Edith Wharton - SSC 11

by Uncollected Stories (v2. 1)

And one star’s ineffectual flicker shot pale through a gap in the gloom,

  As faint as the taper that struggles with night in the sick man’s room.’

  “There’s something about that beginning that makes me feel quietly cold from head to foot. And how charming the description of the girl is:

  “‘She walked with a springing step, as if to some inner tune,

  And her cheeks had the lucent pink of maple-wings in June.’

  “There’s Millet and nature for you! And then when he meets her ghost on Boulterby Ridge—

  “‘White in the palpable black as a lily moored on a moat’—

  what a contrast, eh? And the deadly hopeless chill of the last line, too—

  “‘For the grave is deeper than grief, and longer than life is death.’

  “By Jove, I don’t see how that could be improved!”

  “Neither do I,” said Birkton, bitterly, “more’s the pity.”

  “And what comes next? Ah, that strange sonnet on the Cinque Cento. Did you ever carry out your scheme of writing a series of sonnets embodying all the great epochs of art?”

  “No,” said Birkton, indifferently.

  “It seems a pity, after such a fine beginning. Now just listen to this—listen to it as if it had been written by somebody else:

  “‘Strange hour of art’s august ascendency

  When Sin and Beauty, the old lovers, met

  In a new paradise, still sword-beset

  With monkish terrors, but wherein the tree

  Of knowledge held its golden apples free

  To lips unstayed by hell’s familiar threat;

  And men, grown mad upon the fruit they ate,

  Dreamed a wild dream of lust and liberty;

  Strange hour, when the dead gods arose in Rome

  From altars where the mass was sacrificed,

  When Phryne flaunted on the tiaraed tomb

  Of him who dearly sold the grace unpriced,

  And, twixt old shames and infamies to come,

  Cellini in his prison talked with Christ!’

  “There now, don’t you call that a very happy definition of the most magical moment the world has ever known?”

  “Don’t,” said Birkton, with an impatient gesture. “You’re very good, old man, but don’t go on.”

  Helfenridge, with a sigh, replaced the loose sheets on the desk.

  “Well,” he repeated, “I can’t understand it. But the tide’s got to turn, Maurice—it’s got to. Don’t forget that.”

  Birkton laughed drearily.

  “Haven’t you had a single opening—not one since I saw you?”

  “Not one; at least nothing to speak of,” said Birkton, reddening. “I’ve had one offer, but what do you suppose it was? Do you remember that idiotic squib that I wrote the other day about Mrs. Tolquitt’s being seen alone with Dick Blason at Koster & Bial’s? The thing I read that night in Bradley’s rooms after supper?”

  Helfenridge nodded.

  “Well, I’m sorry I read it now. Somebody must have betrayed me (of course, though no names are mentioned, they all knew who was meant), for who should turn up yesterday but Baker Buley, the editor of the Social Kite, with an offer of a hundred and fifty dollars for my poem.”

  “You didn’t, Maurice—?”

  “Hang you, Helfenridge, what do you take me for? I told him to go to the devil.”

  There was a long pause, during which Helfenridge relit his pipe. Then he said, “But the book reviews in the Symbolic keep you going, don’t they?”

  “After a fashion,” said Birkton, with a shrug. “Luckily my mother has had a tremendous lot of visiting-lists to make up lately, and she has written the invitations for half the balls that have been given this winter, so that between us we manage to keep Annette and ourselves alive; but God knows what would happen if one of us fell ill.”

  “Something else will happen before that. You’ll be offered a hundred and fifty dollars for one of those,” said Helfenridge, pointing to the pile of verses.

  “I wish you were an editor!” Birkton retorted.

  Helfenridge rose, picking up his battered gray hat, and slipping his pipe into his pocket. “I’m not an editor and I’m no good at all,” he said, mournfully.

  “Don’t say that, old man. It’s been the saving of me to be believed in by somebody.”

  Their hands met closely, and with a quick nod and inarticulate grunt Helfenridge turned from the room.

  Maurice, left alone, dropped the smile which he had assumed to speed his friend, and sank into the nearest chair. His eyes, the sensitive eyes of the seer whom Beauty has anointed with her mysterious unguent, travelled painfully about the little room. Not a detail of it but was stamped upon his mind with a morbid accuracy—the yellowish-brown paper which had peeled off here and there, revealing the discolored plaster beneath; the ink-stained desk at which all his poems had been written; the rickety wash-stand of ash, with a strip of marbled oil-cloth nailed over it, and a cracked pitcher and basin; the gas-stove in which a low flame glimmered, the blurred looking-glass, and the book-case which held his thirty or forty worn volumes; yet he never took note of his sordid surroundings without a fresh movement of disgust.

  “And this is our best room,” he muttered to himself.

  His mother and sister slept in the next room, which opened on an air-shaft in the centre of the house, and beyond that was the kitchen, drawing its ventilation from the same shaft, and sending its smells with corresponding facility into the room occupied by the two women.

  The apartment in which they lived, by courtesy called a flat, was in reality a thinly disguised tenement in one of those ignoble quarters of New York where the shabby has lapsed into the degraded. They had moved there a year earlier, leaving reluctantly, under pressure of a diminished purse, the pleasant little flat up-town, with its three bedrooms and sunny parlor, which had been their former home. Maurice winced when he remembered that he had made the change imperative by resigning his clerkship in a wholesale warehouse in order to give more leisure to the writing of the literary criticisms with which he supplied the Symbolic Weekly Review. His mother had approved, had even urged his course; but in the unsparing light of poverty it showed as less inevitable than he had imagined. And then, somehow, the great novel, which he had planned to write as soon as he should be released from his clerical task, was still in embryo. He had time and to spare, but his pen persisted in turning to sonnets, and only the opening chapters of the romance had been summarily blocked out. All this was not very satisfactory, and Maurice was glad to be called from the contemplation of facts so unamiable by the sound of his mother’s voice in the adjoining room.

  “Maurice, dear, has your friend gone?” Mrs. Birkton asked, advancing timidly across the threshold. She had the step and gesture of one who has spent her best energies in a vain endeavor to propitiate fate, and her small, pale face was like a palimpsest on which the record of suffering had been so deeply written that its original lines were concealed beyond recovery.

  “If you are not writing, Maurice,” she continued, “I might come and finish Mrs. Rushingham’s list and save the gas for an hour longer. The light is so good at your window.”

  “Come,” said Maurice, sweeping the poems into his desk and pushing a chair forward for his mother.

  Mrs. Birkton, as she seated herself and opened her neat blank-book, glanced up almost furtively into her son’s face.

  “No news, dear?” she asked, in a low tone.

  “None,” said Maurice, briefly. “I tried the editor of the Inter Oceanic when I was out just now, and he likes The Old Odysseus and Boulterby Ridge very much, but they aren’t exactly suited to his purpose. That’s their formula, you know.”

  Mrs. Birkton dipped her fine steel pen into the inkstand, and began to write, in a delicate copperplate hand:

  Mrs. Albert Lowbridge, 14 East Seventy-fifth Street.

  Mrs. Charles M. McManus, 910 Fifth Avenue.

  The Misses McManus,
910 Fifth Avenue.

  Mr. & Mrs. Hugh Lovermore, 30 East Ninety-Sixth Street.

  She wrote on in silence, but Maurice, who had seated himself near her, saw a glimmer of tears on her thin lashes as her head moved mechanically to and fro with the motion of the pen.

  “Well,” he said, trying for a more cheerful note, “your literary productions are always in demand, at all events. Mrs. Stapleton’s ball ought to bring you in a very tidy little sum. Some one told me the other day that she was going to send out two thousand invitations.”

  “Oh, Maurice—the Stapleton ball! Haven’t you heard?”

  “What about it?”

  “Mr. Seymour Carbridge, Mrs. Stapleton’s uncle, died yesterday, and the ball is given up.”

  Maurice rose from his seat with a movement of dismay.

  “The stars in their courses fight against us!” he exclaimed. “I’m afraid this will make a great difference to you, won’t it, mother?”

  “It does make a difference,” she assented, writing on uninterruptedly. “You see I was to have rewritten her whole visiting-list, besides doing the invitations to the ball. And Lent comes so early this year.”

  Maurice was silent, and for some twenty minutes Mrs. Birkton’s pen continued to move steadily forward over the ruled sheets of the visiting-book. The short January afternoon was fast darkening into a snowy twilight, and Maurice presently stretched out his hand toward the match-box which lay on the desk.

  “Oh, Maurice, don’t light the gas yet. I can see quite well, and you had better keep the stove going a little longer. It’s so cold.”

  “Why not have both?”

  “You extravagant boy! When it gets really dark I shall take my writing into the kitchen, but meanwhile it is so much pleasanter here; and I don’t believe Annette has lit the kitchen stove yet. I haven’t heard her come in.”

  “Where has she been this afternoon?”

  “At her confirmation class. Father Thurifer holds a class every afternoon this week in the chantry. You know Annette is to be confirmed next Sunday.”

  “Is she? No—I had forgotten.”

  “But she must have come in by this time,” Mrs. Birkton continued, with a glance at the darkening window. “Go and see, dear, will you?”

  Maurice obediently stepped out into the narrow passage-way which led from his bedroom to the kitchen. The kitchen door was shut, and as he opened it he came abruptly upon the figure of a young girl, seated in an attitude of tragic self-abandonment at the deal table in the middle of the room. She had evidently just come in, for her shabby hat and jacket and two or three devotional-looking little volumes lay on a chair at her side. Her arms were flung out across the table, with her face hidden between, so that the bluish glimmer of the gas-jet overhead, vaguely outlining her figure, seemed to concentrate all its light upon the mass of her wheat-colored braids. At the sound of the opening door she sprang up suddenly, turning upon Maurice a small disordered face, with red lids and struggling mouth. She was evidently not more than fifteen years old and her undeveloped figure and little round face, in its setting of pale hair, presented that curious mixture of maturity and childishness often seen in girls of her age who have been carefully watched over at home, yet inevitably exposed to the grim diurnal spectacle of poverty and degradation.

  “Annette!” Maurice said, catching the hand with which she tried to hide her face.

  “Oh, Maurice, don’t—don’t please!” she entreated, “I wasn’t crying—I wasn’t! I was only a little tired; and it was so cold walking home from church.”

  “If you are cold, why haven’t you lit the stove?” he asked, giving her time to regain her composure.

  “I will—I was going to.”

  “Carry your things to your room, and I’ll light it for you.”

  “As he spoke his eye fell on the slim little volumes at her side, and he picked up one, which was emblazoned with a cross, surmounted by the title: “Passion Flowers.”

  “And so you are going to be confirmed very soon, Annette?” he asked, his glance wandering over the wide-margined pages with their reiterated invocations in delicate italics:

  O Jesu Christ! Eternal sweetness of them that love Thee,

  O Jesu, Paradise of delights and very glory of the Angels,

  O Jesu, mirror of everlasting love,

  O King most lovely, and Loving One most dear, impress I pray Thee, O Lord Jesus, all Thy wounds upon my heart!

  Annette’s face was smoothed into instant serenity. “Next Sunday—just think, Maurice, only three days more to wait! It will be Sexagesima Sunday, you know.”

  “Will it? And are you glad to be confirmed?”

  “Oh, Maurice! I have waited so long—some girls are confirmed at thirteen.”

  “Are they? And why did you have to wait?”

  “Because Father Thurifer thought it best,” she answered, humbly. “You see I am very young for my age, and very stupid in some ways. He was afraid that I might not understand all the holy mysteries.”

  “And do you now?”

  “Oh, yes—as well as a girl can presume to. At least Father Thurifer says so.”

  “That is very nice,” said Maurice. “Now run away and I’ll light the fire. Mother will be coming soon to sit here.”

  He went back to his bedroom, where Mrs. Birkton’s pen, in the thickening obscurity, still travelled unremittingly over the smooth pages.

  “Mother, what’s the matter with Annette? When I went into the kitchen I found her crying.”

  Mrs. Birkton pushed her work aside with a vexed exclamation.

  “Poor child!” she said. “After all, Maurice, she is only a child; one can’t be too hard on her.”

  “Hard on her? But why? What’s the matter?”

  “You see,” continued Mrs. Birkton, who invariably put her apologies before her explanations, “she would never have allowed herself to think of it if we hadn’t been so sure of the Stapleton ball.”

  “To think of what?”

  “Her white dress, Maurice, her confirmation dress. At the Church of the Precious Blood all the girls are confirmed in white muslin dresses, with tulle veils and moire sashes. Father Thurifer makes a point of it.”

  “And you promised Annette such a dress?”

  “I thought I might, dear, when Mrs. Stapleton decided to give her ball. You see there is a very large class of candidates for confirmation, and I knew it would be very trying for Annette to be the only one not dressed in white—and at such a solemn time, too. But now, of course, she will have to give it up.”

  “Yes,” said Maurice, absently. He stood with his hands in his pockets, his unseeing eyes fixed upon the yellow gleam of the gas-stove, which was now the only point of light in the room.

  “And that is what Annette is crying about?” he asked at length.

  “Poor child,” murmured his mother, deprecatingly; “it is such a solemn moment, Maurice.”

  “Yes, yes—I know. That’s just it. That’s why I don’t understand—Annette is a very religious girl, isn’t she?”

  “Father Thurifer tells me that he has never seen a more religious nature. He said that it was as natural to her to believe as to breathe. Isn’t that such a beautiful expression?”

  “And yet—yet—at such a solemn moment, as you say, it is the color of her dress that is uppermost in her mind?”

  “Oh, Maurice, don’t you see that it is just because she has so much devotional feeling, poor child, that she suffers at the thought of not appearing worthily at such a time?”

  “As if Mrs. Stapleton should ask me to lead the cotillion at her ball when my dress coat is in pawn?”

  “Maurice!” said his mother.

  “I beg your pardon, mother; I didn’t mean that; forgive me. But it all seems so queer—I don’t understand.”

  “I wish you went oftener to church, Maurice,” said Mrs. Birkton, sadly.

  “I wish I understood Annette better,” he returned in a musing tone.

  “Annette is
a very good girl,” said Mrs. Birkton, gathering up her pen and papers. “After the first shock is over she will bear her disappointment bravely; but don’t tell her that I have spoken to you about it, for she would never forgive me.”

  “Poor little thing,” Maurice sighed, as his mother groped her way to the door.

  He sat still in the darkness after she had left, companioned by the dismal brood of his disappointments, until half an hour later Annette’s knock told him that their slender supper was ready.

  When he re-entered the kitchen his sister’s face had grown as smooth and serene as that of some young seraph of Van Eyck’s. She had tied a white apron over her dress and was busy carrying the hot toast and fried eggs from the stove to the table, which had meanwhile been covered with a white cloth and neatly set for the evening meal.

  Maurice sat down between her and his mother, listening in silence to their talk, which fell like the trickle of a cool stream upon his aching nerves. They were speaking as usual of church matters, in which the daughter took an eager and precocious, the mother a somewhat ex-official interest; it seemed to Maurice as though Mrs. Birkton, who had resigned herself to getting on without so many things, had even surrendered her direct share in the scheme of redemption, or rather tacitly passed it on to her child. But what more especially struck him was the force of will displayed in Annette’s demeanor. Her disappointment, which he felt to be very real, was impenetrably masked behind a mien of gay activity; and Maurice, knowing his own facile tendency to be swayed by the emotion of the moment, marvelled at the child’s self-control.

  The next morning he went out earlier than usual. As he opened the hall-door he turned back and called to his mother, who was washing the breakfast dishes in the kitchen:

  “Mother, if Helfenridge comes you can say that you don’t know when I shall be back. Say that I may not be in all day.”

  “Very well, dear,” she replied, with some surprise; but her son’s face forbade questioning, and she went on silently with her work.