The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  “The last—my last visit to you?”

  “Oh, metaphorically, I mean—there’s a break in the continuity.”

  Decidedly, she was pressing too hard: unlearning his arts already!

  “I don’t recognize it,” he said. “Unless you make me—” he added, with a note that slightly stirred her attitude of languid attention.

  She turned to him with grave eyes. “You recognize no difference whatever?”

  “None—except an added link in the chain.”

  “An added link?”

  “In having one more thing to like you for—your letting Miss Gaynor see why I had already so many.” He flattered himself that this turn had taken the least hint of fatuity from the phrase.

  Mrs. Vervain sank into her former easy pose. “Was it that you came for?” she asked, almost gaily.

  “If it is necessary to have a reason—that was one.”

  “To talk to me about Miss Gaynor?”

  “To tell you how she talks about you.”

  “That will be very interesting—especially if you have seen her since her second visit to me.”

  “Her second visit?” Thursdale pushed his chair back with a start and moved to another. “She came to see you again?”

  “This morning, yes—by appointment.”

  He continued to look at her blankly. “You sent for her?”

  “I didn’t have to—she wrote and asked me last night. But no doubt you have seen her since.”

  Thursdale sat silent. He was trying to separate his words from his thoughts, but they still clung together inextricably. “I saw her off just now at the station.”

  “And she didn’t tell you that she had been here again?”

  “There was hardly time, I suppose—there were people about—” he floundered.

  “Ah, she’ll write, then.”

  He regained his composure. “Of course she’ll write: very often, I hope. You know I’m absurdly in love,” he cried audaciously.

  She tilted her head back, looking up at him as he leaned against the chimney piece. He had leaned there so often that the attitude touched a pulse which set up a throbbing in her throat. “Oh, my poor Thursdale!” she murmured.

  “I suppose it’s rather ridiculous,” he owned; and as she remained silent, he added, with a sudden break—“Or have you another reason for pitying me?”

  Her answer was another question. “Have you been back to your rooms since you left her?”

  “Since I left her at the station? I came straight here.”

  “Ah, yes—you could: there was no reason—” Her words passed into a silent musing.

  Thursdale moved nervously nearer. “You said you had something to tell me?”

  “Perhaps I had better let her do so. There may be a letter at your rooms.”

  “A letter? What do you mean? A letter from her? What has happened?”

  His paleness shook her, and she raised a hand of reassurance. “Nothing has happened—perhaps that is just the worst of it. You always hated, you know,” she added incoherently, “to have things happen: you never would let them.”

  “And now—”

  “Well, that was what she came here for: I supposed you had guessed. To know if anything had happened.”

  “Had happened?” He gazed at her slowly. “Between you and me?” he said with a rush of light.

  The words were so much cruder than any that had ever passed between them, that the color rose to her face; but she held his startled gaze.

  “You know girls are not quite as unsophisticated as they used to be. Are you surprised that such an idea should occur to her?”

  His own color answered hers: it was the only reply that came to him.

  Mrs. Vervain went on smoothly: “I supposed it might have struck you that there were times when we presented that appearance.”

  He made an impatient gesture. “A man’s past is his own!”

  “Perhaps—it certainly never belongs to the woman who has shared it. But one learns such truths only by experience; and Miss Gaynor is naturally inexperienced.”

  “Of course—but—supposing her act a natural one—” he floundered lamentably among his innuendoes “—I still don’t see—how there was anything—”

  “Anything to take hold of? There wasn’t—”

  “Well, then—?” escaped him, in undisguised satisfaction; but as she did not complete the sentence he went on with a faltering laugh: “She can hardly object to the existence of a mere friendship between us!”

  “But she does,” said Mrs. Vervain.

  Thursdale stood perplexed. He had seen, on the previous day, no trace of jealousy or resentment in his betrothed: he could still hear the candid ring of the girl’s praise of Mrs. Vervain. If she were such an abyss of insincerity as to dissemble distrust under such frankness, she must at least be more subtle than to bring her doubts to her rival for solution. The situation seemed one through which one could no longer move in a penumbra, and he let in a burst of light with the direct query: “Won’t you explain what you mean?”

  Mrs. Vervain sat silent, not provokingly, as though to prolong his distress, but as if, in the attenuated phraseology he had taught her, it was difficult to find words robust enough to meet his challenge. It was the first time he had ever asked her to explain anything: and she had lived so long in dread of offering elucidations which were not wanted, that she seemed unable to produce one on the spot.

  At last she said slowly: “She came to find out if you were really free.”

  Thursdale colored again. “Free?” he stammered, with a sense of physical disgust at contact with such crassness.

  “Yes—if I had quite done with you.” She smiled in recovered security. “It seems she likes clear outlines; she has a passion for definitions.”

  “Yes—well?” he said, wincing at the echo of his own subtlety.

  “Well—and when I told her that you had never belonged to me, she wanted me to define my status—to know exactly where I had stood all along.”

  Thursdale sat gazing at her intently; his hand was not yet on the clue. “And even when you had told her that—”

  “Even when I had told her that I had had no status—that I had never stood anywhere, in any sense she meant,” said Mrs. Vervain, slowly, “even then she wasn’t satisfied, it seems.”

  He uttered an uneasy exclamation. “She didn’t believe you, you mean?”

  “I mean that she did believe me: too thoroughly.”

  “Well, then—in God’s name, what did she want?”

  “Something more—those were the words she used.”

  “Something more? Between—between you and me? Is it a conundrum?” He laughed awkwardly.

  “Girls are not what they were in my day; they are no longer forbidden to contemplate the relation of the sexes.”

  “So it seems!” he commented. “But since, in this case, there wasn’t any—” he broke off, catching the dawn of a revelation in her gaze.

  “That’s just it. The unpardonable offense has been—in our not offending.”

  He flung himself down despairingly. “I give up! What did you tell her?” he burst out with sudden crudeness.

  “The exact truth. If I had only known,” she broke off with a beseeching tenderness, “won’t you believe that I would still have lied for you?”

  “Lied for me? Why on earth should you have lied for either of us?”

  “To save you—to hide you from her to the last! As I’ve hidden you from myself all these years!” She stood up with a sudden tragic import in her movement. “You believe me capable of that, don’t you? If I had only guessed—but I have never known a girl like her; she had the truth out of me with a spring.”

  “The truth that you and I had never—”

  “Had never—never in all these years! Oh, she knew why—she measured us both in a flash. She didn’t suspect me of having haggled with you—her words pelted me like hail. ‘He just took what he wanted—sifted and sorted you to s
uit his taste. Burnt out the gold and left a heap of cinders. And you let him—you let yourself be cut in bits’—she mixed her metaphors a little—‘be cut in bits, and used or discarded, while all the while every drop of blood in you belonged to him! But he’s Shylock—he’s Shylock—and you have bled to death of the pound of flesh he has cut off you.’ But she despises me the most, you know—far, far the most—” Mrs. Vervain ended.

  The words fell strangely on the scented stillness of the room: they seemed out of harmony with its setting of afternoon intimacy, the kind of intimacy on which, at any moment, a visitor might intrude without perceptibly lowering the atmosphere. It was as though a grand opera singer had strained the acoustics of a private music room.

  Thursdale stood up, facing his hostess. Half the room was between them, but they seemed to stare close at each other now that the veils of reticence and ambiguity had fallen.

  His first words were characteristic: “She does despise me, then?” he exclaimed.

  “She thinks the pound of flesh you took was a little too near the heart.”

  He was excessively pale. “Please tell me exactly what she said of me.”

  “She did not speak much of you: she is proud. But I gather that while she understands love or indifference, her eyes have never been opened to the many intermediate shades of feeling. At any rate, she expressed an unwillingness to be taken with reservations—she thinks you would have loved her better if you had loved someone else first. The point of view is original—she insists on a man with a past!”

  “Oh, a past—if she’s serious—I could rake up a past!” he said with a laugh.

  “So I suggested: but she has her eyes on this particular portion of it. She insists on making it a test case. She wanted to know what you had done to me; and before I could guess her drift I blundered into telling her.”

  Thursdale drew a difficult breath. “I never supposed—your revenge is complete,” he said slowly.

  He heard a little gasp in her throat. “My revenge? When I sent for you to warn you—to save you from being surprised as I was surprised?”

  “You’re very good—but it’s rather late to talk of saving me.” He held out his hand in the mechanical gesture of leave-taking.

  “How you must care!—for I never saw you so dull,” was her answer. “Don’t you see that it’s not too late for me to help you?” And as he continued to stare, she brought out sublimely: “Take the rest—in imagination! Let it at least be of that much use to you. Tell her I lied to her—she’s too ready to believe it! And so, after all, in a sense, I shan’t have been wasted.”

  His stare hung on her, widening to a kind of wonder. She gave the look back brightly, unblushingly, as though the expedient were too simple to need oblique approaches. It was extraordinary how a few words had swept them from an atmosphere of the most complex dissimulations to this contact of naked souls.

  It was not in Thursdale to expand with the pressure of fate; but something in him cracked with it, and the rift let in new light. He went up to his friend and took her hand.

  “You would do it—you would do it!”

  She looked at him, smiling, but her hand shook.

  “Good-bye,” he said, kissing it.

  “Good-bye? You are going—?”

  “To get my letter.”

  “Your letter? The letter won’t matter, if you will only do what I ask.”

  He returned her gaze. “I might, I suppose, without being out of character. Only, don’t you see that if your plan helped me it could only harm her?”

  “Harm her?”

  “To sacrifice you wouldn’t make me different. I shall go on being what I have always been—sifting and sorting, as she calls it. Do you want my punishment to fall on her?”

  She looked at him long and deeply. “Ah, if I had to choose between you—!”

  “You would let her take her chance? But I can’t, you see. I must take my punishment alone.”

  She drew her hand away, sighing. “Oh, there will be no punishment for either of you.”

  “For either of us? There will be the reading of her letter for me.”

  She shook her head with a slight laugh. “There will be no letter.”

  Thursdale faced about from the threshold with fresh life in his look. “No letter? You don’t mean—”

  “I mean that she’s been with you since I saw her—she’s seen you and heard your voice. If there is a letter, she has recalled it—from the first station, by telegraph.”

  He turned back to the door, forcing an answer to her smile. “But in the meanwhile I shall have read it,” he said.

  The door closed on him, and she hid her eyes from the dreadful emptiness of the room.

  THE RECKONING

  “THE MARRIAGE law of the new dispensation will be: Thou shalt not be unfaithful—to thyself.”

  A discreet murmur of approval filled the studio, and through the haze of cigarette smoke Mrs. Clement Westall, as her husband descended from his improvised platform, saw him merged in a congratulatory group of ladies. Westall’s informal talks on “The New Ethics” had drawn about him an eager following of the mentally unemployed—those who, as he had once phrased it, liked to have their brain-food cut up for them. The talks had begun by accident. Westall’s ideas were known to be “advanced,” but hitherto their advance had not been in the direction of publicity. He had been, in his wife’s opinion, almost pusillanimously careful not to let his personal views endanger his professional standing. Of late, however, he had shown a puzzling tendency to dogmatize, to throw down the gauntlet, to flaunt his private code in the face of society; and the relation of the sexes being a topic always sure of an audience, a few admiring friends had persuaded him to give his after-dinner opinions a larger circulation by summing them up in a series of talks at the Van Sideren studio.

  The Herbert Van Siderens were a couple who subsisted, socially, on the fact that they had a studio. Van Sideren’s pictures were chiefly valuable as accessories to the mise en scène which differentiated his wife’s “afternoons” from the blighting functions held in long New York drawing-rooms, and permitted her to offer their friends whiskey-and-soda instead of tea. Mrs. Van Sideren, for her part, was skilled in making the most of the kind of atmosphere which a lay-figure and an easel create; and if at times she found the illusion hard to maintain, and lost courage to the extent of almost wishing that Herbert could paint, she promptly overcame such moments of weakness by calling in some fresh talent, some extraneous re-enforcement of the “artistic” impression. It was in quest of such aid that she had seized on Westall, coaxing him, somewhat to his wife’s surprise, into a flattered participation in her fraud. It was vaguely felt, in the Van Sideren circle, that all the audacities were artistic, and that a teacher who pronounced marriage immoral was somehow as distinguished as a painter who depicted purple grass and a green sky. The Van Sideren set were tired of the conventional color-scheme in art and conduct.

  Julia Westall had long had her own views on the immorality of marriage; she might indeed have claimed her husband as a disciple. In the early days of their union she had secretly resented his disinclination to proclaim himself a follower of the new creed; had been inclined to tax him with moral cowardice, with a failure to live up to the convictions for which their marriage was supposed to stand. That was in the first burst of propagandism, when, womanlike, she wanted to turn her disobedience into a law. Now she felt differently. She could hardly account for the change, yet being a woman who never allowed her impulses to remain unaccounted for, she tried to do so by saying that she did not care to have the articles of her faith misinterpreted by the vulgar. In this connection, she was beginning to think that almost every one was vulgar; certainly there were few to whom she would have cared to entrust the defense of so esoteric a doctrine. And it was precisely at this point that Westall, discarding his unspoken principles, had chosen to descend from the heights of privacy, and stand hawking his convictions at the street-corner!

&nbs
p; It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously focused upon herself Mrs. Westall’s wandering resentment. In the first place, the girl had no business to be there. It was “horrid”—Mrs. Westall found herself slipping back into the old feminine vocabulary—simply “horrid” to think of a young girl’s being allowed to listen to such talk. The fact that Una smoked cigarettes and sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least tarnish a certain radiant innocency which made her appear the victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents’ vulgarities. Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something ought to be done—that some one ought to speak to the girl’s mother. And just then Una glided up.

  “Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!” Una fixed her with large limpid eyes. “You believe it all, I suppose?” she asked with seraphic gravity.

  “All—what, my dear child?”

  The girl shone on her. “About the higher life—the freer expansion of the individual—the law of fidelity to one’s self,” she glibly recited.

  Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning blush.

  “My dear Una,” she said, “you don’t in the least understand what it’s all about!”

  Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. “Don’t you, then?” she murmured.

  Mrs. Westall laughed. “Not always—or altogether! But I should like some tea, please.”

  Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were dispensed. As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl more carefully. It was not such a girlish face, after all—definite lines were forming under the rosy haze of youth. She reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty, and wondered why she had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would have as her dower! If they were to be a part of the modern girl’s trousseau—

  Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though some one else had been speaking—a stranger who had borrowed her own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling and Una’s tea too sweet, she set down her cup and looked about for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger flight. She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which Una had withdrawn—one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a moment later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the girl’s side. She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back, listening, with the depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to flattery, enabling him to swallow the strongest doses without apparent grossness of appetite. Julia winced at her own definition of the smile.