Early Short Stories Vol. 2

by Edith Wharton

  “I’m quite of your opinion,” Miss Van Vluyck came briskly to her support; “on condition, that is, that all grossness of language is avoided.”

  “Oh, I’m sure we shall understand without that,” Mrs. Leveret tittered; and Laura Glyde added significantly: “I fancy we can read between the lines,” while Mrs. Ballinger rose to assure herself that the doors were really closed.

  Mrs. Plinth had not yet given her adhesion. “I hardly see,” she began, “what benefit is to be derived from investigating such peculiar customs—”

  But Mrs. Ballinger’s patience had reached the extreme limit of tension. “This at least,” she returned; “that we shall not be placed again in the humiliating position of finding ourselves less up on our own subjects than Fanny Roby!”

  Even to Mrs. Plinth this argument was conclusive. She peered furtively about the room and lowered her commanding tones to ask: “Have you got a copy?”

  “A—a copy?” stammered Mrs. Ballinger. She was aware that the other members were looking at her expectantly, and that this answer was inadequate, so she supported it by asking another question. “A copy of what?”

  Her companions bent their expectant gaze on Mrs. Plinth, who, in turn, appeared less sure of herself than usual. “Why, of—of—the book,” she explained.

  “What book?” snapped Miss Van Vluyck, almost as sharply as Osric Dane.

  Mrs. Ballinger looked at Laura Glyde, whose eyes were interrogatively fixed on Mrs. Leveret. The fact of being deferred to was so new to the latter that it filled her with an insane temerity. “Why, Xingu, of course!” she exclaimed.

  A profound silence followed this direct challenge to the resources of Mrs. Ballinger’s library, and the latter, after glancing nervously toward the Books of the Day, returned in a deprecating voice: “It’s not a thing one cares to leave about.”

  “I should think NOT!” exclaimed Mrs. Plinth.

  “It IS a book, then?” said Miss Van Vluyck.

  This again threw the company into disarray, and Mrs. Ballinger, with an impatient sigh, rejoined: “Why—there IS a book—naturally…”

  “Then why did Miss Glyde call it a religion?”

  Laura Glyde started up. “A religion? I never—”

  “Yes, you did,” Miss Van Vluyck insisted; “you spoke of rites; and Mrs. Plinth said it was a custom.”

  Miss Glyde was evidently making a desperate effort to reinforce her statement; but accuracy of detail was not her strongest point. At length she began in a deep murmur: “Surely they used to do something of the kind at the Eleusinian mysteries—”

  “Oh—” said Miss Van Vluyck, on the verge of disapproval; and Mrs. Plinth protested: “I understood there was to be no indelicacy!”

  Mrs. Ballinger could not control her irritation. “Really, it is too bad that we should not be able to talk the matter over quietly among ourselves. Personally, I think that if one goes into Xingu at all—”

  “Oh, so do I!” cried Miss Glyde.

  “And I don’t see how one can avoid doing so, if one wishes to keep up with the Thought of the Day—”

  Mrs. Leveret uttered an exclamation of relief. “There—that’s it!” she interposed.

  “What’s it?” the President curtly took her up.

  “Why—it’s a—a Thought: I mean a philosophy.”

  This seemed to bring a certain relief to Mrs. Ballinger and Laura Glyde, but Miss Van Vluyck said dogmatically: “Excuse me if I tell you that you’re all mistaken. Xingu happens to be a language.”

  “A language!” the Lunch Club cried.

  “Certainly. Don’t you remember Fanny Roby’s saying that there were several branches, and that some were hard to trace? What could that apply to but dialects?”

  Mrs. Ballinger could no longer restrain a contemptuous laugh. “Really, if the Lunch Club has reached such a pass that it has to go to Fanny Roby for instruction on a subject like Xingu, it had almost better cease to exist!”

  “It’s really her fault for not being clearer,” Laura Glyde put in.

  “Oh, clearness and Fanny Roby!” Mrs. Ballinger shrugged. “I daresay we shall find she was mistaken on almost every point.”

  “Why not look it up?” said Mrs. Plinth.

  As a rule this recurrent suggestion of Mrs. Plinth’s was ignored in the heat of discussion, and only resorted to afterward in the privacy of each member’s home. But on the present occasion the desire to ascribe their own confusion of thought to the vague and contradictory nature of Mrs. Roby’s statements caused the members of the Lunch Club to utter a collective demand for a book of reference.

  At this point the production of her treasured volume gave Mrs. Leveret, for a moment, the unusual experience of occupying the centre front; but she was not able to hold it long, for Appropriate Allusions contained no mention of Xingu.

  “Oh, that’s not the kind of thing we want!” exclaimed Miss Van Vluyck. She cast a disparaging glance over Mrs. Ballinger’s assortment of literature, and added impatiently: “Haven’t you any useful books?”

  “Of course I have,” replied Mrs. Ballinger indignantly; “but I keep them in my husband’s dressing-room.”

  From this region, after some difficulty and delay, the parlour-maid produced the W-Z volume of an Encyclopaedia and, in deference to the fact that the demand for it had come from Miss Van Vluyck, laid the ponderous tome before her.

  There was a moment of painful suspense while Miss Van Vluyck rubbed her spectacles, adjusted them, and turned to Z; and a murmur of surprise when she said: “It isn’t here.”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Plinth, “it’s not fit to be put in a book of reference.”

  “Oh, nonsense!” exclaimed Mrs. Ballinger. “Try X.”

  Miss Van Vluyck turned back through the volume, peering short-sightedly up and down the pages, till she came to a stop and remained motionless, like a dog on a point.

  “Well, have you found it?” Mrs. Ballinger enquired, after a considerable delay.

  “Yes. I’ve found it,” said Miss Van Vluyck in a queer voice.

  Mrs. Plinth hastily interposed: “I beg you won’t read it aloud if there’s anything offensive.”

  Miss Van Vluyck, without answering, continued her silent scrutiny.

  “Well, what IS it?” exclaimed Laura Glyde excitedly.

  “DO tell us!” urged Mrs. Leveret, feeling that she would have something awful to tell her sister.

  Miss Van Vluyck pushed the volume aside and turned slowly toward the expectant group.

  “It’s a river.”

  “A RIVER?”

  “Yes: in Brazil. Isn’t that where she’s been living?”

  “Who? Fanny Roby? Oh, but you must be mistaken. You’ve been reading the wrong thing,” Mrs. Ballinger exclaimed, leaning over her to seize the volume.

  “It’s the only XINGU in the Encyclopaedia; and she HAS been living in Brazil,” Miss Van Vluyck persisted.

  “Yes: her brother has a consulship there,” Mrs. Leveret eagerly interposed.

  “But it’s too ridiculous! I—we—why we ALL remember studying Xingu last year—or the year before last,” Mrs. Ballinger stammered.

  “I thought I did when YOU said so,” Laura Glyde avowed.

  “I said so?” cried Mrs. Ballinger.

  “Yes. You said it had crowded everything else out of your mind.”

  “Well, YOU said it had changed your whole life!”

  “For that matter, Miss Van Vluyck said she had never grudged the time she’d given it.”

  Mrs. Plinth interposed: “I made it clear that I knew nothing whatever of the original.”

  Mrs. Ballinger broke off the dispute with a groan. “Oh, what does it all matter if she’s been making fools of us? I believe Miss Van Vluyck’s right—she was talking of the river all the while!”

  “How could she? It’s too preposterous,” Miss Glyde exclaimed.

  “Listen.” Miss Van Vluyck had repossessed herself of the Encyclopaedia, and restored her spectacles to
a nose reddened by excitement. “‘The Xingu, one of the principal rivers of Brazil, rises on the plateau of Mato Grosso, and flows in a northerly direction for a length of no less than one thousand one hundred and eighteen miles, entering the Amazon near the mouth of the latter river. The upper course of the Xingu is auriferous and fed by numerous branches. Its source was first discovered in 1884 by the German explorer von den Steinen, after a difficult and dangerous expedition through a region inhabited by tribes still in the Stone Age of culture.’”

  The ladies received this communication in a state of stupefied silence from which Mrs. Leveret was the first to rally. “She certainly DID speak of its having branches.”

  The word seemed to snap the last thread of their incredulity. “And of its great length,” gasped Mrs. Ballinger.

  “She said it was awfully deep, and you couldn’t skip—you just had to wade through,” Miss Glyde subjoined.

  The idea worked its way more slowly through Mrs. Plinth’s compact resistances. “How could there be anything improper about a river?” she inquired.

  “Improper?”

  “Why, what she said about the source—that it was corrupt?”

  “Not corrupt, but hard to get at,” Laura Glyde corrected. “Some one who’d been there had told her so. I daresay it was the explorer himself—doesn’t it say the expedition was dangerous?”

  “‘Difficult and dangerous,’” read Miss Van Vluyck.

  Mrs. Ballinger pressed her hands to her throbbing temples. “There’s nothing she said that wouldn’t apply to a river—to this river!” She swung about excitedly to the other members. “Why, do you remember her telling us that she hadn’t read ‘The Supreme Instant’ because she’d taken it on a boating party while she was staying with her brother, and some one had ‘shied’ it overboard—‘shied’ of course was her own expression?”

  The ladies breathlessly signified that the expression had not escaped them.

  “Well—and then didn’t she tell Osric Dane that one of her books was simply saturated with Xingu? Of course it was, if some of Mrs. Roby’s rowdy friends had thrown it into the river!”

  This surprising reconstruction of the scene in which they had just participated left the members of the Lunch Club inarticulate. At length Mrs. Plinth, after visibly labouring with the problem, said in a heavy tone: “Osric Dane was taken in too.”

  Mrs. Leveret took courage at this. “Perhaps that’s what Mrs. Roby did it for. She said Osric Dane was a brute, and she may have wanted to give her a lesson.”

  Miss Van Vluyck frowned. “It was hardly worth while to do it at our expense.”

  “At least,” said Miss Glyde with a touch of bitterness, “she succeeded in interesting her, which was more than we did.”

  “What chance had we?” rejoined Mrs. Ballinger. “Mrs. Roby monopolised her from the first. And THAT, I’ve no doubt, was her purpose—to give Osric Dane a false impression of her own standing in the Club. She would hesitate at nothing to attract attention: we all know how she took in poor Professor Foreland.”

  “She actually makes him give bridge-teas every Thursday,” Mrs. Leveret piped up.

  Laura Glyde struck her hands together. “Why, this is Thursday, and it’s THERE she’s gone, of course; and taken Osric with her!”

  “And they’re shrieking over us at this moment,” said Mrs. Ballinger between her teeth.

  This possibility seemed too preposterous to be admitted. “She would hardly dare,” said Miss Van Vluyck, “confess the imposture to Osric Dane.”

  “I’m not so sure: I thought I saw her make a sign as she left. If she hadn’t made a sign, why should Osric Dane have rushed out after her?”

  “Well, you know, we’d all been telling her how wonderful Xingu was, and she said she wanted to find out more about it,” Mrs. Leveret said, with a tardy impulse of justice to the absent.

  This reminder, far from mitigating the wrath of the other members, gave it a stronger impetus.

  “Yes—and that’s exactly what they’re both laughing over now,” said Laura Glyde ironically.

  Mrs. Plinth stood up and gathered her expensive furs about her monumental form. “I have no wish to criticise,” she said; “but unless the Lunch Club can protect its members against the recurrence of such—such unbecoming scenes, I for one—”

  “Oh, so do I!” agreed Miss Glyde, rising also.

  Miss Van Vluyck closed the Encyclopaedia and proceeded to button herself into her jacket. “My time is really too valuable—” she began.

  “I fancy we are all of one mind,” said Mrs. Ballinger, looking searchingly at Mrs. Leveret, who looked at the others.

  “I always deprecate anything like a scandal—” Mrs. Plinth continued.

  “She has been the cause of one to-day!” exclaimed Miss Glyde.

  Mrs. Leveret moaned: “I don’t see how she COULD!” and Miss Van Vluyck said, picking up her note-book: “Some women stop at nothing.”

  “—but if,” Mrs. Plinth took up her argument impressively, “anything of the kind had happened in MY house” (it never would have, her tone implied), “I should have felt that I owed it to myself either to ask for Mrs. Roby’s resignation—or to offer mine.”

  “Oh, Mrs. Plinth—” gasped the Lunch Club.

  “Fortunately for me,” Mrs. Plinth continued with an awful magnanimity, “the matter was taken out of my hands by our President’s decision that the right to entertain distinguished guests was a privilege vested in her office; and I think the other members will agree that, as she was alone in this opinion, she ought to be alone in deciding on the best way of effacing its—its really deplorable consequences.”

  A deep silence followed this unexpected outbreak of Mrs. Plinth’s long-stored resentment.

  “I don’t see why I should be expected to ask her to resign—” Mrs. Ballinger at length began; but Laura Glyde turned back to remind her: “You know she made you say that you’d got on swimmingly in Xingu.”

  An ill-timed giggle escaped from Mrs. Leveret, and Mrs. Ballinger energetically continued “—but you needn’t think for a moment that I’m afraid to!”

  The door of the drawing-room closed on the retreating backs of the Lunch Club, and the President of that distinguished association, seating herself at her writing-table, and pushing away a copy of “The Wings of Death” to make room for her elbow, drew forth a sheet of the club’s note-paper, on which she began to write: “My dear Mrs. Roby—”

  The End of Xingu

  THE VERDICT

  June 1908

  I had always thought Jack Gisburn rather a cheap genius—though a good fellow enough—so it was no great surprise to me to hear that, in the height of his glory, he had dropped his painting, married a rich widow, and established himself in a villa on the Riviera. (Though I rather thought it would have been Rome or Florence.)

  “The height of his glory”—that was what the women called it. I can hear Mrs. Gideon Thwing—his last Chicago sitter—deploring his unaccountable abdication. “Of course it’s going to send the value of my picture ‘way up; but I don’t think of that, Mr. Rickham—the loss to Arrt is all I think of.” The word, on Mrs. Thwing’s lips, multiplied its RS as though they were reflected in an endless vista of mirrors. And it was not only the Mrs. Thwings who mourned. Had not the exquisite Hermia Croft, at the last Grafton Gallery show, stopped me before Gisburn’s “Moon-dancers” to say, with tears in her eyes: “We shall not look upon its like again”?

  Well!—even through the prism of Hermia’s tears I felt able to face the fact with equanimity. Poor Jack Gisburn! The women had made him—it was fitting that they should mourn him. Among his own sex fewer regrets were heard, and in his own trade hardly a murmur. Professional jealousy? Perhaps. If it were, the honour of the craft was vindicated by little Claude Nutley, who, in all good faith, brought out in the Burlington a very handsome “obituary” on Jack—one of those showy articles stocked with random technicalities that I have heard (I won’t say by whom) compared
to Gisburn’s painting. And so—his resolve being apparently irrevocable—the discussion gradually died out, and, as Mrs. Thwing had predicted, the price of “Gisburns” went up.

  It was not till three years later that, in the course of a few weeks’ idling on the Riviera, it suddenly occurred to me to wonder why Gisburn had given up his painting. On reflection, it really was a tempting problem. To accuse his wife would have been too easy—his fair sitters had been denied the solace of saying that Mrs. Gisburn had “dragged him down.” For Mrs. Gisburn—as such—had not existed till nearly a year after Jack’s resolve had been taken. It might be that he had married her—since he liked his ease—because he didn’t want to go on painting; but it would have been hard to prove that he had given up his painting because he had married her.

  Of course, if she had not dragged him down, she had equally, as Miss Croft contended, failed to “lift him up”—she had not led him back to the easel. To put the brush into his hand again—what a vocation for a wife! But Mrs. Gisburn appeared to have disdained it—and I felt it might be interesting to find out why.

  The desultory life of the Riviera lends itself to such purely academic speculations; and having, on my way to Monte Carlo, caught a glimpse of Jack’s balustraded terraces between the pines, I had myself borne thither the next day.

  I found the couple at tea beneath their palm-trees; and Mrs. Gisburn’s welcome was so genial that, in the ensuing weeks, I claimed it frequently. It was not that my hostess was “interesting”: on that point I could have given Miss Croft the fullest reassurance. It was just because she was NOT interesting—if I may be pardoned the bull—that I found her so. For Jack, all his life, had been surrounded by interesting women: they had fostered his art, it had been reared in the hothouse of their adulation. And it was therefore instructive to note what effect the “deadening atmosphere of mediocrity” (I quote Miss Croft) was having on him.