Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Edith Wharton

  “Oh, well—at the pass we’ve come to nowadays, it doesn’t matter,” said Mrs. Archer indifferently. The ladies were not really interested in Mrs. Struthers just then; the subject of Ellen Olenska was too fresh and too absorbing to them. Indeed, Mrs. Struthers’s name had been introduced by Mrs. Archer only that she might presently be able to say: “And Newland’s new cousin—Countess Olenska? Was she at the ball too?”

  There was a faint touch of sarcasm in the reference to her son, and Archer knew it and had expected it. Even Mrs. Archer, who was seldom unduly pleased with human events, had been altogether glad of her son’s engagement. (“Especially after that silly business with Mrs. Rushworth,” as she had remarked to Janey, alluding to what had once seemed to Newland a tragedy of which his soul would always bear the scar.) There was no better match in New York than May Welland, look at the question from whatever point you chose. Of course such a marriage was only what Newland was entitled to; but young men are so foolish and incalculable—and some women so ensnaring and unscrupulous—that it was nothing short of a miracle to see one’s only son safe past the Siren Islei and in the haven of a blameless domesticity.

  All this Mrs. Archer felt, and her son knew she felt; but he knew also that she had been perturbed by the premature announcement of his engagement, or rather by its cause; and it was for that reason—because on the whole he was a tender and indulgent master—that he had stayed at home that evening. “It’s not that I don’t approve of the Mingotts’ esprit de corps; but why Newland’s engagement should be mixed up with that Olenska woman’s comings and goings I don’t see,” Mrs. Archer grumbled to Janey, the only witness of her slight lapses from perfect sweetness.

  She had behaved beautifully—and in beautiful behavior she was unsurpassed—during the call on Mrs. Welland; but Newland knew (and his betrothed doubtless guessed) that all through the visit she and Janey were nervously on the watch for Madame Olenska’s possible intrusion; and when they left the house together she had permitted herself to say to her son: “I’m thankful that Augusta Welland received us alone.”

  These indications of inward disturbance moved Archer the more that he too felt that the Mingotts had gone a little too far. But, as it was against all the rules of their code that the mother and son should ever allude to what was uppermost in their thoughts, he simply replied: “Oh, well, there’s always a phase of family parties to be gone through when one gets engaged, and the sooner it’s over the better.” At which his mother merely pursed her lips under the lace veil that hung down from her gray velvet bonnet trimmed with frosted grapes.

  Her revenge, he felt—her lawful revenge—would be to “draw” Mr. Jackson that evening on the Countess Olenska; and, having publicly done his duty as a future member of the Mingott clan, the young man had no objection to hearing the lady discussed in private—except that the subject was already beginning to bore him.

  Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the mournful butler had handed him with a look as skeptical as his own, and had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.

  Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the can dlelit Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the dark walls.

  “Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!” he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white- columned country-house behind him. “Well—well—well... I wonder what he would have said to all these foreign marriages!”

  Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and Mr. Jackson continued with deliberation: “No, she was not at the ball.”

  “Ah—” Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that implied: “She had that decency.”

  “Perhaps the Beauforts don’t know her,” Janey suggested, with artless malice.

  Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible Madeira. “Mrs. Beaufort may not—but Beaufort certainly does, for she was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole of New York.”

  “Mercy—” moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.

  “I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon,” Janey speculated. “At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly plain and flat—like a night-gown.”

  “Janey!” said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look audacious.

  “It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball,” Mrs. Archer continued.

  A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: “I don’t think it was a question of taste with her. May said she meant to go, and then decided that the dress in question wasn’t smart enough.”

  Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference. “Poor Ellen,” she simply remarked; adding compassionately: “We must always bear in mind what an eccentric bring-up Medora Manson gave her. What can you expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out ball?”

  ‘Ah—don’t I remember her in it!“ said Mr. Jackson; adding: ”Poor girl!“ in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory, had fully understood at the time what the sight portended.

  “It’s odd,” Janey remarked, “that she should have kept such an ugly name as Ellen. I should have changed it to Elaine.” She glanced about the table to see the effect of this.

  Her brother laughed. “Why Elaine?”

  “I don’t know; it sounds more—more Polish,” said Janey, blushing.

  “It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes,” said Mrs. Archer distantly.

  “Why not?” broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative. “Why shouldn’t she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? She’s ‘poor Ellen’ certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage; but I don’t see that that’s a reason for hiding her head as if she were the culprit.”

  “That, I suppose,” said Mr. Jackson, speculatively, “is the line the Mingotts mean to take.”

  The young man reddened. “I don’t have to wait for their cue, if that’s what you mean, sir. Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that doesn’t make her an outcast.”

  “There are rumors,” began Mr. Jackson, glancing at Janey.

  “Oh, I know: the secretary,” the young man took him up. “Nonsense, mother; Janey’s grown-up. They say, don’t they,” he went on, “that the secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept her practically a prisoner? Well, what if he did? I hope there isn’t a man among us who wouldn’t have done the same in such a case.”

  Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler: “Perhaps ... that sauce ... just a little, after all—;” then, having helped himself, he remarked: “I’m told she’s looking for a house. She means to live here.”

  “I hear she means to get a divorce,” said Janey boldly.

  “I hope she will!” Archer exclaimed.

  The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil atmosphere of the Archer dining room. Mrs. Archer raised her delicate eyebrows in the particular curve that signified: “The butler—” and the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his visit to old Mrs. Mingott.

  After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs. Archer and Janey trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing room, where, while the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood work-table with a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry band of field-flowers destined to adorn an “occasional” chair in the drawing room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.

  While this rite was
in progress in the drawing room, Archer settled Mr. Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed him a cigar. Mr. Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them), and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said: “You say the secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow? Well, he was still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met ‘em living at Lausanne together.”

  Newland reddened. “Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right to make her life over if she hadn’t? I’m sick of the hypocrisy that would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with harlots.”

  He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. “Women ought to be free—as free as we are,” he declared, making a discovery of which he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.

  Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted a sardonic whistle.

  “Well,” he said after a pause, “apparently Count Olenski takes your view; for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife back.”

  6

  THAT EVENING, AFTER MR. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of “The Fencers” on the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked singularly home-like and welcoming.

  As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all the other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young creature whose soul’s custodian he was to be. That terrifying product of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a stranger through May Welland’s familiar features; and once more it was borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

  The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His own exclamation: “Women should be free—as free as we are,”4 struck to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard as non-existent. “Nice” women, however wronged, would never claim the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself were therefore—in the heat of argument—the more chivalrously ready to concede it to them. Such verbal gen erosities were in fact only a humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed’s cousin, conduct that, on his own wife’s part, would justify him in calling down on her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purely hypothetical; since he wasn’t a blackguard Polish nobleman, it was absurd to speculate what his wife’s rights would be if he were. But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case and May‘s, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable. What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty, as a “decent” fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed his friends’ marriages—the supposedly happy ones—and saw none that answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a dull association of material and social interests held together by ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. Lawrence Lefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completely realized this enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men’s wives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that “Lawrence was so frightfully strict”; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius Beaufort (as became a “foreigner” of doubtful origin) had what was known in New York as “another establishment.”

  Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude: but the difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter’s engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents’ tent.

  The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the center of this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called “the facts of life.”

  The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horse manship, her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She had advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing The Idylls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and The Lotus Eaters.)j She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humor (chiefly proved by her laughing at his jokes); and he suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joy to waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank and innocent, it was full of the twists and defenses of an instinctive guile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

  There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those habitual to young men on the approach of their wedding-day. But they were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasement of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as Thackeray’s heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one she was to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to find their way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnected with his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.

  Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind; but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision were due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska. Here he was, at the very moment of his betrothal—a moment for pure thoughts and c
loudless hopes—pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raised all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie. “Hang Ellen Olenska!” he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began to undress. He could not really see why her fate should have the least bearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun to measure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forced upon him.

  A few days later the bolt fell.

  The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as “a formal dinner” (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the words “To meet the Countess Olenska” in accordance with the hospitable American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, or at least as their ambassadors.

  The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in which the initiated recognized the firm hand of Catherine the Great. Associated with such immemorial stand-bys as the Selfridge Merrys, who were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts, on whom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and his sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were some of the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant “young married” set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth (the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and young Morris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The company indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged to the little inner group of people who, during the long New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparently undiminished zest.

  Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had refused the Mingotts’ invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr. Jackson and his sister. The intended slight was emphasized by the fact that even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were among those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, in all of which the writers “regretted that they were unable to accept,” without the mitigating plea of a “previous engagement” that ordinary courtesy prescribed.