The Custom of the Country (26 page)

Paul was not used to being perched at such a height, and his nature was hospitable to new impressions. ‘Oh, I like it up here – you’re higher than father!’ he exclaimed; and Moffatt hugged him with a laugh.

‘It must feel mighty good to come up town to a fellow like you in the evenings,’ he said, addressing the child but looking at Undine, who also laughed a little.

‘Oh, they’re a dreadful nuisance, you know; but Paul’s a very good boy.’

‘I wonder if he knows what a friend I’ve been to him lately,’ Moffatt went on, as they turned into Fifth Avenue.

Undine smiled: she was glad he should have given her an opening.

‘He shall be told as soon as he’s old enough to thank you. I’m so glad you came to Ralph about that business.’

‘Oh, I gave him a leg up, and I guess he’s given me one too. Queer the way things come round – he’s fairly put me in the way of a fresh start.’

Their eyes met in a silence which Undine was the first to break. ‘It’s been awfully nice of you to do what you’ve done – right along. And this last thing has made a lot of difference to us.’

‘Well, I’m glad you feel that way. I never wanted to be anything but “nice,” as you call it.’ Moffatt paused a moment and then added: ‘If you’re less scared of me than your father is I’d be glad to call round and see you once in a while.’

The quick blood rushed to her cheeks. There was nothing challenging, demanding in his tone – she guessed at once that if he made the request it was simply for the pleasure of being with her, and she liked the magnanimity implied. Nevertheless she was not sorry to have to answer: ‘Of course I’ll always be glad to see you – only, as it happens, I’m just sailing for Europe.’

‘For Europe?’ The word brought Moffatt to a stand so abruptly that little Paul lurched on his shoulder.

‘For Europe?’ he repeated. ‘Why, I thought you said the other evening you expected to stay on in town till July. Didn’t you think of going to the Adirondacks?’

Flattered by his evident disappointment, she became high and careless in her triumph. ‘Oh, yes – but that’s all changed. Ralph and the boy are going; but I sail on Saturday to join some friends in Paris – and later I may do some motoring in Switzerland and Italy.’

She laughed a little in the mere enjoyment of putting her plans into words and Moffatt laughed too, but with an edge of sarcasm.

‘I see – I see: everything’s changed, as you say, and your husband can blow you off to the trip. Well, I hope you’ll have a first-class time.’

Their glances crossed again, and something in his cool scrutiny impelled Undine to say with a burst of candour: ‘If I do, you know, I shall owe it all to you!’

‘Well, I always told you I meant to act white by you,’ he answered.

They walked on in silence, and presently he began again in his usual joking strain: ‘See what one of the Apex girls has been up to?’

Apex was too remote for her to understand the reference, and he went on: ‘Why, Millard Binch’s wife – Indiana Frusk
that was. Didn’t you see in the papers that Indiana’d fixed it up with James J. Rolliver to marry her? They say it was easy enough squaring Millard Binch – you’d know it
would
be – but it cost Rolliver near a million to mislay Mrs R. and the children. Well, Indiana’s pulled it off, anyhow; she always
was
a bright girl. But she never came up to you.’

‘Oh –’ she stammered with a laugh, astonished and agitated by his news. Indiana Frusk and Rolliver! It showed how easily the thing could be done. If only her father had listened to her! If a girl like Indiana Frusk could gain her end so easily, what might not Undine have accomplished? She knew Moffatt was right in saying that Indiana had never come up to her … She wondered how the marriage would strike Van Degen …

She signalled to a cab and they walked toward it without speaking. Undine was recalling with intensity that one of Indiana’s shoulders was higher than the other, and that people in Apex had thought her lucky to catch Millard Binch, the druggist’s clerk, when Undine herself had cast him off after a lingering engagement. And now Indiana Frusk was to be Mrs James J. Rolliver!

Undine got into the cab and bent forward to take little Paul.

Moffatt lowered his charge with exaggerated care, and a ‘Steady there, steady,’ that made the child laugh; then, stooping over, he put a kiss on Paul’s lips before handing him over to his mother.

‘T
HE
P
ARISIAN
Diamond Company – Anglo-American branch.’

Charles Bowen, seated, one rainy evening of the Paris season, in a corner of the great Nouveau Luxe restaurant, was lazily trying to resolve his impressions of the scene into the
phrases of a letter to his old friend Mrs Henley Fairford.

The long habit of unwritten communion with this lady – in no way conditioned by the short rare letters they actually exchanged – usually caused his notations, in absence, to fall into such terms when the subject was of a kind to strike an answering flash from her. And who but Mrs Fairford would see, from his own precise angle, the fantastic improbability, the layers on layers of unsubstantialness, on which the seemingly solid scene before him rested?

The dining-room of the Nouveau Luxe was at its fullest, and, having contracted on the garden side through stress of weather, had even overflowed to the farther end of the long hall beyond; so that Bowen, from his corner, surveyed a seemingly endless perspective of plumed and jewelled heads, of shoulders bare or black-coated, encircling the close-packed tables. He had come half an hour before the time he had named to his expected guest, so that he might have the undisturbed amusement of watching the picture compose itself again before his eyes. During some forty years’ perpetual exercise of his perceptions he had never come across anything that gave them the special titillation produced by the sight of the dinner-hour at the Nouveau Luxe: the same sense of putting his hand on human nature’s passion for the factitious, its incorrigible habit of imitating the imitation.

As he sat watching the familiar faces swept toward him on the rising tide of arrival – for it was one of the joys of the scene that the type was always the same even when the individual was not – he hailed with renewed appreciation this costly expression of a social ideal. The dining-room at the Nouveau Luxe represented, on such a spring evening, what unbounded material power had devised for the delusion of its leisure: a phantom ‘society’, with all the rules, smirks, gestures of its model, but evoked out of promiscuity and incoherence while the other had been the product of continuity and choice. And the instinct which had driven a new class of world-compellers to bind themselves to slavish imitation of the superseded, and their prompt and reverent
faith in the reality of the sham they had created, seemed to Bowen the most satisfying proof of human permanence.

With this thought in his mind he looked up to greet his guest. The Comte Raymond de Chelles, straight, slim and gravely smiling, came toward him with frequent pauses of salutation at the crowded tables; saying, as he seated himself and turned his pleasant eyes on the scene: ‘
Il n’y a pas à dire
, my dear Bowen, it’s charming and sympathetic and original – we owe America a debt of gratitude for inventing it!’

Bowen felt a last touch of satisfaction: they were the very words to complete his thought.

‘My dear fellow, it’s really you and your kind who are responsible. It’s the direct creation of feudalism, like all the great social upheavals!’

Raymond de Chelles stroked his handsome brown moustache. ‘I should have said, on the contrary, that one enjoyed it for the contrast. It’s such a refreshing change from our institutions – which are, nevertheless, the necessary foundations of society. But just as one may have an infinite admiration for one’s wife, and yet occasionally –’ he waved a light hand toward the spectacle. ‘This, in the social order, is the diversion, the permitted diversion, that your original race has devised: a kind of superior Bohemia, where one may be respectable without being bored.’

Bowen laughed. ‘You’ve put it in a nutshell: the ideal of the American woman is to be respectable without being bored; and from that point of view this world they’ve invented has more originality than I gave it credit for.’

Chelles thoughtfully unfolded his napkin. ‘My impression’s a superficial one, of course – for as to what goes on underneath –!’ He looked across the room. ‘If I married I shouldn’t care to have my wife come here too often.’

Bowen laughed again. ‘She’d be as safe as in a bank! Nothing ever goes on! Nothing that ever happens here is real.’

‘
Ah, quant à cela –
’ the Frenchman murmured, inserting a fork into his melon.

Bowen looked at him with enjoyment – he was such a precious footnote to the page! The two men, accidentally thrown together some years previously during a trip up the Nile, always met again with pleasure when Bowen returned to France. Raymond de Chelles, who came of a family of moderate fortune, lived for the greater part of the year on his father’s estates in Burgundy; but he came up every spring to the
entresol
of the old Marquis’s
hôtel
for a two months’ study of human nature, applying to the pursuit the discriminating taste and transient ardour that give the finest bloom to pleasure. Bowen liked him as a companion and admired him as a charming specimen of the Frenchman of his class, embodying in his lean, fatigued and finished person that happy mean of simplicity and intelligence of which no other race has found the secret. If Raymond de Chelles had been English he would have been a mere fox-hunting animal, with appetites but without tastes; but in his lighter Gallic clay the wholesome territorial savour, the inherited passion for sport and agriculture, were blent with an openness to finer sensations, a sense of the come-and-go of ideas, under which one felt the tight hold of two or three inherited notions, religious, political, and domestic, in total contradiction to his surface attitude. That the inherited notions would in the end prevail, everything in his appearance declared, from the distinguished slant of his nose to the narrow forehead under his thinning hair; he was the kind of man who would inevitably ‘revert’ when he married. But meanwhile the surface he presented to the play of life was broad enough to take in the fantastic spectacle of the Nouveau Luxe; and to see its gestures reflected in a Latin consciousness was an endless entertainment to Bowen.

The tone of his guest’s last words made him take them up. ‘But is the lady you allude to more than a hypothesis? Surely you’re not thinking of getting married?’

Chelles raised his eyebrows ironically. ‘When hasn’t one to think of it, in my situation? One hears of nothing else at home – one knows that, like death, it has to come.’ His
glance, which was still mustering the room, came to a sudden pause and kindled.

‘Who’s the lady over there – fair-haired, in white – the one who’s just come in with the red-faced man? They seem to be with a party of your compatriots.’

Bowen followed his glance to a neighbouring table, where, at the moment, Undine Marvell was seating herself at Peter Van Degen’s side, in the company of the Harvey Shallums, the beautiful Mrs Beringer and a dozen other New York figures.

She was so placed that as she took her seat she recognized Bowen and sent him a smile across the tables. She was more simply dressed than usual, and the pink lights, warming her cheeks and striking gleams from her hair, gave her face a dewy freshness that was new to Bowen. He had always thought her beauty too obvious, too bathed in the bright publicity of the American air; but tonight she seemed to have been brushed by the wing of poetry, and its shadow lingered in her eyes.

Chelles’ gaze made it evident that he had received the same impression.

‘One is sometimes inclined to deny your compatriots actual beauty – to charge them with producing the effect without having the features; but in this case – you say you know the lady?’

‘Yes: she’s the wife of an old friend.’

‘The wife? She’s married? There, again, it’s so puzzling! Your young girls look so experienced, and your married women sometimes so – unmarried.’

‘Well, they often are – in these days of divorce!’

The other’s interest quickened. ‘Your friend’s divorced?’

‘Oh, no; heaven forbid! Mrs Marvell hasn’t been long married; and it was a love-match of the good old kind.’

‘Ah – and the husband? Which is he?’

‘He’s not here – he’s in New York.’

‘Feverishly adding to a fortune already monstrous?’

‘No; not precisely monstrous. The Marvells are not
well off,’ said Bowen, amused by his friend’s interrogations.

‘And he allows an exquisite being like that to come to Paris without him – and in company with the red-faced gentleman who seems so alive to his advantages?’

‘We don’t “allow” our women this or that; I don’t think we set much store by the compulsory virtues.’

His companion received this with amusement. ‘If you’re as detached as that, why does the obsolete institution of marriage survive with you?’

‘Oh, it still has its uses. One couldn’t be divorced without it.’

Chelles laughed again; but his straying eye still followed the same direction, and Bowen noticed that the fact was not unremarked by the object of his contemplation. Undine’s party was one of the liveliest in the room: the American laugh rose above the din of the orchestra as the American toilets dominated the less daring effects at the other tables. Undine, on entering, had seemed to be in the same mood as her companions; but Bowen saw that, as she became conscious of his friend’s observation, she isolated herself in a kind of soft abstraction; and he admired the adaptability which enabled her to draw from such surroundings the contrasting graces of reserve.

They had greeted each other with all the outer signs of cordiality, but Bowen fancied she would not care to have him speak to her. She was evidently dining with Van Degen, and Van Degen’s proximity was the last fact she would wish to have transmitted to the critics in Washington Square. Bowen was therefore surprised when, as he rose to leave the restaurant, he heard himself hailed by Peter.