise, she embarked on her usual explanation. ‘I can’t tell you how I miss him,’ she ended, with a ring of truth that carried conviction to her own ears if not to Moffatt’s.

  ‘Why don’t you get him back, then?’

  ‘Why, I –’

  Moffatt had picked up the frame and was looking at the photograph more closely. ‘Pants!’ he chuckled. ‘I declare!’

  He turned back to Undine. ‘Who does he belong to, anyhow?’

  ‘Belong to?’

  ‘Who got him when you were divorced? Did you?’

  ‘Oh, I got everything,’ she said, her instinct of self-defence on the alert.

  ‘So I thought.’ He stood before her, stoutly planted on his short legs, and speaking with an aggressive energy. ‘Well, I know what I’d do if he was mine.’

  ‘If he was yours?’