The Custom of the Country (6 page)

Undine shrugged her shoulders. ‘It was a mistake, of course. Why on earth did you let him come up?’

‘I thought maybe he had a message for you, Undie.’

This plea struck her daughter as not without weight. ‘Well, did he?’ she asked, drawing out her hat-pins and tossing down her hat on the onyx table.

‘Why, no – he just conversed. He was lovely to me, but I couldn’t make out what he was after,’ Mrs Spragg was obliged to own.

Her daughter looked at her with a kind of chill commiseration. ‘You never
can
,’ she murmured, turning away.

She stretched herself out moodily on one of the pink and gold sofas, and lay there brooding, an unread novel on her knee. Mrs Spragg timidly slipped a cushion under her daughter’s head, and then dissembled herself behind the lace window-curtains and sat watching the lights spring out down the long street and spread their glittering net across the Park. It was one of Mrs Spragg’s chief occupations to watch the nightly lighting of New York.

Undine lay silent, her hands clasped behind her head. She was plunged in one of the moods of bitter retrospection when all her past seemed like a long struggle for something she could not have, from a trip to Europe to an opera-box; and when she felt sure that, as the past had been, so the future would be. And yet, as she had often told her parents, all she sought for was improvement: she honestly wanted the best.

Her first struggle – after she had ceased to scream for candy, or sulk for a new toy – had been to get away from Apex in summer. Her summers, as she looked back on them, seemed to typify all that was dreariest and most exasperating in her life. The earliest had been spent in the yellow ‘frame’ cottage where she had hung on the fence, kicking her toes against the broken palings and exchanging moist chewing-gum and half-eaten apples with Indiana Frusk. Later on, she had returned from her boarding-school to the comparative gentility of summer vacations at the Mealey House, whither her parents, forsaking their squalid suburb, had moved in the
first flush of their rising fortunes. The tessellated floors, the plush parlours and organ-like radiators of the Mealey House had, aside from their intrinsic elegance, the immense advantage of lifting the Spraggs high above the Frusks, and making it possible for Undine, when she met Indiana in the street or at school, to chill her advances by a careless allusion to the splendours of hotel life. But even in such a setting, and in spite of the social superiority it implied, the long months of the middle-western summer, fly-blown, torrid, exhaling stale odours, soon became as insufferable as they had been in the little yellow house.

At school Undine met other girls whose parents took them to the Great Lakes for August; some even went to California, others – oh bliss ineffable! – went ‘east’.

Pale and listless under the stifling boredom of the Mealey House routine, Undine secretly sucked lemons, nibbled slate-pencils and drank pints of bitter coffee to aggravate her look of ill-health; and when she learned that even Indiana Frusk was to go on a month’s visit to Buffalo it needed no artificial aids to emphasize the ravages of envy. Her parents, alarmed by her appearance, were at last convinced of the necessity of change, and timidly, tentatively, they transferred themselves for a month to a staring hotel on a glaring lake.

There Undine enjoyed the satisfaction of sending ironic postcards to Indiana, and discovering that she could more than hold her own against the youth and beauty of the other visitors. Then she made the acquaintance of a pretty woman from Richmond, whose husband, a mining engineer, had brought her west with him while he inspected the newly developed Eubaw mines; and the southern visitor’s dismay, her repugnances, her recoil from the faces, the food, the amusements, the general bareness and stridency of the scene, were a terrible initiation to Undine. There was something still better beyond, then – more luxurious, more exciting, more worthy of her! She once said to herself, afterward, that it was always her fate to find out just too late about the ‘something beyond’. But in this case it was not too late – and
obstinately, inflexibly, she set herself to the task of forcing her parents to take her ‘east’ the next summer.

Yielding to the inevitable, they suffered themselves to be impelled to a Virginia ‘resort’, where Undine had her first glimpse of more romantic possibilities – leafy moonlight rides and drives, picnics in mountain glades, and an atmosphere of Christmas-chromo sentimentality that tempered her hard edges a little, and gave her glimpses of a more delicate kind of pleasure. But here again everything was spoiled by a peep through another door. Undine, after a first mustering of the other girls in the hotel, had, as usual, found herself easily first – till the arrival, from Washington, of Mr and Mrs Wincher and their daughter. Undine was much handsomer than Miss Wincher, but she saw at a glance that she did not know how to use her beauty as the other used her plainness. She was exasperated, too, by the discovery that Miss Wincher seemed not only unconscious of any possible rivalry between them, but actually unaware of her existence. Listless, long-faced, supercilious, the young lady from Washington sat apart reading novels or playing solitaire with her parents, as though the huge hotel’s loud life of gossip and flirtation were invisible and inaudible to her. Undine never even succeeded in catching her eye: she always lowered it to her book when the Apex beauty trailed or rattled past her secluded corner. But one day an acquaintance of the Winchers turned up – a lady from Boston, who had come to Virginia on a botanizing tour; and from scraps of Miss Wincher’s conversation with the newcomer, Undine, straining her ears behind a column of the long verandah, obtained a new glimpse into the unimagined.

The Winchers, it appeared, found themselves at Potash Springs merely because a severe illness of Mrs Wincher’s had made it impossible, at the last moment, to move her farther from Washington. They had let their house on the North Shore, and as soon as they could leave ‘this dreadful hole’ were going to Europe for the autumn. Miss Wincher simply didn’t know how she got through the days; though no doubt
it was as good as a rest-cure after the rush of the winter. Of course they would have preferred to hire a house, but the ‘hole’, if one could believe it, didn’t offer one; so they had simply shut themselves off as best they could from the ‘hotel crew’ – had her friend, Miss Wincher parenthetically asked, happened to notice the Sunday young men? They were queerer even than the ‘belles’ they came for – and had escaped the promiscuity of the dinner-hour by turning one of their rooms into a dining-room, and picnicking there – with the Persimmon House standards, one couldn’t describe it in any other way! But luckily the awful place was doing mamma good, and now they had nearly served their term …

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.’

S
HE 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.