The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (story read aloud TXT) 📕

it had come sooner, and spared him a

certain waste of emotion. As he went out into the

wintry night, New York again became vast and imminent,

and May Welland the loveliest woman in it. He

turned into his florist’s to send her the daily box of

lilies-of-the-valley which, to his confusion, he found he

had forgotten that morning.

 

As he wrote a word on his card and waited for an

envelope he glanced about the embowered shop, and

his eye lit on a cluster of yellow roses. He had never

seen any as sun-golden before, and his first impulse

was to send them to May instead of the lilies. But they

did not look like her—there was something too rich,

too strong, in their fiery beauty. In a sudden revulsion

of mood, and almost without knowing what he did, he

signed to the florist to lay the roses in another long

box, and slipped his card into a second envelope, on

which he wrote the name of the Countess Olenska;

then, just as he was turning away, he drew the card out

again, and left the empty envelope on the box.

 

“They’ll go at once?” he enquired, pointing to the

roses.

 

The florist assured him that they would.

 

X.

 

The next day he persuaded May to escape for a walk

in the Park after luncheon. As was the custom in

old-fashioned Episcopalian New York, she usually

accompanied her parents to church on Sunday afternoons;

but Mrs. Welland condoned her truancy, having that

very morning won her over to the necessity of a long

engagement, with time to prepare a hand-embroidered

trousseau containing the proper number of dozens.

 

The day was delectable. The bare vaulting of trees

along the Mall was ceiled with lapis lazuli, and arched

above snow that shone like splintered crystals. It was

the weather to call out May’s radiance, and she burned

like a young maple in the frost. Archer was proud of

the glances turned on her, and the simple joy of

possessorship cleared away his underlying perplexities.

 

“It’s so delicious—waking every morning to smell

lilies-of-the-valley in one’s room!” she said.

 

“Yesterday they came late. I hadn’t time in the

morning—”

 

“But your remembering each day to send them makes

me love them so much more than if you’d given a

standing order, and they came every morning on the

minute, like one’s music-teacher—as I know Gertrude

Lefferts’s did, for instance, when she and Lawrence

were engaged.”

 

“Ah—they would!” laughed Archer, amused at her

keenness. He looked sideways at her fruit-like cheek

and felt rich and secure enough to add: “When I sent

your lilies yesterday afternoon I saw some rather

gorgeous yellow roses and packed them off to Madame

Olenska. Was that right?”

 

“How dear of you! Anything of that kind delights

her. It’s odd she didn’t mention it: she lunched with us

today, and spoke of Mr. Beaufort’s having sent her

wonderful orchids, and cousin Henry van der Luyden a

whole hamper of carnations from Skuytercliff. She seems

so surprised to receive flowers. Don’t people send them

in Europe? She thinks it such a pretty custom.”

 

“Oh, well, no wonder mine were overshadowed by

Beaufort’s,” said Archer irritably. Then he remembered

that he had not put a card with the roses, and

was vexed at having spoken of them. He wanted to

say: “I called on your cousin yesterday,” but hesitated.

If Madame Olenska had not spoken of his visit it might

seem awkward that he should. Yet not to do so gave

the affair an air of mystery that he disliked. To shake

off the question he began to talk of their own plans,

their future, and Mrs. Welland’s insistence on a long

engagement.

 

“If you call it long! Isabel Chivers and Reggie were

engaged for two years: Grace and Thorley for nearly a

year and a half. Why aren’t we very well off as we

are?”

 

It was the traditional maidenly interrogation, and he

felt ashamed of himself for finding it singularly childish.

No doubt she simply echoed what was said for her;

but she was nearing her twenty-second birthday, and

he wondered at what age “nice” women began to

speak for themselves.

 

“Never, if we won’t let them, I suppose,” he mused,

and recalled his mad outburst to Mr. Sillerton Jackson:

“Women ought to be as free as we are—”

 

It would presently be his task to take the bandage

from this young woman’s eyes, and bid her look forth

on the world. But how many generations of the women

who had gone to her making had descended bandaged

to the family vault? He shivered a little, remembering

some of the new ideas in his scientific books, and the

much-cited instance of the Kentucky cave-fish, which

had ceased to develop eyes because they had no use for

them. What if, when he had bidden May Welland to

open hers, they could only look out blankly at blankness?

 

“We might be much better off. We might be

altogether together—we might travel.”

 

Her face lit up. “That would be lovely,” she owned:

she would love to travel. But her mother would not

understand their wanting to do things so differently.

 

“As if the mere `differently’ didn’t account for it!”

the wooer insisted.

 

“Newland! You’re so original!” she exulted.

 

His heart sank, for he saw that he was saying all the

things that young men in the same situation were

expected to say, and that she was making the answers

that instinct and tradition taught her to make—even to

the point of calling him original.

 

“Original! We’re all as like each other as those dolls

cut out of the same folded paper. We’re like patterns

stencilled on a wall. Can’t you and I strike out for

ourselves, May?”

 

He had stopped and faced her in the excitement of

their discussion, and her eyes rested on him with a

bright unclouded admiration.

 

“Mercy—shall we elope?” she laughed.

 

“If you would—”

 

“You DO love me, Newland! I’m so happy.”

 

“But then—why not be happier?”

 

“We can’t behave like people in novels, though, can

we?”

 

“Why not—why not—why not?”

 

She looked a little bored by his insistence. She knew

very well that they couldn’t, but it was troublesome to

have to produce a reason. “I’m not clever enough to

argue with you. But that kind of thing is rather—vulgar,

isn’t it?” she suggested, relieved to have hit on a word

that would assuredly extinguish the whole subject.

 

“Are you so much afraid, then, of being vulgar?”

 

She was evidently staggered by this. “Of course I

should hate it—so would you,” she rejoined, a trifle

irritably.

 

He stood silent, beating his stick nervously against

his boot-top; and feeling that she had indeed found the

right way of closing the discussion, she went on light-heartedly: “Oh, did I tell you that I showed Ellen my

ring? She thinks it the most beautiful setting she ever

saw. There’s nothing like it in the rue de la Paix, she

said. I do love you, Newland, for being so artistic!”

 

The next afternoon, as Archer, before dinner, sat

smoking sullenly in his study, Janey wandered in on

him. He had failed to stop at his club on the way up

from the office where he exercised the profession of the

law in the leisurely manner common to well-to-do New

Yorkers of his class. He was out of spirits and slightly

out of temper, and a haunting horror of doing the same

thing every day at the same hour besieged his brain.

 

“Sameness—sameness!” he muttered, the word

running through his head like a persecuting tune as he saw

the familiar tall-hatted figures lounging behind the plate-glass; and because he usually dropped in at the club at

that hour he had gone home instead. He knew not only

what they were likely to be talking about, but the part

each one would take in the discussion. The Duke of

course would be their principal theme; though the

appearance in Fifth Avenue of a golden-haired lady in a

small canary-coloured brougham with a pair of black

cobs (for which Beaufort was generally thought

responsible) would also doubtless be thoroughly gone

into. Such “women” (as they were called) were few in

New York, those driving their own carriages still fewer,

and the appearance of Miss Fanny Ring in Fifth Avenue

at the fashionable hour had profoundly agitated

society. Only the day before, her carriage had passed

Mrs. Lovell Mingott’s, and the latter had instantly rung

the little bell at her elbow and ordered the coachman to

drive her home. “What if it had happened to Mrs. van

der Luyden?” people asked each other with a shudder.

Archer could hear Lawrence Lefferts, at that very hour,

holding forth on the disintegration of society.

 

He raised his head irritably when his sister Janey

entered, and then quickly bent over his book (Swinburne’s

“Chastelard”—just out) as if he had not seen

her. She glanced at the writing-table heaped with books,

opened a volume of the “Contes Drolatiques,” made

a wry face over the archaic French, and sighed: “What

learned things you read!”

 

“Well—?” he asked, as she hovered Cassandra-like

before him.

 

“Mother’s very angry.”

 

“Angry? With whom? About what?”

 

“Miss Sophy Jackson has just been here. She brought

word that her brother would come in after dinner: she

couldn’t say very much, because he forbade her to: he

wishes to give all the details himself. He’s with cousin

Louisa van der Luyden now.”

 

“For heaven’s sake, my dear girl, try a fresh start. It

would take an omniscient Deity to know what you’re

talking about.”

 

“It’s not a time to be profane, Newland… . Mother

feels badly enough about your not going to church …”

 

With a groan he plunged back into his book.

 

“NEWLAND! Do listen. Your friend Madame Olenska

was at Mrs. Lemuel Struthers’s party last night: she

went there with the Duke and Mr. Beaufort.”

 

At the last clause of this announcement a senseless

anger swelled the young man’s breast. To smother it he

laughed. “Well, what of it? I knew she meant to.”

 

Janey paled and her eyes began to project. “You

knew she meant to—and you didn’t try to stop her? To

warn her?”

 

“Stop her? Warn her?” He laughed again. “I’m not

engaged to be married to the Countess Olenska!” The

words had a fantastic sound in his own ears.

 

“You’re marrying into her family.”

 

“Oh, family—family!” he jeered.

 

“Newland—don’t you care about Family?”

 

“Not a brass farthing.”

 

“Nor about what cousin Louisa van der Luyden will

think?”

 

“Not the half of one—if she thinks such old maid’s

rubbish.”

 

“Mother is not an old maid,” said his virgin sister

with pinched lips.

 

He felt like shouting back: “Yes, she is, and so are

the van der Luydens, and so we all are, when it comes

to being so much as brushed by the wing-tip of Reality.”

But he saw her long gentle face puckering into

tears, and felt ashamed of the useless pain he was

inflicting.

 

“Hang Countess Olenska! Don’t be a goose, Janey—

I’m not her keeper.”

 

“No; but you DID ask the Wellands to announce

your engagement sooner so that we might all back her

up; and if it hadn’t been for that cousin Louisa would

never have invited her to the dinner for the Duke.”

 

“Well—what harm was there in inviting her? She

was the best-looking woman in the room; she made the

dinner a little less funereal than the usual van der

Luyden banquet.”

 

“You know cousin Henry asked her to please you:

he persuaded cousin Louisa. And now