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

blaze of light,

descended to his private brougham, and rolled away to

a mysterious and probably unmentionable destination.

It was not an Opera night, and no one was giving a

party, so that Beaufort’s outing was undoubtedly of a

clandestine nature. Archer connected it in his mind

with a little house beyond Lexington Avenue in which

beribboned window curtains and flower-boxes had

recently appeared, and before whose newly painted door

the canary-coloured brougham of Miss Fanny Ring

was frequently seen to wait.

 

Beyond the small and slippery pyramid which

composed Mrs. Archer’s world lay the almost unmapped

quarter inhabited by artists, musicians and “people

who wrote.” These scattered fragments of humanity

had never shown any desire to be amalgamated with

the social structure. In spite of odd ways they were said

to be, for the most part, quite respectable; but they

preferred to keep to themselves. Medora Manson, in

her prosperous days, had inaugurated a “literary

salon”; but it had soon died out owing to the reluctance

of the literary to frequent it.

 

Others had made the same attempt, and there was a

household of Blenkers—an intense and voluble mother,

and three blowsy daughters who imitated her—where

one met Edwin Booth and Patti and William Winter,

and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold, and

some of the magazine editors and musical and literary

critics.

 

Mrs. Archer and her group felt a certain timidity

concerning these persons. They were odd, they were

uncertain, they had things one didn’t know about in

the background of their lives and minds. Literature and

art were deeply respected in the Archer set, and Mrs.

Archer was always at pains to tell her children how

much more agreeable and cultivated society had been

when it included such figures as Washington Irving,

Fitz-Greene Halleck and the poet of “The Culprit Fay.”

The most celebrated authors of that generation had

been “gentlemen”; perhaps the unknown persons who

succeeded them had gentlemanly sentiments, but their

origin, their appearance, their hair, their intimacy with

the stage and the Opera, made any old New York

criterion inapplicable to them.

 

“When I was a girl,” Mrs. Archer used to say, “we

knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street;

and only the people one knew had carriages. It was

perfectly easy to place any one then; now one can’t tell,

and I prefer not to try.”

 

Only old Catherine Mingott, with her absence of

moral prejudices and almost parvenu indifference to

the subtler distinctions, might have bridged the abyss;

but she had never opened a book or looked at a

picture, and cared for music only because it reminded her

of gala nights at the Italiens, in the days of her triumph

at the Tuileries. Possibly Beaufort, who was her match

in daring, would have succeeded in bringing about a

fusion; but his grand house and silk-stockinged footmen

were an obstacle to informal sociability. Moreover,

he was as illiterate as old Mrs. Mingott, and

considered “fellows who wrote” as the mere paid

purveyors of rich men’s pleasures; and no one rich enough

to influence his opinion had ever questioned it.

 

Newland Archer had been aware of these things ever

since he could remember, and had accepted them as

part of the structure of his universe. He knew that

there were societies where painters and poets and

novelists and men of science, and even great actors, were

as sought after as Dukes; he had often pictured to

himself what it would have been to live in the intimacy

of drawing-rooms dominated by the talk of Merimee

(whose “Lettres a une Inconnue” was one of his

inseparables), of Thackeray, Browning or William Morris.

But such things were inconceivable in New York, and

unsettling to think of. Archer knew most of the

“fellows who wrote,” the musicians and the painters: he

met them at the Century, or at the little musical and

theatrical clubs that were beginning to come into

existence. He enjoyed them there, and was bored with

them at the Blenkers’, where they were mingled with

fervid and dowdy women who passed them about like

captured curiosities; and even after his most exciting

talks with Ned Winsett he always came away with the

feeling that if his world was small, so was theirs, and

that the only way to enlarge either was to reach a stage

of manners where they would naturally merge.

 

He was reminded of this by trying to picture the

society in which the Countess Olenska had lived and

suffered, and also—perhaps—tasted mysterious joys.

He remembered with what amusement she had told

him that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands

objected to her living in a “Bohemian” quarter given

over to “people who wrote.” It was not the peril but

the poverty that her family disliked; but that shade

escaped her, and she supposed they considered

literature compromising.

 

She herself had no fears of it, and the books

scattered about her drawing-room (a part of the house in

which books were usually supposed to be “out of place”),

though chiefly works of fiction, had whetted Archer’s

interest with such new names as those of Paul Bourget,

Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers. Ruminating on

these things as he approached her door, he was once

more conscious of the curious way in which she

reversed his values, and of the need of thinking himself

into conditions incredibly different from any that he

knew if he were to be of use in her present difficulty.

 

Nastasia opened the door, smiling mysteriously. On

the bench in the hall lay a sable-lined overcoat, a

folded opera hat of dull silk with a gold J. B. on the

lining, and a white silk muffler: there was no mistaking

the fact that these costly articles were the property of

Julius Beaufort.

 

Archer was angry: so angry that he came near scribbling

a word on his card and going away; then he

remembered that in writing to Madame Olenska he

had been kept by excess of discretion from saying that

he wished to see her privately. He had therefore no one

but himself to blame if she had opened her doors to

other visitors; and he entered the drawing-room with

the dogged determination to make Beaufort feel himself

in the way, and to outstay him.

 

The banker stood leaning against the mantelshelf,

which was draped with an old embroidery held in place

by brass candelabra containing church candies of

yellowish wax. He had thrust his chest out, supporting his

shoulders against the mantel and resting his weight on

one large patent-leather foot. As Archer entered he was

smiling and looking down on his hostess, who sat on a

sofa placed at right angles to the chimney. A table

banked with flowers formed a screen behind it, and

against the orchids and azaleas which the young man

recognised as tributes from the Beaufort hot-houses,

Madame Olenska sat half-reclined, her head propped

on a hand and her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare to

the elbow.

 

It was usual for ladies who received in the evenings

to wear what were called “simple dinner dresses”: a

close-fitting armour of whale-boned silk, slightly open

in the neck, with lace ruffles filling in the crack, and

tight sleeves with a flounce uncovering just enough

wrist to show an Etruscan gold bracelet or a velvet

band. But Madame Olenska, heedless of tradition, was

attired in a long robe of red velvet bordered about the

chin and down the front with glossy black fur. Archer

remembered, on his last visit to Paris, seeing a portrait

by the new painter, Carolus Duran, whose pictures

were the sensation of the Salon, in which the lady wore

one of these bold sheath-like robes with her chin nestling

in fur. There was something perverse and provocative

in the notion of fur worn in the evening in a heated

drawing-room, and in the combination of a muffled

throat and bare arms; but the effect was undeniably

pleasing.

 

“Lord love us—three whole days at Skuytercliff!”

Beaufort was saying in his loud sneering voice as Archer

entered. “You’d better take all your furs, and a

hot-water-bottle.”

 

“Why? Is the house so cold?” she asked, holding out

her left hand to Archer in a way mysteriously suggesting

that she expected him to kiss it.

 

“No; but the missus is,” said Beaufort, nodding

carelessly to the young man.

 

“But I thought her so kind. She came herself to invite

me. Granny says I must certainly go.”

 

“Granny would, of course. And I say it’s a shame

you’re going to miss the little oyster supper I’d planned

for you at Delmonico’s next Sunday, with Campanini

and Scalchi and a lot of jolly people.”

 

She looked doubtfully from the banker to Archer.

 

“Ah—that does tempt me! Except the other evening

at Mrs. Struthers’s I’ve not met a single artist since I’ve

been here.”

 

“What kind of artists? I know one or two painters,

very good fellows, that I could bring to see you if you’d

allow me,” said Archer boldly.

 

“Painters? Are there painters in New York?” asked

Beaufort, in a tone implying that there could be none

since he did not buy their pictures; and Madame Olenska

said to Archer, with her grave smile: “That would be

charming. But I was really thinking of dramatic artists,

singers, actors, musicians. My husband’s house was

always full of them.”

 

She said the words “my husband” as if no sinister

associations were connected with them, and in a tone

that seemed almost to sigh over the lost delights of her

married life. Archer looked at her perplexedly, wondering

if it were lightness or dissimulation that enabled her

to touch so easily on the past at the very moment when

she was risking her reputation in order to break with it.

 

“I do think,” she went on, addressing both men,

that the imprevu adds to one’s enjoyment. It’s perhaps

a mistake to see the same people every day.”

 

“It’s confoundedly dull, anyhow; New York is dying

of dullness,” Beaufort grumbled. “And when I try to

liven it up for you, you go back on me. Come—think

better of it! Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini

leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia; and

I’ve a private room, and a Steinway, and they’ll sing all

night for me.”

 

“How delicious! May I think it over, and write to

you tomorrow morning?”

 

She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of

dismissal in her voice. Beaufort evidently felt it, and being

unused to dismissals, stood staring at her with an obstinate

line between his eyes.

 

“Why not now?”

 

“It’s too serious a question to decide at this late

hour.”

 

“Do you call it late?”

 

She returned his glance coolly. “Yes; because I have

still to talk business with Mr. Archer for a little while.”

 

“Ah,” Beaufort snapped. There was no appeal from

her tone, and with a slight shrug he recovered his

composure, took her hand, which he kissed with a

practised air, and calling out from the threshold: “I

say, Newland, if you can persuade the Countess to stop

in town of course you’re included in the supper,” left

the room with his heavy important step.

 

For a moment Archer fancied that Mr. Letterblair

must have told her of his coming; but the irrelevance of

her next remark made him change his mind.

 

“You know painters, then? You live in their milieu?”

she asked, her eyes full of interest.

 

“Oh, not exactly. I don’t know that the arts have a

milieu here, any of them; they’re more like a very

thinly settled outskirt.”

 

“But you care for such things?”

 

“Immensely. When I’m in Paris or London I never

miss an exhibition. I try to keep up.”

 

She looked down at the tip