The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  Undine turned sick as she listened. Only the evening before she had gone on a ‘buggy-ride’ with a young gentleman from Deposit – a dentist’s assistant – and had let him kiss her, and given him the flower from her hair. She loathed the thought of him now: she loathed all the people about her, and most of all the disdainful Miss Wincher. It enraged her to think that the Winchers classed her with the ‘hotel crew’ – with the ‘belles’ who awaited their Sunday young men. The place was forever blighted for her, and the next week she dragged her amazed but thankful parents back to Apex.

  But Miss Wincher’s depreciatory talk had opened ampler vistas, and the pioneer blood in Undine would not let her rest. She had heard the call of the Atlantic seaboard, and the next summer found the Spraggs at Skog Harbour, Maine. Even now Undine felt a shiver of boredom as she recalled it. That summer had been the worst of all. The bare wind-beaten inn, all shingles without and blueberry pie within, was ‘exclusive’, parochial, Bostonian; and the Spraggs wore through the interminable weeks in blank unmitigated isolation. The incomprehensible part of it was that every other woman in the hotel was plain, dowdy or elderly – and most of them all three. If there had been any competition on ordinary lines Undine would have won, as Van Degen said, ‘hands down’. But there wasn’t – the other ‘guests’ simply formed a cold impenetrable group who walked, boated, played golf, and discussed Christian Science and the Subliminal, unaware of the tremulous organism drifting helplessly against their rock-bound circle.

  It was on the day the Spraggs left Skog Harbour that Undine vowed to herself with set lips: ‘I’ll never try anything again till I try New York.’ Now she had gained her point and tried New York and so far, it seemed, with no better success. From small things to great, everything went against her. In such hours of self-searching she was ready enough to acknowledge her own mistakes, but they exasperated her less than the blunders of her parents. She was sure, for instance, that she was on what Mrs Heeny called ‘the right tack’ at last: yet, just at the moment when her luck seemed about to turn she was to be thwarted by her father’s stupid obstinacy about the opera-box …

  She lay brooding over these things till long after Mrs Spragg had gone away to dress for dinner, and it was nearly eight o’clock when she heard her father’s dragging tread in the hall.

  She kept her eyes fixed on her book while he entered the room and moved about behind her, laying aside his hat and overcoat; then his steps came close and a small parcel dropped on the pages of her book.

  ‘Oh, father!’ She sprang up, all alight, the novel on the floor, her fingers twitching for the tickets. But a substantial packet emerged, like nothing she had ever seen. She looked at it, hoping, fearing – she beamed blissful interrogation on her father while his sallow smile continued to tantalize her. Then she closed on him with a rush, smothering his words against her hair.

  ‘It’s for more than one night – why, it’s for every other Friday! Oh, you darling, you darling!’ she exulted.

  Mr Spragg, through the glittering meshes, feigned dismay. ‘That so? They must have given me the wrong –!’ Then, convicted by her radiant eyes as she swung round on him: ‘I knew you only wanted it once for yourself, Undine; but I thought maybe, off nights, you’d like to send it to your friends.’

  Mrs Spragg, who from her doorway had assisted with moist eyes at this closing pleasantry, came forward as Undine hurried away to dress.

  ‘Abner – can you really manage it all right?’

  He answered her with one of his awkward brief caresses. ‘Don’t you fret about that, Leota. I’m bound to have her go round with these people she knows. I want her to be with them all she can.’ A pause fell between them, while Mrs Spragg looked anxiously into his fagged eyes.

  ‘You seen Elmer again?’

  ‘No. Once was enough,’ he returned, with a scowl like Undine’s.

  ‘Why – you said he couldn’t come after her, Abner!’

  ‘No more he can. But what if she was to get nervous and lonesome, and want to go after him?’

  Mrs Spragg shuddered away from the suggestion. ‘How’d he look? Just the same?’ she whispered.

  ‘No. Spruced up. That’s what scared me.’

  It scared her too, to the point of blanching her habitually lifeless cheek. She continued to scrutinize her husband broodingly. ‘You look fairly sick, Abner. You better let me get you some of those stomach-drops right off,’ she proposed.

  But he parried this with his unfailing humour. ‘I guess I’m too sick to risk that.’ He passed his hand through her arm with the conjugal gesture familiar to Apex City. ‘Come along down to dinner, mother – I guess Undine won’t mind if I don’t rig up tonight.’

  V

  SHE HAD looked down at them, enviously, from the balcony – she had looked up at them, reverentially, from the stalls; but now at last she was on a line with them, among them, she was part of the sacred semi-circle whose privilege it is, between the acts, to make the mere public forget that the curtain has fallen.

  As she swept to the left-hand seat of their crimson niche, waving Mabel Lipscomb to the opposite corner with a gesture learned during her apprenticeship in the stalls, Undine felt that quickening of the faculties that comes in the high moments of life. Her consciousness seemed to take in at once the whole bright curve of the auditorium, from the unbroken lines of spectators below her to the culminating blaze of the central chandelier; and she herself was the core of that vast illumination, the sentient throbbing surface which gathered all the shafts of light into a centre.

  It was almost a relief when, a moment later, the lights sank, the curtain rose, and the focus of illumination was shifted. The music, the scenery, and the movement on the stage, were like a rich mist tempering the radiance that shot on her from every side, and giving her time to subside, draw breath, adjust herself to this new clear medium which made her feel so oddly brittle and transparent.

  When the curtain fell on the first act she began to be aware of a subtle change in the house. In all the boxes cross-currents of movement had set in: groups were coalescing and breaking up, fans waving and heads twinkling, black coats emerging among white shoulders, late comers dropping their furs and laces in the red penumbra of the background. Undine, for the moment unconscious of herself, swept the house with her opera-glass, searching for familiar faces. Some she knew without being able to name them – fixed figure-heads of the social prow – others she recognized from their portraits in the papers; but of the few from whom she could herself claim recognition not one was visible, and as she pursued her investigations the whole scene grew blank and featureless.

  Almost all the boxes were full now, but one, just opposite, tantalized her by its continued emptiness. How queer to have an opera-box and not use it! What on earth could the people be doing – what rarer delight could they be tasting? Undine remembered that the numbers of the boxes and the names of their owners were given on the back of the programme, and after a rapid computation she turned to consult the list. Mondays and Fridays, Mrs Peter Van Degen. That was it: the box was empty because Mrs Van Degen was dining alone with Ralph Marvell! ‘Peter will be at one of his club dinners.’ Undine had a sharp vision of the Van Degen dining-room – she pictured it as oak-carved and sumptuous with gilding – with a small table in the centre, and rosy lights and flowers, and Ralph Marvell, across the hot-house grapes and champagne, leaning to take a light from his hostess’s cigarette. Undine had seen such scenes on the stage, she had come upon them in the glowing pages of fiction, and it seemed to her that every detail was before her now, from the glitter of jewels on Mrs Van Degen’s bare shoulders to the way young Marvell stroked his slight blond moustache while he smiled and listened.

  Undine blushed with anger at her own simplicity in fancying that he had been ‘taken’ by her – that she could ever really count among these happy self-absorbed people! They all had their friends, their ties, their delightful crowding obligations: why should they make room for an intruder in a
circle so packed with the initiated?

  As her imagination developed the details of the scene in the Van Degen dining-room it became clear to her that fashionable society was horribly immoral and that she could never really be happy in such a poisoned atmosphere. She remembered that an eminent divine was preaching a series of sermons against Social Corruption, and she determined to go and hear him on the following Sunday.

  This train of thought was interrupted by the feeling that she was being intently observed from the neighbouring box. She turned around with a feint of speaking to Mrs Lipscomb, and met the bulging stare of Peter Van Degen. He was standing behind the lady of the eye-glass, who had replaced her tortoise-shell implement by one of closely set brilliants, which, at a word from her companion, she critically bent on Undine.

  ‘No – I don’t remember,’ she said; and the girl reddened, divining herself unidentified after this protracted scrutiny.

  But there was no doubt as to young Van Degen’s remembering her. She was even conscious that he was trying to provoke in her some reciprocal sign of recognition; and the attempt drove her to the haughty study of her programme.

  ‘Why, there’s Mr Popple over there!’ exclaimed Mabel Lipscomb, making large signs across the house with fan and playbill.

  Undine had already become aware that Mabel, planted, blonde and brimming, too near the edge of the box, was somehow out of scale and out of drawing; and the freedom of her demonstrations increased the effect of disproportion. No one else was wagging and waving in that way: a gesture-less mute telegraphy seemed to pass between the other boxes. Still, Undine could not help following Mrs Lipscomb’s glance, and there in fact was Claud Popple, taller and more dominant than ever, and bending easily over what she felt must be the back of a brilliant woman.

  He replied by a discreet salute to Mrs Lipscomb’s intemperate motions, and Undine saw the brilliant woman’s opera-glass turn in their direction, and said to herself that in a moment Mr Popple would be ’round’. But the entr’acte wore on, and no one turned the handle of their door, or disturbed the peaceful somnolence of Harry Lipscomb, who, not being (as he put it) ‘on to’ grand opera, had abandoned the struggle and withdrawn to the seclusion of the inner box. Undine jealously watched Mr Popple’s progress from box to box, from brilliant woman to brilliant woman; but just as it seemed about to carry him to their door he reappeared at his original post across the house.

  ‘Undie, do look – there’s Mr Marvell!’ Mabel began again, with another conspicuous outbreak of signalling; and this time Undine flushed to the nape as Mrs Peter Van Degen appeared in the opposite box with Ralph Marvell behind her. The two seemed to be alone in the box – as they had doubtless been alone all the evening! – and Undine furtively turned to see if Mr Van Degen shared her disapproval. But Mr Van Degen had disappeared, and Undine, leaning forward, nervously touched Mabel’s arm.

  ‘What’s the matter, Undine? Don’t you see Mr Marvell over there? Is that his sister he’s with?’

  ‘No. – I wouldn’t beckon like that,’ Undine whispered between her teeth.

  ‘Why not? Don’t you want him to know you’re here?’

  ‘Yes – but the other people are not beckoning.’

  Mabel looked about unabashed. ‘Perhaps they’ve all found each other. Shall I send Harry over to tell him?’ she shouted above the blare of the wind instruments.

  ‘No!’ gasped Undine as the curtain rose.

  She was no longer capable of following the action on the stage. Two presences possessed her imagination: that of Ralph Marvell, small, unattainable, remote, and that of Mabel Lipscomb, near-by, immense and irrepressible.

  It had become clear to Undine that Mabel Lipscomb was ridiculous. That was the reason why Popple did not come to the box. No one would care to be seen talking to her while Mabel was at her side: Mabel, monumental and moulded while the fashionable were flexible and diaphanous, Mabel strident and explicit while they were subdued and allusive. At the Stentorian she was the centre of her group – here she revealed herself as unknown and unknowing. Why, she didn’t even know that Mrs Peter Van Degen was not Ralph Marvell’s sister! And she had a way of trumpeting out her ignorances that jarred on Undine’s subtler methods. It was precisely at this point that there dawned on Undine what was to be one of the guiding principles of her career: ‘It’s better to watch than to ask questions.’

  The curtain fell again, and Undine’s eyes flew back to the Van Degen box. Several men were entering it together, and a moment later she saw Ralph Marvell rise from his seat and pass out. Half-unconsciously she placed herself in such a way as to have an eye on the door of the box. But its handle remained unturned, and Harry Lipscomb, leaning back on the sofa, his head against the opera cloaks, continued to breathe stertorously through his open mouth and stretched his legs a little farther across the threshold …

  The entr’acte was nearly over when the door opened and two gentlemen stumbled over Mr Lipscomb’s legs. The foremost was Claud Walsingham Popple; and above his shoulder shone the batrachian countenance of Peter Van Degen. A brief murmur from Mr Popple made his companion known to the two ladies, and Mr Van Degen promptly seated himself behind Undine, relegating the painter to Mrs Lipscomb’s elbow.

  ‘Queer go – I happened to see your friend there waving to old Popp across the house. So I bolted over and collared him: told him he’d got to introduce me before he was a minute older. I tried to find out who you were the other day at the Motor Show – no, where was it? Oh, those pictures at Goldmark’s. What d’you think of ’em, by the way? You ought to be painted yourself – no, I mean it, you know – you ought to get old Popp to do you. He’d do your hair rippingly. You must let me come and talk to you about it … About the picture or your hair? Well, your hair if you don’t mind. Where’d you say you were staying? Oh, you live here, do you? I say, that’s first-rate!’

  Undine sat well forward, curving toward him a little, as she had seen the other women do, but holding back sufficiently to let it be visible to the house that she was conversing with no less a person than Mr Peter Van Degen. Mr Popple’s talk was certainly more brilliant and purposeful, and she saw him cast longing glances at her from behind Mrs Lipscomb’s shoulder; but she remembered how lightly he had been treated at the Fairford dinner, and she wanted – oh, how she wanted! – to have Ralph Marvell see her talking to Van Degen.

  She poured out her heart to him, improvising an opinion on the pictures and an opinion on the music, falling in gaily with his suggestion of a jolly little dinner some night soon, at the Café Martin, and strengthening her position, as she thought, by an easy allusion to her acquaintance with Mrs Van Degen. But at the word her companion’s eye clouded, and a shade of constraint dimmed his enterprising smile.

  ‘My wife –? Oh, she doesn’t go to restaurants – she moves on too high a plane. But we’ll get old Popp, and Mrs –, Mrs –, what’d you say your fat friend’s name was? Just a select little crowd of four – and some kind of a cheerful show afterward … Jove! There’s the curtain, and I must skip.’

  As the door closed on him Undine’s cheeks burned with resentment. If Mrs Van Degen didn’t go to restaurants, why had he supposed that she would? And to have to drag Mabel in her wake! The leaden sense of failure overcame her again. Here was the evening nearly over, and what had it led to? Looking up from the stalls, she had fancied that to sit in a box was to be in society – now she saw it might but emphasize one’s exclusion. And she was burdened with the box for the rest of the season! It was really stupid of her father to have exceeded his instructions: why had he not done as she told him? … Undine felt helpless and tired … hateful memories of Apex crowded back on her. Was it going to be as dreary here as there?

  She felt Lipscomb’s loud whisper in her back: ‘Say, you girls, I guess I’ll cut this and come back for you when the show busts up.’ They heard him shuffle out of the box, and Mabel settled back to undisturbed enjoyment of the stage.

  When the last entr’acte began U
ndine stood up, resolved to stay no longer. Mabel, lost in the study of the audience, had not noticed her movement, and as she passed alone into the back of the box the door opened and Ralph Marvell came in.

  Undine stood with one arm listlessly raised to detach her cloak from the wall. Her attitude showed the long slimness of her figure and the fresh curve of the throat below her bent-back head. Her face was paler and softer than usual, and the eyes she rested on Marvell’s face looked deep and starry under their fixed brows.

  ‘Oh – you’re not going?’ he exclaimed.

  ‘I thought you weren’t coming,’ she answered simply.

  ‘I waited till now on purpose to dodge your other visitors.’

  She laughed with pleasure. ‘Oh, we hadn’t so many!’

  Some intuition had already told her that frankness was the tone to take with him. They sat down together on the red damask sofa, against the hanging cloaks. As Undine leaned back her hair caught in the spangles of the wrap behind her, and she had to sit motionless while the young man freed the captive mesh. Then they settled themselves again, laughing a little at the incident.

  A glance had made the situation clear to Mrs Lipscomb, and they saw her return to her rapt inspection of the boxes. In their mirror-hung recess the light was subdued to a rosy dimness and the hum of the audience came to them through half-drawn silken curtains. Undine noticed the delicacy and finish of her companion’s features as his head detached itself against the red silk walls. The hand with which he stroked his small moustache was finely finished too, but sinewy and not effeminate. She had always associated finish and refinement entirely with her own sex, but she began to think they might be even more agreeable in a man. Marvell’s eyes were grey, like her own, with chestnut eyebrows and darker lashes; and his skin was as clear as a woman’s, but pleasantly reddish, like his hands.