Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Edith Wharton

  “If things go on at this pace,” Lefferts thundered, looking like a young prophet dressed by Poole,as and who had not yet been stoned, “we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers’ houses, and marrying Beaufort’s bastards.”

  “Oh, I say—draw it mild!” Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested, while Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely alarmed, and an expression of pain and disgust settled on Mr. van der Luyden’s sensitive face.

  “Has he got any?” cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears; and while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old gentleman twittered into Archer’s ear: “Queer, those fellows who are always wanting to set things right. The people who have the worst cooks are always telling you they’re poisoned when they dine out. But I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence’s diatribe: typewriterat this time, I understand ...”

  The talk swept past Archer like some senseless river running and running because it did not know enough to stop. He saw, on the faces about him, expressions of interest, amusement and even mirth. He listened to the younger men’s laughter, and to the praise of the Archer Madeira, which Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully celebrating. Through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude of friendliness toward himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt himself to be were trying to soften his captivity; and the perception increased his passionate determination to be free.

  In the drawing room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met May’s triumphant eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything had “gone off” beautifully. She rose from Madame Olenska’s side, and immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned the latter to a seat on the gilt sofa where she throned. Mrs. Selfridge Merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to Archer that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going on. The silent organization which held his little world together was determined to put itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame Olenska’s conduct, or the completeness of Archer’s domestic felicity. All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the least hint to the contrary; and from this tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that New York believed him to be Madame Olenska’s lover. He caught the glitter of victory in his wife’s eyes, and for the first time understood that she shared the belief. The discovery roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his efforts to discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs. Reggie Chivers and little Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on, running and running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop.

  At length he saw that Madame Olenska had risen and was saying good-bye. He understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to remember what he had said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single word they had exchanged.

  She went up to May, the rest of the company making a circle about her as she advanced. The two young women clasped hands; then May bent forward and kissed her cousin.

  “Certainly our hostess is much the handsomer of the two,” Archer heard Reggie Chivers say in an undertone to young Mrs. Newland; and he remembered Beaufort’s coarse sneer at May’s ineffectual beauty.

  A moment later he was in the hall, putting Madame Olenska’s cloak about her shoulders.

  Through all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to say nothing that might startle or disturb her. Convinced that no power could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to let events shape themselves as they would. But as he followed Madame Olenska into the hall he thought with a sudden hunger of being for a moment alone with her at the door of her carriage.

  “Is your carriage here?” he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der Luyden, who was being majestically inserted into her sables, said gently: “We are driving dear Ellen home.”

  Archer’s heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and fan with one hand, held out the other to him. “Good-bye,” she said.

  “Good-bye—but I shall see you soon in Paris,” he answered aloud—it seemed to him that he had shouted it.

  “Oh,” she murmured, “if you and May could come—!”

  Mr. van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned to Mrs. van der Luyden. For a moment, in the billowy darkness inside the big landau, he caught the dim oval of a face, eyes shining steadily—and she was gone.

  As he went up the steps he crossed Lawrence Lefferts coming down with his wife. Lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let Gertrude pass.

  “I say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that I’m dining with you at the club tomorrow night? Thanks so much, you old brick! Good-night.”

  “It did go off beautifully, didn’t it?” May questioned from the threshold of the library.

  Archer roused himself with a start. As soon as the last carriage had driven away, he had come up to the library and shut himself in, with the hope that his wife, who still lingered below, would go straight to her room. But there she stood, pale and drawn, yet radiating the factitious energy of one who has passed beyond fatigue.

  “May I come and talk it over?” she asked.

  “Of course, if you like. But you must be awfully sleepy—”

  “No, I’m not sleepy. I should like to sit with you a little.”

  “Very well,” he said, pushing her chair near the fire.

  She sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long time. At length Archer began abruptly: “Since you’re not tired, and want to talk, there’s something I must tell you. I tried to the other night—”

  She looked at him quickly. “Yes, dear. Something about yourself?”

  “About myself. You say you’re not tired: well, I am. Horribly tired ...”

  In an instant she was all tender anxiety. “Oh, I’ve seen it coming on, Newland! You’ve been so wickedly overworked—”

  “Perhaps it’s that. Anyhow, I want to make a break—”

  “A break? To give up the law?”

  “To go away, at any rate—at once. On a long trip, ever so far off—away from everything—”

  He paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with the indifference of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary to welcome it. Do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated. “Away from everything—” he repeated.

  “Ever so far? Where, for instance?” she asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know, India—or Japan.”

  She stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his hands, he felt her warmly and fragrantly hovering over him.

  “As far as that? But I’m afraid you can‘t, dear ...” she said in an unsteady voice. “Not unless you’ll take me with you.” And then, as he was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and evenly pitched that each separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain: “That is, if the doctors will let me go ... but I’m afraid they won’t. For you see, Newland, I’ve been sure since this morning of something I’ve been so longing and hoping for—”

  He looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and roses, and hid her face against his knee.

  “Oh, my dear,” he said, holding her to him while his cold hand stroked her hair.

  There was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident laughter; then May freed herself from his arms and stood up.

  “You didn’t guess—?”

  “Yes—I; no. That is, of course I hoped—”

  They looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then, turning his eyes from hers, he asked abruptly: “Have you told anyone else?”

  “Only Mamma and your mother.” She paused, and then added hurriedly, the blood flushing up to her forehead: “That is—and Ellen. You know I told you we’d had a long talk one afternoon—and how dear
she was to me.”

  “Ah—” said Archer, his heart stopping.

  He felt that his wife was watching him intently. “Did you mind my telling her first, Newland?”

  “Mind? Why should I?” He made a last effort to collect himself. “But that was a fortnight ago, wasn’t it? I thought you said you weren’t sure till today.”

  Her color burned deeper, but she held his gaze. “No; I wasn’t sure then—but I told her I was. And you see I was right!” she exclaimed, her blue eyes wet with victory.

  34

  NEWLAND ARCHER SAT AT the writing-table in his library in East Thirty-ninth Street.

  He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle of those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.

  “Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms,” he heard someone say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagerly fitted vista of the old Museum.

  The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.

  It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the Bishop of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first staggered across the floor shouting “Dad,” while May and the nurse laughed behind the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so like her mother), had announced her engagement to the dullest and most reliable of Reggie Chivers’s many sons; and there Archer had kissed her through her wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was to carry them to Grace Church—for in a world where all else had reeled on its foundations the “Grace Church wedding” remained an unchanged institution.

  It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary’s incurable indifference to “accomplishments,” and passion for sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward “art” which had finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.

  The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in the pre-revolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word “Colonial.” Nobody nowadays had “Colonial” houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

  But above all—sometimes Archer put it above all—it was in that library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host and said, banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses: “Hang the professional politician! You’re the kind of man the country wants, Archer. If the stable’s ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend a hand in the cleaning.”

  “Men like you—” how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly he had risen up at the call! It was an echo of Ned Winsett’s old appeal to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was irresistible.

  Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself were what his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not, for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its apathy. It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked forward—the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been limited—even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man’s friendship to be his strength and pride.

  He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call “a good citizen.” In New York, for many years past, every new movement, philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his opinion and wanted his name. People said: “Ask Archer” when there was a question of starting the first school for crippled children, reorganizing the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club,au inaugurating the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music. His days were full and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man ought to ask.

  Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in his lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that he had missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithful husband; and when May had suddenly died—carried off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child—he had honestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honored his own past, and mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.

  with English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white and pleasantly shaded electric lamps—came back to the old Eastlake writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his first photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.

  There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the Mission garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hard bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered. Her incapacity to recognize change made her children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretense of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she had died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his parents’ lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her) would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill. And of Mary she was sure as of her own self. So, having snatched little Bill from the grave, and given her life in
the effort, she went contentedly to her place in the Archer vault in St. Mark‘s, where Mrs. Archer already lay safe from the terrifying “trend” which her daughter-in-law had never even become aware of.

  Opposite May’s portrait stood one of her daughter. Mary Chivers was as tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. Mary Chivers’s mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the twenty-inch waist that May Archer’s azure sash so easily spanned. And the difference seemed symbolic; the mother’s life had been as closely girt as her figure. Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There was good in the new order too.

  The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s only means of quick communication!

  “Chicago wants you.”

  Ah—it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent to Chicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the lakeside palace they were to build for a young millionaire with ideas. The firm always sent Dallas on such errands.

  “Hallo, Dad. Yes: Dallas. I say—how do you feel about sailing on Wednesday? Mauretania. Yes, next Wednesday as ever is. Our client wants me to look at some Italian gardens before we settle anything, and has asked me to nip over on the next boat. I’ve got to be back on the first of June—” the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh—“so we must look alive. I say, Dad, I want your help: do come.”

  Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as nearby and natural as if he had been lounging in his favorite armchair by the fire. The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the laugh did startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and miles of country—forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and busy indifferent millions—Dallas’s laugh should be able to say: “Of course, whatever happens, I must get back on the first, because Fanny Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth.”