The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  As though to divert his attention, she precipitately asked: “Are you—?”

  His answer carried the shock of an evocation. “I merely asked her what she thought of you.”

  “Of me?”

  “She admires you immensely, you know.”

  For a moment Mrs. Quentin’s cheek showed the lingering light of girlhood: praise transmitted by her son acquired something of the transmitter’s merit. “Well—?” she smiled.

  “Well—you didn’t make my father give up the Radiator, did you?”

  His mother, stiffening, made a circuitous return: “She never comes here. How can she know me?”

  “She’s so poor! She goes out so little.” He rose and leaned against the mantelpiece, dislodging with impatient fingers a slender bronze wrestler poised on a porphyry base, between two warm-toned Spanish ivories. “And then her mother—” he added, as if involuntarily.

  “Her mother has never visited me,” Mrs. Quentin finished for him.

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Mrs. Fenno has the scope of a wax doll. Her rule of conduct is taken from her grandmother’s sampler.”

  “But the daughter is so modern—and yet—”

  “The result is the same? Not exactly. She admires you—oh, immensely!” He replaced the bronze and turned to his mother with a smile. “Aren’t you on some hospital committee together? What especially strikes her is your way of doing good. She says philanthropy is not a line of conduct but a state of mind—and it appears that you are one of the elect.”

  As, in the vague diffusion of physical pain, relief seems to come with the acuter pang of a single nerve, Mrs. Quentin felt herself suddenly eased by a rush of anger against the girl. “If she loved you—” she began.

  His gesture checked her. “I’m not asking you to get her to do that.”

  The two were again silent, facing each other in the disarray of a common catastrophe—as though their thoughts, at the summons of danger, had rushed naked into action. Mrs. Quentin, at this revealing moment, saw for the first time how many elements of her son’s character had seemed comprehensible simply because they were familiar: as, in reading a foreign language, we take the meaning of certain words for granted till the context corrects us. Often as, in a given case, her maternal musings had figured his conduct, she now found herself at a loss to forecast it; and with this failure of intuition came a sense of the subserviency which had hitherto made her counsels but the anticipation of his wish. Her despair escaped in the moan, “What is it you ask me?”

  “To talk to her.”

  “Talk to her?”

  “Show her—tell her—make her understand that the paper has always been a thing outside your life—that hasn’t touched you—that needn’t touch her. Only, let her hear you—watch you—be with you—she’ll see...she can’t help seeing....”

  His mother faltered. “But if she’s given you her reasons?”

  “Let her give them to you! If she can—when she sees you....” His impatient hand again displaced the wrestler. “I care abominably,” he confessed.

  II

  On the Fenno threshold a sudden sense of the futility of the attempt had almost driven Mrs. Quentin back to her carriage; but the door was already opening, and a parlor-maid who believed that Miss Fenno was in led the way to the depressing drawing-room. It was the kind of room in which no member of the family is likely to be found except after dinner or after death. The chairs and tables looked like poor relations who had repaid their keep by a long career of grudging usefulness: they seemed banded together against intruders in a sullen conspiracy of discomfort. Mrs. Quentin, keenly susceptible to such influences, read failure in every angle of the upholstery. She was incapable of the vulgar error of thinking that Hope Fenno might be induced to marry Alan for his money; but between this assumption and the inference that the girl’s imagination might be touched by the finer possibilities of wealth, good taste admitted a distinction. The Fenno furniture, however, presented to such reasoning the obtuseness of its black walnut chamferings; and something in its attitude suggested that its owners would be as uncompromising. The room showed none of the modern attempts at palliation, no apologetic draping of facts; and Mrs. Quentin, provisionally perched on a green reps Gothic sofa with which it was clearly impossible to establish any closer relation, concluded that, had Mrs. Fenno needed another seat of the same size, she would have set out placidly to match the one on which her visitor now languished.

  To Mrs. Quentin’s fancy, Hope Fenno’s opinions, presently imparted in a clear young voice from the opposite angle of the Gothic sofa, partook of the character of their surroundings. The girl’s mind was like a large light empty place, scantily furnished with a few massive prejudices, not designed to add to anyone’s comfort but too ponderous to be easily moved. Mrs. Quentin’s own intelligence, in which its owner, in an artistically shaded half-light, had so long moved amid a delicate complexity of sensations, seemed in comparison suddenly close and crowded; and in taking refuge there from the glare of the young girl’s candor, the older woman found herself stumbling in an unwonted obscurity. Her uneasiness resolved itself into a sense of irritation against her listener. Mrs. Quentin knew that the momentary value of any argument lies in the capacity of the mind to which it is addressed; and as her shafts of persuasion spent themselves against Miss Fenno’s obduracy, she said to herself that, since conduct is governed by emotions rather than ideas, the really strong people are those who mistake their sensations for opinions. Viewed in this light, Miss Fenno was certainly very strong: there was an unmistakable ring of finality in the tone with which she declared:

  “It’s impossible.”

  Mrs. Quentin’s answer veiled the least shade of feminine resentment. “I told Alan that where he had failed there was no chance of my making an impression.”

  Hope Fenno laid on her visitor’s an almost reverential hand. “Dear Mrs. Quentin, it’s the impression you make that confirms the impossibility.”

  Mrs. Quentin waited a moment: she was perfectly aware that, where her feelings were concerned, her sense of humor was not to be relied on. “Do I make such an odious impression?” she asked at length, with a smile that seemed to give the girl her choice of two meanings.

  “You make such a beautiful one! It’s too beautiful—it obscures my judgment.”

  Mrs. Quentin looked at her thoughtfully. “Would it be permissible, I wonder, for an older woman to suggest that, at your age, it isn’t always a misfortune to have what one calls one’s judgment temporarily obscured?”

  Miss Fenno flushed. “I try not to judge others—”

  “You judge Alan.”

  “Ah, he is not others,” she murmured with an accent that touched the older woman.

  “You judge his mother.”

  “I don’t; I don’t!”

  Mrs. Quentin pressed her point. “You judge yourself, then, as you would be in my position—and your verdict condemns me.”

  “How can you think it? It’s because I appreciate the difference in our point of view that I find it so difficult to defend myself—”

  “Against what?”

  “The temptation to imagine that I might be as you are—feeling as I do.”

  Mrs. Quentin rose with a sigh. “My child, in my day love was less subtle.” She added, after a moment: “Alan is a perfect son.”

  “Ah, that again—that makes it worse!”

  “Worse?”

  “Just as your goodness does, your sweetness, your immense indulgence in letting me discuss things with you in a way that must seem almost an impertinence.”

  Mrs. Quentin’s smile was not without irony. “You must remember that I do it for Alan.”

  “That’s what I love you for!” the girl instantly returned; and again her tone touched her listener.

  “And yet you’re sacrificing him—and to an idea!”

  “Isn’t it to ideas that all the sacrifices that were worth-while have been made?”

  “One may sacrifice one�
��s self.”

  Miss Fenno’s color rose. “That’s what I’m doing,” she said gently.

  Mrs. Quentin took her hand. “I believe you are,” she answered. “And it isn’t true that I speak only for Alan. Perhaps I did when I began; but now I want to plead for you too—against yourself.” She paused, and then went on with a deeper note: “I have let you, as you say, speak your mind to me in terms that some women might have resented, because I wanted to show you how little, as the years go on, theories, ideas, abstract conceptions of life, weigh against the actual, against the particular way in which life presents itself to us—to women especially. To decide beforehand exactly how one ought to behave in given circumstances is like deciding that one will follow a certain direction in crossing an unexplored country. Afterward we find that we must turn out for the obstacles —cross the rivers where they’re shallowest—take the tracks that others have beaten—make all sorts of unexpected concessions. Life is made up of compromises: that is what youth refuses to understand. I’ve lived long enough to doubt whether any real good ever came of sacrificing beautiful facts to even more beautiful theories. Do I seem casuistical? I don’t know—there may be losses either way...but the love of the man one loves...of the child one loves...that makes up for everything....”

  She had spoken with a thrill which seemed to communicate itself to the hand her listener had left in hers. Her eyes filled suddenly, but through their dimness she saw the girl’s lips shape a last desperate denial: “Don’t you see it’s because I feel all this that I mustn’t—that I can’t?”

  III

  Mrs. Quentin, in the late spring afternoon, had turned in at the doors of the Metropolitan Museum. She had been walking in the Park, in a solitude oppressed by the ever-present sense of her son’s trouble, and had suddenly remembered that someone had added a Beltraffio to the collection. It was an old habit of Mrs. Quentin’s to seek in the enjoyment of the beautiful the distraction that most of her acquaintances appeared to find in each other’s company. She had few friends, and their society was welcome to her only in her more superficial moods; but she could drug anxiety with a picture as some women can soothe it with a bonnet.

  During the six months which had elapsed since her visit to Miss Fenno she had been conscious of a pain of which she had supposed herself no longer capable: as a man will continue to feel the ache of an amputated arm. She had fancied that all her centers of feeling had been transferred to Alan; but she now found herself subject to a kind of dual suffering, in which her individual pang was the keener in that it divided her from her son’s. Alan had surprised her: she had not foreseen that he would take a sentimental rebuff so hard. His disappointment took the uncommunicative form of a sterner application to work. He threw himself into the concerns of the Radiator with an aggressiveness which almost betrayed itself in the paper. Mrs. Quentin never read the Radiator, but from the glimpses of it reflected in the other journals she gathered that it was at least not being subjected to the moral reconstruction which had been one of Miss Fenno’s alternatives.

  Mrs. Quentin never spoke to her son of what had happened. She was superior to the cheap satisfaction of avenging his in-jury by deprecating its cause. She knew that in sentimental sorrows such consolations are as salt in the wound. The avoidance of a subject so vividly present to both could not but affect the closeness of their relation. An invisible presence hampered their liberty of speech and thought. The girl was always between them; and to hide the sense of her intrusion they began to be less frequently together. It was then that Mrs. Quentin measured the extent of her isolation. Had she ever dared to forecast such a situation, she would have proceeded on the conventional theory that her son’s suffering must draw her nearer to him; and this was precisely the relief that was denied her. Alan’s uncommunicativeness extended below the level of speech, and his mother, reduced to the helplessness of dead reckoning, had not even the solace of adapting her sympathy to his needs. She did not know what he felt: his course was incalculable to her. She sometimes wondered if she had become as incomprehensible to him; and it was to find a moment’s refuge from the dogging misery of such conjectures that she had now turned in at the Museum.

  The long line of mellow canvases seemed to receive her into the rich calm of an autumn twilight. She might have been walking in an enchanted wood where the footfall of care never sounded. So deep was the sense of seclusion that, as she turned from her prolonged communion with the new Beltraffio, it was a surprise to find that she was not alone.

  A young lady who had risen from the central ottoman stood in suspended flight as Mrs. Quentin faced her. The older woman was the first to regain her self-possession.

  “Miss Fenno!” she said.

  The girl advanced with a blush. As it faded, Mrs. Quentin noticed a change in her. There had always been something bright and banner-like in her aspect, but now her look drooped, and she hung at half-mast, as it were. Mrs. Quentin, in the embarrassment of surprising a secret that its possessor was doubtless unconscious of betraying, reverted hurriedly to the Beltraffio.

  “I came to see this,” she said. “It’s very beautiful.”

  Miss Fenno’s eye traveled incuriously over the mystic blue reaches of the landscape. “I suppose so,” she assented; adding, after another tentative pause: “You come here often, don’t you?”

  “Very often,” Mrs. Quentin answered. “I find pictures a great help.”

  “A help?”

  “A rest, I mean...if one is tired or out of sorts.”

  “Ah,” Miss Fenno murmured, looking down.

  “This Beltraffio is new, you know,” Mrs. Quentin continued. “What a wonderful background, isn’t it? Is he a painter who interests you?”

  The girl glanced again at the dusky canvas, as though in a final endeavor to extract from it a clue to the consolations of art. “I don’t know,” she said at length; “I’m afraid I don’t understand pictures.” She moved nearer to Mrs. Quentin and held out her hand.

  “You’re going?”

  “Yes.”

  Mrs. Quentin looked at her. “Let me drive you home,” she said, impulsively. She was feeling, with a shock of surprise, that it gave her, after all, no pleasure to see how much the girl had suffered.

  Miss Fenno stiffened perceptibly. “Thank you; I shall like the walk.”

  Mrs. Quentin dropped her hand with a corresponding movement of withdrawal, and a momentary wave of antagonism seemed to sweep the two women apart. Then, as Mrs. Quentin, bowing slightly, again addressed herself to the picture, she felt a sudden touch on her arm.

  “Mrs. Quentin,” the girl faltered, “I really came here because I saw your carriage.” Her eyes sank, and then fluttered back to her hearer’s face. “I’ve been horribly unhappy!” she exclaimed.

  Mrs. Quentin was silent. If Hope Fenno had expected an immediate response to her appeal, she was disappointed. The older woman’s face was like a veil dropped before her thoughts.

  “I’ve thought so often,” the girl went on precipitately, “of what you said that day you came to see me last autumn. I think I understand now what you meant—what you tried to make me see.... Oh, Mrs. Quentin,” she broke out, “I didn’t mean to tell you this—I never dreamed of it till this moment—but you do remember what you said, don’t you? You must remember it! And now that I’ve met you in this way, I can’t help telling you that I believe—I begin to believe—that you were quite right, after all.”

  Mrs. Quentin had listened without moving; but now she raised her eyes with a slight smile. “Do you wish me to say this to Alan?” she asked.

  The girl flushed, but her glance braved the smile. “Would he still care to hear it?” she said fearlessly.

  Mrs. Quentin took momentary refuge in a renewed inspection of the Beltraffio; then, turning, she said, with a kind of reluctance: “He would still care.”

  “Ah!” broke from the girl.

  During this exchange of words the two speakers had drifted unconsciously toward one of the be
nches. Mrs. Quentin glanced about her: a custodian who had been hovering in the doorway sauntered into the adjoining gallery, and they remained alone among the silvery Van Dykes and flushed bituminous Halses. Mrs. Quentin sank down on the bench and reached a hand to the girl.

  “Sit by me,” she said.

  Miss Fenno dropped beside her. In both women the stress of emotion was too strong for speech. The girl was still trembling, and Mrs. Quentin was the first to regain her composure.

  “You say you’ve suffered,” she began at last. “Do you suppose I haven’t?”

  “I knew you had. That made it so much worse for me—that I should have been the cause of your suffering for Alan!”

  Mrs. Quentin drew a deep breath. “Not for Alan only,” she said. Miss Fenno turned on her a wondering glance. “Not for Alan only. That pain every woman expects—and knows how to bear. We all know our children must have such disappointments, and to suffer with them is not the deepest pain. It’s the suffering apart—in ways they don’t understand.” She breathed deeply. “I want you to know what I mean. You were right—that day—and I was wrong.”

  “Oh,” the girl faltered.

  Mrs. Quentin went on in a voice of passionate lucidity. “I knew it then—I knew it even while I was trying to argue with you—I’ve always known it! I didn’t want my son to marry you till I heard your reasons for refusing him; and then—then I longed to see you his wife!”

  “Oh, Mrs. Quentin!”

  “I longed for it; but I knew it mustn’t be.”

  “Mustn’t be?”

  Mrs. Quentin shook her head sadly, and the girl, gaining courage from this mute negation, cried with an uncontrollable escape of feeling:

  “It’s because you thought me hard, obstinate, narrow-minded? Oh, I understand that so well! My self-righteousness must have seemed so petty! A girl who could sacrifice a man’s future to her own moral vanity—for it was a form of vanity; you showed me that plainly enough—how you must have despised me! But I am not that girl now—indeed I’m not. I’m not impulsive—I think things out. I’ve thought this out. I know Alan loves me—I know how he loves me—and I believe I can help him—oh, not in the ways I had fancied before—but just merely by loving him.” She paused, but Mrs. Quentin made no sign. “I see it all so differently now. I see what an influence love itself may be—how my believing in him, loving him, accepting him just as he is, might help him more than any theories, any arguments. I might have seen this long ago in looking at you—as he often told me—in seeing how you’d kept yourself apart from—from—Mr. Quentin’s work and his—been always the beautiful side of life to them—kept their faith alive in spite of themselves—not by interfering, preaching, reforming, but by—just loving them and being there—” She looked at Mrs. Quentin with a simple nobleness. “It isn’t as if I cared for the money, you know; if I cared for that, I should be afraid—”