The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

It had been agreed that he should go to the specialist’s alone; his wife was to wait for him at their hotel. “But you’ll come straight back afterward? You’ll take a taxi—you won’t walk?” she had pleaded, for the first time betraying her impatience. “She knows the hours are numbered, and she can’t bear to lose one,” he thought, a choking in his throat; and as he bent to kiss her he had a vision of what it would have been, after the interview that lay ahead of him, the verdict he had already discounted, to walk back to an hotel in which no one awaited him, climb to an empty room and sit down alone with his doom. “Bless you, child, of course I’ll take a taxi....”

  Now the consultation was over, and he had descended from the specialist’s door, and stood alone in the summer twilight, watching the trees darken against the illumination of the street lamps. What a divine thing a summer evening was, even in a crowded city street! He wondered that he had never before felt its peculiar loveliness. Through the trees the sky was deepening from pearl gray to blue as the stars came out. He stood there, unconscious of the hour, gazing at the people hurrying to and fro on the pavement, the traffic flowing by in an unbroken stream, all the ceaseless tides of the city’s life which had seemed to him, half an hour ago, forever suspended....

  “No, it’s too lovely; I’ll walk,” he said, rousing himself, and took a direction opposite to that in which his hotel lay. “After all,” he thought, “there’s no hurry.... What a charming town Vienna is—I think I should like to live here,” he mused as he wandered on under the trees....

  When at last he reached his hotel he stopped short on the threshold and asked himself: “How am I going to tell her?” He realized that during his two hours’ perambulations since he had left the doctor’s office he had thought out nothing, planned nothing, not even let his imagination glance at the future, but simply allowed himself to be absorbed into the softly palpitating life about him, like a tired traveler sinking, at his journey’s end, into a warm bath. Only now, at the foot of the stairs, did he see the future facing him, and understand that he knew no more how to prepare for the return to life than he had for the leaving it....“If only she takes it quietly—without too much fuss,” he thought, shrinking in advance from any disturbance of those still waters into which it was so beatific to subside.

  “That New York diagnosis was a mistake—an utter mistake,” he began vehemently, and then paused, arrested, silenced, by something in his wife’s face which seemed to oppose an invisible resistance to what he was in the act of saying. He had hoped she would not be too emotional—and now: what was it? Did he really resent the mask of composure she had no doubt struggled to adjust during her long hours of waiting? He stood and stared at her. “I suppose you don’t believe it?” he broke off, with an aimless irritated laugh.

  She came to him eagerly. “But of course I do, of course!” She seemed to hesitate for a second. “What I never did believe,” she said abruptly, “was the other—the New York diagnosis.”

  He continued to stare, vaguely resentful of this new attitude, and of the hint of secret criticism it conveyed. He felt himself suddenly diminished in her eyes, as though she were retrospectively stripping him of some prerogative. If she had not believed in the New York diagnosis, what must her secret view of him have been all the while? “Oh, you never believed in it? And may I ask why?” He heard the edge of sarcasm in his voice.

  She gave a little laugh that sounded almost as aimless as his. “I—I don’t know. I suppose I couldn’t bear to, simply; I couldn’t believe fate could be so cruel.”

  Still with a tinge of sarcasm he rejoined: “I’m glad you had your incredulity to sustain you.” Inwardly he was saying: “Not a tear...not an outbreak of emotion...” and his heart, dilated by the immense inrush of returning life, now contracted as if an invisible plug had been removed from it, and its fullness were slowly ebbing. “It’s a queer business, anyhow,” he mumbled.

  “What is, dear?”

  “This being alive again. I’m not sure I know yet what it consists in.”

  She came up and put her arms about him, almost shyly. “We’ll try to find out, love—together.”

  III

  This magnificent gift of life, which the Viennese doctor had restored to him as lightly as his New York colleagues had withdrawn it, lay before Paul Dorrance like something external, outside of himself, an honor, an official rank, unexpectedly thrust on him: he did not discover till then how completely he had dissociated himself from the whole business of living. It was as if life were a growth which the surgeon’s knife had already extirpated, leaving him, disembodied, on the pale verge of nonentity. All the while that he had kept saying to himself: “In a few weeks more I shall be dead,” had he not really known that he was dead already?

  “But what are we to do, then, dearest?” he heard his wife asking. “What do you want? Would you like to go home at once? Do you want me to cable to have the flat got ready?”

  He looked at her in astonishment, wounded by such unperceivingness. Go home—to New York? To his old life there? Did she really think of it as something possible, even simple and natural? Why, the small space he had occupied there had closed up already; he felt himself as completely excluded from that other life as if his absence had lasted for years. And what did she mean by “going home”? The old Paul Dorrance who had made his will, wound up his affairs, resigned from his clubs and directorships, pensioned off his old servants and married his old mistress—that Dorrance was as dead as if he had taken that final step for which all those others were but the hasty preparation. He was dead; this new man, to whom the doctor had said: “Cancer? Nothing of the sort—not a trace of it. Go home and tell your wife that in a few months you’ll be as sound as any man of fifty I ever met—” This new Dorrance, with his new health, his new leisure and his new wife, was an intruder for whom a whole new existence would have to be planned out. And how could anything be decided until one got to know the new Paul Dorrance a little better?

  Conscious that his wife was waiting for his answer, he said: “Oh, this fellow here may be all wrong. Anyhow, he wants me to take a cure somewhere first—I’ve got the name written down. After that we’ll see.... But wouldn’t you rather travel for a year or so? How about South Africa or India next winter?” he ventured at random, after trying to think of some point of the globe even more remote from New York.

  IV

  The cure was successful, the Viennese specialist’s diagnosis proved to be correct; and the Paul Dorrances celebrated the event by two years of foreign travel. But Dorrance never felt again the unconditioned ecstasy he had tasted as he walked out from the doctor’s door into the lamplit summer streets. After that, at the very moment of re-entering his hotel, the effort of readjustment had begun; and ever since it had gone on.

  For a few months the wanderers, weary of change, had settled in Florence, captivated by an arcaded villa on a cypress-walled hill, and the new Paul Dorrance, whom it was now the other’s incessant task to study and placate, had toyed with the idea of a middle life of cultivated leisure. But he soon grew tired of his opportunities, and found it necessary to move on, and forget in strenuous travel his incapacity for assimilation and reflection. And before the two years were over the old Paul Dorrance, who had constituted himself the other’s courier and prime minister, discovered that the old and the new were one, and that the original Paul Dorrance was there, unchanged, unchangeable, and impatient to get back to his old niche because it was too late to adapt himself to any other. So the flat was reopened and the Dorrances returned to New York.

  The completeness of his identity with the old Paul Dorrance was indelibly impressed on the new one on the first evening of his return home. There he was, the same man in the same setting as when, two years earlier, he had glanced down from the same armchair and seen the diagnosis of the consulting physicians at his feet. The hour was late, the room profoundly still; no touch of outward reality intervened between him and that hallucinating vision. He almost saw the paper on the
floor, and with the same gesture as before he covered his eyes to shut it out. Two years ago— and nothing was changed, after so many changes, except that he should not hear the hesitating ring at the door, should not again see Eleanor Welwood, pale and questioning, on the threshold. Eleanor Welwood did not ring his door-bell now; she had her own latch-key; she was no longer Eleanor Welwood but Eleanor Dorrance, and asleep at this moment in the bedroom which had been Dorrance’s, and was now encumbered with feminine properties, while his own were uncomfortably wedged into the cramped guest room of the flat.

  Yes—that was the only change in his life; and how aptly the change in the rooms symbolized it! During their travels, even after Dorrance’s return to health, his wife’s presence had been like a soft accompaniment of music, a painted background to the idle episodes of convalescence; now that he was about to fit himself into the familiar furrow of old habits and relations he felt as if she were already expanding and crowding him into a corner. He did not mind about the room—so he assured himself, though with a twinge of regret for the slant of winter sun which never reached the guest room; what he minded was what he now recognized as the huge practical joke that fate had played on him. He had never meant, he the healthy, vigorous, middle-aged Paul Dorrance, to marry this faded woman for whom he had so long ceased to feel anything but a friendly tenderness. It was the bogey of death, starting out from the warm folds of his closely-curtained life, that had tricked him into the marriage, and then left him to expiate his folly.

  Poor Eleanor! It was not her fault if he had imagined, in a moment of morbid retrospection, that happiness would transform and enlarge her. Under the surface changes she was still the same: a perfect companion while he was ill and lonely, an unwitting encumbrance now that (unchanged also) he was restored to the life from which his instinct of self-preservation had so long excluded her. Why had he not trusted to that instinct, which had warned him she was the woman for a sentimental parenthesis, not for the pitiless continuity of marriage? Why, even her face declared it. A lovely profile, yes; but somehow the full face was inadequate....

  Dorrance suddenly remembered another face; that of a girl they had met in Cairo the previous winter. He felt the shock of her young fairness, saw the fruity bloom of her cheeks, the light animal vigor of every movement, he heard her rich beckoning laugh, and met the eyes questioning his under the queer slant of her lids. Someone had said: “She’s had an offer from a man who can give her everything a woman wants; but she’s refused, and no one can make out why....” Dorrance knew.... She had written to him since, and he had not answered her letters. And now here he was, installed once more in the old routine he could not live without, yet from which all the old savor was gone. “I wonder why I was so scared of dying,” he thought; then the truth flashed on him. “Why, you fool, you’ve been dead all the time. That first diagnosis was the true one. Only they put it on the physical plane by mistake....” The next day he began to insert himself painfully into his furrow.

  V

  One evening some two years later, as Paul Dorrance put his latch-key into his door, he said to himself reluctantly: “Perhaps I really ought to take her away for a change.”

  There was nothing nowadays that he dreaded as much as change. He had had his fill of the unexpected, and it had not agreed with him. Now that he had fitted himself once more into his furrow all he asked was to stay there. It had even become an effort, when summer came, to put off his New York habits and go with his wife to their little place in the country. And the idea that he might have to go away with her in mid-February was positively disturbing.

  For the past ten days she had been fighting a bad bronchitis, following on influenza. But “fighting” was hardly the right word. She, usually so elastic, so indomitable, had not shown her usual resiliency, and Dorrance, from the vantage ground of his recovered health, wondered a little at her lack of spirit. She mustn’t let herself go, he warned her gently. “I was in a good deal tighter place myself not so many years ago—and look at me now. Don’t you let the doctors scare you.” She had promised him again that morning that she wouldn’t, and he had gone off to his office without waiting for the physician’s visit. But during the day he began in an odd way to feel his wife’s nearness. It was as though she needed him, as though there were something she wanted to say; and he concluded that she probably knew she ought to go south, and had been afraid to tell him so. “Poor child—of course I’ll take her if the doctor says it’s really necessary.” Hadn’t he always done everything he could for her? It seemed to him that they had been married for years and years, and that as a husband he had behind him a long and irreproachable record. Why, he hadn’t even answered that girl’s letters....

  As he opened the door of the flat a strange woman in a nurse’s dress crossed the hall. Instantly Dorrance felt the alien atmosphere of the place, the sense of something absorbing and exclusive which ignores and averts itself from the common doings of men. He had felt that same atmosphere, in all its somber implications, the day he had picked up the cancer diagnosis from the floor.

  The nurse stopped to say “Pneumonia,” and hurried down the passage to his wife’s room. The doctor was coming back at nine o’clock; he had left a note in the library, the butler said. Dorrance knew what was in the note before he opened it. Precipitately, with the vertical drop of a bird of prey, death was descending on his house again. And this time there was no mistake in the diagnosis.

  The nurse said he could come in for a minute; but he wasn’t to stay long, for she didn’t like the way the temperature was rising...and there, between the chalk-white pillows, in the green-shaded light, he saw his wife’s face. What struck him first was the way it had shrunk and narrowed after a few hours of fever; then, that though it wore a just-perceptible smile of welcome, there was no sign of the tremor of illumination which usually greeted his appearance. He remembered how once, encountering that light, he had grumbled inwardly: “I wish to God she wouldn’t always unroll a red carpet when I come in—” and then been ashamed of his thought. She never embarrassed him by any public show of feeling; that subtle play of light remained invisible to others, and his irritation was caused simply by knowing it was there. “I don’t want to be anybody’s sun and moon,” he concluded. But now she was looking at him with a new, an almost critical equality of expression. His first thought was: “Is it possible she doesn’t know me?” But her eyes met his with a glance of recognition, and he understood that the change was simply due to her being enclosed in a world of her own, complete, and independent of his.

  “Please, now—” the nurse reminded him; and obediently he stole out of the room.

  The next day there was a slight improvement; the doctors were encouraged; the day nurse said: “If only it goes on like this—”; and as Dorrance opened the door of his wife’s room he thought: “If only she looks more like her own self—!”

  But she did not. She was still in that new and self-contained world which he had immediately identified as the one he had lived in during the months when he had thought he was to die. “After all, I didn’t die,” he reminded himself; but the reminder brought no solace, for he knew exactly what his wife was feeling, he had tested the impenetrability of the barrier which shut her off from the living. “The truth is, one doesn’t only die once,” he mused, aware that he had died already; and the memory of the process, now being re-enacted before him, laid a chill on his heart. If only he could have helped her, made her understand! But the barrier was there, the transparent barrier through which everything on the hither side looked so different. And today it was he who was on the hither side.

  Then he remembered how, in his loneliness, he had yearned for the beings already so remote, the beings on the living side; and he felt for his wife the same rush of pity as when he had thought himself dying, and known what agony his death would cost her.

  That day he was allowed to stay five minutes; the next day ten; she continued to improve, and the doctors would have been perfectly sati
sfied if her heart had not shown signs of weakness. Hearts, however, medically speaking, are relatively easy to deal with; and to Dorrance she seemed much stronger.

  Soon the improvement became so marked that the doctor made no objection to his sitting with her for an hour or two; the nurse was sent for a walk, and Dorrance was allowed to read the morning paper to the invalid. But when he took it up his wife stretched out her hand. “No—I want to talk to you.”

  He smiled, and met her smile. It was as if she had found a slit in the barrier and were reaching out to him. “Dear—but won’t talking tire you?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.” She waited. “You see, I’m talking to you all the time, while I lie here....”

  He knew—he knew! How her pangs went through him! “But you see, dear, raising your voice....”

  She smiled incredulously, that remote behind-the-barrier smile he had felt so often on his own lips. Though she could reach through to him the dividing line was still there, and her eyes met his with a look of weary omniscience.

  “But there’s no hurry,” he argued. “Why not wait a day or two? Try to lie there and not even think.”

  “Not think!” She raised herself on a weak elbow. “I want to think every minute—every second. I want to relive everything, day by day, to the last atom of time....”

  “Time? But there’ll be plenty of time!”

  She continued to lean on her elbow, fixing her illumined eyes on him. She did not seem to hear what he said; her attention was concentrated on some secret vision of which he felt himself the mere transparent mask.

  “Well,” she exclaimed, with a sudden passionate energy, “it was worth it! I always knew—”

  Dorrance bent toward her. “What was worth—?” But she had sunk back with closed eyes, and lay there reabsorbed into the cleft of the pillows, merged in the inanimate, a mere part of the furniture of the sick room. Dorrance waited for a moment, hardly understanding the change; then he started up, rang, called, and in a few moments the professionals were in possession, the air was full of ether and camphor, the telephone ringing, the disarray of death in the room. Dorrance knew that he would never know what she had found worth it....