The Glimpses of the Moon, Edith Wharton [most important books of all time .TXT] 📗

that it was Mrs. Melrose who stopped short in front of his picture on the opening day, and screamed out: 'This is genius!' It seems funny he should care so much, when I've always known he had genius-and he has known it too. But they're all so kind to him; and Mrs. Melrose especially. And I suppose it makes a thing sound new to hear it said in a new voice."

Susy looked at her meditatively. "And how should you feel if Nat liked too much to hear Mrs. Melrose say it? Too much, I mean, to care any longer what you felt or thought?"

Her friend's worn face flushed quickly, and then paled: Susy almost repented the question. But Mrs. Fulmer met it with a tranquil dignity. "You haven't been married long enough, dear, to understand... how people like Nat and me feel about such things... or how trifling they seem, in the balance... the balance of one's memories." Susy stood up again, and flung her arms about her friend. "Oh, Grace," she laughed with wet eyes, "how can you be as wise as that, and yet not have sense enough to buy a decent hat?" She gave Mrs. Fulmer a quick embrace and hurried away. She had learned her lesson after all; but it was not exactly the one she had come to seek.

The week she had allowed herself had passed, and still there was no word from Nick. She allowed herself yet another day, and that too went by without a letter. She then decided on a step from which her pride had hitherto recoiled; she would call at the bank and ask for Nick's address. She called, embarrassed and hesitating; and was told, after enquiries in the post-office department, that Mr. Nicholas Lansing had given no address since that of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, three months previously. She went back to Versailles that afternoon with the definite intention of writing to Strefford unless the next morning's post brought a letter.

The next morning brought nothing from Nick, but a scribbled message from Mrs. Melrose: would Susy, as soon as possible, come into her room for a word, Susy jumped up, hurried through her bath, and knocked at her hostess's door. In the immense low bed that faced the rich umbrage of the park Mrs. Melrose lay smoking cigarettes and glancing over her letters. She looked up with her vague smile, and said dreamily: "Susy darling, have you any particular plans--for the next few months, I mean?"

Susy coloured: she knew the intonation of old, and fancied she understood what it implied.

"Plans, dearest? Any number... I'm tearing myself away the day after to-morrow... to the Gillows' moor, very probably," she hastened to announce.

Instead of the relief she had expected to read on Mrs. Melrose's dramatic countenance she discovered there the blankest disappointment.

"Oh, really? That's too bad. Is it absolutely settled--?"

"As far as I'm concerned," said Susy crisply.

The other sighed. "I'm too sorry. You see, dear, I'd meant to ask you to stay on here quietly and look after the Fulmer children. Fulmer and I are going to Spain next week--I want to be with him when he makes his studies, receives his first impressions; such a marvellous experience, to be there when he and Velasquez meet!" She broke off, lost in prospective ecstasy. "And, you see, as Grace Fulmer insists on coming with us--"

"Ah, I see."

"Well, there are the five children--such a problem," sighed the benefactress. "If you were at a loose end, you know, dear, while Nick's away with his friends, I could really make it worth your while...."

"So awfully good of you, Violet; only I'm not, as it happens."

Oh the relief of being able to say that, gaily, firmly and even truthfully! Take charge of the Fulmer children, indeed! Susy remembered how Nick and she had fled from them that autumn afternoon in New Hampshire. The offer gave her a salutary glimpse of the way in which, as the years passed, and she lost her freshness and novelty, she would more and more be used as a convenience, a stop-gap, writer of notes, runner of errands, nursery governess or companion. She called to mind several elderly women of her acquaintance, pensioners of her own group, who still wore its livery, struck its attitudes and chattered its jargon, but had long since been ruthlessly relegated to these slave-ant offices. Never in the world would she join their numbers.

Mrs. Melrose's face fell, and she looked at Susy with the plaintive bewilderment of the wielder of millions to whom everything that cannot be bought is imperceptible.

"But I can't see why you can't change your plans," she murmured with a soft persistency.

"Ah, well, you know"--Susy paused on a slow inward smile--"they're not mine only, as it happens."

Mrs. Melrose's brow clouded. The unforeseen complication of Mrs. Fulmer's presence on the journey had evidently tried her nerves, and this new obstacle to her arrangements shook her faith in the divine order of things.

"Your plans are not yours only? But surely you won't let Ursula Gillow dictate to you?... There's my jade pendant; the one you said you liked the other day.... The Fulmers won't go with me, you understand, unless they're satisfied about the children; the whole plan will fall through. Susy darling, you were always too unselfish; I hate to see you sacrificed to Ursula."

Susy's smile lingered. Time was when she might have been glad to add the jade pendant to the collection already enriched by Ellie Vanderlyn's sapphires; more recently, she would have resented the offer as an insult to her newly-found principles. But already the mere fact that she might henceforth, if she chose, be utterly out of reach of such bribes, enabled her to look down on them with tolerance. Oh, the blessed moral freedom that wealth conferred! She recalled Mrs. Fulmer's uncontrollable cry: "The most wonderful thing of all is not having to contrive and skimp, and give up something every single minute!" Yes; it was only on such terms that one could call one's soul one's own. The sense of it gave Susy the grace to answer amicably: "If I could possibly help you out, Violet, I shouldn't want a present to persuade me. And, as you say, there's no reason why I should sacrifice myself to Ursula--or to anybody else. Only, as it happens"--she paused and took the plunge--"I'm going to England because I've promised to see a friend." That night she wrote to Strefford.


XVI

STRETCHED out under an awning on the deck of the Ibis, Nick Lansing looked up for a moment at the vanishing cliffs of Malta and then plunged again into his book.

He had had nearly three weeks of drug-taking on the Ibis. The drugs he had absorbed were of two kinds: visions of fleeing landscapes, looming up from the blue sea to vanish into it again, and visions of study absorbed from the volumes piled up day and night at his elbow. For the first time in months he was in reach of a real library, just the kind of scholarly yet miscellaneous library, that his restless and impatient spirit craved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitive scenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: he swallowed them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeks only to still pain and deaden memory. But they were beginning to produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable, that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days, was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that he needed.

There is probably no point on which the average man has more definite views than on the uselessness of writing a letter that is hard to write. In the line he had sent to Susy from Genoa Nick had told her that she would hear from him again in a few days; but when the few days had passed, and he began to consider setting himself to the task, he found fifty reasons for postponing it.

Had there been any practical questions to write about it would have been different; he could not have borne for twenty-four hours the idea that she was in uncertainty as to money. But that had all been settled long ago. From the first she had had the administering of their modest fortune. On their marriage Nick's own meagre income, paid in, none too regularly, by the agent who had managed for years the dwindling family properties, had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present he could make. And the wedding cheques had of course all been deposited in her name. There were therefore no "business" reasons for communicating with her; and when it came to reasons of another order the mere thought of them benumbed him.

For the first few days he reproached himself for his inertia; then he began to seek reasons for justifying it. After all, for both their sakes a waiting policy might be the wisest he could pursue. He had left Susy because he could not tolerate the conditions on which he had discovered their life together to be based; and he had told her so. What more was there to say?

Nothing was changed in their respective situations; if they came together it could be only to resume the same life; and that, as the days went by, seemed to him more and more impossible. He had not yet reached the point of facing a definite separation; but whenever his thoughts travelled back over their past life he recoiled from any attempt to return to it. As long as this state of mind continued there seemed nothing to add to the letter he had already written, except indeed the statement that he was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing reason for communicating that.

To the Hickses he had given no hint of his situation. When Coral Hicks, a fortnight earlier, had picked him up in the broiling streets of Genoa, and carried him off to the Ibis, he had thought only of a cool dinner and perhaps a moonlight sail. Then, in reply to their friendly urging, he had confessed that he had not been well--had indeed gone off hurriedly for a few days' change of air--and that left him without defence against the immediate proposal that he should take his change of air on the Ibis. They were just off to Corsica and Sardinia, and from there to Sicily: he could rejoin the railway at Naples, and be back at Venice in ten days.

Ten days of respite--the temptation was irresistible. And he really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome honesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, as if the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled the fragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being with such people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touched at Naples he agreed since they were so awfully kind--to go on to Sicily. And when the chief steward, going ashore at Naples for the last time before they got up steam, said: "Any letters for the post, sir?" he answered, as he had answered at each previous halt: "No, thank you: none."

Now they were heading for Rhodes and Crete--Crete, where he had never been, where he had so often longed to go. In spite of the lateness of the season the weather was still miraculously fine: the short waves danced ahead under a sky without a cloud, and the strong bows of the Ibis hardly swayed as she flew forward over the flying crests.

Only his