The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
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Book online «The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗». Author Edith Wharton
For a moment she made no reply; then she asked,
hardly above a whisper: “What do you mean by trusting
to it to come true?”
“Why—you know it will, don’t you?”
“Your vision of you and me together?” She burst
into a sudden hard laugh. “You choose your place well
to put it to me!”
“Do you mean because we’re in my wife’s brougham?
Shall we get out and walk, then? I don’t suppose you
mind a little snow?”
She laughed again, more gently. “No; I shan’t get
out and walk, because my business is to get to Granny’s
as quickly as I can. And you’ll sit beside me, and
we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
“I don’t know what you mean by realities. The only
reality to me is this.”
She met the words with a long silence, during which
the carriage rolled down an obscure side-street and
then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth
Avenue.
“Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as
your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?” she asked.
The crudeness of the question startled him: the word
was one that women of his class fought shy of, even
when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He
noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a
recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if
it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible
life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up
with a jerk, and he floundered.
“I want—I want somehow to get away with you into
a world where words like that—categories like that—
won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human
beings who love each other, who are the whole of life
to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh.
“Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever
been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly
dumb she went on: “I know so many who’ve tried to
find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at
wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or
Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the
old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier
and more promiscuous.”
He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he
remembered the phrase she had used a little while
before.
“Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears,” he said.
“Well, she opened my eyes too; it’s a delusion to say
that she blinds people. What she does is just the
contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re
never again in the blessed darkness. Isn’t there a Chinese
torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe
me, it’s a miserable little country!”
The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May’s
sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward
as if he had been a Kentucky trotter. Archer choked
with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.
“For US? But there’s no US in that sense! We’re near
each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we
can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer,
the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen
Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying
to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust
them.”
“Ah, I’m beyond that,” he groaned.
“No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I
have,” she said, in a strange voice, “and I know what it
looks like there.”
He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he
groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell
that signalled orders to the coachman. He remembered
that May rang twice when she wished to stop. He
pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the
curbstone.
“Why are we stopping? This is not Granny’s,” Madame
Olenska exclaimed.
“No: I shall get out here,” he stammered, opening
the door and jumping to the pavement. By the light of
a street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive
motion she made to detain him. He closed the
door, and leaned for a moment in the window.
“You’re right: I ought not to have come today,” he
said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should
not hear. She bent forward, and seemed about to speak;
but he had already called out the order to drive on, and
the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner.
The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung
up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly he
felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived
that he had been crying, and that the wind had
frozen his tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a
sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.
XXX.
That evening when Archer came down before dinner
he found the drawing-room empty.
He and May were dining alone, all the family
engagements having been postponed since Mrs. Manson
Mingott’s illness; and as May was the more punctual
of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded
him. He knew that she was at home, for while he
dressed he had heard her moving about in her room;
and he wondered what had delayed her.
He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such
conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to
reality. Sometimes he felt as if he had found the clue to
his father-in-law’s absorption in trifles; perhaps even
Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions,
and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to
defend himself against them.
When May appeared he thought she looked tired.
She had put on the low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial exacted on the
most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair
into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in
contrast, was wan and almost faded. But she shone on him
with her usual tenderness, and her eyes had kept the
blue dazzle of the day before.
“What became of you, dear?” she asked. “I was
waiting at Granny’s, and Ellen came alone, and said
she had dropped you on the way because you had to
rush off on business. There’s nothing wrong?”
“Only some letters I’d forgotten, and wanted to get
off before dinner.”
“Ah—” she said; and a moment afterward: “I’m
sorry you didn’t come to Granny’s—unless the letters
were urgent.”
“They were,” he rejoined, surprised at her insistence.
“Besides, I don’t see why I should have gone to your
grandmother’s. I didn’t know you were there.”
She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the
mantelpiece. As she stood there, lifting her long arm to
fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her
intricate hair, Archer was struck by something languid
and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly
monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also.
Then he remembered that, as he had left the house that
morning, she had called over the stairs that she would
meet him at her grandmother’s so that they might drive
home together. He had called back a cheery “Yes!”
and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his
promise. Now he was smitten with compunction, yet
irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored
up against him after nearly two years of marriage. He
was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon,
without the temperature of passion yet with all its
exactions. If May had spoken out her grievances (he
suspected her of many) he might have laughed them
away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds
under a Spartan smile.
To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her
grandmother was, and she answered that Mrs. Mingott
was still improving, but had been rather disturbed by
the last news about the Beauforts.
“What news?”
“It seems they’re going to stay in New York. I believe
he’s going into an insurance business, or something.
They’re looking about for a small house.”
The preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion,
and they went in to dinner. During dinner their
talk moved in its usual limited circle; but Archer
noticed that his wife made no allusion to Madame Olenska,
nor to old Catherine’s reception of her. He was thankful
for the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous.
They went up to the library for coffee, and Archer
lit a cigar and took down a volume of Michelet. He
had taken to history in the evenings since May had
shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever
she saw him with a volume of poetry: not that he
disliked the sound of his own voice, but because he
could always foresee her comments on what he read. In
the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now
perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had
ceased to provide her with opinions she had begun to
hazard her own, with results destructive to his enjoyment
of the works commented on.
Seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her
workbasket, drew up an armchair to the green-shaded
student lamp, and uncovered a cushion she was
embroidering for his sofa. She was not a clever needle-woman; her large capable hands were made for riding,
rowing and open-air activities; but since other wives
embroidered cushions for their husbands she did not
wish to omit this last link in her devotion.
She was so placed that Archer, by merely raising his
eyes, could see her bent above her work-frame, her
ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back from her firm round
arms, the betrothal sapphire shining on her left hand
above her broad gold wedding-ring, and the right hand
slowly and laboriously stabbing the canvas. As she sat
thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to
himself with a secret dismay that he would always
know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years
to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected
mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an
emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on
their short courting: the function was exhausted
because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening
into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the
very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.
He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and
at once she raised her head.
“What’s the matter?”
“The room is stifling: I want a little air.”
He had insisted that the library curtains should draw
backward and forward on a rod, so that they might be
closed in the evening, instead of remaining nailed to a
gilt cornice, and immovably looped up over layers of
lace, as in the drawing-room; and he pulled them back
and pushed up the sash, leaning out into the icy night.
The mere fact of not looking at May, seated beside his
table, under his lamp, the fact of seeing other houses,
roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other lives
outside his own, other cities beyond New York, and a
whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and
made it easier to breathe.
After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few
minutes he heard her say: “Newland! Do shut the
window. You’ll catch your death.”
He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch
my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But
I’ve
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