The Custom of the Country

by Edith Wharton

  Something of this was in his mind when, the afternoon before their departure, he came home to help her with their last arrangements. She had begged him, for the day, to leave her alone in their cramped salon, into which belated bundles were still pouring; and it was nearly dark when he returned. The evening before she had seemed pale and nervous, and at the last moment had excused herself from dining with the Shallums at a suburban restaurant. It was so unlike her to miss any opportunity of the kind that Ralph had felt a little anxious. But with the arrival of the packers she was afoot and in command again, and he withdrew submissively, as Mr Spragg, in the early Apex days, might have fled from the spring storm of ‘house-cleaning’.

  When he entered the sitting-room, he found it still in disorder. Every chair was hidden under scattered dresses, tissue-paper surged from the yawning trunks and, prone among her heaped-up finery, Undine lay with closed eyes on the sofa.

  She raised her head as he entered, and then turned listlessly away.

  ‘My poor girl, what’s the matter? Haven’t they finished yet?’

  Instead of answering she pressed her face into the cushion and began to sob. The violence of her weeping shook her hair down on her shoulders, and her hands, clenching the arm of the sofa, pressed it away from her as if any contact were insufferable.

  Ralph bent over her in alarm. ‘Why, what’s wrong, dear? What’s happened?’

  Her fatigue of the previous evening came back to him – a puzzled hunted look in her eyes; and with the memory a vague wonder revived. He had fancied himself fairly disencumbered of the stock formulas about the hallowing effects of motherhood, and there were many reasons for not welcoming the news he suspected she had to give; but the woman a man loves is always a special case, and everything was different that befell Undine. If this was what had befallen her it was wonderful and divine: for the moment that was all he felt.

  ‘Dear, tell me what’s the matter,’ he pleaded.

  She sobbed on unheedingly and he waited for her agitation to subside. He shrank from the phrases considered appropriate to the situation, but he wanted to hold her close and give her the depth of his heart in a long kiss.

  Suddenly she sat upright and turned a desperate face on him. ‘Why on earth are you staring at me like that? Anybody can see what’s the matter!’

  He winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye.

  ‘Are you as sorry as all that?’ he began at length, conscious of the flatness of his voice.

  ‘Sorry – sorry? I’m – I’m –’ She snatched her hand away, and went on weeping.

  ‘But, Undine – dearest – by and by you’ll feel differently – I know you will!’

  ‘Differently? Differently? When? In a year? It takes a year – a whole year out of life! What do I care how I shall feel in a year?’

  The chill of her tone struck in. This was more than a revolt of the nerves: it was a settled, a reasoned resentment. Ralph found himself groping for extenuations, evasions – anything to put a little warmth into her!

  ‘Who knows? Perhaps, after all, it’s a mistake.’

  There was no answering light in her face. She turned her head from him wearily.

  ‘Don’t you think, dear, you may be mistaken?’

  ‘Mistaken? How on earth can I be mistaken?’

  Even in that moment of confusion he was struck by the cold competence of her tone, and wondered how she could be so sure.

  ‘You mean you’ve asked – you’ve consulted –?’

  The irony of it took him by the throat. They were the very words he might have spoken in some miserable secret colloquy – the words he was speaking to his wife!

  She repeated dully: ‘I know I’m not mistaken.’

  There was another long silence. Undine lay still, her eyes shut, drumming on the arm of the sofa with a restless hand. The other lay cold in Ralph’s clasp, and through it there gradually stole to him the benumbing influence of the thoughts she was thinking: the sense of the approach of illness, anxiety, and expense, and of the general unnecessary disorganization of their lives.

  ‘That’s all you feel, then?’ he asked at length a little bitterly, as if to disguise from himself the hateful fact that he felt it too. He stood up and moved away. ‘That’s all?’ he repeated.

  ‘Why, what else do you expect me to feel? I feel horribly ill, if that’s what you want.’ He saw the sobs trembling up through her again.

  ‘Poor girl – poor girl … I’m so sorry – so dreadfully sorry!’

  The senseless reiteration seemed to exasperate her. He knew it by the quiver that ran through her like the premonitory ripple on smooth water before the coming of the wind. She turned about on him and jumped to her feet.

  ‘Sorry – you’re sorry? You’re sorry? Why, what earthly difference will it make to you?’ She drew back a few steps and lifted her slender arms from her sides. ‘Look at me – see how I look – how I’m going to look! You won’t hate yourself more and more every morning when you get up and see yourself in the glass! Your life’s going on just as usual! But what’s mine going to be for months and months? And just as I’d been to all this bother – fagging myself to death about all these things –’ her tragic gesture swept the disordered room – ‘just as I thought I was going home to enjoy myself, and look nice, and see people again, and have a little pleasure after all our worries –’ She dropped back on the sofa with another burst of tears. ‘For all the good this rubbish will do me now! I loathe the very sight of it!’ she sobbed with her face in her hands.

  XIV

  IT WAS one of the distinctions of Mr Claud Walsingham Popple that his studio was never too much encumbered with the attributes of his art to permit the installing, in one of its cushioned corners, of an elaborately furnished tea-table flanked by the most varied seductions in sandwiches and pastry.

  Mr Popple, like all great men, had at first had his ups and downs; but his reputation had been permanently established by the verdict of a wealthy patron who, returning from an excursion into other fields of portraiture, had given it as the final fruit of his experience that Popple was the only man who could ‘do pearls’. To sitters for whom this was of the first consequence it was another of the artist’s merits that he always subordinated art to elegance, in life as well as in his portraits. The ‘messy’ element of production was no more visible in his expensively screened and tapestried studio than its results were perceptible in his painting; and it was often said, in praise of his work, that he was the only artist who kept his studio tidy enough for a lady to sit to him in a new dress.

  Mr Popple, in fact, held that the personality of the artist should at all times be dissembled behind that of the man. It was his opinion that the essence of good-breeding lay in tossing off a picture as easily as you lit a cigarette. Ralph Marvell had once said of him that when he began a portrait he always turned back his cuffs and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you can see there’s absolutely nothing here’; and Mrs Fairford supplemented the description by defining his painting as ‘chafing-dish’ art.

  On a certain late afternoon of December, some four years after Mr Popple’s first meeting with Miss Undine Spragg of Apex, even the symbolic chafing-dish was nowhere visible in his studio; the only evidence of its recent activity being the full-length portrait of Mrs Ralph Marvell, who, from her lofty easel and her heavily garlanded frame, faced the doorway with the air of having been invited to ‘receive’ for Mr Popple.

  The artist himself, becomingly clad in mouse-coloured velveteen, had just turned away from the picture to hover above the tea-cups; but his place had been taken by the considerably broader bulk of Mr Peter Van Degen, who, tightly moulded into a coat of the latest cut, stood before the portrait in the attitude of a first arrival.

  ‘Yes, it’s good – it’s damn good, Popp; you’ve hit the hair off rippingly; but the pearls ain’t big enough,’ he pronounced.

  A slight laugh sounded from the raised dai
s behind the easel.

  ‘Of course they’re not! But it’s not his fault, poor man; he didn’t give them to me!’ As she spoke Mrs Ralph Marvell rose from a monumental gilt armchair of pseudo-Venetian design and swept her long draperies to Van Degen’s side.

  ‘He might, then – for the privilege of painting you!’ the latter rejoined, transferring his bulging stare from the counterfeit to the original. His eyes rested on Mrs Marvell’s in what seemed a quick exchange of understanding; then they passed on to a critical inspection of her person. She was dressed for the sitting in something faint and shining, above which the long curves of her neck looked dead white in the cold light of the studio; and her hair, all a shadowless rosy gold, was starred with a hard glitter of diamonds.

  ‘The privilege of painting me? Mercy, I have to pay for being painted! He’ll tell you he’s giving me the picture – but what do you suppose this cost?’ She laid a finger-tip on her shimmering dress.

  Van Degen’s eye rested on her with cold enjoyment. ‘Does the price come higher than the dress?’

  She ignored the allusion. ‘Of course what they charge for is the cut –’

  ‘What they cut away? That’s what they ought to charge for, ain’t it, Popp?’

  Undine took this with cool disdain, but Mr Popple’s sensibilities were offended.

  ‘My dear Peter – really – the artist, you understand, sees all this as a pure question of colour, of pattern; and it’s a point of honour with the man to steel himself against the personal seduction.’

  Mr Van Degen received this protest with a sound of almost vulgar derision, but Undine thrilled agreeably under the glance which her portrayer cast on her. She was flattered by Van Degen’s notice, and thought his impertinence witty; but she glowed inwardly at Mr Popple’s eloquence. After more than three years of social experience she still thought he ‘spoke beautifully’, like the hero of a novel, and she ascribed to jealousy the lack of seriousness with which her husband’s friends regarded him. His conversation struck her as intellectual, and his eagerness to have her share his thoughts was in flattering contrast to Ralph’s growing tendency to keep his to himself. Popple’s homage seemed the subtlest proof of what Ralph could have made of her if he had ‘really understood’ her. It was but another step to ascribe all her past mistakes to the lack of such understanding; and the satisfaction derived from this thought had once impelled her to tell the artist that he alone knew how to rouse her ‘higher self. He had assured her that the memory of her words would thereafter hallow his life; and as he hinted that it had been stained by the darkest errors she was moved at the thought of the purifying influence she exerted.

  Thus it was that a man should talk to a true woman – but how few whom she had known possessed the secret! Ralph, in the first months of their marriage, had been eloquent too, had even gone the length of quoting poetry; but he disconcerted her by his baffling twists and strange allusions (she always scented ridicule in the unknown), and the poets he quoted were esoteric and abstruse. Mr Popple’s rhetoric was drawn from more familiar sources, and abounded in favourite phrases and in moving reminiscences of the Fifth Reader. He was moreover as literary as he was artistic; possessing an unequalled acquaintance with contemporary fiction, and dipping even into the lighter type of memoirs, in which the old acquaintances of history are served up in the disguise of A Royal Sorceress or Passion in a Palace. The mastery with which Mr Popple discussed the novel of the day, especially in relation to the sensibilities of its hero and heroine, gave Undine a sense of intellectual activity which contrasted strikingly with Marvell’s flippant estimate of such works. ‘Passion’, the artist implied, would have been the dominant note of his life, had it not been held in check by a sentiment of exalted chivalry, and by the sense that a nature of such emotional intensity as his must always be ‘ridden on the curb’.

  Van Degen was helping himself from the tray of iced cocktails which stood near the tea-table, and Popple, turning to Undine, took up the thread of his discourse. But why, he asked, why allude before others to feelings so few could understand? The average man – lucky devil! – (with a compassionate glance at Van Degen’s back) the average man knew nothing of the fierce conflict between the lower and higher natures; and even the woman whose eyes had kindled it – how much did she guess of its violence? Did she know – Popple recklessly asked – how often the artist was forgotten in the man – how often the man would take the bit between his teeth, were it not that the look in her eyes recalled some sacred memory, some lesson learned perhaps beside his mother’s knee?

  ‘I say, Popp – was that where you learned to mix this drink? Because it does the old lady credit,’ Van Degen called out, smacking his lips; while the artist, dashing a nervous hand through his hair, muttered: ‘Hang it, Peter – is nothing sacred to you?’

  It pleased Undine to feel herself capable of inspiring such emotions. She would have been fatigued by the necessity of maintaining her own talk on Popple’s level, but she liked to listen to him, and especially to have others overhear what he said to her.

  Her feeling for Van Degen was different. There was more similarity of tastes between them, though his manner flattered her vanity less than Popple’s. She felt the strength of Van Degen’s contempt for everything he did not understand or could not buy: that was the only kind of “exclusiveness” that impressed her. And he was still to her, as in her inexperienced days, the master of the mundane science she had once imagined that Ralph Marvell possessed. During the three years since her marriage she had learned to make distinctions unknown to her girlish categories. She had found out that she had given herself to the exclusive and the dowdy when the future belonged to the showy and the promiscuous; that she was in the case of those who have cast in their lot with a fallen cause, or – to use an analogy more within her range – who have hired an opera-box on the wrong night. It was all confusing and exasperating. Apex ideals had been based on the myth of ‘old families’ ruling New York from a throne of Revolutionary tradition, with the new millionaires paying them feudal allegiance. But experience had long since proved the delusiveness of the simile. Mrs Marvell’s classification of the world into the visited and the unvisited was as obsolete as a medieval cosmogony. Some of those whom Washington Square left unvisited were the centre of social systems far outside its ken, and as indifferent to its opinions as the constellations to the reckonings of the astronomers; and all these systems joyously revolved about their central sun of gold.

  There were moments after Undine’s return to New York when she was tempted to class her marriage with the hateful early mistakes from the memories of which she had hoped it would free her. Since it was never her habit to accuse herself of such mistakes it was inevitable that she should gradually come to lay the blame on Ralph. She found a poignant pleasure, at this stage of her career, in the question: ‘What does a young girl know of life?’ And the poignancy was deepened by the fact that each of the friends to whom she put the question seemed convinced that – had the privilege been his – he would have known how to spare her the disenchantment it implied.

  The conviction of having blundered was never more present to her than when, on this particular afternoon, the guests invited by Mr Popple to view her portrait began to assemble before it.

  Some of the principal figures of Undine’s group had rallied for the occasion, and almost all were in exasperating enjoyment of the privileges for which she pined. There was young Jim Driscoll, heir apparent of the house, with his short stout mistrustful wife, who hated society, but went everywhere lest it might be thought she had been left out; the ‘beautiful Mrs Beringer’, a lovely aimless being, who kept (as Laura Fairford said) a home for stray opinions, and could never quite tell them apart; little Dicky Bowles, whom every one invited because he was understood to ‘say things’ if one didn’t; the Harvey Shallums, fresh from Paris, and dragging in their wake a bewildered nobleman vaguely designated as ‘the Count’, who offered cautious conversational openings, like an exp
lorer trying beads on savages; and, behind these more salient types, the usual filling in of those who are seen everywhere because they have learned to catch the social eye. Such a company was one to flatter the artist as much as his sitter, so completely did it represent that unanimity of opinion which constitutes social strength. Not one of the number was troubled by any personal theory of art: all they asked of a portrait was that the costume should be sufficiently ‘life-like’, and the face not too much so; and a long experience in idealizing flesh and realizing dress-fabrics had enabled Mr Popple to meet both demands.

  ‘Hang it,’ Peter Van Degen pronounced, standing before the easel in an attitude of inspired interpretation, ‘the great thing in a man’s portrait is to catch the likeness – we all know that; but with a woman’s it’s different – a woman’s picture has got to be pleasing. Who wants it about if it isn’t? Those big chaps who blow about what they call realism – how do their portraits look in a drawing-room? Do you suppose they ever ask themselves that? They don’t care – they’re not going to live with the things! And what do they know of drawing-rooms, anyhow? Lots of them haven’t even got a dress-suit. There’s where old Popp has the pull over ’em – he knows how we live and what we want.’

  This was received by the artist with a deprecating murmur, and by his public with warm expressions of approval.

  ‘Happily in this case,’ Popple began (‘as in that of so many of my sitters,’ he hastily put in), ‘there has been no need to idealize – nature herself has outdone the artist’s dream.’