The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

by Edith Wharton

  “Do you feel better?” he asked gently as he sat down beside her.

  “Oh, yes. I only needed a little air.”

  “I’m so glad you did. Of course the speeches were tremendously interesting—but I prefer this. What a good night!”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause, which now, after all, the soothing accompaniment of the river seemed hardly sufficient to fill.

  “I wonder what time it is. I ought to be going home,” Margaret began at length.

  “Oh, it’s not late. They’ll be at it for hours in there—yet.”

  She made a faint inarticulate sound. She wanted to say: “No—Robert’s speech was to be the last—” but she could not bring herself to pronounce Ransom’s name, and at the moment no other way of refuting her companion’s statement occurred to her.

  The young man leaned back luxuriously, reassured by her silence.

  “You see it’s my last chance—and I want to make the most of it.”

  “Your last chance?” How stupid of her to repeat his words on that cooing note of interrogation! It was just such a lead as the Brant girl might have given him.

  “To be with you—like this. I haven’t had so many. And there’s less than a week left.”

  She attempted to laugh. “Perhaps it will sound longer if you call it five days.”

  The flatness of that, again! And she knew there were people who called her intelligent. Fortunately he did not seem to notice it; but her laugh continued to sound in her own ears—the coquettish chirp of middle age! She decided that if he spoke again—if he said anything—she would make no farther effort at evasion: she would take it directly, seriously, frankly—she would not be doubly disloyal.

  “Besides,” he continued, throwing his arm along the back of the bench, and turning toward her so that his face was like a dusky bas-relief with a silver rim—“besides, there’s something I’ve been wanting to tell you.”

  The sound of the river seemed to cease altogether: the whole world became silent.

  Margaret had trusted her inspiration farther than it appeared likely to carry her. Again she could think of nothing happier than to repeat, on the same witless note of interrogation: “To tell me?”

  “You only.”

  The constraint, the difficulty, seemed to be on his side now: she divined it by the renewed shifting of his attitude—he was capable, usually, of such fine intervals of immobility—and by a confusion in his utterance that set her own voice throbbing in her throat.

  “You’ve been so perfect to me,” he began again. “It’s not my fault if you’ve made me feel that you would understand everything—make allowances for everything—see just how a man may have held out, and fought against a thing—as long as he had the strength…. This may be my only chance; and I can’t go away without telling you.”

  He had turned from her now, and was staring at the river, so that his profile was projected against the moonlight in all its beautiful young dejection.

  There was a slight pause, as though he waited for her to speak; then she leaned forward and laid her hand on his.

  “If I have really been—if I have done for you even the least part of what you say … what you imagine … will you do for me, now, just one thing in return?”

  He sat motionless, as if fearing to frighten away the shy touch on his hand, and she left it there, conscious of her gesture only as part of the high ritual of their farewell.

  “What do you want me to do?” he asked in a low tone.

  “Not to tell me!” she breathed on a deep note of entreaty.

  “Not to tell you—?”

  “Anything—_anything_—just to leave our … our friendship … as it has been—as—as a painter, if a friend asked him, might leave a picture—not quite finished, perhaps … but all the more exquisite….”

  She felt the hand under hers slip away, recover itself, and seek her own, which had flashed out of reach in the same instant—felt the start that swept him round on her as if he had been caught and turned about by the shoulders.

  “You—_you_—?” he stammered, in a strange voice full of fear and tenderness; but she held fast, so centred in her inexorable resolve that she was hardly conscious of the effect her words might be producing.

  “Don’t you see,” she hurried on, “don’t you feel how much safer it is—yes, I’m willing to put it so!—how much safer to leave everything undisturbed … just as … as it has grown of itself … without trying to say: ‘It’s this or that’…? It’s what we each choose to call it to ourselves, after all, isn’t it? Don’t let us try to find a name that … that we should both agree upon … we probably shouldn’t succeed.” She laughed abruptly. “And ghosts vanish when one names them!” she ended with a break in her voice.

  When she ceased her heart was beating so violently that there was a rush in her ears like the noise of the river after rain, and she did not immediately make out what he was answering. But as she recovered her lucidity she said to herself that, whatever he was saying, she must not hear it; and she began to speak again, half playfully, half appealingly, with an eloquence of entreaty, an ingenuity in argument, of which she had never dreamed herself capable. And then, suddenly, strangling hands seemed to reach up from her heart to her throat, and she had to stop.

  Her companion remained motionless. He had not tried to regain her hand, and his eyes were away from her, on the river. But his nearness had become something formidable and exquisite—something she had never before imagined. A flush of guilt swept over her—vague reminiscences of French novels and of opera plots. This was what such women felt, then … this was “shame.” … Phrases of the newspaper and the pulpit danced before her…. She dared not speak, and his silence began to frighten her. Had ever a heart beat so wildly before in Wentworth?

  He turned at last, and taking her two hands, quite simply, kissed them one after the other.

  “I shall never forget—” he said in a confused voice, unlike his own.

  A return of strength enabled her to rise, and even to let her eyes meet his for a moment.

  “Thank you,” she said, simply also.

  She turned away from the bench, regaining the path that led back to the college buildings, and he walked beside her in silence. When they reached the elm walk it was dotted with dispersing groups. The “speaking” was over, and Hamblin Hall had poured its audience out into the moonlight. Margaret felt a rush of relief, followed by a receding wave of regret. She had the distinct sensation that her hour—her one hour—was over.

  One of the groups just ahead broke up as they approached, and projected Ransom’s solid bulk against the moonlight.

  “My husband,” she said, hastening forward; and she never afterward forgot the look of his back—heavy, round-shouldered, yet a little pompous—in a badly fitting overcoat that stood out at the neck and hid his collar. She had never before noticed how he dressed.

  IV

  THEY met again, inevitably, before Dawnish left; but the thing she feared did not happen—he did not try to see her alone.

  It even became clear to her, in looking back, that he had deliberately avoided doing so; and this seemed merely an added proof of his “understanding,” of that deep undefinable communion that set them alone in an empty world, as if on a peak above the clouds.

  The five days passed in a flash; and when the last one came, it brought to Margaret Ransom an hour of weakness, of profound disorganization, when old barriers fell, old convictions faded—when to be alone with him for a moment became, after all, the one craving of her heart. She knew he was coming that afternoon to say “good-by”—and she knew also that Ransom was to be away at South Wentworth. She waited alone in her pale little drawing-room, with its scant kakemonos, its one or two chilly reproductions from the antique, its slippery Chippendale chairs. At length the bell rang, and her world became a rosy blur—through which she presently discerned the austere form of Mrs. Sperry, wife of the Professor of palaeontology, who had come to ta
lk over with her the next winter’s programme for the Higher Thought Club. They debated the question for an hour, and when Mrs. Sperry departed Margaret had a confused impression that the course was to deal with the influence of the First Crusade on the development of European architecture—but the sentient part of her knew only that Dawnish had not come.

  He “bobbed in,” as he would have put it, after dinner—having, it appeared, run across Ransom early in the day, and learned that the latter would be absent till evening. Margaret was in the study with her husband when the door opened and Dawnish stood there. Ransom—who had not had time to dress—was seated at his desk, a pile of shabby law books at his elbow, the light from a hanging lamp falling on his grayish stubble of hair, his sallow forehead and spectacled eyes. Dawnish, towering higher than usual against the shadows of the room, and refined by his unusual pallor, hung a moment on the threshold, then came in, explaining himself profusely—laughing, accepting a cigar, letting Ransom push an armchair forward—a Dawnish she had never seen, ill at ease, ejaculatory, yet somehow more mature, more obscurely in command of himself.

  Margaret drew back, seating herself in the shade, in such a way that she saw her husband’s head first, and beyond it their visitor’s, relieved against the dusk of the book shelves. Her heart was still—she felt no throbbing in her throat or temples: all her life seemed concentrated in the hand that lay on her knee, the hand he would touch when they said good-by.

  Afterward her heart rang all the changes, and there was a mood in which she reproached herself for cowardice—for having deliberately missed her one moment with him, the moment in which she might have sounded the depths of life, for joy or anguish. But that mood was fleeting and infrequent. In quieter hours she blushed for it—she even trembled to think that he might have guessed such a regret in her. It seemed to convict her of a lack of fineness that he should have had, in his youth and his power, a tenderer, surer sense of the peril of a rash touch—should have handled the case so much more delicately.

  At first her days were fire and the nights long solemn vigils. Her thoughts were no longer vulgarized and defaced by any notion of “guilt,” of mental disloyalty. She was ashamed now of her shame. What had happened was as much outside the sphere of her marriage as some transaction in a star. It had simply given her a secret life of incommunicable joys, as if all the wasted springs of her youth had been stored in some hidden pool, and she could return there now to bathe in them.

  After that there came a phase of loneliness, through which the life about her loomed phantasmal and remote. She thought the dead must feel thus, repeating the vain gestures of the living beside some Stygian shore. She wondered if any other woman had lived to whom nothing had ever happened? And then his first letter came….

  It was a charming letter—a perfect letter. The little touch of awkwardness and constraint under its boyish spontaneity told her more than whole pages of eloquence. He spoke of their friendship—of their good days together…. Ransom, chancing to come in while she read, noticed the foreign stamps; and she was able to hand him the letter, saying gaily: “There’s a message for you,” and knowing all the while that her message was safe in her heart.

  On the days when the letters came the outlines of things grew indistinct, and she could never afterward remember what she had done or how the business of life had been carried on. It was always a surprise when she found dinner on the table as usual, and Ransom seated opposite to her, running over the evening paper.

  But though Dawnish continued to write, with all the English loyalty to the outward observances of friendship, his communications came only at intervals of several weeks, and between them she had time to repossess herself, to regain some sort of normal contact with life. And the customary, the recurring, gradually reclaimed her, the net of habit tightened again—her daily life became real, and her one momentary escape from it an exquisite illusion. Not that she ceased to believe in the miracle that had befallen her: she still treasured the reality of her one moment beside the river. What reason was there for doubting it? She could hear the ring of truth in young Dawnish’s voice: “It’s not my fault if you’ve made me feel that you would understand everything….” No! she believed in her miracle, and the belief sweetened and illumined her life; but she came to see that what was for her the transformation of her whole being might well have been, for her companion, a mere passing explosion of gratitude, of boyish good-fellowship touched with the pang of leave-taking. She even reached the point of telling herself that it was “better so”: this view of the episode so defended it from the alternating extremes of self-reproach and derision, so enshrined it in a pale immortality to which she could make her secret pilgrimages without reproach.

  For a long time she had not been able to pass by the bench under the willows—she even avoided the elm walk till autumn had stripped its branches. But every day, now, she noted a step toward recovery; and at last a day came when, walking along the river, she said to herself, as she approached the bench: “I used not to be able to pass here without thinking of him; and now I am not thinking of him at all!”

  This seemed such convincing proof of her recovery that she began, as spring returned, to permit herself, now and then, a quiet session on the bench—a dedicated hour from which she went back fortified to her task.

  She had not heard from her friend for six weeks or more—the intervals between his letters were growing longer. But that was “best” too, and she was not anxious, for she knew he had obtained the post he had been preparing for, and that his active life in London had begun. The thought reminded her, one mild March day, that in leaving the house she had thrust in her reticule a letter from a Wentworth friend who was abroad on a holiday. The envelope bore the London post mark, a fact showing that the lady’s face was turned toward home. Margaret seated herself on her bench, and drawing out the letter began to read it.

  The London described was that of shops and museums—as remote as possible from the setting of Guy Dawnish’s existence. But suddenly Margaret’s eye fell on his name, and the page began to tremble in her hands.

  “I heard such a funny thing yesterday about your friend Mr. Dawnish. We went to a tea at Professor Bunce’s (I do wish you knew the Bunces—their atmosphere is so uplifting), and there I met that Miss Bruce-Pringle who came out last year to take a course in histology at the Annex. Of course she asked about you and Mr. Ransom, and then she told me she had just seen Mr. Dawnish’s aunt—the clever one he was always talking about, Lady Caroline something—and that they were all in a dreadful state about him. I wonder if you knew he was engaged when he went to America? He never mentioned it to us. She said it was not a positive engagement, but an understanding with a girl he has always been devoted to, who lives near their place in Wiltshire; and both families expected the marriage to take place as soon as he got back. It seems the girl is an heiress (you know how low the English ideals are compared with ours), and Miss Bruce-Pringle said his relations were perfectly delighted at his ‘being provided for,’ as she called it. Well, when he got back he asked the girl to release him; and she and her family were furious, and so were his people; but he holds out, and won’t marry her, and won’t give a reason, except that he has ‘formed an unfortunate attachment.’ Did you ever hear anything so peculiar? His aunt, who is quite wild about it, says it must have happened at Wentworth, because he didn’t go anywhere else in America. Do you suppose it could have been the Brant girl? But why ‘unfortunate’ when everybody knows she would have jumped at him?”

  Margaret folded the letter and looked out across the river. It was not the same river, but a mystic current shot with moonlight. The bare willows wove a leafy veil above her head, and beside her she felt the nearness of youth and tempestuous tenderness. It had all happened just here, on this very seat by the river—it had come to her, and passed her by, and she had not held out a hand to detain it….

  Well! Was it not, by that very abstention, made more deeply and ineffaceably hers? She could argue
thus while she had thought the episode, on his side, a mere transient effect of propinquity; but now that she knew it had altered the whole course of his life, now that it took on substance and reality, asserted a separate existence outside of her own troubled consciousness—now it seemed almost cowardly to have missed her share in it.

  She walked home in a dream. Now and then, when she passed an acquaintance, she wondered if the pain and glory were written on her face. But Mrs. Sperry, who stopped her at the corner of Maverick Street to say a word about the next meeting of the Higher Thought Club, seemed to remark no change in her.

  When she reached home Ransom had not yet returned from the office, and she went straight to the library to tidy his writing-table. It was part of her daily duty to bring order out of the chaos of his papers, and of late she had fastened on such small recurring tasks as some one falling over a precipice might snatch at the weak bushes in its clefts.

  When she had sorted the letters she took up some pamphlets and newspapers, glancing over them to see if they were to be kept. Among the papers was a page torn from a London Times of the previous month. Her eye ran down its columns and suddenly a paragraph flamed out.

  “We are requested to state that the marriage arranged between Mr. Guy Dawnish, son of the late Colonel the Hon. Roderick Dawnish, of Malby, Wilts, and Gwendolen, daughter of Samuel Matcher, Esq. of Armingham Towers, Wilts, will not take place.”

  Margaret dropped the paper and sat down, hiding her face against the stained baize of the desk. She remembered the photograph of the tennis-court at Guise—she remembered the handsome girl at whom Guy Dawnish looked up, laughing. A gust of tears shook her, loosening the dry surface of conventional feeling, welling up from unsuspected depths. She was sorry—very sorry, yet so glad—so ineffably, impenitently glad.