The Custom of the Country (2 page)

‘They get their mothers – or their married friends,’ said Mrs Heeny omnisciently.

‘Married gentlemen?’ inquired Mrs Spragg, slightly shocked, but genuinely desirous of mastering her lesson.

‘Mercy, no! Married ladies.’

‘But are there never any gentlemen present?’ pursued Mrs Spragg, feeling that if this were the case Undine would certainly be disappointed.

‘Present where? At their dinners? Of course – Mrs Fairford gives the smartest little dinners in town. There was an account of one she gave last week in this morning’s
Town Talk
: I guess it’s right here among my clippings.’ Mrs Heeny, swooping down on her bag, drew from it a handful of newspaper cuttings, which she spread on her ample lap and proceeded to sort with a moistened forefinger. ‘Here,’ she said, holding one of the slips at arm’s length; and throwing back her head she read, in a slow unpunctuated chant: ‘ “Mrs
Henley Fairford gave another of her natty little dinners last Wednesday as usual it was smart small and exclusive and there was much gnashing of teeth among the left-outs as Madame Olga Loukowska gave some of her new steppe dances after dinner” – that’s the French for new dance steps,’ Mrs Heeny concluded, thrusting the documents back into her bag.

‘Do you know Mrs Fairford too?’ Undine asked eagerly; while Mrs Spragg, impressed, but anxious for facts, pursued: ‘Does she reside on Fifth Avenue?’

‘No, she has a little house in Thirty-eighth Street, down beyond Park Avenue.’

The ladies’ faces drooped again, and the masseuse went on promptly: ‘But they’re glad enough to have her in the big houses! – Why, yes, I know her,’ she said, addressing herself to Undine. ‘I mass’d her for a sprained ankle a couple of years ago. She’s got a lovely manner, but
no
conversation. Some of my patients converse exquisitely,’ Mrs Heeny added with discrimination.

Undine was brooding over the note. ‘It
is
written to mother – Mrs Abner E. Spragg – I never saw anything so funny! “Will you
allow
your daughter to dine with me?” Allow! Is Mrs Fairford peculiar?’

‘No – you are,’ said Mrs Heeny bluntly. ‘Don’t you know it’s the thing in the best society to pretend that girls can’t do anything without their mothers’ permission? You just remember that, Undine. You mustn’t accept invitations from gentlemen without you say you’ve got to ask your mother first.’

‘Mercy! But how’ll mother know what to say?’

‘Why, she’ll say what you tell her to, of course. You’d better tell her you want to dine with Mrs Fairford,’ Mrs Heeny added humorously, as she gathered her waterproof together and stooped for her bag.

‘Have I got to write the note, then?’ Mrs Spragg asked with rising agitation.

Mrs Heeny reflected. ‘Why, no. I guess Undine can write
it as if it was from you. Mrs Fairford don’t know your writing.’

This was an evident relief to Mrs Spragg, and as Undine swept to her room with the note her mother sank back, murmuring plaintively: ‘Oh, don’t go yet, Mrs Heeny. I haven’t seen a human being all day, and I can’t seem to find anything to say to that French maid.’

Mrs Heeny looked at her hostess with friendly compassion. She was well aware that she was the only bright spot on Mrs Spragg’s horizon. Since the Spraggs, some two years previously, had moved from Apex City to New York, they had made little progress in establishing relations with their new environment; and when, about four months earlier, Mrs Spragg’s doctor had called in Mrs Heeny to minister professionally to his patient, he had done more for her spirit than for her body. Mrs Heeny had had such ‘cases’ before: she knew the rich helpless family, stranded in lonely splendour in a sumptuous West Side hotel, with a father compelled to seek a semblance of social life at the hotel bar, and a mother deprived of even this contact with her kind, and reduced to illness by boredom and inactivity. Poor Mrs Spragg had done her own washing in her youth, but since her rising fortunes had made this occupation unsuitable she had sunk into the relative inertia which the ladies of Apex City regarded as one of the prerogatives of affluence. At Apex, however, she had belonged to a social club, and, until they moved to the Mealey House, had been kept busy by the incessant struggle with domestic cares; whereas New York seemed to offer no field for any form of lady-like activity. She therefore took her exercise vicariously, with Mrs Heeny’s help; and Mrs Heeny knew how to manipulate her imagination as well as her muscles. It was Mrs Heeny who peopled the solitude of the long ghostly days with lively anecdotes of the Van Degens, the Driscolls, the Chauncey Ellings and the other social potentates whose least doings Mrs Spragg and Undine had followed from afar in the Apex papers, and who had come to seem so much more remote
since only the width of the Central Park divided mother and daughter from their Olympian portals.

Mrs Spragg had no ambition for herself – she seemed to have transferred her whole personality to her child – but she was passionately resolved that Undine should have what she wanted, and she sometimes fancied that Mrs Heeny, who crossed those sacred thresholds so familiarly, might some day gain admission for Undine.

‘Well – I’ll stay a little mite longer if you want; and supposing I was to rub up your nails while we’re talking? It’ll be more sociable,’ the masseuse suggested, lifting her bag to the table and covering its shiny onyx surface with bottles and polishers.

Mrs Spragg consentingly slipped the rings from her small mottled hands. It was soothing to feel herself in Mrs Heeny’s grasp, and though she knew the attention would cost her three dollars she was secure in the sense that Abner wouldn’t mind. It had been clear to Mrs Spragg, ever since their rather precipitate departure from Apex City, that Abner was resolved not to mind – resolved at any cost to ‘see through’ the New York adventure. It seemed likely now that the cost would be considerable. They had lived in New York for two years without any social benefit to their daughter; and it was of course for that purpose that they had come. If, at the time, there had been other and more pressing reasons, they were such as Mrs Spragg and her husband never touched on, even in the gilded privacy of their bedroom at the Stentorian; and so completely had silence closed in on the subject that to Mrs Spragg it had become non-existent: she really believed that, as Abner put it, they had left Apex because Undine was too big for the place.

She seemed as yet – poor child! – too small for New York: actually imperceptible to its heedless multitudes; and her mother trembled for the day when her invisibility should be borne in on her. Mrs Spragg did not mind the long delay for herself – she had stores of lymphatic patience. But she had noticed lately that Undine was beginning to be nervous, and
there was nothing that Undine’s parents dreaded so much as her being nervous. Mrs Spragg’s maternal apprehensions unconsciously escaped in her next words.

‘I do hope she’ll quiet down now,’ she murmured, feeling quieter herself as her hand sank into Mrs Heeny’s roomy palm.

‘Who’s that? Undine?’

‘Yes. She seemed so set on that Mr Popple’s coming round. From the way he acted last night she thought he’d be sure to come round this morning. She’s so lonesome, poor child – I can’t say as I blame her.’

‘Oh, he’ll come round. Things don’t happen as quick as that in New York,’ said Mrs Heeny, driving her nail-polisher cheeringly.

Mrs Spragg sighed again. ‘They don’t appear to. They say New Yorkers are always in a hurry; but I can’t say as they’ve hurried much to make our acquaintance.’

Mrs Heeny drew back to study the effect of her work. ‘You wait, Mrs Spragg, you wait. If you go too fast you sometimes have to rip out the whole seam.’

‘Oh, that’s so – that’s
so
!’ Mrs Spragg exclaimed, with a tragic emphasis that made the masseuse glance up at her.

‘Of course it’s so. And it’s more so in New York than anywhere. The wrong set’s like fly-paper: once you’re in it you can pull and pull, but you’ll never get out of it again.’

Undine’s mother heaved another and more helpless sigh. ‘I wish
you’d
tell Undine that, Mrs Heeny.’

‘Oh, I guess Undine’s all right. A girl like her can afford to wait. And if young Marvell’s really taken with her she’ll have the run of the place in no time.’

This solacing thought enabled Mrs Spragg to yield herself unreservedly to Mrs Heeny’s ministrations, which were prolonged for a happy confidential hour; and she had just bidden the masseuse good-bye, and was restoring the rings to her fingers, when the door opened to admit her husband.

Mr Spragg came in silently, setting his high hat down on the centre-table, and laying his overcoat across one of the gilt
chairs. He was tallish, grey-bearded and somewhat stooping, with the slack figure of the sedentary man who would be stout if he were not dyspeptic; and his cautious grey eyes with pouch-like underlids had straight black brows like his daughter’s. His thin hair was worn a little too long over his coat collar, and a Masonic emblem dangled from the heavy gold chain which crossed his crumpled black waistcoat.

He stood still in the middle of the room, casting a slow pioneering glance about its gilded void; then he said gently: ‘Well, mother?’

Mrs Spragg remained seated, but her eyes dwelt on him affectionately.

‘Undine’s been asked out to a dinner-party; and Mrs Heeny says it’s to one of the first families. It’s the sister of one of the gentlemen that Mabel Lipscomb introduced her to last night.’

There was a mild triumph in her tone, for it was owing to her insistence and Undine’s that Mr Spragg had been induced to give up the house they had bought in West End Avenue, and move with his family to the Stentorian. Undine had early decided that they could not hope to get on while they ‘kept house’ – all the fashionable people she knew either boarded or lived in hotels. Mrs Spragg was easily induced to take the same view, but Mr Spragg had resisted, being at the moment unable either to sell his house or to let it as advantageously as he had hoped. After the move was made it seemed for a time as though he had been right, and the first social steps would be as difficult to make in a hotel as in one’s own house; and Mrs Spragg was therefore eager to have him know that Undine really owed her first invitation to a meeting under the roof of the Stentorian.

‘You see we were right to come here, Abner,’ she added, and he absently rejoined: ‘I guess you two always manage to be right.’

But his face remained unsmiling, and instead of seating himself and lighting his cigar, as he usually did before dinner, he took two or three aimless turns about the room, and then paused in front of his wife.

‘What’s the matter – anything wrong down town?’ she asked, her eyes reflecting his anxiety.

Mrs Spragg’s knowledge of what went on ‘down town’ was of the most elementary kind, but her husband’s face was the barometer in which she had long been accustomed to read the leave to go on unrestrictedly, or the warning to pause and abstain till the coming storm should be weathered.

He shook his head. ‘N-no. Nothing worse than what I can see to, if you and Undine will go steady for a while.’ He paused and looked across the room at his daughter’s door. ‘Where is she – out?’

‘I guess she’s in her room, going over her dresses with that French maid. I don’t know as she’s got anything fit to wear to that dinner,’ Mrs Spragg added in a tentative murmur.

Mr Spragg smiled at last. ‘Well – I guess she
will
have,’ he said prophetically.

He glanced again at his daughter’s door, as if to make sure of its being shut; then, standing close before his wife, he lowered his voice to say: ‘I saw Elmer Moffatt down town today.’

‘Oh, Abner!’ A wave of almost physical apprehension passed over Mrs Spragg. Her jewelled hands trembled in her black brocade lap, and the pulpy curves of her face collapsed as if it were a pricked balloon.

‘Oh, Abner,’ she moaned again, her eyes also on her daughter’s door.

Mr Spragg’s black eyebrows gathered in an angry frown, but it was evident that his anger was not against his wife.

‘What’s the good of Oh Abnering? Elmer Moffatt’s nothing to us – no more’n if we never laid eyes on him.’

‘No – I know it; but what’s he doing here? Did you speak to him?’ she faltered.

He slipped his thumbs into his waistcoat pockets. ‘No – I guess Elmer and I are pretty well talked out.’

Mrs Spragg took up her moan. ‘Don’t you tell her you saw him, Abner.’

‘I’ll do as you say; but she may meet him herself’.

‘Oh, I guess not – not in this new set she’s going with! Don’t tell her
anyhow
.’

He turned away, feeling for one of the cigars which he always carried loose in his pocket; and his wife, rising, stole after him, and laid her hand on his arm.

‘He can’t do anything to her, can he?’

‘Do anything to her?’ He swung about furiously. ‘I’d like to see him touch her – that’s all!’

U
NDINE’S
white and gold bedroom, with sea-green panels and old-rose carpet, looked along Seventy-second Street toward the leafless tree-tops of the Central Park.

She went to the window, and drawing back its many layers of lace gazed eastward down the long brown-stone perspective. Beyond the Park lay Fifth Avenue – and Fifth Avenue was where she wanted to be!

She turned back into the room, and going to her writing-table laid Mrs Fairford’s note before her, and began to study it minutely. She had read in the
Boudoir Chat
of one of the Sunday papers that the smartest women were using the new pigeon-blood notepaper with white ink; and rather against her mother’s advice she had ordered a large supply, with her monogram in silver. It was a disappointment, therefore, to find that Mrs Fairford wrote on the old-fashioned white sheet, without even a monogram – simply her address and telephone number. It gave Undine rather a poor opinion of Mrs Fairford’s social standing, and for a moment she thought with considerable satisfaction of answering the note on her pigeon-blood paper. Then she remembered Mrs Heeny’s emphatic commendation of Mrs Fairford, and her pen wavered. What if white paper were really newer than pigeon-blood? It might be more stylish, anyhow. Well, she didn’t care if Mrs Fairford didn’t like red paper –
she
did!
And she wasn’t going to truckle to any woman who lived in a small house down beyond Park Avenue …