The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton [red novels .txt] 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
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put my hand in the fire … well, that there hadn’t been
tit for tat … with the young champion… .” Mr.
Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded
paper toward Archer. “This report, the result of discreet
enquiries …” And then, as Archer made no
effort to glance at the paper or to repudiate the suggestion,
the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: “I don’t
say it’s conclusive, you observe; far from it. But straws
show … and on the whole it’s eminently satisfactory
for all parties that this dignified solution has been
reached.”
“Oh, eminently,” Archer assented, pushing back the
paper.
A day or two later, on responding to a summons
from Mrs. Manson Mingott, his soul had been more
deeply tried.
He had found the old lady depressed and querulous.
“You know she’s deserted me?” she began at once;
and without waiting for his reply: “Oh, don’t ask me
why! She gave so many reasons that I’ve forgotten
them all. My private belief is that she couldn’t face the
boredom. At any rate that’s what Augusta and my
daughters-in-law think. And I don’t know that I
altogether blame her. Olenski’s a finished scoundrel; but
life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it
is in Fifth Avenue. Not that the family would admit
that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de
la Paix thrown in. And poor Ellen, of course, has no
idea of going back to her husband. She held out as
firmly as ever against that. So she’s to settle down in
Paris with that fool Medora… . Well, Paris is Paris;
and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing.
But she was as gay as a bird, and I shall miss her.”
Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down
her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her
bosom.
“All I ask is,” she concluded, “that they shouldn’t
bother me any more. I must really be allowed to digest
my gruel… .” And she twinkled a little wistfully at
Archer.
It was that evening, on his return home, that May
announced her intention of giving a farewell dinner to
her cousin. Madame Olenska’s name had not been
pronounced between them since the night of her flight
to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with
surprise.
“A dinner—why?” he interrogated.
Her colour rose. “But you like Ellen—I thought you’d
be pleased.”
“It’s awfully nice—your putting it in that way. But I
really don’t see—”
“I mean to do it, Newland,” she said, quietly rising
and going to her desk. “Here are the invitations all
written. Mother helped me—she agrees that we ought
to.” She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and
Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image
of the Family.
“Oh, all right,” he said, staring with unseeing eyes at
the list of guests that she had put in his hand.
When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May
was stooping over the fire and trying to coax the logs
to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate
tiles.
The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden’s
orchids had been conspicuously disposed in various
receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver. Mrs.
Newland Archer’s drawing-room was generally thought
a great success. A gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which
the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed,
blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of
the Venus of Milo); the sofas and armchairs of pale
brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables
densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and
efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded
lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.
“I don’t think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted
up,” said May, rising flushed from her struggle, and
sending about her a glance of pardonable pride. The
brass tongs which she had propped against the side of
the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband’s
answer; and before he could restore them Mr.
and Mrs. van der Luyden were announced.
The other guests quickly followed, for it was known
that the van der Luydens liked to dine punctually. The
room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing
to Mrs. Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished
Verbeckhoven “Study of Sheep,” which Mr. Welland
had given May for Christmas, when he found Madame
Olenska at his side.
She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her
dark hair seem denser and heavier than ever. Perhaps
that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of
amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of
the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children’s
parties, when Medora Manson had first brought
her to New York.
The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or
her dress was perhaps unbecoming: her face looked
lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as
he did at that minute. Their hands met, and he thought
he heard her say: “Yes, we’re sailing tomorrow in the
Russia—”; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening
doors, and after an interval May’s voice: “Newland!
Dinner’s been announced. Won’t you please take Ellen
in?”
Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he
noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered
how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he
had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing-room. All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed
to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly
dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself:
“If it were only to see her hand again I should have to
follow her—.”
It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to
a “foreign visitor” that Mrs. van der Luyden could
suffer the diminution of being placed on her host’s left.
The fact of Madame Olenska’s “foreignness” could
hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by
this farewell tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted
her displacement with an affability which left no doubt
as to her approval. There were certain things that had
to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and
thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York
code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about
to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on
earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have
done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the
Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe
was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat
marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her
popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her
silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated
by the family approval. Mrs. van der Luyden
shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her
nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden,
from his seat at May’s right, cast down the table glances
plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent
from Skuytercliff.
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a
state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere
between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at
nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.
As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to
another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged
upon May’s canvasbacks as a band of dumb conspirators,
and himself and the pale woman on his right as
the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over
him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams,
that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were
lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to “foreign”
vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for
months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes
and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by
means as yet unknown to him, the separation between
himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved,
and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife
on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or
had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of
the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural
desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and
cousin.
It was the old New York way of taking life “without
effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded
scandal more than disease, who placed decency above
courage, and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those
who gave rise to them.
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind
Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed
camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the
inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which,
over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing
with Beaufort and his wife. “It’s to show me,” he
thought, “what would happen to ME—” and a deathly
sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over
direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in
on him like the doors of the family vault.
He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden’s startled
eyes.
“You think it laughable?” she said with a pinched
smile. “Of course poor Regina’s idea of remaining in
New York has its ridiculous side, I suppose;” and
Archer muttered: “Of course.”
At this point, he became conscious that Madame
Olenska’s other neighbour had been engaged for some
time with the lady on his right. At the same moment he
saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der
Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick
glance down the table. It was evident that the host and
the lady on his right could not sit through the whole
meal in silence. He turned to Madame Olenska, and
her pale smile met him. “Oh, do let’s see it through,” it
seemed to say.
“Did you find the journey tiring?” he asked in a
voice that surprised him by its naturalness; and she
answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom travelled
with fewer discomforts.
“Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train,”
she added; and he remarked that she would not suffer
from that particular hardship in the country she was
going to.
“I never,” he declared with intensity, “was more
nearly frozen than once, in April, in the train between
Calais and Paris.”
She said she did not wonder, but remarked that,
after all, one could always carry an extra rug, and that
every form of travel had its hardships; to which he
abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account
compared with the blessedness of getting away.
She changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly
rising in pitch: “I mean to do a lot of travelling myself
before long.” A tremor crossed her face, and leaning
over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: “I say, Reggie,
what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next
month, I mean? I’m game if you are—” at which Mrs.
Reggie piped up that she could not think of letting
Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she
was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week;
and her husband placidly observed that by that time he
would have to be practising for the International Polo
match.
But Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase “round
the world,” and having once circled the globe in his
steam-yacht, he seized the opportunity to send down
the table several striking items concerning the shallowness
of the Mediterranean ports. Though, after all, he
added, it didn’t matter; for when you’d seen Athens
and Smyrna and Constantinople, what else was there?
And Mrs. Merry said
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