“I remember the last time that I held you in my arms as though it were only minutes ago,” he said.
Her face flushed pink. “Yes, I, too.”
“How you made me feel as though life were truly complete.”
She sipped her tea, and when she went to replace the cup on the saucer, the cup tipped, spilling the liquid over the sides and spotting her dress. She gasped in embarrassment and rose from her seat.
He stood quickly and with his napkin dabbed at the front of her dress. She drew away from his touch and walked over to the window.
She folded her hands in front of her. He followed, but did not move too near. The snow outside the window seemed to fall around her, framing her with heavenly grace. The urge to hold her in his arms was stronger than ever. She was so close and yet she had placed an invisible, seemingly unbreakable barrier between them. His emotions overcame reason and he moved even closer to her. He did not dare touch her again. She did not turn, but continued to watch the falling snowflakes. He mustered his courage and placed a gentle hand upon her shoulder. To his delight, she covered his hand with hers. Her touch thrilled him, and so powerful was his love for her that as a result of this simple touch of a hand, his manhood began to rise.
He tried to take a step back, but she clung to him. “Stay close to me,” she whispered, tenderly. He pressed his body more firmly against her back. She swayed slightly, and a moment later, she reached down behind her and found his other hand. She slid hers inside his and then raised his hand to her bosom and laid it upon her breast. Then she covered his hand with hers, pressed him to her, and sighed deeply.
Together they stood, watching the snowfall enfold them in this timeless moment. She turned her head to look back at him, her long neck stretching swanlike. When their eyes met, Newland was overcome, and he leaned forward and kissed her. She turned around to face him and he took her into his arms, and the gentle kiss became passionate.
“I need you,” she said when the kiss broke.
He started to pull back, fighting his urges, demurring to her original wishes.
“Take me,” she said, advancing on him, not letting him separate from her.
“But—”
“None of that matters. Not now.” She grasped his hand and led him to the bed.
Overcome with love and lust, he lifted her and placed her upon the bed. He had to taste her, to savor her essence. He reached for her skirts and raised them in one motion. As always, she was without undergarments. He opened her legs so that her secret treasure was before him. He slid his hands up her legs, across her loins, and then grasped her thighs. He lifted her cheeks and lowered himself to her flower, immersing himself in her intoxicating scent, and began sliding his tongue through her rich cream. He swirled his tongue through her petals to her pearl and danced back to her sheath, probing with his tongue, and then circling the opening. Lost in her delicacies, he might have stayed right there forever if his manhood had not begun to throb insistently.
They undressed and he positioned himself between her legs, taking her into his arms. He kissed her lips, and they held each other as if they would never let go. He lowered himself so that his manhood slid between her intimate folds and stopped at the entrance to her feminine delta.
“Make love to me,” she said softly.
“I’ve been making love to you all of my life.”
“Oh my darling, yes.”
And before she finished uttering those words, he slid only the crown of his staff inside her creamy vessel and began moving ever so slightly in and out of her. Her hips moved encouragingly, urging him to enter more fully. He closed his eyes and basked in the pure pleasure of her silken moist orchid as he gladly fulfilled her desire. When he reached the end of her vessel, he paused for a moment to open his eyes and stare into hers. His heart was filled with love, his body with desire, and he knew they were, once again, the same body and soul.
They made love, leisurely at first, until the carnal desires of the flesh consumed them with the overwhelming need to release. Their hips met with perfect synchronicity, and their breathing hastened. Their hearts beat rapidly, their bodies slid with moisture from their breasts to the tips of their toes. And finally, they sprang to that heavenly height of passion, and together released.
If only they could run away, he thought, wanting this moment to last forever. But reality was cruel, so very cruel. Taking what was given, they lay in one another’s arms, not speaking, just breathing, and savoring those last few precious moments they had been offered.
Love had stolen their hearts, if only for a sliver of time, and all too quickly, Newland found himself helping her into the brougham with her bags, and had afterward the vague recollection of having properly reassured her about her grandmother and given her a summary of the Beaufort situation (he was struck by the softness of her: “Poor Regina!”). Meanwhile the carriage had worked its way out of the coil about the station, and they were crawling down the slippery incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying coal-carts, bewildered horses, dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty hearse—ah, that hearse! She shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at Archer’s hand.
“If only it doesn’t mean—poor Granny!”
“Oh, no, no—she’s much better—she’s all right, really. There—we’ve passed it!” he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference. Her hand remained in his, and as the carriage lurched across the gang-plank onto the ferry he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown glove, and kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic. She disengaged herself with a faint smile, and he said: “You didn’t expect me or any of this today?”
“Oh, no.”
“I meant to go to Washington to see you. I’d made all my arrangements—I very nearly crossed you in the train.”
“Oh—” she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape.
“Do you know—I hardly remembered you?”
“Hardly remembered me?”
“I mean: how shall I explain? I—it’s always so. EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN.”
“Oh, yes: I know! I know!”
“Does it—do I too: to you?” he insisted.
She nodded, looking out of the window.
“Ellen—Ellen—Ellen!”
She made no answer, and he sat in silence, watching her profile grow indistinct against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window. What had she been doing in all those four long months, he wondered? How little they knew of each other, after all! The precious moments were slipping away, but he had forgotten everything that he had meant to say to her and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of their remoteness and their proximity, which seemed to be symbolised by the fact of their sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable to see each other’s faces.
“What a pretty carriage! Is it May’s?” she asked, suddenly turning her face from the window.
“Yes.”
“It was May who sent you to fetch me, then? How kind of her!”
He made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively: “Your husband’s secretary came to see me the day after we met in Boston.”
In his brief letter to her he had made no allusion to M. Riviere’s visit, and his intention had been to bury the incident in his bosom. But her reminder that they were in his wife’s carriage provoked him to an impulse of retaliation. He would see if she liked his reference to Riviere any better than he liked hers to May! As on certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual composure, she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded: “He writes to her, then.”
“M. Riviere went to see you?”
“Yes: didn’t you know?”
“No,” she answered simply.
“And you’re not surprised?”
She hesitated. “Why should I be? He told me in Boston that he knew you; that he’d met you in England I think.”
“Ellen—I must ask you one thing.”
“Yes.”
“I
wanted to ask it after I saw him, but I couldn’t put it in a letter. It was Riviere who helped you to get away—when you left your husband?”
His heart was beating suffocatingly. Would she meet this question with the same composure?
“Yes: I owe him a great debt,” she answered, without the least tremor in her quiet voice.
Her tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that Archer’s turmoil subsided. Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the winds.
“I think you’re the most honest woman I ever met!” he exclaimed.
“Oh, no—but probably one of the least fussy,” she answered, a smile in her voice.
“Call it what you like: you look at things as they are.”
“Ah—I’ve had to. I’ve had to look at the Gorgon.”
“Well—it hasn’t blinded you! You’ve seen that she’s just an old bogey like all the others.”
“She doesn’t blind one; but she dries up one’s tears.”
The answer checked the pleading on Archer’s lips: it seemed to come from depths of experience beyond his reach. The slow advance of the ferry-boat had ceased, and her bows bumped against the piles of the slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger, and flung Archer and Madame Olenska against each other. The young man, trembling, felt the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his arm about her.
“If you’re not blind, then, you must see that this can’t last.”
“What can’t?”
“Our being together—and not together.”
“No. You ought not to have come today. We ought not to have made love,” she said in an altered voice; and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him and pressed her lips to his. “But I’m glad you came, and I’m glad we did make love.” At the same moment the carriage began to move, and a gas-lamp at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window. She drew away, and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled through the congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing. As they gained the street Archer began to speak hurriedly.
“Don’t be afraid of me: you needn’t squeeze yourself back into your corner like that. A stolen kiss isn’t what I want. Look: I’m not even trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket. Don’t suppose that I don’t understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair. I couldn’t have spoken like this yesterday, because when we’ve been apart, and I’m looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great flame. But then you come; and you’re so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true.”
For a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper: “What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?”
“Why—you know it will, don’t you?”
“Your vision of you and me together?” She burst into a sudden hard laugh. “You choose your place well to put it to me!”
“Do you mean because we’re in my wife’s brougham? Shall we get out and walk, then? I don’t suppose you mind a little snow?”
She laughed again, more gently. “No; I shan’t get out and walk, because my business is to get to Granny’s as quickly as I can. And you’ll sit beside me, and we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.”
“I don’t know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is this. Ellen, we made love. I love you.”
She met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled down an obscure side-street and then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth Avenue.
“Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?” she asked.
The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
“I want—I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like that—categories like that—won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. “Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on: “I know so many who’ve tried to find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous.”
He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the phrase she had used a little while before.
“Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears,” he said.
“Well, she opened my eyes too; it’s a delusion to say that she blinds people. What she does is just the contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re never again in the blessed darkness. Isn’t there a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it’s a miserable little country!”
The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May’s sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky trotter. Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.
“For US? But there’s no US in that sense! We’re near each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust them.”
“Ah, I’m beyond that,” he groaned.
“No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I have,” she said, in a strange voice, “and I know what it looks like there.”
He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders to the coachman. He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to stop. He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone.
“Why are we stopping? This is not Granny’s,” Madame Olenska exclaimed.
“No: I shall get out here,” he stammered, opening the door and jumping to the pavement. By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. He closed the door, and leaned for a moment in the window.
“You’re right: I ought not to have come today,” he said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should not hear. She bent forward, and seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.
Chapter 12
That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the drawing room empty.
He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott’s illness; and as May was the more punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him. He knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.
He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to reality. Sometimes
he felt as if he had found the clue to his father-in-law’s absorption in trifles; perhaps even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.
When May appeared he thought she looked tired. She had put on the low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan and almost faded. But she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before.
“What became of you, dear?” she asked. “I was waiting at Granny’s, and Ellen came alone, and said she had dropped you on the way because you had to rush off on business. There’s nothing wrong?”
“Only some letters I’d forgotten, and wanted to get off before dinner.”
“Ah—” she said; and a moment afterward: “I’m sorry you didn’t come to Granny’s—unless the letters were urgent.”
“They were,” he rejoined, surprised at her insistence. “Besides, I don’t see why I should have gone to your grandmother’s. I didn’t know you were there.”
She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the mantelpiece. As she stood there, lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her intricate hair, Archer was struck by something languid and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also. Then he remembered that, as he had left the house that morning, she had called over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother’s so that they might drive home together. He had called back a cheery “Yes!” and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise. Now he was smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage. He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, some days cool, others unexpectedly wild, all without the temperature of a constant and steady passion yet with all its exactions. If May had spoken out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a Spartan smile.
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