The Custom of the Country (5 page)

The symptoms of Undine’s nervousness were unmistakable to Mr and Mrs Spragg. They could read the approaching storm in the darkening of her eyes from limpid grey to slate-colour, and in the way her straight black brows met above them and the red curves of her lips narrowed to a parallel line below.

Mr Spragg, having finished the last course of his heterogeneous meal, was adjusting his gold eye-glasses for a glance at the paper when Undine trailed down the sumptuous stuffy room, where coffee-fumes hung perpetually under the emblazoned ceiling and the spongy carpet might have absorbed a year’s crumbs without a sweeping.

About them sat other pallid families, richly dressed, and silently eating their way through a bill-of-fare which seemed to have ransacked the globe for gastronomic incompatibilities; and in the middle of the room a knot of equally pallid waiters, engaged in languid conversation, turned their backs by common consent on the persons they were supposed to serve.

Undine, who rose too late to share the family breakfast, usually had her chocolate brought to her in bed by Céleste,
after the manner described in the articles on ‘A Society Woman’s Day’ which were appearing in
Boudoir Chat
. Her mere appearance in the restaurant therefore prepared her parents for those symptoms of excessive tension which a nearer inspection confirmed, and Mr Spragg folded his paper and hooked his glasses to his waistcoat with the air of a man who prefers to know the worst and have it over.

‘An opera-box!’ faltered Mrs Spragg, pushing aside the bananas and cream with which she had been trying to tempt an appetite too languid for fried liver or crab mayonnaise.

‘A parterre box,’ Undine corrected, ignoring the exclamation, and continuing to address herself to her father. ‘Friday’s the stylish night, and that new tenor’s going to sing again in
Cavaleeria
,’ she condescended to explain.

‘That so?’ Mr Spragg thrust his hands into his waistcoat pockets, and began to tilt his chair till he remembered there was no wall to meet it. He regained his balance and said: ‘Wouldn’t a couple of good orchestra seats do you?’

‘No; they wouldn’t,’ Undine answered with a darkening brow.

He looked at her humorously. ‘You invited the whole dinner-party, I suppose?’

‘No – no one.’

‘Going all alone in a box?’ She was disdainfully silent. ‘I don’t s’pose you’re thinking of taking mother and me?’

This was so obviously comic that they all laughed – even Mrs Spragg – and Undine went on more mildly: ‘I want to do something for Mabel Lipscomb: make some return. She’s always taking me ’round, and I’ve never done a thing for her – not a single thing.’

This appeal to the national belief in the duty of reciprocal ‘treating’ could not fail of its effect, and Mrs Spragg murmured: ‘She never
has
, Abner,’ – but Mr Spragg’s brow remained unrelenting.

‘Do you know what a box costs?’

‘No; but I s’pose you do,’ Undine returned with unconscious flippancy.

‘I do. That’s the trouble.
Why
won’t seats do you?’

‘Mabel could buy seats for herself.’

‘That’s so,’ interpolated Mrs Spragg – always the first to succumb to her daughter’s arguments.

‘Well, I guess I can’t buy a box for her.’

Undine’s face gloomed more deeply. She sat silent, her chocolate thickening in the cup, while one hand, almost as much beringed as her mother’s, drummed on the crumpled table-cloth.

‘We might as well go straight back to Apex,’ she breathed at last between her teeth.

Mrs Spragg cast a frightened glance at her husband. These struggles between two resolute wills always brought on her palpitations, and she wished she had her phial of digitalis with her.

‘A parterre box costs a hundred and twenty-five dollars a night,’ said Mr Spragg, transferring a toothpick to his waistcoat pocket.

‘I only want it once.’

He looked at her with a quizzical puckering of his crow’s-feet. ‘You only want most things once, Undine.’

It was an observation they had made in her earliest youth – Undine never wanted anything long, but she wanted it ‘right off’. And until she got it the house was uninhabitable.

‘I’d a good deal rather have a box for the season,’ she rejoined, and he saw the opening he had given her. She had two ways of getting things out of him against his principles: the tender wheedling way, and the harsh-lipped and cold – and he did not know which he dreaded most. As a child they had admired her assertiveness, had made Apex ring with their boasts of it; but it had long since cowed Mrs Spragg, and it was beginning to frighten her husband.

‘Fact is, Undie,’ he said, weakening, ‘I’m a little mite strapped just this month.’

Her eyes grew absent-minded as they always did when he alluded to business.
That
was man’s province; and what did men go ‘down town’ for but to bring back the spoils to their
women? She rose abruptly, leaving her parents seated, and said, more to herself than the others: ‘Think I’ll go for a ride.’

‘Oh, Undine!’ fluttered Mrs Spragg. She always had palpitations when Undine rode, and since the Aaronson episode her fears were not confined to what the horse might do.

‘Why don’t you take your mother out shopping a little?’ Mr Spragg suggested, conscious of the limitation of his resources.

Undine made no answer, but swept down the room, and out of the door ahead of her mother, with scorn and anger in every line of her arrogant young back. Mrs Spragg tottered meekly after her, and Mr Spragg lounged out into the marble hall to buy a cigar before taking the Subway to his office.

Undine went for a ride, not because she felt particularly disposed for the exercise, but because she wished to discipline her mother. She was almost sure she would get her opera box, but she did not see why she should have to struggle for her rights, and she was especially annoyed with Mrs Spragg for seconding her so half-heartedly. If she and her mother did not hold together in such crises she would have twice the work to do.

Undine hated ‘scenes’: she was essentially peace-loving, and would have preferred to live on terms of unbroken harmony with her parents. But she could not help it if they were unreasonable. Ever since she could remember there had been ‘fusses’ about money; yet she and her mother had always got what they wanted, apparently without lasting detriment to the family fortunes. It was therefore natural to conclude that there were ample funds to draw upon, and that Mr Spragg’s occasional resistances were merely due to an imperfect understanding of what constituted the necessities of life.

When she returned from her ride Mrs Spragg received her as if she had come back from the dead. It was absurd, of course; but Undine was inured to the absurdity of parents.

‘Has father telephoned?’ was her first brief question.

‘No, he hasn’t yet.’

Undine’s lips tightened, but she proceeded deliberately with the removal of her habit.

‘You’d think I’d asked him to buy me the Opera House, the way he’s acting over a single box,’ she muttered, flinging aside her smartly fitting coat.

Mrs Spragg received the flying garment and smoothed it out on the bed. Neither of the ladies could ‘bear’ to have their maid about when they were at their toilet, and Mrs Spragg had always performed these ancillary services for Undine.

‘You know, Undie, father hasn’t always got the money in his pocket, and the bills have been pretty heavy lately. Father was a rich man for Apex, but that’s different from being rich in New York.’

She stood before her daughter, looking down on her appealingly.

Undine, who had seated herself while she detached her stock and waistcoat, raised her head with an impatient jerk. ‘Why on earth did we ever leave Apex, then?’ she exclaimed.

Mrs Spragg’s eyes usually dropped before her daughter’s inclement gaze; but on this occasion they held their own with a kind of awe-struck courage, till Undine’s lids sank above her flushing cheeks.

She sprang up, tugging at the waistband of her habit, while Mrs Spragg, relapsing from temerity to meekness, hovered about her with obstructive zeal.

‘If you’d only just let go of my skirt, mother – I can unhook it twice as quick myself.’

Mrs Spragg drew back, understanding that her presence was no longer wanted. But on the threshold she paused, as if overruled by a stronger influence, and said, with a last look at her daughter: ‘You didn’t meet anybody when you were out, did you, Undie?’

Undine’s brows drew together: she was struggling with her long patent-leather boot.

‘Meet anybody? Do you mean anybody I know? I don’t
know
anybody – I never shall, if father can’t afford to let me go round with people!’

The boot was off with a wrench, and she flung it violently across the old-rose carpet, while Mrs Spragg, turning away to hide a look of inexpressible relief, slipped discreetly from the room.

The day wore on. Undine had meant to go down and tell Mabel Lipscomb about the Fairford dinner, but its after-taste was flat on her lips. What could it lead to? Nothing, as far as she could see. Ralph Marvell had not even asked when he might call; and she was ashamed to confess to Mabel that he had not driven home with her.

Suddenly she decided that she would go and see the pictures of which Mrs Fairford had spoken. Perhaps she might meet some of the people she had seen at dinner – from their talk one might have imagined that they spent their lives in picture-galleries.

The thought reanimated her, and she put on her handsomest furs, and a hat for which she had not yet dared present the bill to her father. It was the fashionable hour in Fifth Avenue, but Undine knew none of the ladies who were bowing to each other from interlocked motors. She had to content herself with the gaze of admiration which she left in her wake along the pavement; but she was used to the homage of the streets and her vanity craved a choicer fare.

When she reached the art gallery which Mrs Fairford had named she found it even more crowded than Fifth Avenue; and some of the ladies and gentlemen wedged before the pictures had the ‘look’ which signified social consecration. As Undine made her way among them, she was aware of attracting almost as much notice as in the street, and she flung herself into rapt attitudes before the canvases, scribbling notes in the catalogue in imitation of a tall girl in sables, while ripples of self-consciousness played up and down her watchful back.

Presently her attention was drawn to a lady in black who was examining the pictures through a tortoise-shell eye-glass adorned with diamonds and hanging from a long pearl chain. Undine was instantly struck by the opportunities which this toy presented for graceful wrist movements and supercilious turns of the head. It seemed suddenly plebeian and promiscuous to look at the world with a naked eye, and all her floating desires were merged in the wish for a jewelled eye-glass and chain. So violent was this wish that, drawn on in the wake of the owner of the eye-glass, she found herself inadvertently bumping against a stout tight-coated young man whose impact knocked her catalogue from her hand.

As the young man picked the catalogue up and held it out to her she noticed that his bulging eyes and queer retreating face were suffused with a glow of admiration. He was so unpleasant-looking that she would have resented his homage had not his odd physiognomy called up some vaguely agreeable association of ideas. Where had she seen before this grotesque saurian head, with eyelids as thick as lips and lips as thick as ear-lobes? It fled before her down a perspective of innumerable newspaper portraits, all, like the original before her, tightly coated, with a huge pearl transfixing a silken tie …

‘Oh, thank you,’ she murmured, all gleams and graces, while he stood hat in hand, saying sociably: ‘The crowd’s simply awful, isn’t it?’

At the same moment the lady of the eye-glass drifted closer, and with a tap of her wand, and a careless ‘Peter, look at this,’ swept him to the other side of the gallery.

Undine’s heart was beating excitedly, for as he turned away she had identified him. Peter Van Degen – who could he be but young Peter Van Degen, the son of the great banker, Thurber Van Degen, the husband of Ralph Marvell’s cousin, the hero of
Sunday Supplements
, the captor of Blue Ribbons at Horse-Shows, of Gold Cups at Motor Races, the owner of winning race-horses and ‘crack’ sloops:
the supreme exponent, in short, of those crowning arts that made all life seem stale and unprofitable outside the magic ring of the Society Column?

Undine smiled as she recalled the look with which his pale protruding eyes had rested on her – it almost consoled her for his wife’s indifference!

When she reached home she found that she could not remember anything about the pictures she had seen …

There was no message from her father, and a reaction of disgust set in. Of what good were such encounters if they were to have no sequel? She would probably never meet Peter Van Degen again or, if she
did
run across him in the same accidental way, she knew they could not continue their conversation without being ‘introduced’. What was the use of being beautiful and attracting attention if one were perpetually doomed to relapse again into the obscure mass of the Uninvited?

Her gloom was not lightened by finding Ralph Marvell’s card on the drawing-room table. She thought it unflattering and almost impolite of him to call without making an appointment: it seemed to show that he did not wish to continue their acquaintance. But as she tossed the card aside her mother said: ‘He was real sorry not to see you, Undine – he sat here nearly an hour.’

Undine’s attention was roused. ‘Sat here – all alone? Didn’t you tell him I was out?’

‘Yes – but he came up all the same. He asked for me.’

‘Asked for you?’

The social order seemed to be falling in ruins at Undine’s feet. A visitor who asked for a girl’s mother! – she stared at Mrs Spragg with cold incredulity. ‘What makes you think he did?’

‘Why, they told me so. I telephoned down that you were out, and they said he’d asked for me.’ Mrs Spragg let the fact speak for itself – it was too much out of the range of her experience to admit of even a hypothetical explanation.