The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  It was all very novel and interesting, and at first Undine envied Mabel Lipscomb for having made herself a place in such circles; but in time she began to despise her for being content to remain there. For it did not take Undine long to learn that introduction to Mabel’s ‘set’ had brought her no nearer to Fifth Avenue. Even in Apex, Undine’s tender imagination had been nurtured on the feats and gestures of Fifth Avenue. She knew all of New York’s golden aristocracy by name, and the lineaments of its most distinguished scions had been made familiar by passionate poring over the daily press. In Mabel’s world she sought in vain for the originals, and only now and then caught a tantalizing glimpse of one of their familiars: as when Claud Walsingham Popple, engaged on the portrait of a lady whom the Lipscombs described as ‘the wife of a Steel Magnet’, felt it his duty to attend one of his client’s teas, where it became Mabel’s privilege to make his acquaintance and to name to him her friend Miss Spragg.

  Unsuspected social gradations were thus revealed to the attentive Undine, but she was beginning to think that her sad proficiency had been acquired in vain when her hopes were revived by the appearance of Mr Popple and his friend at the Stentorian dance. She thought she had learned enough to be safe from any risk of repeating the hideous Aaronson mistake; yet she now saw she had blundered again in distinguishing Claud Walsingham Popple while she almost snubbed his more retiring companion. It was all very puzzling, and her perplexity had been further increased by Mrs Heeny’s tale of the great Mrs Harmon B. Driscoll’s despair.

  Hitherto Undine had imagined that the Driscoll and Van Degen clans and their allies held undisputed suzerainty over New York society. Mabel Lipscomb thought so too, and was given to bragging of her acquaintance with a Mrs Spoff, who was merely a second cousin of Mrs Harmon B. Driscoll’s. Yet here was she, Undine Spragg of Apex, about to be introduced into an inner circle to which Driscolls and Van Degens had laid siege in vain! It was enough to make her feel a little dizzy with her triumph – to work her up into that state of perilous self-confidence in which all her worst follies had been committed.

  She stood up and, going close to the glass, examined the reflection of her bright eyes and glowing cheeks. This time her fears were superfluous: there were to be no more mistakes and no more follies now! She was going to know the right people at last – she was going to get what she wanted!

  As she stood there, smiling at her happy image, she heard her father’s voice in the room beyond, and instantly began to tear off her dress, strip the long gloves from her arms and unpin the rose in her hair. Tossing the fallen finery aside, she slipped on a dressing-gown and opened the door into the drawing-room.

  Mr Spragg was standing near her mother, who sat in a drooping attitude, her head sunk on her breast, as she did when she had one of her ‘turns’. He looked up abruptly as Undine entered.

  ‘Father – has mother told you? Mrs Fairford has asked me to dine. She’s Mrs Paul Marvell’s daughter – Mrs Marvell was a Dagonet – and they’re sweller than anybody; they won’t know the Driscolls and Van Degens!’

  Mr Spragg surveyed her with humorous fondness.

  ‘That so? What do they want to know you for, I wonder?’ he jeered.

  ‘Can’t imagine – unless they think I’ll introduce you!’ she jeered back in the same key, her arms around his stooping shoulders, her shining hair against his cheek.

  ‘Well – and are you going to? Have you accepted?’ he took up her joke as she held him pinioned; while Mrs Spragg, behind them, stirred in her seat with a little moan.

  Undine threw back her head, plunging her eyes in his, and pressing so close that to his tired elderly sight her face was a mere bright blur.

  ‘I want to awfully,’ she declared, ‘but I haven’t got a single thing to wear.’

  Mrs Spragg, at this, moaned more audibly. ‘Undine, I wouldn’t ask father to buy any more clothes right on top of those last bills.’

  ‘I ain’t on top of those last bills yet – I’m way down under them,’ Mr Spragg interrupted, raising his hands to imprison his daughter’s slender wrists.

  ‘Oh, well – if you want me to look like a scarecrow, and not get asked again, I’ve got a dress that’ll do perfectly,’ Undine threatened, in a tone between banter and vexation.

  Mr Spragg held her away at arm’s length, a smile drawing up the loose wrinkles about his eyes.

  ‘Well, that kind of dress might come in mighty handy on some occasions; so I guess you’d better hold on to it for future use, and go and select another for this Fairford dinner,’ he said; and before he could finish he was in her arms again, and she was smothering his last word in little cries and kisses.

  III

  THOUGH she would not for the world have owned it to her parents, Undine was disappointed in the Fairford dinner.

  The house, to begin with, was small and rather shabby. There was no gilding, no lavish diffusion of light: the room they sat in after dinner, with its green-shaded lamps making faint pools of brightness, and its rows of books from floor to ceiling, reminded Undine of the old circulating library at Apex, before the new marble building was put up. Then, instead of a gas-log, or a polished grate with electric bulbs behind ruby glass, there was an old-fashioned wood-fire, like pictures of ‘Back to the farm for Christmas’; and when the logs fell forward Mrs Fairford or her brother had to jump up to push them in place, and the ashes scattered over the hearth untidily.

  The dinner too was disappointing. Undine was too young to take note of culinary details, but she had expected to view the company through a bower of orchids and eat pretty-coloured entrées in ruffled papers. Instead, there was only a low centre-dish of ferns, and plain roasted and broiled meat that one could recognize – as if they’d been dyspeptics on a diet! With all the hints in the Sunday papers, she thought it dull of Mrs Fairford not to have picked up something newer; and as the evening progressed she began to suspect that it wasn’t a real ‘dinner-party’, and that they had just asked her in to share what they had when they were alone.

  But a glance about the table convinced her that Mrs Fairford could not have meant to treat her other guests so lightly. They were only eight in number, but one was no less a person than young Mrs Peter Van Degen – the one who had been a Dagonet – and the consideration which this young lady, herself one of the choicest ornaments of the Society Column, displayed toward the rest of the company, convinced Undine that they must be more important than they looked. She liked Mrs Fairford, a small incisive woman, with a big nose and good teeth revealed by frequent smiles. In her dowdy black and antiquated ornaments she was not what Undine would have called ‘stylish’; but she had a droll kind way which reminded the girl of her father’s manner when he was not tired or worried about money. One of the other ladies, having white hair, did not long arrest Undine’s attention; and the fourth, a girl like herself, who was introduced as Miss Harriet Ray, she dismissed at a glance as plain and wearing a last year’s ‘model’. The men, too, were less striking than she had hoped. She had not expected much of Mr Fairford, since married men were intrinsically uninteresting, and his baldness and grey moustache seemed naturally to relegate him to the background; but she had looked for some brilliant youths of her own age – in her inmost heart she had looked for Mr Popple. He was not there, however, and of the other men one, whom they called Mr Bowen, was hopelessly elderly – she supposed he was the husband of the white-haired lady – and the other two, who seemed to be friends of young Marvell’s, were both lacking in Claud Walsingham’s dash.

  Undine sat between Mr Bowen and young Marvell, who struck her as very ‘sweet’ (it was her word for friendliness), but even shyer than at the hotel dance. Yet she was not sure if he were shy, or if his quietness were only a new kind of self-possession which expressed itself negatively instead of aggressively. Small, well-knit, fair, he sat stroking his slight blond moustache and looking at her with kindly, almost tender eyes; but he left it to his sister and the others to draw her out and fit her into the patt
ern.

  Mrs Fairford talked so well that the girl wondered why Mrs Heeny had found her lacking in conversation. But though Undine thought silent people awkward she was not easily impressed by verbal fluency. All the ladies in Apex City were more voluble than Mrs Fairford, and had a larger vocabulary: the difference was that with Mrs Fairford conversation seemed to be a concert and not a solo. She kept drawing in the others, giving each a turn, beating time for them with her smile, and somehow harmonizing and linking together what they said. She took particular pains to give Undine her due part in the performance; but the girl’s expansive impulses were always balanced by odd reactions of mistrust, and tonight the latter prevailed. She meant to watch and listen without letting herself go, and she sat very straight and pink, answering promptly but briefly, with the nervous laugh that punctuated all her phrases – saying ‘I don’t care if I do’ when her host asked her to try some grapes, and ‘I wouldn’t wonder’ when she thought any one was trying to astonish her.

  This state of lucidity enabled her to take note of all that was being said. The talk ran more on general questions, and less on people, than she was used to; but though the allusions to pictures and books escaped her, she caught and stored up every personal reference, and the pink in her cheeks deepened at a random mention of Mr Popple.

  ‘Yes – he’s doing me,’ Mrs Peter Van Degen was saying, in her slightly drawling voice. ‘He’s doing everybody this year, you know –’

  ‘As if that were a reason!’ Undine heard Mrs Fairford breathe to Mr Bowen; who replied, at the same pitch: ‘It’s a Van Degen reason, isn’t it?’ – to which Mrs Fairford shrugged assentingly.

  ‘That delightful Popple – he paints so exactly as he talks!’ the white-haired lady took it up. ‘All his portraits seem to proclaim what a gentleman he is, and how he fascinates women! They’re not pictures of Mrs or Miss So-and-so, but simply of the impression Popple thinks he’s made on them.’

  Mrs Fairford smiled. ‘I’ve sometimes thought,’ she mused, ‘that Mr Popple must be the only gentleman I know; at least he’s the only man who has ever told me he was a gentleman – and Mr Popple never fails to mention it.’

  Undine’s ear was too well attuned to the national note of irony for her not to perceive that her companions were making sport of the painter. She winced at their banter as if it had been at her own expense, yet it gave her a dizzy sense of being at last in the very stronghold of fashion. Her attention was diverted by hearing Mrs Van Degen, under cover of the general laugh, say in a low tone to young Marvell: ‘I thought you liked his things, or I wouldn’t have had him paint me.’

  Something in her tone made all Undine’s perceptions bristle, and she strained her ears for the answer.

  ‘I think he’ll do you capitally – you must let me come and see some day soon.’ Marvell’s tone was always so light, so unemphasized, that she could not be sure of its being as indifferent as it sounded. She looked down at the fruit on her plate and shot a side-glance through her lashes at Mrs Peter Van Degen.

  Mrs Van Degen was neither beautiful nor imposing: just a dark girlish-looking creature with plaintive eyes and a fidgety frequent laugh. But she was more elaborately dressed and jewelled than the other ladies, and her elegance and her restlessness made her seem less alien to Undine. She had turned on Marvell a gaze at once pleading and possessive; but whether betokening merely an inherited intimacy (Undine had noticed that they were all more or less cousins) or a more personal feeling, her observer was unable to decide; just as the tone of the young man’s reply might have expressed the open avowal of good-fellowship or the disguise of a different sentiment. All was blurred and puzzling to the girl in this world of half-lights, half-tones, eliminations and abbreviations; and she felt a violent longing to brush away the cobwebs and assert herself as the dominant figure of the scene.

  Yet in the drawing-room, with the ladies, where Mrs Fairford came and sat by her, the spirit of caution once more prevailed. She wanted to be noticed but she dreaded to be patronized, and here again her hostess’s gradations of tone were confusing. Mrs Fairford made no tactless allusions to her being a newcomer in New York – there was nothing as bitter to the girl as that – but her questions as to what pictures had interested Undine at the various exhibitions of the moment, and which of the new books she had read, were almost as open to suspicion, since they had to be answered in the negative. Undine did not even know that there were any pictures to be seen, much less that ‘people’ went to see them; and she had read no new book but When the Kissing Had to Stop, of which Mrs Fairford seemed not to have heard. On the theatre they were equally at odds, for while Undine had seen Oolaloo fourteen times, and was ‘wild’ about Ned Norris in The Soda-Water Fountain, she had not heard of the famous Berlin comedians who were performing Shakespeare at the German Theatre, and knew only by name the clever American actress who was trying to give ‘repertory’ plays with a good stock company. The conversation was revived for a moment by her recalling that she had seen Sarah Burnhard in a play she called Leg-long, and another which she pronounced Fade; but even this did not carry them far, as she had forgotten what both plays were about and had found the actress a good deal older than she expected.

  Matters were not improved by the return of the men from the smoking-room. Henley Fairford replaced his wife at Undine’s side; and since it was unheard-of at Apex for a married man to force his society on a young girl, she inferred that the others didn’t care to talk to her, and that her host and hostess were in league to take her off their hands. This discovery resulted in her holding her vivid head very high, and answering ‘I couldn’t really say,’ or ‘Is that so?’ to all Mr Fairford’s ventures; and as these were neither numerous nor striking it was a relief to both when the rising of the elderly lady gave the signal for departure.

  In the hall, where young Marvell had managed to precede her, Undine found Mrs Van Degen putting on her cloak. As she gathered it about her she laid her hand on Marvell’s arm.

  ‘Ralphie, dear, you’ll come to the opera with me on Friday? We’ll dine together first – Peter’s got a club dinner.’ They exchanged what seemed a smile of intelligence, and Undine heard the young man accept. Then Mrs Van Degen turned to her.

  ‘Good-bye, Miss Spragg. I hope you’ll come –’

  ‘– to dine with me too?’ That must be what she was going to say, and Undine’s heart gave a bound.

  ‘– to see me some afternoon,’ Mrs Van Degen ended, going down the steps to her motor, at the door of which a much-furred footman waited with more furs on his arm.

  Undine’s face burned as she turned to receive her cloak. When she had drawn it on with haughty deliberation she found Marvell at her side, in hat and overcoat, and her heart gave a higher bound. He was going to ‘escort’ her home, of course! This brilliant youth – she felt now that he was brilliant – who dined alone with married women, whom the ‘Van Degen set’ called ‘Ralphie, dear’, had really no eyes for any one but herself; and at the thought her lost self-complacency flowed back warm through her veins.

  The street was coated with ice, and she had a delicious moment descending the steps on Marvell’s arm, and holding it fast while they waited for her cab to come up; but when he had helped her in he closed the door and held his hand out over the lowered window.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said, smiling; and she could not help the break of pride in her voice, as she faltered out stupidly, from the depths of her disillusionment: ‘Oh – good-bye.’

  IV

  ‘FATHER, you’ve got to take a box for me at the opera next Friday.’ From the tone of her voice Undine’s parents knew at once that she was ‘nervous’.

  They had counted a great deal on the Fairford dinner as a means of tranquillization, and it was a blow to detect signs of the opposite result when, late the next morning, their daughter came dawdling into the sodden splendour of the Stentorian breakfast-room.

  The symptoms of Undine’s nervousness were unmistakable to Mr and Mrs Spragg
. They could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, and in the way her straight black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips narrowed to a parallel line below.

  Mr Spragg, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal, was adjusting his gold eye-glasses for a glance at the paper when Undine trailed down the sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year’s crumbs without a sweeping.

  About them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation, turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve.

  Undine, who rose too late to share the family breakfast, usually had her chocolate brought to her in bed by Céleste, after the manner described in the articles on ‘A Society Woman’s Day’ which were appearing in Boudoir Chat. Her mere appearance in the restaurant therefore prepared her parents for those symptoms of excessive tension which a nearer inspection confirmed, and Mr Spragg folded his paper and hooked his glasses to his waistcoat with the air of a man who prefers to know the worst and have it over.

  ‘An opera-box!’ faltered Mrs Spragg, pushing aside the bananas and cream with which she had been trying to tempt an appetite too languid for fried liver or crab mayonnaise.

  ‘A parterre box,’ Undine corrected, ignoring the exclamation, and continuing to address herself to her father. ‘Friday’s the stylish night, and that new tenor’s going to sing again in Cavaleeria,’ she condescended to explain.

  ‘That so?’ Mr Spragg thrust his hands into his waistcoat pockets, and began to tilt his chair till he remembered there was no wall to meet it. He regained his balance and said: ‘Wouldn’t a couple of good orchestra seats do you?’