The Custom of the Country (27 page)

‘Hallo – hold on! When did you come over? Mrs Marvell’s dying for the last news about the old homestead.’

Undine’s smile confirmed the appeal. She wanted to know how lately Bowen had left New York, and pressed him to tell her when he had last seen her boy, how he was looking, and whether Ralph had been persuaded to go down to Clare’s on Saturdays and get a little riding and tennis? And
dear Laura – was she well too, and was Paul with her, or still with his grandmother? They were all dreadfully bad correspondents, and so was she, Undine laughingly admitted; and when Ralph had last written her these questions had still been undecided.

As she smiled up at Bowen he saw her glance stray to the spot where his companion hovered; and when the diners rose to move toward the garden for coffee she said, with a sweet note and a detaining smile: ‘Do come with us – I haven’t half finished.’

Van Degen echoed the request, and Bowen, amused by Undine’s arts, was presently introducing Chelles, and joining with him in the party’s transit to the terrace.

The rain had ceased, and under the clear evening sky the restaurant garden opened green depths that skilfully hid its narrow boundaries. Van Degen’s company was large enough to surround two of the tables on the terrace, and Bowen noted the skill with which Undine, leaving him to Mrs Shallum’s care, contrived to draw Raymond de Chelles to the other table. Still more noticeable was the effect of this stratagem on Van Degen, who also found himself relegated to Mrs Shallum’s group. Poor Peter’s state was betrayed by the irascibility which wreaked itself on a jostling waiter, and found cause for loud remonstrance in the coldness of the coffee and the badness of the cigars; and Bowen, with something more than the curiosity of the looker-on, wondered whether this were the real clue to Undine’s conduct. He had always smiled at Mrs Fairford’s fears for Ralph’s domestic peace. He thought Undine too clear-headed to forfeit the advantages of her marriage; but it now struck him that she might have had a glimpse of larger opportunities. Bowen, at the thought, felt the pang of the sociologist over the individual havoc wrought by every social readjustment: it had so long been clear to him that poor Ralph was a survival, and destined, as such, to go down in any conflict with the rising forces.

S
OME
six weeks later, Undine Marvell stood at the window smiling down on her recovered Paris.

Her hotel sitting-room had, as usual, been flowered, cushioned and lamp-shaded into a delusive semblance of stability; and she had really felt, for the last few weeks, that the life she was leading there must be going to last – it seemed so perfect an answer to all her wants!

As she looked out at the thronged street, on which the summer light lay like a blush of pleasure, she felt herself naturally akin to all the bright and careless freedom of the scene. She had been away from Paris for two days, and the spectacle before her seemed more rich and suggestive after her brief absence from it. Her senses luxuriated in all its material details: the thronging motors, the brilliant shops, the novelty and daring of the women’s dresses, the piled-up colours of the ambulant flower-carts, the appetizing expanse of the fruiterers’ windows, even the chromatic effects of the
petits fours
behind the plate-glass of the pastry-cooks: all the surface-sparkle and variety of the inexhaustible streets of Paris.

The scene before her typified to Undine her first real taste of life. How meagre and starved the past appeared in comparison with this abundant present! The noise, the crowd, the promiscuity beneath her eyes symbolized the glare and movement of her life. Every moment of her days was packed with excitement and exhilaration. Everything amused her: the long hours of bargaining and debate with dress-makers and jewellers, the crowded lunches at fashionable restaurants, the perfunctory dash through a picture-show or the lingering visit to the last new milliner; the afternoon motor-rush to some leafy suburb, where tea and music and sunset were hastily absorbed on a crowded terrace above the Seine; the whirl home through the Bois to dress
for dinner and start again on the round of evening diversions; the dinner at the Nouveau Luxe or the Café de Paris, and the little play at the Capucines or the Variétés, followed, because the night was ‘too lovely’, and it was a shame to waste it, by a breathless flight back to the Bois, with supper in one of its lamp-hung restaurants, or, if the weather forbade, a tumultuous progress through the midnight haunts where ‘ladies’ were not supposed to show themselves, and might consequently taste the thrill of being occasionally taken for their opposites.

As the varied vision unrolled itself, Undine contrasted it with the pale monotony of her previous summers. The one she most resented was the first after her marriage, the European summer out of whose joys she had been cheated by her own ignorance and Ralph’s perversity. They had been free then, there had been no child to hamper their movements, their money anxieties had hardly begun, the face of life had been fresh and radiant, and she had been doomed to waste such opportunities on a succession of ill-smelling Italian towns. She still felt it to be her deepest grievance against her husband; and now that, after four years of petty household worries, another chance of escape had come, he already wanted to drag her back to bondage!

This fit of retrospection had been provoked by two letters which had come that morning. One was from Ralph, who began by reminding her that he had not heard from her for weeks, and went on to point out, in his usual tone of good-humoured remonstrance, that since her departure the drain on her letter of credit had been deep and constant. ‘I wanted you,’ he wrote, ‘to get all the fun you could out of the money I made last spring; but I didn’t think you’d get through it quite so fast. Try to come home without leaving too many bills behind you. Your illness and Paul’s cost more than I expected, and Lipscomb has had a bad knock in Wall Street, and hasn’t yet paid his first quarter …’

Always the same monotonous refrain! Was it her fault that she and the boy had been ill? Or that Harry Lipscomb had
been ‘on the wrong side’ of Wall Street? Ralph seemed to have money on the brain: his business life had certainly deteriorated him. And, since he hadn’t made a success of it after all, why shouldn’t he turn back to literature and try to write his novel? Undine, the previous winter, had been dazzled by the figures which a well-known magazine editor whom she had met at dinner had named as within reach of the successful novelist. She perceived for the first time that literature was becoming fashionable, and instantly decided that it would be amusing and original if she and Ralph should owe their prosperity to his talent. She already saw herself, as the wife of a celebrated author, wearing ‘artistic’ dresses and doing the drawing-room over with Gothic tapestries and dim lights in altar candlesticks. But when she suggested Ralph’s taking up his novel he answered with a laugh that his brains were sold to the firm – that when he came back at night the tank was empty … And now he wanted her to sail for home in a week!

The other letter excited a deeper resentment. It was an appeal from Laura Fairford to return and look after Ralph. He was overworked and out of spirits, she wrote, and his mother and sister, reluctant as they were to interfere, felt they ought to urge Undine to come back to him. Details followed, unwelcome and officious. What right had Laura Fairford to preach to her of wifely obligations? No doubt Charles Bowen had sent home a highly-coloured report – and there was really a certain irony in Mrs Fairford’s criticizing her sister-in-law’s conduct on information obtained from such a source!

Undine turned from the window and threw herself down on her deeply cushioned sofa. She was feeling the pleasant fatigue consequent on her trip to the country, whither she and Mrs Shallum had gone with Raymond de Chelles to spend a night at the old Marquis’s château. When her travelling companions, an hour earlier, had left her at her door, she had half-promised to rejoin them for a late dinner in the Bois; and as she leaned back among the cushions
disturbing thoughts were banished by the urgent necessity of deciding what dress she should wear.

These bright weeks of the Parisian spring had given her a first real glimpse into the art of living. From the experts who had taught her to subdue the curves of her figure and soften her bright free stare with dusky pencillings, to the skilled purveyors of countless forms of pleasure – the theatres and restaurants, the green and blossoming suburbs, the whole shining shifting spectacle of nights and days – every sight and sound and word had combined to charm her perceptions and refine her taste. And her growing friendship with Raymond de Chelles had been the most potent of these influences.

Chelles, at once immensely ‘taken’, had not only shown his eagerness to share in the helter-skelter motions of Undine’s party, but had given her glimpses of another, still more brilliant existence, that life of the inaccessible ‘Faubourg’ of which the first tantalizing hints had but lately reached her. Hitherto she had assumed that Paris existed for the stranger, that its native life was merely an obscure foundation for the dazzling superstructure of hotels and restaurants in which her compatriots disported themselves. But lately she had begun to hear about other American women, the women who had married into the French aristocracy, and who led, in the high-walled houses beyond the Seine which she had once thought so dull and dingy, a life that made her own seem as undistinguished as the social existence of the Mealey House. Perhaps what most exasperated her was the discovery, in this impenetrable group, of the Miss Wincher who had poisoned her far-off summer at Potash Springs. To recognize her old enemy in the Marquise de Trézac who so frequently figured in the Parisian chronicle was the more irritating to Undine because her intervening social experiences had caused her to look back on Nettie Wincher as a frumpy girl who wouldn’t have ‘had a show’ in New York.

Once more all the accepted values were reversed, and it turned out that Miss Wincher had been in possession of some
key to success on which Undine had not yet put her hand. To know that others were indifferent to what she had thought important was to cheapen all present pleasure and turn the whole force of her desires in a new direction. What she wanted for the moment was to linger on in Paris, prolonging her flirtation with Chelles, and profiting by it to detach herself from her compatriots and enter doors closed to their approach. And Chelles himself attracted her: she thought him as ‘sweet’ as she had once thought Ralph, whose fastidiousness and refinement were blent in him with a delightful foreign vivacity. His chief value, however, lay in his power of exciting Van Degen’s jealousy. She knew enough of French customs to be aware that such devotion as Chelles’ was not likely to have much practical bearing on her future; but Peter had an alarming way of lapsing into security and as a spur to his ardour she knew the value of other men’s attentions.

It had become Undine’s fixed purpose to bring Van Degen to a definite expression of his intentions. The case of Indiana Frusk, whose brilliant marriage the journals of two continents had recently chronicled with unprecedented richness of detail, had made less impression on him than she hoped. He treated it as a comic episode without special bearing on their case, and once, when Undine cited Rolliver’s expensive fight for freedom as an instance of the power of love over the most invulnerable natures, had answered carelessly: ‘Oh, his first wife was a laundress, I believe.’

But all about them couples were unpairing and pairing again with an ease and rapidity that encouraged Undine to bide her time. It was simply a question of making Van Degen want her enough, and of not being obliged to abandon the game before he wanted her as much as she meant he should. This was precisely what would happen if she were compelled to leave Paris now. Already the event had shown how right she had been to come abroad: the attention she attracted in Paris had reawakened Van Degen’s fancy, and her hold over him was stronger than when they had parted in America.
But the next step must be taken with coolness and circumspection; and she must not throw away what she had gained by going away at a stage when he was surer of her than she of him.

She was still intensely considering these questions when the door behind her opened and he came in.

She looked up with a frown and he gave a deprecating laugh. ‘Didn’t I knock? Don’t look so savage! They told me downstairs you’d got back, and I just bolted in without thinking.’

He had widened and purpled since their first encounter, five years earlier, but his features had not matured. His face was still the face of a covetous bullying boy, with a large appetite for primitive satisfactions and a sturdy belief in his intrinsic right to them. It was all the more satisfying to Undine’s vanity to see his look change at her tone from command to conciliation, and from conciliation to the entreaty of a capriciously-treated animal.

‘What a ridiculous hour for a visit!’ she exclaimed, ignoring his excuse.

‘Well, if you disappear like that, without a word –’

‘I told my maid to telephone you I was going away.’

‘You couldn’t make time to do it yourself, I suppose?’

‘We rushed off suddenly; I’d hardly time to get to the station.’

‘You rushed off where, may I ask?’ Van Degen still lowered down on her.

‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? I’ve been down staying at Chelles’ château in Burgundy.’ Her face lit up and she raised herself eagerly on her elbow.

‘It’s the most wonderful old house you ever saw: a real castle, with towers, and water all round it, and a funny kind of bridge they pull up. Chelles said he wanted me to see just how they lived at home, and I did; I saw everything: the tapestries that Louis Quinze gave them, and the family portraits, and the chapel, where their own priest says mass, and they sit by themselves in a balcony with crowns all over
it. The priest was a lovely old man – he said he’d give anything to convert me. Do you know, I think there’s something very beautiful about the Roman Catholic religion? I’ve often felt I might have been happier if I’d had some religious influence in my life.’