The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  “When we went back into the drawing-room I had said nothing to her that I might not have said to any other woman of the party; but when we shook hands I knew we should meet the next day—and the next....

  “That’s the way, I take it, that Nature has arranged the beginning of the great enduring loves; and likewise of the little epidermal flurries. And how is a man to know where he is going?

  “From the first my feeling for Paulina Trant seemed to me a grave business; but then the Enemy is given to producing that illusion. Many a man—I’m talking of the kind with imagination—has thought he was seeking a soul when all he wanted was a closer view of its tenement. And I tried—honestly tried—to make myself think I was in the latter case. Because, in the first place, I didn’t, just then, want a big disturbing influence in my life; and because I didn’t want to be a dupe; and because Paulina Trant was not, according to hearsay, the kind of woman for whom it was worth-while to bring up the big batteries....

  “But my resistance was only half-hearted. What I really felt—all I really felt—was the flood of joy that comes of heightened emotion. She had given me that, and I wanted her to give it to me again. That’s as near as I’ve ever come to analyzing my state in the beginning.

  “I knew her story, as no doubt you know it: the current version, I mean. She had been poor and fond of enjoyment, and she had married that pompous stick Philip Trant because she needed a home, and perhaps also because she wanted a little luxury. Queer how we sneer at women for wanting the thing that gives them half their attraction!

  “People shook their heads over the marriage, and divided, prematurely, into Philip’s partisans and hers: for no one thought it would work. And they were almost disappointed when, after all, it did. She and her wooden consort seemed to get on well enough. There was a ripple, at one time, over her friendship with young Jim Dalham, who was always with her during a summer at Newport and an autumn in Italy; then the talk died out, and she and Trant were seen together, as before, on terms of apparent good-fellowship.

  “This was the more surprising because, from the first, Paulina had never made the least attempt to change her tone or subdue her colors. In the gray Trant atmosphere she flashed with prismatic fires. She smoked, she talked subversively, she did as she liked and went where she chose, and danced over the Trant prejudices and the Trant principles as if they’d been a ball-room floor; and all without apparent offense to her solemn husband and his cloud of cousins. I believe her frankness and directness struck them dumb. She moved like a kind of primitive Una through the virtuous rout, and never got a finger-mark on her freshness.

  “One of the finest things about her was the fact that she never, for an instant, used her situation as a means of enhancing her attraction. With a husband like Trant it would have been so easy! He was a man who always saw the small sides of big things. He thought most of life compressible into a set of by-laws and the rest unmentionable; and with his stiff frock-coated and tall-hatted mind, instinctively distrustful of intelligences in another dress, with his arbitrary classification of whatever he didn’t understand into ‘the kind of thing I don’t approve of,’ ‘the kind of thing that isn’t done,’ and—deepest depth of all—‘the kind of thing I’d rather not discuss,’ he lived in bondage to a shadowy moral etiquette of which the complex rites and awful penalties had cast an abiding gloom upon his manner.

  “A woman like his wife couldn’t have asked a better foil; yet I’m sure she never consciously used his dullness to relieve her brilliancy. She may have felt that the case spoke for itself. But I believe her reserve was rather due to a lively sense of justice, and to the rare habit (you said she was rare) of looking at facts as they are, without any throwing of sentimental lime-lights. She knew Trant could no more help being Trant than she could help being herself—and there was an end of it. I’ve never known a woman who ‘made up’ so little mentally....

  “Perhaps her very reserve, the fierceness of her implicit rejection of sympathy, exposed her the more to—well, to what happened when we met. She said afterward that it was like having been shut up for months in the hold of a ship, and coming suddenly on deck on a day that was all flying blue and silver....

  “I won’t try to tell you what she was. It’s easier to tell you what her friendship made of me; and I can do that best by adopting her metaphor of the ship. Haven’t you, sometimes, at the moment of starting on a journey, some glorious plunge into the unknown, been tripped up by the thought: ‘If only one hadn’t to come back’? Well, with her one had the sense that one would never have to come back; that the magic ship would always carry one farther. And what an air one breathed on it! And, oh, the wind, and the islands, and the sunsets!

  “I said just now ‘her friendship’; and I used the word advisedly. Love is deeper than friendship, but friendship is a good deal wider. The beauty of our relation was that it included both dimensions. Our thoughts met as naturally as our eyes: it was almost as if we loved each other because we liked each other. The quality of a love may be tested by the amount of friendship it contains, and in our case there was no dividing line between loving and liking, no disproportion between them, no barrier against which desire beat in vain or from which thought fell back unsatisfied. Ours was a robust passion that could give an open-eyed account of itself, and not a beautiful madness shrinking away from the proof....

  “For the first months friendship sufficed us, or rather gave us so much by the way that we were in no hurry to reach what we knew it was leading to. But we were moving there nevertheless, and one day we found ourselves on the borders. It came about through a sudden decision of Trant’s to start on a long tour with his wife. We had never foreseen that: he seemed rooted in his New York habits and convinced that the whole social and financial machinery of the metropolis would cease to function if he did not keep an eye on it through the columns of his morning paper, and pronounce judgment on it in the afternoon at his club. But something new had happened to him: he caught a cold, which was followed by a touch of pleurisy, and instantly he perceived the intense interest and importance which ill-health may add to life. He took the fullest advantage of it. A discerning doctor recommended travel in a warm climate; and suddenly, the morning paper, the afternoon club, Fifth Avenue, Wall Street, all the complex phenomena of the metropolis, faded into insignificance, and the rest of the terrestrial globe, from being a mere geographical hypothesis, useful in enabling one to determine the latitude of New York, acquired reality and magnitude as a factor in the convalescence of Mr. Philip Trant.

  “His wife was absorbed in preparations for the journey. To move him was like mobilizing an army, and weeks before the date set for their departure it was almost as if she were already gone.

  “This foretaste of separation showed us what we were to each other. Yet I was letting her go—and there was no help for it, no way of preventing it. Resistance was as useless as the vain struggles in a nightmare. She was Trant’s and not mine: part of his luggage when he traveled as she was part of his household furniture when he stayed at home....

  “The day she told me that their passages were taken—it was on a November afternoon, in her drawing-room in town—I turned away from her and, going to the window, stood looking out at the torrent of traffic interminably pouring down Fifth Avenue. I watched the senseless machinery of life revolving in the rain and mud, and tried to picture myself performing my small function in it after she had gone from me.

  “‘It can’t be—it can’t be!’ I exclaimed.

  “‘What can’t be?’

  “I came back into the room and sat down by her. ‘This—this—’ I hadn’t any words. ‘Two weeks!’ I said. ‘What’s two weeks?’

  “She answered, vaguely, something about their thinking of Spain for the spring—

  “‘Two weeks—two weeks!’ I repeated. ‘And the months we’ve lost—the days that belonged to us!’

  “‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m thankful it’s settled.’

  “Our words
seemed irrelevant, haphazard. It was as if each were answering a secret voice, and not what the other was saying.

  “‘Don’t you feel anything at all?’ I remember bursting out at her. As I asked it the tears were streaming down her face. I felt angry with her, and was almost glad to note that her lids were red and that she didn’t cry becomingly. I can’t express my sensation to you except by saying that she seemed part of life’s huge league against me. And suddenly I thought of an afternoon we had spent together in the country, on a ferny hill-side, when we had sat under a beech-tree, and her hand had lain palm upward in the moss, close to mine, and I had watched a little black-and-red beetle creeping over it....

  “The bell rang, and we heard the voice of a visitor and the click of an umbrella in the umbrella-stand.

  “She rose to go into the inner drawing-room, and I caught her suddenly by the wrist. ‘You understand,’ I said, ‘that we can’t go on like this?’

  “‘I understand,’ she answered, and moved away to meet her visitor. As I went out I heard her saying in the other room: ‘Yes, we’re really off on the twelfth.’

  IV

  “I wrote her a long letter that night, and waited two days for a reply.

  “On the third day I had a brief line saying that she was going to spend Sunday with some friends who had a place near Riverdale, and that she would arrange to see me while she was there. That was all.

  “It was on a Saturday that I received the note and I came out here the same night. The next morning was rainy, and I was in despair, for I had counted on her asking me to take her for a drive or a long walk. It was hopeless to try to say what I had to say to her in the drawing-room of a crowded country-house. And only eleven days were left!

  “I stayed indoors all the morning, fearing to go out lest she should telephone me. But no sign came, and I grew more and more restless and anxious. She was too free and frank for coquetry, but her silence and evasiveness made me feel that, for some reason, she did not wish to hear what she knew I meant to say. Could it be that she was, after all, more conventional, less genuine, than I had thought? I went again and again over the whole maddening round of conjecture; but the only conclusion I could rest in was that, if she loved me as I loved her, she would be as determined as I was to let no obstacle come between us during the days that were left.

  “The luncheon-hour came and passed, and there was no word from her. I had ordered my trap to be ready, so that I might drive over as soon as she summoned me; but the hours dragged on, the early twilight came, and I sat here in this very chair, or measured up and down, up and down, the length of this very rug—and still there was no message and no letter.

  “It had grown quite dark, and I had ordered away, impatiently, the servant who came in with the lamps: I couldn’t bear any definite sign that the day was over! And I was standing there on the rug, staring at the door, and noticing a bad crack in its panel, when I heard the sound of wheels on the gravel. A word at last, no doubt—a line to explain....I didn’t seem to care much for her reasons, and I stood where I was and continued to stare at the door. And suddenly it opened and she came in.

  “The servant followed her with a light, and then went out and closed the door. Her face looked pale in the lamp-light, but her voice was as clear as a bell.

  “‘Well,’ she said, ‘you see I’ve come.’

  “I started toward her with hands outstretched. ‘You’ve come—you’ve come!’ I stammered.

  “Yes; it was like her to come in that way—without dissimulation or explanation or excuse. It was like her, if she gave at all, to give not furtively or in haste, but openly, deliberately, without stinting the measure or counting the cost. But her quietness and serenity disconcerted me. She did not look like a woman who has yielded impetuously to an uncontrollable impulse. There was something almost solemn in her face.

  “The effect of it stole over me as I looked at her, suddenly subduing the huge flush of gratified longing.

  “‘You’re here, here, here!’ I kept repeating, like a child singing over a happy word.

  “‘You said,’ she continued, in her grave clear voice, ‘that we couldn’t go on as we were—’

  “‘Ah, it’s divine of you!’ I held out my arms to her.

  “She didn’t draw back from them, but her faint smile said, ‘Wait,’ and lifting her hands she took the pins from her hat, and laid the hat on the table.

  “As I saw her dear head bare in the lamp-light, with the thick hair waving away from the parting, I forgot everything but the bliss and wonder of her being here—here, in my house, on my hearth—that fourth rose from the corner of the rug is the exact spot where she was standing....

  “I drew her to the fire, and made her sit down in the chair you’re in, and knelt down by her, and hid my face on her knees. She put her hand on my head, and I was happy to the depths of my soul.

  “‘Oh, I forgot—’ she exclaimed suddenly. I lifted my head and our eyes met. Hers were smiling.

  “She reached out her hand, opened the little bag she had tossed down with her hat, and drew a small object from it. ‘I left my trunk at the station. Here’s the check. Can you send for it?’ she asked.

  “Her trunk—she wanted me to send for her trunk! Oh, yes—I see your smile, your ‘lucky man!’ Only, you see, I didn’t love her in that way. I knew she couldn’t come to my house without running a big risk of discovery, and my tenderness for her, my impulse to shield her, was stronger, even then, than vanity or desire. Judged from the point of view of those emotions I fell terribly short of my part. I hadn’t any of the proper feelings. Such an act of romantic folly was so unlike her that it almost irritated me, and I found myself desperately wondering how I could get her to reconsider her plan without—well, without seeming to want her to.

  “It’s not the way a novel hero feels; it’s probably not the way a man in real life ought to have felt. But it’s the way I felt—and she saw it.

  “She put her hands on my shoulders and looked at me with deep, deep eyes. ‘Then you didn’t expect me to stay?’ she asked.

  “I caught her hands and pressed them to me, stammering out that I hadn’t dared to dream....

  “‘You thought I’d come—just for an hour?’

  “‘How could I dare think more? I adore you, you know, for what you’ve done! But it would be known if you—if you stayed on. My servants—everybody about here knows you. I’ve no right to expose you to the risk.’ She made no answer, and I went on tenderly: ‘Give me, if you will, the next few hours: there’s a train that will get you to town by midnight. And then we’ll arrange something—in town—where it’s safer for you—more easily managed.... It’s beautiful, it’s heavenly of you to have come; but I love you too much—I must take care of you and think for you—’

  “I don’t suppose it ever took me so long to say so few words, and though they were profoundly sincere they sounded unutterably shallow, irrelevant and grotesque. She made no effort to help me out, but sat silent, listening, with her meditative smile. ‘It’s my duty, dearest, as a man,’ I rambled on. ‘The more I love you the more I’m bound—’

  “‘Yes; but you don’t understand,’ she interrupted.

  “She rose as she spoke, and I got up also, and we stood and looked at each other.

  “‘I haven’t come for a night; if you want me I’ve come for always,’ she said.

  “Here again, if I give you an honest account of my feelings I shall write myself down as the poor-spirited creature I suppose I am. There wasn’t, I swear, at the moment, a grain of selfishness, of personal reluctance, in my feeling. I worshipped every hair of her head—when we were together I was happy, when I was away from her something was gone from every good thing; but I had always looked on our love for each other, our possible relation to each other, as such situations are looked on in what is called society. I had supposed her, for all her freedom and originality, to be just as tacitly subservient to that view as I was: ready to take what she wanted on the t
erms on which society concedes such taking, and to pay for it by the usual restrictions, concealments and hypocrisies. In short, I supposed that she would ‘play the game’—look out for her own safety, and expect me to look out for it. It sounds cheap enough, put that way—but it’s the rule we live under, all of us. And the amazement of finding her suddenly outside of it, oblivious of it, unconscious of it, left me, for an awful minute, stammering at her like a graceless dolt.... Perhaps it wasn’t even a minute; but in it she had gone the whole round of my thoughts.

  “‘It’s raining,’ she said, very low. ‘I suppose you can telephone for a trap?’

  “There was no irony or resentment in her voice. She walked slowly across the room and paused before the Brangwyn etching over there. ‘That’s a good impression. Will you telephone, please?’ she repeated.

  “I found my voice again, and with it the power of movement. I followed her and dropped at her feet. ‘You can’t go like this!’ I cried.

  “She looked down on me from heights and heights. ‘I can’t stay like this,’ she answered.

  “I stood up and we faced each other like antagonists. ‘You don’t know,’ I accused her passionately, ‘in the least what you’re asking me to ask of you!’

  “‘Yes, I do: everything,’ she breathed.

  “‘And it’s got to be that or nothing?’

  “‘Oh, on both sides,’ she reminded me.

  “‘Not on both sides. It’s not fair. That’s why—’

  “‘Why you won’t?’

  “‘Why I cannot—may not!’

  “‘Why you’ll take a night and not a life?’

  “The taunt, for a woman usually so sure of her aim, fell so short of the mark that its only effect was to increase my conviction of her helplessness. The very intensity of my longing for her made me tremble where she was fearless. I had to protect her first, and think of my own attitude afterward.