Edith Wharton - SSC 09

by Human Nature (v2. 1)

  Margaret Aslar, leaning back against the piano, stood looking down at him sternly. “Have you no respect for art?” she exclaimed.

  “Respect for art? But I venerate it—in all its forms!” Kilvert stammered, overwhelmed.

  “Well, then—you ought to try to understand its interpreters. We’re instruments, you see, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “Kilvert.”

  “We’re the pipes the god plays on—not mere servile eyes or ears, like all the rest of you! And whatever branch of art we’re privileged to represent, that we must uphold, we must defend—even against the promptings of our own hearts. Brand has left me because he won’t recognise that my branch is higher, is more important, than his. In his infatuated obstinacy he won’t admit what all the music of all the greatest composers goes to show; that the piano ranks above the ‘cello. And yet it’s so obvious, isn’t it? I could have made my career as a great pianist without him—but where would he as a ‘cellist be without me? Ah, let him try—let him try! That’s what I’ve always told him. If he thinks any girl of twenty, because she has long eyelashes, and pretends to swoon whenever he plays his famous Beethoven adagio, can replace an artist who is his equal; but his equal in a higher form of art—” She broke off, and sank down again on the piano-stool. “Our association has made him; but he won’t admit it. He won’t admit that the ‘cello has no life of its own without the piano. Well, let him see how he feels as number four in a string quartet! Because that’s what he’ll have to come to now.”

  Kilvert felt himself out of his depth in this tossing sea of technical resentments. He might have smiled at it in advance, as a display of artistic fatuity; but now he divined, under the surface commotion, something nobler, something genuine and integral. “I’ve never before met a mouthpiece of the gods,” he thought, “and I don’t believe I know how to talk to them.”

  And then, with a start, he recalled the humble purpose of his mission, and that he was there, not as the answering mouthpiece of divinity, but only as Mrs. Roseneath’s. After all, it was hard on her to have her party wrecked for a whim. He looked at Margaret Aslar with a smile.

  “You have a wonderful opportunity of proving your argument to your friend this very evening. Everybody in Venice is coming to hear you at Mrs. Roseneath’s. You have simply to give a piano recital to show that you need no one to help you.”

  She gazed at him in a sort of incredulous wonder, and slowly an answering smile stole over her grave lips. “Ah, he’d see then—he’d see!” She seemed to be looking beyond Kilvert’s shoulder, at a figure unseen by him, to whom she flung out her ironic challenge. “Let him go off, and do as much himself! Let him try to cram a house to bursting, and get ten recalls, with a stammering baby at the piano!” She put up her hands to her tossed hair. “I’ve grown gray at this work—and so has he! Twenty years ago we began. And every gray hair is a string in the perfect instruments that time has made of us. That’s what a man never sees—never remembers! Ah, just let him try; let him have his lesson now, if he wants to!”

  Kilvert sprang up, as if swept to his feet on the waves of her agitation. “You will come then, won’t you? And the programme—? Can I go back and say you’ll have it ready in an hour or two? I hate to bother you; but, you see, Mrs. Roseneath’s in suspense—I must hurry back now with your promise.”

  “My promise?” Margaret Aslar confronted him with a brow of tragic wonderment. Her face reminded him of a windswept plain with cloud-shadows rushing over it. “My promise—to play tonight without Brand? But my poor Mr.— Mr.—”

  “Kilvert.”

  “Are you serious? Really serious? Do you really suppose that a tree torn up by the roots and flung to the ground can give out the same music as when it stands in the forest by its mate, and the wind rushes through their branches? I couldn’t play a note tonight. I must bury my old self first—the self made out of Brand and Margaret Aslar. Tell Mrs. Roseneath I’m sorry—tell her anything you like. Tell her I’m burying a friend; tell her that Brand’s dead—and he is dead, now that he’s lost me. Tell her I must watch by him tonight….”

  She stood before Kilvert with lifted arms, in an attitude of sculptural desolation; then she turned away and went and leaned in the window, as unconscious of his presence as if he had already left the room.

  Kilvert wanted to speak, to argue, urge, entreat; but a kind of awe, a sense of her inaccessibility, restrained him. What plea of expediency would weigh anything in the scales of such anger and such sorrow? He stood waiting for a while, trying to think of something to say; but no words came, and he slipped out and closed the door on the greatest emotional spectacle he had ever witnessed.

  The whirr of wings was still in his ears when he reached the door of the hotel and began to walk along the narrow street

  (Saturday Evening Post 205, 12 November 1932)

  

  Joy in the House.

  I.

  The moment the big liner began to move out of harbour Christine Ansley went down to her small inside stateroom and addressed herself, attentively and systematically, to unpacking and arranging her things. Only a week between Havre and New York; but that was no reason why she should not be comfortably settled, have everything within easy reach, “ship-shape,” in fact—she saw now the fitness of the term.

  She sat down on the narrow berth with a sigh of mingled weariness and satisfaction. The wrench had been dreadful—the last hours really desperate; she was shaken with them still—but the very moment the steamer began to glide out into the open the obsession fell from her, the tumult and the agony seemed to grow unreal, remote, as if they had been part of a sensational film she had sat and gazed at from the stalls. The real woman, her only real self, was here in this cabin, homeward bound, was Mrs. Devons Ansley—ah, thank God, still Mrs. Devons Ansley!—and not the bewildered shattered Christine who, a few hours earlier, had stumbled out of the room in the hotel at Havre, repeating to the man who sat, his face buried in his arms, and neither moved nor spoke any longer: “I can’t … I mean I must. … I promised Devons I’d go back…. You know I promised!”

  That was barely three hours ago. But by this time no doubt Jeff Lithgow was in the train again, on his way back to Paris; and she was here, on this blessed boat, in this dear little cabin of her own, sitting on the narrow berth in which she would sleep undisturbed through the long safe quiet night and on into the next day, for as many hours on end as she chose. A whole week by herself, in which to sleep, and to think things over, and gradually to become Christine Ansley again—oh, yes, forever! The time seemed too short; she wished the steamer were bound across the Pacific at its widest….

  She began to unpack, shaking out the garments she had flung into her steamer-trunk that morning, she didn’t know how! What a welter of untidiness and confusion she had come out of: things always being pitched into trunks or tumbled out, in the perpetual rush and confusion of their unsettied lives. Poor Jeff! He would never be anything but a roamer … With whom would he roam next, she wondered? But that speculation did not detain her long. She wanted to turn her thoughts away from Jeff, not to follow him through his subsequent divagations…. She supposed all artists were like that; he said they were. Painters especially…. Not that she had ever thought him a great painter—not really…. His portrait of her, for instance! Why, she must have sat for it sixty times—no, sixty-two; she’d counted…. Hours and hours of stiff neck and petrified joints…. He had a theory that a painter should always catch his subjects unawares, but there wasn’t much unawareness about his practice! She was thankful Devons had never seen that portrait…. Of course Devons didn’t know much about painting; at least that particular kind of painting. In his own line—as a militant moralist, and an amateur lecturer on the New Psychology—he prided himself on being in the advance guard, an “ultra,” as he smilingly boasted; but though he had a smattering of Academic culture, and had once discoursed on Renaissance Painters to the Stokesburg Wednesday Evening Club, his business as an active real-
estate agent had prevented his having time to deal with the moderns, and Christine recalled his genial guffaw when he had first encountered a picture of Jeff’s at Mabel Breck’s: “My Lithgow,” Mabel simperingly called it.

  “That a Lithgow, is it? Glad to know! I saw at once it wasn’t a picture,” Dev had guffawed—how it had mortified Christine at the time! Mabel had been obviously annoyed; Mabel liked to be in the “last boat,” but not alone there; but Mabel’s husband and the others had enjoyed the joke, and been put at their ease by it, for Devons passed for a wit in their set, and Stokesburg, in spite of its thirst for modern culture, was not yet collecting Lithgows….

  Jeff had a brilliant talent; Christine had been among the first to recognise it. At least among the first at Stokesburg; for when she went to New York that spring she found that everybody (the “everybody” she wanted to be one of) was talking of him, and wondering whether one oughtn’t to get in ahead and buy his pictures. Yes, of course Jeff had talent—but there was something unstable, unreliable in his talent, just as there was in his character … whereas Devons …

  She put up her hands and hid her face in them for a moment…. Why this perpetual pendulum swing: Jeff—Devons, Devons—Jeff, backward and forward in her brain? The Jeff affair was over, wound up, wiped out of existence; she was Mrs. Devons Ansley, going back to her husband after a six months’ absence. No; no six months, even. Five months and sixteen days. That had been the understanding when she and Devons had parted at the station (so like him to drive her to the station, and see that she was properly settled in the New York train, and had the newspapers, and a box of chocolates!). He had said then, slipping a letter into her hand with her ticket: “Here, my dear; I’ve put it in writing so that there can be no mistake. Any time within six months, if you want to come back, there’ll be joy in the house. Joy in the house!” He had said it emphatically, deliberately, with a drawn smile, and ended on a sort of nervous parody of his large hospitable laugh. “Within six months! After that, of course, I shall assume … I shall feel obliged to assume …” The train was already moving, but his strained grin, his laborious laugh, had followed her. It had been “poor Dev” then—till she saw Jeff’s dark eager head working a way toward her through the crowd at the Grand Central station….

  Well—she had made a horrible mistake, and she had recognised it in time. Many women make just such mistakes, but to few, even in communities more advanced than Stokesburg, is given the opportunity of wiping out the past and beginning over again. She owed that to Devons; to his really superhuman generosity. It was something she would never forget; she would devote the rest of her life to making up to him for it—to that, and to bringing up their boy to appreciate and revere his father…. When she thought of the boy—her baby Christopher—the sense of her iniquity, of her inhumanity, overcame her afresh. She had walked out of the house and left husband and child to fend for themselves, consoling herself with the idea that the same thing happened to lots of children whose parents were “unsuited” to each other, and that they never seemed much the worse for it. And then Christopher’s Susan was a perfect nurse, and Mrs. Robbit, Devons’s mother (who had remarried, but was again a widow) lived only five minutes away, and was devoted to her son and to the boy, and would manage everything ever so much better than Christine ever had. That had stilled her conscience as she pushed her way through the crowd to join Jeff at the Grand Central … but now?

  Now she saw that, but for her husband’s magnanimity, his loyalty to his given word, she would have been alone and adrift, husbandless and childless—for whatever happened (even if Jeff had been able to persuade his wife to divorce him, which had never been very sure, Madge Lithgow’s views being less “advance guard” and more proprietary than Devons’s); whatever happened, Christine now knew, she could never have married Jeffrey Lithgow…. Anything, anything but that!

  “A trial marriage,” Devons had called it, stiffening his lips into a benedictory smile on the day when she had wrung his consent from him. “Let’s call it that, shall we? A marriage, I’ll understand—not an elopement. For, of course, my child, unless your object is marriage—and unless you have a definite understanding—er … er … pledge—I couldn’t possibly let you expose yourself—.” A man like Devons, of course, couldn’t dream that, to men like Jeff Lithgow, marriage means nothing; that they don’t care whether they’re married or not, because it makes no practical difference to them—no difference in their way of thinking or living. After all, what’s the meaning of “self-realisation,” if you’re to let your life be conditioned and contracted by somebody else’s? To the abstract argument, of course, Devons would have agreed; it was exactly what he was always preaching and proclaiming. “You wouldn’t think it a virtue to limp about in a tight shoe, would you? Then, if the domestic shoe pinches—” didn’t she know all the figures of speech and all the deductions? Jeff, on the contrary, had never thought about such questions, or worried about his own conduct or anybody else’s. Abstract reasoning sent him to sleep, and he was unaware of institutions unless they got in his way and tripped him up. Every faculty was concentrated on the pursuit of his two passions: painting and loving. He said perhaps some time he’d take a day off—from painting, that is—and find out about the rest of life….

  With Devons it was just the other way. He was forever taking out his convictions and re-examining and re-formulating them. But he might lecture on “The New Morality” to the end of time, and talk as loudly as he pleased about individual liberty, and living one’s life: his life was one of bed-room slippers and the evening paper by a clean gas-fire, with his wife stitching across the hearth, and telling him that the baby’s first tooth was showing. Only, having proclaimed the doctrine of sentimental liberty so long and loudly, when he was asked to apply his doctrine to his wife’s case he had either to admit it was a failure, or to accept the consequences; and he had accepted them.

  She remembered the first day she had really listened to Jeff, consented to take his entreaties seriously, his look of genuine surprise when she had questioned: “Yes—but what about your wife?”

  “Who—Madge?” (As if he had had several, and wasn’t sure which!) “Oh, Madge’s all right. She’s A-l.” That settled it, his easy smile seemed to say.

  “But if you feel like that about her—why do you want to leave her?”

  He took the end of one of his paint-brushes and ran it through the tawny-brown ripples of Christine’s hair. “Because she smells of soap,” he said gravely.

  “Oh, Jeff-—how monstrous!” But how could she help laughing with him when he laughed? “Madge understands—she knows,” he continued, reassuring her. “Doesn’t Ansley know?” he added, with sudden insight. And she murmured: “I suppose people can’t help knowing when they’re out of step….” “Well, what’s worrying you, then? Turn your head a fraction of a hair’s breadth to the left, will you, darling? There—that’s it…. For how many aeons of time do you suppose the Creator has been storing the light in your hair for me? It may come from some star thirty million light-years away. Especially stored up for Jeff Lithgow!”

  “But then, if it comes from as far off as that, the star’s dead already; been dead for aeons; the Christine star, you know.”

  At that he had drawn up his tormented eyebrows to meet the dusky-brown wrinkles of his forehead. “Ton dead? Why, you’ve hardly begun to be alive! You’re a lovely buried lady that I’ve stumbled on in a desert tomb, shrouded in your golden hair; and being a sorcerer I’m breathing life into you. There! You’re actually getting rosier with every word….”

  “Yes,” she laughed. “But those resuscitated ladies never stay alive long. What are you going to do when I crumble on you?”

  He threw down his brushes. “Do? Kill myself. I’ve waited for you too long,” he said with a sudden sombreness, and a shiver swept through her that checked her laugh.

  “Well—as long as you don’t kill me,” she bantered back with dry lips.

  “Tow? I won�
�t have to. You’ll die of losing me,” he announced in his calm concentrated voice. “This isn’t any ordinary flurry, you understand; it’s one of those damned predestined things…. Child! You’ve moved again. Here—do try to look steadily at the left-hand upper corner of that picture-frame. So …” He sank back into his absorption with a murmur of deep content.

  Yes; she saw it now. That was the kind of thing that had dazzled her—the light-years, and the buried lady, and that calm fatalistic vision: “You’ll die of losing me—Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra . . .” and all the rest of it.

  And then—the reality? Well, it wasn’t that he seemed to love her less. Perhaps it was, in part, that the violence, the absoluteness of his love, was too much for her, was more than mortal stature—hers at any rate—could carry. There were days when she simply staggered under the load. And somehow he never seemed to try to share it with her—just left her to bear this prodigious burden of being loved by him as he left her, when they got out at a railway station, to stagger under the burden of their joint bags and wraps, to dive after the umbrellas, capture a porter and hunt for the hotel bus, while he solicitously nursed those sacred objects, his “painting things,” and forgot about everything else, herself included.

  Not that he wasn’t kind; but how could he notice a poor woman carrying too heavy a load when he was miles above the earth, floating overhead in his native medium, in the stratosphere, as he called it? Why wouldn’t she come up there with him? he was always asking her. “Don’t say you couldn’t breathe up there, when your eyes are made of two pieces of it.” She had thought that enchanting, she remembered….

  But then, one day, when her eyes reminded him of something else, and he was bending over them, as he said, to fish for his lost soul—that day he had drawn back suddenly, and exclaimed, in a voice strident with jealousy: “Who’s that other man in your eyes?”