The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

  XXIV.

  They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals betweenrushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, andyet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologuesof silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not withconscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of herhistory; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her claspedhands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

  She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the wayin which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of noveltyshe had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care forthe things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, andmake a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of allher other relations just at the time when she most needed looking afterand protecting from matrimonial perils.

  "But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he's beenstaying with you at the Blenkers'."

  She smiled. "Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a veryclever man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora issimply a good advertisement as a convert."

  "A convert to what?"

  "To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, theyinterest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebodyelse's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid tohave discovered America only to make it into a copy of anothercountry." She smiled across the table. "Do you suppose ChristopherColumbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera withthe Selfridge Merrys?"

  Archer changed colour. "And Beaufort--do you say these things toBeaufort?" he asked abruptly.

  "I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to; and heunderstands."

  "Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you likeBeaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room andout at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strungalong the shore. "We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour,no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"

  Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she satsilent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightenedlest she should answer that she wondered too.

  At length she said: "I believe it's because of you."

  It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in atone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. Archerreddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if herwords had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might driveoff on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if itwere left undisturbed.

  "At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand thatunder the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicatethat even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap incomparison. I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together hertroubled brows--"but it seems as if I'd never before understood withhow much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasuresmay be paid."

  "Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt likeretorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.

  "I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and withmyself. For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that Imight tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"

  Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with alaugh. "And what do you make out that you've made of me?"

  She paled a little. "Of you?"

  "Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I'mthe man who married one woman because another one told him to."

  Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. "I thought--you promised--youwere not to say such things today."

  "Ah--how like a woman! None of you will ever see a bad businessthrough!"

  She lowered her voice. "IS it a bad business--for May?"

  He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feelingin every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken hercousin's name.

  "For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by yourown showing?" she insisted.

  "My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.

  "Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painfulapplication, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have missedthings, so that others may be saved from disillusionment andmisery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my otherlife seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there tookaccount of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"

  He turned around without moving from his place. "And in that casethere's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded forher.

  Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. "Oh, IS there no reason?"

  "Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. Mymarriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep youhere." She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gaveme my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked meto go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all."

  "Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyesfilling.

  Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her faceabandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, withthe soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenlytold him.

  "You too--oh, all this time, you too?"

  For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowlydownward.

  Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made anyshow of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to herbodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of thehands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on theoccasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept hiseye on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination spunabout the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made noeffort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caressesand feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was notto be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything whichmight efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought,that he should never again feel quite alone.

  But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. Therethey were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to theirseparate destinies that they might as well have been half the worldapart.

  "What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopelessHOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU? crying out to her beneath his words.

  She sat motionless, with lowered lids. "Oh--I shan't go yet!"

  "Not yet? Some time, then? Some time that you already foresee?"

  At that she raised her clearest eyes. "I promise you: not as long asyou hold out. Not as long as we can look straight at each other likethis."

  He dropped into his chair. What her answer really said was: "If youlift a finger you'll drive me back: back to all the abominations youknow of, and all the temptations you half guess." He understood it asclearly as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept himanchored to his side of the table in a kind of moved and sacredsubmission.

  "What a life for you!--" he groaned.

  "Oh--as long as it's a part of yours."

  "And mine a part of yours?"

  She nodded.

  "And that's to be all--for either of us?"

  "Well; it IS all, isn't it?"

  At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the sweetness of herface. She rose too, not as if to meet him or to flee from him, butquietly, as t
hough the worst of the task were done and she had only towait; so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands actednot as a check but as a guide to him. They fell into his, while herarms, extended but not rigid, kept him far enough off to let hersurrendered face say the rest.

  They may have stood in that way for a long time, or only for a fewmoments; but it was long enough for her silence to communicate all shehad to say, and for him to feel that only one thing mattered. He mustdo nothing to make this meeting their last; he must leave their futurein her care, asking only that she should keep fast hold of it.

  "Don't--don't be unhappy," she said, with a break in her voice, as shedrew her hands away; and he answered: "You won't go back--you won't goback?" as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

  "I won't go back," she said; and turning away she opened the door andled the way into the public dining-room.

  The strident school-teachers were gathering up their possessionspreparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf; across the beach laythe white steam-boat at the pier; and over the sunlit waters Bostonloomed in a line of haze.