Literary Love

by Gabrielle Vigot

  A dead silence greeted this unusual flow of words from Mr. van der Luyden. Mrs. Archer drew her embroidery out of the basket into which she had nervously tumbled it, and Newland, leaning against the chimney-place and twisting a humming-bird-feather screen in his hand, saw Janey’s gaping countenance lit up by the coming of the second lamp.

  “The fact is,” Mr. van der Luyden continued, stroking his long grey leg with a bloodless hand weighed down by the Patroon’s great signet-ring, “the fact is, I dropped in to thank her for the very pretty note she wrote me about my flowers; and also—but this is between ourselves, of course—to give her a friendly warning about allowing the Duke to carry her off to parties with him. I don’t know if you’ve heard—”

  Mrs. Archer produced an indulgent smile. “Has the Duke been carrying her off to parties?”

  “You know what these English grandees are. They’re all alike. Louisa and I are very fond of our cousin—but it’s hopeless to expect people who are accustomed to the European courts to trouble themselves about our little republican distinctions. The Duke goes where he’s amused.” Mr. van der Luyden paused, but no one spoke. “Yes—it seems he took her with him last night to Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s. Sillerton Jackson has just been to us with the foolish story, and Louisa was rather troubled. So I thought the shortest way was to go straight to Countess Olenska and explain—by the merest hint, you know—how we feel in New York about certain things. I felt I might, without indelicacy, because the evening she dined with us she rather suggested … rather let me see that she would be grateful for guidance. And she WAS.”

  Mr. van der Luyden looked about the room with what would have been self-satisfaction on features less purged of the vulgar passions. On his face it became a mild benevolence which Mrs. Archer’s countenance dutifully reflected.

  “How kind you both are, dear Henry—always! Newland will particularly appreciate what you have done because of dear May and his new relations.”

  She shot an admonitory glance at her son, who said: “Immensely, sir. But I was sure you’d like Madame Olenska.”

  Mr. van der Luyden looked at him with extreme gentleness. “I never ask to my house, my dear Newland,” he said, “any one whom I do not like. And so I have just told Sillerton Jackson.” With a glance at the clock he rose and added: “But Louisa will be waiting. We are dining early, to take the Duke to the Opera.”

  After the portieres had solemnly closed behind their visitor a silence fell upon the Archer family.

  “Gracious—how romantic!” at last broke explosively from Janey. No one knew exactly what inspired her elliptic comments, and her relations had long since given up trying to interpret them.

  Mrs. Archer shook her head with a sigh. “Provided it all turns out for the best,” she said, in the tone of one who knows how surely it will not. “Newland, you must stay and see Sillerton Jackson when he comes this evening: I really shan’t know what to say to him.”

  “Poor mother! But he won’t come—” her son laughed, stooping to kiss away her frown.

  Chapter 11

  Some two weeks later, Newland Archer, sitting in abstracted idleness in his private compartment of the office of Letterblair, Lamson and Low, attorneys at law, was summoned by the head of the firm.

  Old Mr. Letterblair, the accredited legal adviser of three generations of New York gentility, throned behind his mahogany desk in evident perplexity. As he stroked his closeclipped white whiskers and ran his hand through the rumpled grey locks above his jutting brows, his disrespectful junior partner thought how much he looked like the Family Physician annoyed with a patient whose symptoms refuse to be classified.

  “My dear sir—” he always addressed Archer as “sir”—“I have sent for you to go into a little matter; a matter which, for the moment, I prefer not to mention either to Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood.” The gentlemen he spoke of were the other senior partners of the firm; for, as was always the case with legal associations of old standing in New York, all the partners named on the office letter-head were long since dead; and Mr. Letterblair, for example, was, professionally speaking, his own grandson.

  He leaned back in his chair with a furrowed brow. “For family reasons—” he continued.

  Archer looked up.

  “The Mingott family,” said Mr. Letterblair with an explanatory smile and bow. “Mrs. Manson Mingott sent for me yesterday. Her granddaughter the Countess Olenska wishes to sue her husband for divorce. Certain papers have been placed in my hands.” He paused and drummed on his desk. “In view of your prospective alliance with the family I should like to consult you—to consider the case with you—before taking any farther steps.”

  Archer felt the blood in his temples. He had seen the Countess Olenska only once since his visit to her, and then at the Opera, in the Mingott box. During this interval she had become a less vivid and importunate image, receding from his foreground as May Welland resumed her rightful place in it. He had not heard her divorce spoken of since Janey’s first random allusion to it, and had dismissed the tale as unfounded gossip. Theoretically, the idea of divorce was almost as distasteful to him as to his mother; and he was annoyed that Mr. Letterblair (no doubt prompted by old Catherine Mingott) should be so evidently planning to draw him into the affair. After all, there were plenty of Mingott men for such jobs, and as yet he was not even a Mingott by marriage.

  He waited for the senior partner to continue. Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and drew out a packet. “If you will run your eye over these papers—”

  Archer frowned. “I beg your pardon, sir; but just because of the prospective relationship, I should prefer your consulting Mr. Skipworth or Mr. Redwood.”

  Mr. Letterblair looked surprised and slightly offended. It was unusual for a junior to reject such an opening.

  He bowed. “I respect your scruple, sir; but in this case I believe true delicacy requires you to do as I ask. Indeed, the suggestion is not mine but Mrs. Manson Mingott’s and her son’s. I have seen Lovell Mingott; and also Mr. Welland. They all named you.”

  Archer felt his temper rising. He had been somewhat languidly drifting with events for the last fortnight, and letting May’s fair looks and radiant nature obliterate the rather importunate pressure of the Mingott claims. But this behest of old Mrs. Mingott’s roused him to a sense of what the clan thought they had the right to exact from a prospective son-in-law; and he chafed at the role.

  “Her uncles ought to deal with this,” he said.

  “They have. The matter has been gone into by the family. They are opposed to the Countess’s idea; but she is firm, and insists on a legal opinion.”

  The young man was silent: he had not opened the packet in his hand.

  “Does she want to marry again?”

  “I believe it is suggested; but she denies it.”

  “Then—”

  “Will you oblige me, Mr. Archer, by first looking through these papers? Afterward, when we have talked the case over, I will give you my opinion.”

  Archer withdrew reluctantly with the unwelcome documents. Since their last meeting he had half-unconsciously collaborated with events in ridding himself of the burden of Madame Olenska. His hour alone with her by the firelight had drawn them into a momentary intimacy on which the Duke of St. Austrey’s intrusion with Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, and the Countess’s joyous greeting of them, had rather providentially broken. Two days later Archer had assisted at the comedy of her reinstatement in the van der Luydens’ favour, and had said to himself, with a touch of tartness, that a lady who knew how to thank all-powerful elderly gentlemen to such good purpose for a bunch of flowers did not need either the private consolations or the public championship of a young man of his small compass. To look at the matter in this light simplified his own case and surprisingly furbished up all the dim domestic virtues. He could not picture May Welland, in whatever conceivable emergency, hawking about her private difficulties and lavishing her confidences on strange men; and she had never seemed to
him finer or fairer than in the week that followed. He had even yielded to her wish for a long engagement, since she had found the one disarming answer to his plea for haste.

  “You know, when it comes to the point, your parents have always let you have your way ever since you were a little girl,” he argued; and she had answered, with her clearest look: “Yes; and that’s what makes it so hard to refuse the very last thing they’ll ever ask of me as a little girl.”

  That was the old New York note; that was the kind of answer he would like always to be sure of his wife’s making. If one had habitually breathed the New York air there were times when anything less crystalline seemed stifling.

  The papers he had retired to read did not tell him much in fact; but they plunged him into an atmosphere in which he choked and spluttered. They consisted mainly of an exchange of letters between Count Olenska’s solicitors and a French legal firm to whom the Countess had applied for the settlement of her financial situation. There was also a short letter from the Count to his wife: after reading it, Newland Archer rose, jammed the papers back into their envelope, and reentered Mr. Letterblair’s office.

  “Here are the letters, sir. If you wish, I’ll see Madame Olenska,” he said in a constrained voice.

  “Thank you—thank you, Mr. Archer. Come and dine with me tonight if you’re free, and we’ll go into the matter afterward: in case you wish to call on our client tomorrow.”

  Newland Archer walked straight home again that afternoon. It was a winter evening of transparent clearness, with an innocent young moon above the house-tops; and he wanted to fill his soul’s lungs with the pure radiance, and not exchange a word with any one till he and Mr. Letterblair were closeted together after dinner. It was impossible to decide otherwise than he had done: he must see Madame Olenska himself rather than let her secrets be bared to other eyes. A great wave of compassion had swept away his indifference and impatience: she stood before him as an exposed and pitiful figure, to be saved at all costs from farther wounding herself in her mad plunges against fate.

  He remembered what she had told him of Mrs. Welland’s request to be spared whatever was “unpleasant” in her history, and winced at the thought that it was perhaps this attitude of mind which kept the New York air so pure. “Are we only Pharisees after all?” he wondered, puzzled by the effort to reconcile his instinctive disgust at human vileness with his equally instinctive pity for human frailty.

  For the first time he perceived how elementary his own principles had always been. He passed for a young man who had not been afraid of risks, and he knew that his secret love-affair with poor silly Mrs. Thorley Rushworth had not been too secret to invest him with a becoming air of adventure. But Mrs. Rushworth was “that kind of woman”; foolish, vain, clandestine by nature, and far more attracted by the secrecy and peril of the affair than by such charms and qualities as he possessed. When the fact dawned on him it nearly broke his heart, but now it seemed the redeeming feature of the case. The affair, in short, had been of the kind that most of the young men of his age had been through, and emerged from with calm consciences and an undisturbed belief in the abysmal distinction between the women one loved and respected and those one enjoyed—and pitied. In this view they were sedulously abetted by their mothers, aunts and other elderly female relatives, who all shared Mrs. Archer’s belief that when “such things happened” it was undoubtedly foolish of the man, but somehow always criminal of the woman. All the elderly ladies whom Archer knew regarded any woman who loved imprudently as necessarily unscrupulous and designing, and mere simple-minded man as powerless in her clutches. The only thing to do was to persuade him, as early as possible, to marry a nice girl, and then trust to her to look after him.

  In the complicated old European communities, Archer began to guess, love-problems might be less simple and less easily classified. Rich and idle and ornamental societies must produce many more such situations; and there might even be one in which a woman naturally sensitive and aloof would yet, from the force of circumstances, from sheer defencelessness and loneliness, be drawn into a tie inexcusable by conventional standards.

  Newland thought of his intimate encounter with Countess Ellen Olenska. Was she no more than a trollop, the type of woman that was only to be enjoyed, rather than loved and respected? At the time, he felt only lust for her, but now, upon considering her situation more closely, he was beginning to see her as more of a real person who deserved to be loved—a woman that could be both loved and enjoyed.

  One thing was certain—Newland’s attraction for the Countess was strong. Had their evening not been disrupted, he would have carried her to her bed and made passionate love to her into the late hours of the night. He could not help but imagine how he would make love to her.

  He would have slowly undressed her, one button at a time, until she stood before him completely bare. He would have kissed each and every inch of her body, breathing in her fragrance and consuming her with all his senses. Then it occurred to Newland that he had not touched her breasts, not once. He had tasted her rich cream and made love to her in such haste, each still wearing their clothes, but they had not disrobed so that their bodies touched.

  Newland was suddenly filled with a desire to touch her breasts, to grasp them in his hands, and bury his face between them. How he longed to suckle them, and to tease the tips with his tongue.

  On reaching home he wrote a line to the Countess Olenska, asking at what hour of the next day she could receive him, and despatched it by a messenger-boy, who returned presently with a word to the effect that she was going to Skuytercliff the next morning to stay over Sunday with the van der Luydens, but that he would find her alone that evening after dinner. The note was written on a rather untidy half-sheet, without date or address, but her hand was firm and free. Newland drew the note to his nose and inhaled. The paper had a sweet smell, like gardenias—the very fragrance that defined her person. He was amused at the idea of her week-ending in the stately solitude of Skuytercliff, but immediately afterward felt that there, of all places, she would most feel the chill of minds rigorously averted from the “unpleasant.” A sense of frustration swept over Newland. He had an insatiable desire to see the Countess.

  “Sir?” It was the meek voice of that young chambermaid, Anne.

  Newland set the note aside and turned to the young woman. Her blonde hair was neatly tied, her pretty face a rosy color, and more enticingly noticeable, her full bosom spilled from her dress.

  “It’s my evening, Mr. Archer.”

  He could not take his eyes from her breasts, remembering her button size nipples that he had suckled only nights ago. He had basked in their delight, nursing those nipples as he claimed her virginity, making her a woman.

  “Mr. Archer?” she said in a quivering voice. “Shall I come to you later this evening when you return? I’d very much like to come to you. If …” She let out a girlish giggle.

  He checked his timepiece, thinking that if he took comfort with Anne now, he might better be able to clear his mind. “No, I think now would do nicely.”

  She smiled, her face flushing a deeper shade.

  He closed the door to his private quarters, turned, and saw Anne waiting at the foot of the bed. He approached her from behind, reached his arms around her, and grasped her full breasts. Closing his eyes, he imagined that he was touching the Countess and gently began massaging Anne’s voluptuous breasts.

  She moaned, lightly at first, and thrust her chest forward desirously.

  Then he spun her around and gaped at her breasts spilling from her apron. He grasped the top edges of the dress and jerked the bodice down, exposing her breasts. Her large nipples were hard, beckoning him. Newland immediately sunk down, took one of her breasts into his mouth, and began to suck with great vigor. To increase her pleasure, he used a hand to massage the other.

  Anne moaned harder and longer and began undulating her hips.

  He rolled his head from one breast to the other, and then pulled t
hem together so that he could lick both her nipples with a long slide of his tongue. He lingered between her bosoms, suckling and licking the tips, and then clasped one of her nipples between his teeth and bit lightly.

  “Mr. Archer, oh yes,” Anne hissed with urgent desire.

  Newland rose up and quickly laid her on the bed. With haste, he raised her skirts and pulled her undergarment from her body. Once she lay exposed, he spread open her legs, and began massaging her intimate form, running his fingers through her moist petals and across her fully erect crimson pearl. When he felt how ready she was for his member, he first thrust a finger inside of her sheath, dipping it in and out of her several times. She writhed beneath him, turning her head from side to side with inflamed desire. Wet, her body called for his manhood. He removed his trousers and positioned himself between her legs. He clasped one of her breasts in his mouth and again began to suck, and then pushed his throbbing manhood inside of her sheath with one masterful stroke.

  Anne moaned loudly as he began thrusting his cock.

  “Faster, faster,” she said. “Harder.”

  Newland closed his eyes and thought of the Countess. He would much rather have been making love to Ellen, but Anne’s vessel was so tight and rich with cream that he soon found himself lost in the pleasure of Anne’s sweet loins.

  Anne grasped his buttocks, gave him a sweet squeeze, and then quite unexpectedly, began spanking him, keeping beat as he thrust inside of her.