The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  As he walked away with this fresh weight on his mind he caught sight of the strolling figure of Peter Van Degen – Peter lounging and luxuriating among the seductions of the Boulevard with the disgusting ease of a man whose wants are all measured by money, and who always has enough to gratify them.

  His present sense of these advantages revealed itself in the affability of his greeting to Ralph, and in his off-hand request that the latter should ‘look up Clare’, who had come over with him to get her winter finery.

  ‘She’s motoring to Italy next week with some of her longhaired friends – but I’m off for the other side; going back on the Sorceress. She’s just been overhauled at Greenock, and we ought to have a good spin over. Better come along with me, old man.’

  The Sorceress was Van Degen’s steam-yacht, most huge and complicated of her kind: it was his habit, after his semiannual flights to Paris and London to take a joyous company back on her and let Clare return by steamer. The character of these parties made the invitation almost an offence to Ralph; but reflecting that it was probably a phrase distributed to every acquaintance when Van Degen was in a rosy mood, he merely answered: ‘Much obliged, my dear fellow; but Undine and I are sailing immediately.’

  Peter’s glassy eye grew livelier. ‘Ah, to be sure – you’re not over the honeymoon yet. How’s the bride? Stunning as ever? My regards to her, please. I suppose she’s too deep in dressmaking to be called on? – but don’t you forget to look up Clare!’ He hurried on in pursuit of a flitting petticoat and Ralph continued his walk home.

  He prolonged it a little in order to put off telling Undine of his plight; for he could devise only one way of meeting the cost of the voyage, and that was to take it at once, and thus curtail their Parisian expenses. But he knew how unwelcome this plan would be, and he shrank the more from seeing Undine’s face harden since, of late, he had so basked in its brightness.

  When at last he entered the little salon she called ‘stuffy’ he found her in conference with a blond-bearded gentleman who wore the red ribbon in his lapel, and who, on Ralph’s appearance – and at a sign, as it appeared, from Mrs Marvell – swept into his note-case some small objects that had lain on the table, and bowed himself out with a ‘Madame – Monsieur’ worthy of the highest traditions.

  Ralph looked after him with amusement. ‘Who’s your friend – an Ambassador or a tailor?’

  Undine was rapidly slipping on her rings, which, as he now saw, had also been scattered over the table.

  ‘Oh, it was only that jeweller I told you about – the one Bertha Shallum goes to.’

  ‘A jeweller? Good heavens, my poor girl! You’re buying jewels?’ The extravagance of the idea struck a laugh from him.

  Undine’s face did not harden: it took on, instead, an almost deprecating look. ‘Of course not – how silly you are! I only wanted a few old things reset. But I won’t if you’d rather not.’

  She came to him and sat down at his side, laying her hand on his arm. He took the hand up and looked at the deep gleam of the sapphires in the old family ring he had given her.

  ‘You won’t have that reset?’ he said, smiling and twisting the ring about on her finger; then he went on with his thankless explanation. ‘It’s not that I don’t want you to do this or that; it’s simply that, for the moment, we’re rather strapped. I’ve just been to see the steamer people, and our passages will cost a good deal more than I thought.’

  He mentioned the sum and the fact that he must give an answer the next day. Would she consent to sail that very Saturday? Or should they go a fortnight later, in a slow boat from Plymouth?

  Undine frowned on both alternatives. She was an indifferent sailor and shrank from the possible ‘nastiness’ of the cheaper boat. She wanted to get the voyage over as quickly and luxuriously as possible – Bertha Shallum had told her that in a ‘deck-suite’ no one need be sea-sick – but she wanted still more to have another week or two of Paris; and it was always hard to make her see why circumstances could not be bent to her wishes.

  ‘This week? But how on earth can I be ready? Besides, we’re dining at Enghien with the Shallums on Saturday, and motoring to Chantilly with the Jim Driscolls on Sunday. I can’t imagine how you thought we could go this week!’

  But she still opposed the cheap steamer, and after they had carried the question on to Voisin’s, and there unprofitably discusseci it through a long luncheon, it seemed no nearer a solution.

  ‘Well, think it over – let me know this evening,’ Ralph said, proportioning the waiter’s fee to a bill burdened by Undine’s reckless choice of primeurs.

  His wife was to join the newly arrived Mrs Shallum in a round of the Rue de la Paix; and he had seized the opportunity of slipping off to a classical performance at the Français. On their arrival in Paris he had taken Undine to one of these entertainments, but it left her too weary and puzzled for him to renew the attempt, and he had not found time to go back without her. He was glad now to shed his cares in such an atmosphere. The play was of the greatest, the interpretation that of the vanishing grand manner which lived in his first memories of the Parisian stage, and his surrender to such influences as complete as in his early days. Caught up in the fiery chariot of art, he felt once more the tug of its coursers in his muscles, and the rush of their flight still throbbed in him when he walked back late to the hotel.

  XIII

  HE HAD expected to find Undine still out; but on the stairs he crossed Mrs Shallum, who threw at him from under an immense hat-brim: ‘Yes, she’s in, but you’d better come and have tea with me at the Luxe. I don’t think husbands are wanted!’

  Ralph laughingly rejoined that that was just the moment for them to appear; and Mrs Shallum swept on, crying back: ‘All the same, I’ll wait for you!’

  In the sitting-room Ralph found Undine seated behind a tea-table on the other side of which, in an attitude of easy intimacy, Peter Van Degen stretched his lounging length.

  He did not move on Ralph’s appearance, no doubt thinking their kinship close enough to make his nod and ‘Hullo!’ a sufficient greeting. Peter in intimacy was given to miscalculations of the sort, and Ralph’s first movement was to glance at Undine and see how it affected her. But her eyes gave out the vivid rays that noise and banter always struck from them; her face, at such moments, was like a theatre with all the lustres blazing. That the illumination should have been kindled by his cousin’s husband was not precisely agreeable to Marvell, who thought Peter a bore in society and an insufferable nuisance on closer terms. But he was becoming blunted to Undine’s lack of discrimination; and his own treatment of Van Degen was always tempered by his sympathy for Clare.

  He therefore listened with apparent good-humour to Peter’s suggestion of an evening at a petit théâtre with the Harvey Shallums, and joined in the laugh with which Undine declared: ‘Oh, Ralph won’t go – he only likes the theatres where they walk around in bath-towels and talk poetry. – Isn’t that what you’ve just been seeing?’ she added, with a turn of the neck that shed her brightness on him.

  ‘What? One of those five-barrelled shows at the Français? Great Scott, Ralph – no wonder your wife’s pining for the Folies Bergère!’

  ‘She needn’t, my dear fellow. We never interfere with each other’s vices.’

  Peter, unsolicited, was comfortably lighting a cigarette. ‘Ah, there’s the secret of domestic happiness. Marry somebody who likes all the things you don’t, and make love to somebody who likes all the things you do.’

  Undine laughed appreciatively. ‘Only it dooms poor Ralph to such awful frumps. Can’t you see the sort of woman who’d love his sort of play?’

  ‘Oh, I can see her fast enough – my wife loves ’em,’ said their visitor, rising with a grin; while Ralph threw out: ‘So don’t waste your pity on me!’ and Undine’s laugh had the slight note of asperity that the mention of Clare always elicited.

  ‘Tomorrow night, then, at Paillard’s,’ Van Degen concluded. ‘And about the other business
– that’s a go too? I leave it to you to settle the date.’

  The nod and laugh they exchanged seemed to hint at depths of collusion from which Ralph was pointedly excluded; and he wondered how large a programme of pleasure they had already had time to sketch out. He disliked the idea of Undine’s being too frequently seen with Van Degen, whose Parisian reputation was not fortified by the connections that propped it up in New York; but he did not want to interfere with her pleasure, and he was still wondering what to say when, as the door closed, she turned to him gaily.

  ‘I’m so glad you’ve come! I’ve got some news for you.’ She laid a light touch on his arm.

  Touch and tone were enough to disperse his anxieties, and he answered that he was in luck to find her already in when he had supposed her engaged, over a Nouveau Luxe tea-table, in repairing the afternoon’s ravages.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t shop much – I didn’t stay out long.’ She raised a kindling face to him. ‘And what do you think I’ve been doing? While you were sitting in your stuffy old theatre, worrying about the money I was spending (oh, you needn’t fib – I know you were!) I was saving you hundreds and thousands. I’ve saved you the price of our passage!’

  Ralph laughed in pure enjoyment of her beauty. When she shone on him like that what did it matter what nonsense she talked?

  ‘You wonderful woman – how did you do it? By countermanding a tiara?’

  ‘You know I’m not such a fool as you pretend!’ She held him at arm’s length with a nod of joyous mystery. ‘You’ll simply never guess! I’ve made Peter Van Degen ask us to go home on the Sorceress. What do you say to that?’

  She flashed it out on a laugh of triumph, without appearing to have a doubt of the effect the announcement would produce.

  Ralph stared at her. ‘The Sorceress? You made him?’

  ‘Well, I managed it, I worked him round to it! He’s crazy about the idea now – but I don’t think he’d thought of it before he came.’

  ‘I should say not!’ Ralph ejaculated. ‘He never would have had the cheek to think of it.’

  ‘Well, I’ve made him, anyhow! Did you ever know such luck?’

  ‘Such luck?’ He groaned at her obstinate innocence. ‘Do you suppose I’ll let you cross the ocean on the Sorceress?’

  She shrugged impatiently. ‘You say that because your cousin doesn’t go on her.’

  ‘If she doesn’t, it’s because it’s no place for decent women.’

  ‘It’s Clare’s fault if it isn’t. Everybody knows she’s crazy about you, and she makes him feel it. That’s why he takes up with other women.’

  Her anger reddened her cheeks and dropped her brows like a black bar above her glowing eyes. Even in his recoil from what she said Ralph felt the tempestuous heat of her beauty. But for the first time his latent resentments rose in him, and he gave her back wrath for wrath.

  ‘Is that the precious stuff he tells you?’

  ‘Do you suppose I had to wait for him to tell me? Everybody knows it – everybody in New York knew she was wild when you married. That’s why she’s always been so nasty to me. If you won’t go on the Sorceress they’ll all say it’s because she was jealous of me and wouldn’t let you.’

  Ralph’s indignation had already flickered down to disgust. Undine was no longer beautiful – she seemed to have the face of her thoughts. He stood up with an impatient laugh.

  ‘Is that another of his arguments? I don’t wonder they’re convincing –’ But as quickly as it had come the sneer dropped, yielding to a wave of pity, the vague impulse to silence and protect her. How could he have given way to the provocation of her weakness, when his business was to defend her from it and lift her above it? He recalled his old dreams of saving her from Van Degenism – it was not thus that he had imagined the rescue.

  ‘Don’t let’s pay Peter the compliment of squabbling over him,’ he said, turning away to pour himself a cup of tea.

  When he had filled his cup he sat down beside Undine with a smile. ‘No doubt he was joking – and thought you were; but if you really made him believe we might go with him you’d better drop him a line.’

  Undine’s brow still gloomed. ‘You refuse, then?’

  ‘Refuse? I don’t need to! Do you want to succeed to half the chorus-world of New York?’

  ‘They won’t be on board with us, I suppose!’

  ‘The echoes of their conversation will. It’s the only language Peter knows.’

  ‘He told me he longed for the influence of a good woman –’ She checked herself, reddening at Ralph’s laugh.

  ‘Well, tell him to apply again when he’s been under it a month or two. Meanwhile we’ll stick to the liners.’

  Ralph was beginning to learn that the only road to her reason lay through her vanity, and he fancied that if she could be made to see Van Degen as an object of ridicule she might give up the idea of the Sorceress of her own accord. But her will hardened slowly under his joking opposition, and she became no less formidable as she grew more calm. He was used to women who, in such cases, yielded as a matter of course to masculine judgements: if one pronounced a man ‘not decent’ the question was closed. But it was Undine’s habit to ascribe all interference with her plans to personal motives, and he could see that she attributed his opposition to the furtive machinations of poor Clare. It was odious to him to prolong the discussion, for the accent of recrimination was the one he most dreaded on her lips. But the moment came when he had to take the brunt of it, averting his thoughts as best he might from the glimpse it gave of a world of mean familiarities, of reprisals drawn from the vulgarest of vocabularies. Certain retorts sped through the air like the flight of household utensils, certain charges rang out like accusations of tampering with the groceries. He stiffened himself against such comparisons, but they stuck in his imagination and left him thankful when Undine’s anger yielded to a burst of tears. He had held his own and gained his point. The trip on the Sorceress was given up, and a note of withdrawal dispatched to Van Degen; but at the same time Ralph cabled his sister to ask if she could increase her loan. For he had conquered only at the cost of a concession: Undine was to stay in Paris till October, and they were to sail on a fast steamer, in a deck-suite, like the Harvey Shallums.

  Undine’s ill-humour was soon dispelled by any new distraction, and she gave herself to the untroubled enjoyment of Paris. The Shallums were the centre of a like-minded group, and in the hours the ladies could spare from their dress-makers the restaurants shook with their hilarity and the suburbs with the shriek of their motors. Van Degen, who had postponed his sailing, was a frequent sharer in these amusements; but Ralph counted on New York influences to detach him from Undine’s train. He was learning to influence her through her social instincts where he had once tried to appeal to other sensibilities.

  His worst moment came when he went to see Clare Van Degen, who, on the eve of departure, had begged him to come to her hotel. He found her less restless and rattling than usual, with a look in her eyes that reminded him of the days when she had haunted his thoughts. The visit passed off without vain returns to the past; but as he was leaving she surprised him by saying: ‘Don’t let Peter make a goose of your wife.’

  Ralph reddened, but laughed.

  ‘Oh, Undine’s wonderfully able to defend herself, even against such seductions as Peter’s.’

  Mrs Van Degen looked down with a smile at the bracelets on her thin brown wrist. ‘His personal seductions – yes. But as an inventor of amusements he’s inexhaustible; and Undine likes to be amused.’

  Ralph made no reply but showed no annoyance. He simply took her hand and kissed it as he said good-bye; and she turned from him without audible farewell.

  As the day of departure approached, Undine’s absorption in her dresses almost precluded the thought of amusement. Early and late she was closeted with fitters and packers – even the competent Céleste not being trusted to handle the treasures now pouring in – and Ralph cursed his weakness in not restraining h
er, and then fled for solace to museums and galleries.

  He could not rouse in her any scruple about incurring fresh debts, yet he knew she was no longer unaware of the value of money. She had learned to bargain, pare down prices, evade fees, brow-beat the small tradespeople and wheedle concessions from the great – not, as Ralph perceived, from any effort to restrain her expenses, but only to prolong and intensify the pleasure of spending. Pained by the trait, he tried to laugh her out of it. He told her once that she had a miserly hand – showing her, in proof, that, for all their softness, the fingers would not bend back, or the pink palm open. But she retorted a little sharply that it was no wonder, since she’d heard nothing talked of since their marriage but economy; and this left him without any answer. So the purveyors continued to mount to their apartment, and Ralph, in the course of his frequent flights from it, found himself always dodging the corners of black glazed boxes and swaying pyramids of pasteboard; always lifting his hat to sidling milliners’ girls, or effacing himself before slender vendeuses floating by in a mist of opoponax. He felt incompetent to pronounce on the needs to which these visitors ministered; but the reappearance among them of the blond-bearded jeweller gave him ground for fresh fears. Undine had assured him that she had given up the idea of having her ornaments reset, and there had been ample time for their return; but on his questioning her she explained that there had been delays and ‘bothers’ and put him in the wrong by asking ironically if he supposed she was buying things ‘for pleasure’ when she knew as well as he that there wasn’t any money to pay for them.

  But his thoughts were not all dark. Undine’s moods still infected him, and when she was happy he felt an answering lightness. Even when her amusements were too primitive to be shared he could enjoy their reflection in her face. Only, as he looked back, he was struck by the evanescence, the lack of substance, in their moments of sympathy, and by the permanent marks left by each breach between them. Yet he still fancied that some day the balance might be reversed, and that as she acquired a finer sense of values the depths in her would find a voice.