Roman Fever and Other Stories

by Edith Wharton

  “Oh,” said the nurse incredulously. (“Old fox,” she thought, “I wonder why she’s always pretended she’d forgotten it.”) For Miss Cress did not know that the age of miracles is not yet past.

  Joyous, trembling, her cheeks wet with grateful tears, the little old woman was on her feet again, clutching to her breast the diamond stars, the necklace of solitaires, the tiara, the earrings. One by one she spread them out on the velvet-lined tray in which they always used to be carried from the safe to the dressing-room; then, with rambling fingers, she managed to lock the safe again, and put the keys in the drawer where they belonged, while Miss Cress continued to stare at her in amazement. “I don’t believe the old witch is as shaky as she makes out,” was her reflection as Lavinia passed her, bearing the jewels to the dressing-room where Mrs. Jaspar, lost in pleasant memories, was still computing: “The Italian Ambassador, the Bishop, the Torrington Blighs, the Mitchell Magraws, the Fred Amesworths . . .”

  Mrs. Jaspar was allowed to go down to the drawing-room alone on dinner-party evenings because it would have mortified her too much to receive her guests with a maid or a nurse at her elbow; but Miss Cress and Lavinia always leaned over the stair-rail to watch her descent, and make sure it was accomplished in safety.

  “She do look lovely yet, when all her diamonds is on,” Lavinia sighed, her purblind eyes bedewed with memories, as the bedizened wig and purple velvet disappeared at the last bend of the stairs. Miss Cress, with a shrug, turned back to the fire and picked up her knitting, while Lavinia set about the slow ritual of tidying up her mistress’s room. From below they heard the sound of George’s stentorian monologue: “Mr. and Mrs. Torrington Bligh, Mr. and Mrs. Mitchell Magraw . . . Mr. Ladew, Miss Laura Ladew . . .”

  IV.

  ANSON Warley, who had always prided himself on his equable temper, was conscious of being on edge that evening. But it was an irritability which did not frighten him (in spite of what those doctors always said about the importance of keeping calm) because he knew it was due merely to the unusual lucidity of his mind. He was in fact feeling uncommonly well, his brain clear and all his perceptions so alert that he could positively hear the thoughts passing through his man-servant’s mind on the other side of the door, as Filmore grudgingly laid out the evening clothes.

  Smiling at the man’s obstinacy, he thought: “I shall have to tell them tonight that Filmore thinks I’m no longer fit to go into society.” It was always pleasant to hear the incredulous laugh with which his younger friends received any allusion to his supposed senility. “What, you? Well, that’s a good one!” And he thought it was, himself.

  And then, the moment he was in his bedroom, dressing, the sight of Filmore made him lose his temper again. “No; not those studs, confound it. The black onyx ones—haven’t I told you a hundred times? Lost them, I suppose? Sent them to the wash again in a soiled shirt? That it?” He laughed nervously, and sitting down before his dressing-table began to brush back his hair with short angry strokes.

  “Above all,” he shouted out suddenly, “don’t stand there staring at me as if you were watching to see exactly at what minute to telephone for the undertaker!”

  “The under—? Oh, sir!” gasped Filmore.

  “The—the—damn it, are you deaf too? Who said undertaker? I said taxi; can’t you hear what I say?”

  “You want me to call a taxi, sir?”

  “No; I don’t. I’ve already told you so. I’m going to walk.” Warley straightened his tie, rose and held out his arms toward his dresscoat.

  “It’s bitter cold, sir; better let me call a taxi all the same.”

  Warley gave a short laugh. “Out with it, now! What you’d really like to suggest is that I should telephone to say I can’t dine out. You’d scramble me some eggs instead eh?”

  “I wish you would stay in, sir. There’s eggs in the house.”

  “My overcoat,” snapped Warley.

  “Or else let me call a taxi; now do, sir.”

  Warley slipped his arms into his overcoat, tapped his chest to see if his watch (the thin evening watch) and his note-case were in their proper pockets, turned back to put a dash of lavender on his handkerchief, and walked with stiff quick steps toward the front door of his flat.

  Filmore, abashed, preceded him to ring for the lift; and then, as it quivered upward through the long shaft, said again: “It’s a bitter cold night, sir; and you’ve had a good deal of exercise today.”

  Warley levelled a contemptuous glance at him. “Daresay that’s why I’m feeling so fit,” he retorted as he entered the lift.

  It was bitter cold; the icy air hit him in the chest when he stepped out of the overheated building, and he halted on the doorstep and took a long breath. “Filmore’s missed his vocation; ought to be nurse to a paralytic,” he thought. “He’d love to have to wheel me about in a chair.”

  After the first shock of the biting air he began to find it exhilarating, and walked along at a good pace, dragging one leg ever so little after the other. (The masseur had promised him that he’d soon be rid of that stiffness.) Yes—decidedly a fellow like himself ought to have a younger valet; a more cheerful one, anyhow. He felt like a young’un himself this evening; as he turned into Fifth Avenue he rather wished he could meet some one he knew, some man who’d say afterward at his club: “Warley? Why, I saw him sprinting up Fifth Avenue the other night like a two-year-old; that night it was four or five below . . .” He needed a good counter-irritant for Filmore’s gloom. “Always have young people about you,” he thought as he walked along; and at the words his mind turned to Elfrida Flight, next to whom he would soon be sitting in a warm pleasantly lit dining-room—where?

  It came as abruptly as that: the gap in his memory. He pulled up at it as if his advance had been checked by a chasm in the pavement at his feet. Where the dickens was he going to dine? And with whom was he going to dine? God! But things didn’t happen in that way; a sound strong man didn’t suddenly have to stop in the middle of the street and ask himself where he was going to dine . . .

  “Perfect in mind, body and understanding.” The old legal phrase bobbed up inconsequently into his thoughts. Less than two minutes ago he had answered in every particular to that description; what was he now? He put his hand to his forehead, which was bursting; then he lifted his hat and let the cold air blow for a while on his overheated temples. It was queer, how hot he’d got, walking. Fact was, he’d been sprinting along at a damned good pace. In future he must try to remember not to hurry . . . Hang it—one more thing to remember! . . . Well, but what was all the fuss about? Of course, as people got older their memories were subject to these momentary lapses; he’d noticed it often enough among his contemporaries. And, brisk and alert though he still was, it wouldn’t do to imagine himself totally exempt from human ills . . .

  Where was it he was dining? Why, somewhere farther up Fifth Avenue; he was perfectly sure of that. With that lovely . . . that lovely . . . No; better not make any effort for the moment. Just keep calm, and stroll slowly along. When he came to the right street corner of course he’d spot it; and then everything would be perfectly clear again. He walked on, more deliberately, trying to empty his mind of all thoughts. “Above all,” he said to himself, “don’t worry.”

  He tried to beguile his nervousness by thinking of amusing things. “Decline the boredom—” He thought he might get off that joke tonight. “Mrs. Jaspar requests the pleasure—Mr. Warley declines the boredom.” Not so bad, really; and he had an idea he’d never told it to the people . . . what in hell was their name? . . . the people he was on his way to dine with . . . Mrs. Jaspar requests the pleasure. Poor old Mrs. Jaspar; again it occurred to him that he hadn’t always been very civil to her in old times. When everybody’s running after a fellow it’s pardonable now and then to chuck a boring dinner at the last minute; but all the same as one grew older one understood better how an unintentional slight of that sort might cause offense, cause even pain. And he hated to cause people pain .
. .

  He thought perhaps he’d better call on Mrs. Jaspar some afternoon. She’d be surprised! Or ring her up, poor old girl, and propose himself, just informally, for dinner. One dull evening wouldn’t kill him—and how pleased she’d be! Yes—he thought decidedly . . . When he got to be her age, he could imagine how much he’d like it if somebody still in the running should ring him up unexpectedly and say—

  He stopped, and looked up, slowly, wonderingly, at the wide illuminated façade of the house he was approaching. Queer coincidence—it was the Jaspar house. And all lit up; for a dinner evidently. And that was queerer yet; almost uncanny; for here he was, in front of the door, as the clock struck a quarter past eight; and of course—he remembered it quite clearly now—it was just here, it was with Mrs. Jaspar, that he was dining . . . Those little lapses of memory never lasted more than a second or two. How right he’d been not to let himself worry. He pressed his hand on the door-bell.

  “God,” he thought, is the double doors swung open, “but it’s good to get in out of the cold.”

  V.

  IN that hushed sonorous house the sound of the door-bell was as loud to the two women upstairs as if it had been rung in the next room.

  Miss Cress raised her head in surprise, and Lavinia dropped Mrs. Jaspar’s other false set (the more comfortable one) with a clatter on the marble wash-stand. She stumbled across the dressing-room, and hastened out to the landing. With Munson absent, there was no knowing how George might muddle things . . .

  Miss Cress joined her. “Who is it?” she whispered excitedly. Below, they heard the sound of a hat and a walking stick being laid down on the big marble-topped table in the hall, and then George’s stentorian drone: “Mr. Anson Warley.”

  “It is—it is! I can see him—a gentleman in evening clothes,” Miss Cress whispered, hanging over the stair-rail.

  “Good gracious—mercy me! And Munson not here! Oh, whatever, whatever shall we do?” Lavinia was trembling so violently that she had to clutch the stair-rail to prevent herself from falling. Miss Cress thought, with her cold lucidity: “She’s a good deal sicker than the old woman.”

  “What shall we do, Miss Cress? That fool of a George—he’s showing him in! Who could have thought it?” Miss Cress knew the images that were whirling through Lavinia’s brain: the vision of Mrs. Jaspar’s having another stroke at the sight of this mysterious intruder, of Mr. Anson Warley’s seeing her there, in her impotence and her abasement, of the family’s being summoned, and rushing in to exclaim, to question, to be horrified and furious—and all because poor old Munson’s memory was going, like his mistress’s, like Lavinia’s, and because he had forgotten that it was one of the dinner nights. Oh, misery! . . . The tears were running down Lavinia’s cheeks, and Miss Cress knew she was thinking: “If the daughters send him off—and they will—where’s he going to, old and deaf as he is, and all his people dead? Oh, if only he can hold on till she dies, and get his pension . . .”

  Lavinia recovered herself with one of her supreme efforts. “Miss Cress, we must go down at once, at once! Something dreadful’s going to happen . . .” She began to totter toward the little velvet-lined lift in the corner of the landing.

  Miss Cress took pity on her. “Come along,” she said. “But nothing dreadful’s going to happen. You’ll see.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miss Cress. But the shock—the awful shock to her—of seeing that strange gentleman walk in.”

  “Not a bit of it.” Miss Cress laughed as she stepped into the lift. “He’s not a stranger. She’s expecting him.”

  “Expecting him? Expecting Mr. Warley?”

  “Sure she is. She told me so just now. She says she invited him yesterday.”

  “But, Miss Cress, what are you thinking of? Invite him—how? When you know she can’t write nor telephone?”

  “Well, she says she saw him; she saw him last night at a dance.”

  “Oh, God,” murmured Lavinia, covering her eyes with her hands.

  “At a dance at the Fred Amesworths’—that’s what she said,” Miss Cress pursued, feeling the same little shiver run down her back as when Mrs. Jaspar had made the statement to her.

  “The Amesworths—oh, not the Amesworths?” Lavinia echoed, shivering too. She dropped her hands from her face, and followed Miss Cress out of the lift. Her expression had become less anguished, and the nurse wondered why. In reality, she was thinking, in a sort of dreary beatitude: “But if she’s suddenly got as much worse as this, she’ll go before me, after all, my poor lady, and I’ll be able to see to it that she’s properly laid out and dressed, and nobody but Lavinia’s hands’ll touch her.”

  “You’ll see—if she was expecting him, as she says, it won’t give her a shock, anyhow. Only, how did he know?” Miss Cress whispered, with an acuter renewal of her shiver. She followed Lavinia with muffled steps down the passage to the pantry, and from there the two women stole into the dining-room, and placed themselves noiselessly at its farther end, behind the tall Coromandel screen through the cracks of which they could peep into the empty room.

  The long table was set, as Mrs. Jaspar always insisted that it should be on these occasions; but old Munson not having returned, the gold plate (which his mistress also insisted on) had not been got out, and all down the table, as Lavinia saw with horror, George had laid the coarse blue and white plates from the servants’ hall. The electric wall-lights were on, and the candles lit in the branching Sèvres candelabra—so much at least had been done. But the flowers in the great central dish of Rose Dubarry porcelain, and in the smaller dishes which accompanied it—the flowers, oh, shame, had been forgotten! They were no longer real flowers; the family had long since suppressed that expense; and no wonder, for Mrs. Jaspar always insisted on orchids. But Grace, the youngest daughter who was the kindest, had hit on the clever device of arranging three beautiful clusters of artificial orchids and maiden hair, which had only to be lifted from their shelf in the pantry and set in the dishes—only, of course, that imbecile footman had forgotten, or had not known where to find them. And, oh, horror, realizing his oversight too late, no doubt to appeal to Lavinia, he had taken some old newspapers and bunched them up into something that he probably thought resembled a bouquet, and crammed one into each of the priceless Rose Dubarry dishes.

  Lavinia clutched at Miss Cress’s arm. “Oh, look—look what he’s done; I shall die of the shame of it . . . Oh, Miss, hadn’t we better slip around to the drawing-room and try to coax my poor lady upstairs again, afore she ever notices?”

  Miss Cress, peering through the crack of the screen, could hardly suppress a giggle. For at that moment the double doors of the dining-room were thrown open, and George, shuffling about in a baggy livery inherited from a long-departed predecessor of more commanding build, bawled out in his loud singsong: “Dinner is served, madam.”

  “Oh, it’s too late,” moaned Lavinia. Miss Cress signed to her to keep silent, and the two watchers glued their eyes to their respective cracks of the screen.

  What they saw, far off down the vista of empty drawing-rooms, and after an interval during which (as Lavinia knew) the imaginary guests were supposed to file in and take their seats, was the entrance, at the end of the ghostly cortège, of a very old woman, still tall and towering on the arm of a man somewhat smaller than herself, with a fixed smile on a darkly pink face, and a slim erect figure clad in perfect evening clothes, who advanced with short measured steps, profiting (Miss Cress noticed) by the support of the arm he was supposed to sustain. “Well—I never!” was the nurse’s inward comment.

  The couple continued to advance, with rigid smiles and eyes staring straight ahead. Neither turned to the other, neither spoke. All their attention was concentrated on the immense, the almost unachievable effort of reaching that point, halfway down the long dinner table, opposite the big Dubarry dish, where George was drawing back a gilt arm-chair for Mrs. Jaspar. At last they reached it, and Mrs. Jaspar seated herself, and waved a stony hand to Mr. Warley. �
��On my right.” He gave a little bow, like the bend of a jointed doll, and with infinite precaution let himself down into his chair. Beads of perspiration were standing on his forehead, and Miss Cress saw him draw out his handkerchief and wipe them stealthily away. He then turned his head somewhat stiffly toward his hostess.

  “Beautiful flowers,” he said, with great precision and perfect gravity, waving his hand toward the bunched-up newspaper in the bowl of Sèvres.

  Mrs. Jaspar received the tribute with complacency. “So glad . . . orchards . . . From High Lawn . . . every morning,” she simpered.

  “Mar-vellous,” Mr. Warley completed.

  “I always say to the Bishop . . .” Mrs. Jaspar continued.

  “Ha—of course,” Mr. Warley warmly assented.

  “Not that I don’t think . . .”

  “Ha—rather!”

  George had reappeared from the pantry with a blue crockery dish of mashed potatoes. This he handed in turn to one after another of the imaginary guests, and finally presented to Mrs. Jaspar and her right-hand neighbour.

  They both helped themselves cautiously, and Mrs. Jaspar addressed an arch smile to Mr. Warley. “ ’Nother month—no more oysters.”

  “Ha—no more!”

  George, with a bottle of Apollinaris wrapped in a napkin, was saying to each guest in turn: “Perrier-Jouet, ’ninety-five.” (He had picked that up, thought Miss Cress, from hearing old Munson repeat it so often.)

  “Hang it—well, then just a sip,” murmured Mr. Warley.

  “Old times,” bantered Mrs. Jaspar; and the two turned to each other and bowed their heads and touched glasses.

  “I often tell Mrs. Amesworth . . .” Mrs. Jaspar continued, bending to an imaginary presence across the table.

  “Ha—ha!” Mr. Warley approved.

  George reappeared and slowly encircled the table with a dish of spinach. After the spinach the Apollinaris also went the rounds again, announced successively as Château Lafite, ’seventy-four, and “the old Newbold Madeira.” Each time that George approached his glass, Mr. Warley made a feint of lifting a defensive hand, and then smiled and yielded. “Might as well—hanged for a sheep . . .” he remarked gaily; and Mrs. Jaspar giggled.