The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, but not in sleep. He did not feel sleepy, but keyed up and alert. In the next room he heard Filmore reluctantly, protestingly, laying out his evening clothes... He had no fear about the dinner tonight; a quiet intimate little affair at an old friend’s house. Just two or three congenial men, and Elfmann, the pianist (who would probably play), and that lovely Elfrida Flight. The fact that people asked him to dine to meet Elfrida Flight seemed to prove pretty conclusively that he was still in the running! He chuckled softly at Filmore’s pessimism, and thought: “Well, after all, I suppose no man seems young to his valet... Time to dress very soon,” he thought; and luxuriously postponed getting up out of his chair...

  III

  “She’s worse than usual tonight,” said the day nurse, laying down the evening paper as her colleague joined her. “Absolutely determined to have her jewels out.”

  The night nurse, fresh from a long sleep and an afternoon at the movies with a gentleman friend, threw down her fancy bag, tossed off her hat and rumpled up her hair before old Mrs. Jaspar’s tall toilet mirror. “Oh, I’ll settle that—don’t you worry,” she said brightly.

  “Don’t you fret her, though, Miss Cress,” said the other, getting wearily out of her chair. “We’re very well off here, take it as a whole, and I don’t want her pressure rushed up for nothing.”

  Miss Cress, still looking at herself in the glass, smiled reassuringly at Miss Dunn’s pale reflection behind her. She and Miss Dunn got on very well together, and knew on which side their bread was buttered. But at the end of the day Miss Dunn was always fagged out and fearing the worst. The patient wasn’t as hard to handle as all that. Just let her ring for her old maid, old Lavinia, and say: “My sapphire velvet tonight, with the diamond stars”—and Lavinia would know exactly how to manage her.

  Miss Dunn had put on her hat and coat, and crammed her knitting, and the newspaper, into her bag, which, unlike Miss Cress’s, was capacious and shabby; but she still loitered undecided on the threshold. “I could stay with you till ten as easy as not...” She looked almost reluctantly about the big high-studded dressing-room (everything in the house was high-studded), with its rich dusky carpet and curtains, and its monumental dressing-table draped with lace and laden with gold-backed brushes and combs, gold-stoppered toilet-bottles, and all the charming paraphernalia of beauty at her glass. Old Lavinia even renewed every morning the roses and carnations in the slim crystal vases between the powder boxes and the nail polishers. Since the family had shut down the hot-houses at the uninhabited country place on the Hudson, Miss Cress suspected that old Lavinia bought these flowers out of her own pocket.

  “Cold out tonight?” queried Miss Dunn from the door.

  “Fierce... Reg’lar blizzard at the corners. Say, shall I lend you my fur scarf?” Miss Cress, pleased with the memory of her afternoon (they’d be engaged soon, she thought), and with the drowsy prospect of an evening in a deep armchair near the warm gleam of the dressing-room fire, was disposed to kindliness toward that poor thin Dunn girl, who supported her mother, and her brother’s idiot twins. And she wanted Miss Dunn to notice her new fur.

  “My! Isn’t it too lovely? No, not for worlds, thank you...” Her hand on the door-knob, Miss Dunn repeated: “Don’t you cross her now,” and was gone.

  Lavinia’s bell rang furiously, twice; then the door between the dressing-room and Mrs. Jaspar’s bedroom opened, and Mrs. Jaspar herself emerged.

  “Lavinia!” she called, in a high irritated voice; then, seeing the nurse, who had slipped into her print dress and starched cap, she added in a lower tone: “Oh, Miss Lemoine, good evening.” Her first nurse, it appeared, had been called Miss Lemoine; and she gave the same name to all the others, quite unaware that there had been any changes in the staff.

  “I heard talking, and carriages driving up. Have people begun to arrive?” she asked nervously. “Where is Lavinia? I still have my jewels to put on.”

  She stood before the nurse, the same petrifying apparition which always, at this hour, struck Miss Cress to silence. Mrs. Jaspar was tall; she had been broad; and her bones remained impressive though the flesh had withered on them. Lavinia had encased her, as usual, in her low-necked purple velvet dress, nipped in at the waist in the old-fashioned way, expanding in voluminous folds about the hips and flowing in a long train over the darker velvet of the carpet. Mrs. Jaspar’s swollen feet could no longer be pushed into the high-heeled satin slippers which went with the dress; but her skirts were so long and spreading that, by taking short steps, she managed (so Lavinia daily assured her) entirely to conceal the broad round tips of her black orthopedic shoes.

  “Your jewels, Mrs. Jaspar? Why, you’ve got them on,” said Miss Cress brightly.

  Mrs. Jaspar turned her porphyry-tinted face to Miss Cress, and looked at her with a glassy incredulous gaze. Her eyes, Miss Cress thought, were the worst... She lifted one old hand, veined and knobbed as a raised map, to her elaborate purple-black wig, groped among the puffs and curls and undulations (queer, Miss Cress thought, that it never occurred to her to look into the glass), and after an interval affirmed: “You must be mistaken, my dear. Don’t you think you ought to have your eyes examined?”

  The door opened again, and a very old woman, so old as to make Mrs. Jaspar appear almost young, hobbled in with sidelong steps. “Excuse me, madam. I was downstairs when the bell rang.”

  Lavinia had probably always been small and slight; now, beside her towering mistress, she looked a mere feather, a straw. Everything about her had dried, contracted, been volatilized into nothingness, except her watchful gray eyes, in which intelligence and comprehension burned like two fixed stars. “Do excuse me, madam,” she repeated.

  Mrs. Jaspar looked at her despairingly. “I hear carriages driving up. And Miss Lemoine says I have my jewels on; and I know I haven’t.”

  “With that lovely necklace!” Miss Cress ejaculated.

  Mrs. Jaspar’s twisted hand rose again, this time to her denuded shoulders, which were as stark and barren as the rock from which the hand might have been broken. She felt and felt, and tears rose in her eyes...

  “Why do you lie to me?” she burst out passionately.

  Lavinia softly intervened. “Miss Lemoine meant, how lovely you’ll be when you get the necklace on, madam.”

  “Diamonds, diamonds,” said Mrs. Jaspar with an awful smile.

  “Of course, madam.”

  Mrs. Jaspar sat down at the dressing-table, and Lavinia, with eager random hands, began to adjust the point de Venise about her mistress’s shoulders, and to repair the havoc wrought in the purple-black wig by its wearer’s gropings for her tiara.

  “Now you do look lovely, madam,” she sighed.

  Mrs. Jaspar was on her feet again, stiff but incredibly active. (“Like a cat she is,” Miss Cress used to relate.) “I do hear carriages—or is it an automobile? The Magraws, I know, have one of those new-fangled automobiles. And now I hear the front door opening. Quick, Lavinia! My fan, my gloves, my handkerchief...how often have I got to tell you? I used to have a perfect maid—”

  Lavinia’s eyes brimmed. “That was me, madam,” she said, bending to straighten out the folds of the long purple velvet train. (“To watch the two of ’em,” Miss Cress used to tell a circle of appreciative friends, “is a lot better than any circus.”)

  Mrs. Jaspar paid no attention. She twitched the train out of Lavinia’s vacillating hold, swept to the door, and then paused there as if stopped by a jerk of her constricted muscles. “Oh, but my diamonds—you cruel woman, you! You’re letting me go down without my diamonds!” Her ruined face puckered up in a grimace like a new-born baby’s, and she began to sob despairingly. “Everybody... Every...body’s...against me...” she wept in her powerless misery.

  Lavinia helped herself to her feet and tottered across the floor. It was almost more than she could bear to see her mistress in distress. “Madam, madam—if you’ll just wait till they’re got out of the s
afe,” she entreated.

  The woman she saw before her, the woman she was entreating and consoling, was not the old petrified Mrs. Jaspar with porphyry face and wig awry whom Miss Cress stood watching with a smile, but a young proud creature, commanding and splendid in her Paris gown of amber moiré, who, years ago, had burst into just such furious sobs because, as she was sweeping down to receive her guests, the doctor had told her that little Grace, with whom she had been playing all the afternoon, had a diphtheritic throat, and no one must be allowed to enter. “Everybody’s against me, everybody...” she had sobbed in her fury; and the young Lavinia, stricken by such Olympian anger, had stood speechless, longing to comfort her, and secretly indignant with little Grace and the doctor...

  “If you’ll just wait, madam, while I go down and ask Munson to open the safe. There’s no one come yet, I do assure you...”

  Munson was the old butler, the only person who knew the combination of the safe in Mrs. Jaspar’s bedroom. Lavinia had once known it too, but now she was no longer able to remember it. The worst of it was that she feared lest Munson, who had been spending the day in the Bronx, might not have returned. Munson was growing old too, and he did sometimes forget about these dinner-parties of Mrs. Jaspar’s, and then the stupid footman, George, had to announce the names; and you couldn’t be sure that Mrs. Jaspar wouldn’t notice Munson’s absence, and be excited and angry. These dinner-party nights were killing old Lavinia, and she did so want to keep alive; she wanted to live long enough to wait on Mrs. Jaspar to the last.

  She disappeared, and Miss Cress poked up the fire, and persuaded Mrs. Jaspar to sit down in an armchair and “tell her who was coming.” It always amused Mrs. Jaspar to say over the long list of her guests’ names, and generally she remembered them fairly well, for they were always the same—the last people, Lavinia and Munson said, who had dined at the house, on the very night before her stroke. With recovered complacency she began, counting over one after another on her ring-laden fingers: “The Italian Ambassador, the Bishop, Mr. and Mrs. Torrington Bligh, Mr. and Mrs. Fred Amesworth, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Magraw, Mr. and Mrs. Torrington Bligh...” (“You’ve said them before,” Miss Cress interpolated, getting out her fancy knitting—a necktie for her friend—and beginning to count the stitches.) And Mrs. Jaspar, distressed and bewildered by the interruption, had to repeat over and over: “Torrington Bligh, Torrington Bligh,” till the connection was re-established, and she went on again swimmingly with “Mr. and Mrs. Fred Amesworth, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Magraw, Miss Laura Ladew, Mr. Harold Ladew, Mr. and Mrs. Benjamin Bronx, Mr. and Mrs. Torrington Bl—no, I mean, Mr. Anson Warley. Yes, Mr. Anson Warley; that’s it,” she ended complacently.

  Miss Cress smiled and interrupted her counting. “No, that’s not it.”

  “What do you mean, my dear—not it?”

  “Mr. Anson Warley. He’s not coming.”

  Mrs. Jaspar’s jaw fell, and she stared at the nurse’s coldly smiling face. “Not coming?”

  “No. He’s not coming. He’s not on the list.” (That old list! As if Miss Cress didn’t know it by heart! Everybody in the house did, except the booby, George, who heard it reeled off every other night by Munson, and who was always stumbling over the names, and having to refer to the written paper.)

  “Not on the list?” Mrs. Jaspar gasped.

  Miss Cress shook her pretty head.

  Signs of uneasiness gathered on Mrs. Jaspar’s face and her lip began to tremble. It always amused Miss Cress to give her these little jolts, though she knew Miss Dunn and the doctors didn’t approve of her doing so. She knew also that it was against her own interests, and she did try to bear in mind Miss Dunn’s oft-repeated admonition about not sending up the patient’s blood-pressure; but when she was in high spirits, as she was tonight (they would certainly be engaged), it was irresistible to get a rise out of the old lady. And she thought it funny, this new figure unexpectedly appearing among those time-worn guests. (“I wonder what the rest of ’em ’ll say to him,” she giggled inwardly.)

  “No; he’s not on the list.” Mrs. Jaspar, after pondering deeply, announced the fact with an air of recovered composure.

  “That’s what I told you,” snapped Miss Cress.

  “He’s not on the list; but he promised me to come. I saw him yesterday,” continued Mrs. Jaspar, mysteriously.

  “You saw him—where?”

  She considered. “Last night, at the Fred Amesworths’ dance.”

  “Ah,” said Miss Cress, with a little shiver; for she knew that Mrs. Amesworth was dead, and she was the intimate friend of the trained nurse who was keeping alive, by dint of piqûres and high frequency, the inarticulate and inanimate Mr. Amesworth. “It’s funny,” she remarked to Mrs. Jaspar, “that you’d never invited Mr. Warley before.”

  “No, I hadn’t; not for a long time. I believe he felt I’d neglected him; for he came up to me last night, and said he was so sorry he hadn’t been able to call. It seems he’s been ill, poor fellow. Not as young as he was! So of course I invited him. He was very much gratified.”

  Mrs. Jaspar smiled at the remembrance of her little triumph; but Miss Cress’s attention had wandered, as it always did when the patient became docile and reasonable. She thought: “Where’s old Lavinia? I bet she can’t find Munson.” And she got up and crossed the floor to look into Mrs. Jaspar’s bedroom, where the safe was.

  There an astonishing sight met her. Munson, as she had expected, was nowhere visible; but Lavinia, on her knees before the safe, was in the act of opening it herself, her twitching hand slowly moving about the mysterious dial.

  “Why, I thought you’d forgotten the combination!” Miss Cress exclaimed.

  Lavinia turned a startled face over her shoulder. “So I had, Miss. But I’ve managed to remember it, thank God. I had to, you see, because Munson’s forgot to come home.”

  “Oh,” said the nurse incredulously. (“Old fox,” she thought, “I wonder why she’s always pretended she’d forgotten it.”) For Miss Cress did not know that the age of miracles is not yet past.

  Joyous, trembling, her cheeks wet with grateful tears, the little old woman was on her feet again, clutching to her breast the diamond stars, the necklace of solitaires, the tiara, the earrings. One by one she spread them out on the velvet-lined tray in which they always used to be carried from the safe to the dressing-room; then, with rambling fingers, she managed to lock the safe again, and put the keys in the drawer where they belonged, while Miss Cress continued to stare at her in amazement. “I don’t believe the old witch is as shaky as she makes out,” was her reflection as Lavinia passed her, bearing the jewels to the dressing-room where Mrs. Jaspar, lost in pleasant memories, was still computing: “The Italian Ambassador, the Bishop, the Torrington Blighs, the Mitchell Magraws, the Fred Amesworths...”

  Mrs. Jaspar was allowed to go down to the drawing-room alone on dinner-party evenings because it would have mortified her too much to receive her guests with a maid or a nurse at her elbow; but Miss Cress and Lavinia always leaned over the stair-rail to watch her descent, and make sure it was accomplished in safety.

  “She do look lovely yet, when all her diamonds is on,” Lavinia sighed, her purblind eyes bedewed with memories, as the bedizened wig and purple velvet disappeared at the last bend of the stairs. Miss Cress, with a shrug, turned back to the fire and picked up her knitting, while Lavinia set about the slow ritual of tidying up her mistress’s room. From below they heard the sound of George’s stentorian monologue: “Mr. and Mrs. Torrington Bligh, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Magraw... Mr. Ladew, Miss Laura Ladew...”

  IV

  Anson Warley, who had always prided himself on his equable temper, was conscious of being on edge that evening. But it was an irritability which did not frighten him (in spite of what those doctors always said about the importance of keeping calm) because he knew it was due merely to the unusual lucidity of his mind. He was in fact feeling uncommonly well, his brain clear and all his perceptions so alert that he
could positively hear the thoughts passing through his man-servant’s mind on the other side of the door, as Filmore grudgingly laid out the evening clothes.

  Smiling at the man’s obstinacy, he thought: “I shall have to tell them tonight that Filmore thinks I’m no longer fit to go into society.” It was always pleasant to hear the incredulous laugh with which his younger friends received any allusion to his supposed senility. “What, you? Well, that’s a good one!” And he thought it was, himself.

  And then, the moment he was in his bedroom, dressing, the sight of Filmore made him lose his temper again. “No; not those studs, confound it. The black onyx ones—haven’t I told you a hundred times? Lost them, I suppose? Sent them to the wash again in a soiled shirt? That it?” He laughed nervously, and sitting down before his dressing-table began to brush back his hair with short angry strokes.

  “Above all,” he shouted out suddenly, “don’t stand there staring at me as if you were watching to see exactly at what minute to telephone for the undertaker!”

  “The under—? Oh, sir!” gasped Filmore.

  “The—the—damn it, are you deaf too? Who said undertaker? I said taxi; can’t you hear what I say?”

  “You want me to call a taxi, sir?”

  “No; I don’t. I’ve already told you so. I’m going to walk.” Warley straightened his tie, rose and held out his arms toward his dress-coat.

  “It’s bitter cold, sir; better let me call a taxi all the same.”