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

and vicissitudes which

he spared his listener—into tutoring English youths in

Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much

in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised

by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed

to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked

with Merimee in his mother’s house. He had obviously

always been desperately poor and anxious (having a

mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and it

was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His

situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more

brilliant than Ned Winsett’s; but he had lived in a

world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas

need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love

that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked

with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious

young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.

 

“You see, Monsieur, it’s worth everything, isn’t it, to

keep one’s intellectual liberty, not to enslave one’s powers

of appreciation, one’s critical independence? It was

because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took

to so much duller work: tutoring and private secretaryship.

There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but

one preserves one’s moral freedom, what we call in

French one’s quant a soi. And when one hears good

talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions

but one’s own; or one can listen, and answer it

inwardly. Ah, good conversation—there’s nothing like

it, is there? The air of ideas is the only air worth

breathing. And so I have never regretted giving up

either diplomacy or journalism—two different forms of

the same self-abdication.” He fixed his vivid eyes on

Archer as he lit another cigarette. “Voyez-vous,

Monsieur, to be able to look life in the face: that’s worth

living in a garret for, isn’t it? But, after all, one must

earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that to

grow old as a private tutor—or a `private’ anything—is

almost as chilling to the imagination as a second

secretaryship at Bucharest. Sometimes I feel I must make a

plunge: an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance,

there would be any opening for me in America—

in New York?”

 

Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York,

for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts

and Flaubert, and who thought the life of ideas the

only one worth living! He continued to stare at M.

Riviere perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that

his very superiorities and advantages would be the

surest hindrance to success.

 

“New York—New York—but must it be especially

New York?” he stammered, utterly unable to imagine

what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a

young man to whom good conversation appeared to be

the only necessity.

 

A sudden flush rose under M. Riviere’s sallow skin.

“I—I thought it your metropolis: is not the intellectual

life more active there?” he rejoined; then, as if fearing

to give his hearer the impression of having asked a

favour, he went on hastily: “One throws out random

suggestions—more to one’s self than to others. In reality,

I see no immediate prospect—” and rising from his

seat he added, without a trace of constraint: “But

Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be taking you

upstairs.”

 

During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply

on this episode. His hour with M. Riviere had put

new air into his lungs, and his first impulse had been to

invite him to dine the next day; but he was beginning

to understand why married men did not always immediately

yield to their first impulses.

 

“That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had

some awfully good talk after dinner about books and

things,” he threw out tentatively in the hansom.

 

May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences

into which he had read so many meanings before six

months of marriage had given him the key to them.

 

“The little Frenchman? Wasn’t he dreadfully

common?” she questioned coldly; and he guessed that she

nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited

out in London to meet a clergyman and a French tutor.

The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment

ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old

New York’s sense of what was due to it when it risked

its dignity in foreign lands. If May’s parents had

entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have

offered them something more substantial than a parson

and a schoolmaster.

 

But Archer was on edge, and took her up.

 

“Common—common WHERE?” he queried; and she

returned with unusual readiness: “Why, I should say

anywhere but in his school-room. Those people are

always awkward in society. But then,” she added

disarmingly, “I suppose I shouldn’t have known if he was

clever.”

 

Archer disliked her use of the word “clever” almost

as much as her use of the word “common”; but he was

beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he

disliked in her. After all, her point of view had always

been the same. It was that of all the people he had

grown up among, and he had always regarded it as

necessary but negligible. Until a few months ago he had

never known a “nice” woman who looked at life

differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be

among the nice.

 

“Ah—then I won’t ask him to dine!” he concluded

with a laugh; and May echoed, bewildered: “Goodness—

ask the Carfrys’ tutor?”

 

“Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you

prefer I shouldn’t. But I did rather want another talk

with him. He’s looking for a job in New York.”

 

Her surprise increased with her indifference: he

almost fancied that she suspected him of being tainted

with “foreignness.”

 

“A job in New York? What sort of a job? People

don’t have French tutors: what does he want to do?”

 

“Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand,”

her husband retorted perversely; and she broke into an

appreciative laugh. “Oh, Newland, how funny! Isn’t

that FRENCH?”

 

On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled

for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to

invite M. Riviere. Another after-dinner talk would have

made it difficult to avoid the question of New York;

and the more Archer considered it the less he was able

to fit M. Riviere into any conceivable picture of New

York as he knew it.

 

He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in

future many problems would be thus negatively solved

for him; but as he paid the hansom and followed his

wife’s long train into the house he took refuge in the

comforting platitude that the first six months were

always the most difficult in marriage. “After that I

suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing

off each other’s angles,” he reflected; but the worst of

it was that May’s pressure was already bearing on the

very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.

 

XXI.

 

The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to

the big bright sea.

 

The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium

and coleus, and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate

colour, standing at intervals along the winding

path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of

petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.

 

Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square

wooden house (which was also chocolate-coloured, but

with the tin roof of the verandah striped in yellow and

brown to represent an awning) two large targets had

been placed against a background of shrubbery. On the

other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a

real tent, with benches and garden-seats about it. A

number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in

grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or sat

upon the benches; and every now and then a slender

girl in starched muslin would step from the tent,

bow in hand, and speed her shaft at one of the targets,

while the spectators interrupted their talk to watch

the result.

 

Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the

house, looked curiously down upon this scene. On each

side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china

flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. A spiky

green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran

a wide border of blue hydrangeas edged with more red

geraniums. Behind him, the French windows of the

drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave

glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet

floors islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs,

and velvet tables covered with trifles in silver.

 

The Newport Archery Club always held its August

meeting at the Beauforts’. The sport, which had hitherto

known no rival but croquet, was beginning to be

discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter game

was still considered too rough and inelegant for social

occasions, and as an opportunity to show off pretty

dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held

their own.

 

Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar

spectacle. It surprised him that life should be going on

in the old way when his own reactions to it had so

completely changed. It was Newport that had first

brought home to him the extent of the change. In New

York, during the previous winter, after he and May

had settled down in the new greenish-yellow house

with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he

had dropped back with relief into the old routine of the

office, and the renewal of this daily activity had served

as a link with his former self. Then there had been the

pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper

for May’s brougham (the Wellands had given the

carriage), and the abiding occupation and interest of

arranging his new library, which, in spite of family

doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he

had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake

bookcases and “sincere” armchairs and tables. At the

Century he had found Winsett again, and at the Knickerbocker

the fashionable young men of his own set;

and what with the hours dedicated to the law and

those given to dining out or entertaining friends at

home, with an occasional evening at the Opera or the

play, the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real

and inevitable sort of business.

 

But Newport represented the escape from duty into

an atmosphere of unmitigated holiday-making. Archer

had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a

remote island off the coast of Maine (called, appropriately

enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians

and Philadelphians were camping in “native”

cottages, and whence came reports of enchanting

scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence amid

woods and waters.

 

But the Wellands always went to Newport, where

they owned one of the square boxes on the cliffs, and

their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he

and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland

rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for

May to have worn herself out trying on summer clothes

in Paris if she was not to be allowed to wear them; and

this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as yet

found no answer.

 

May herself could not understand his obscure

reluctance to fall in with so reasonable and pleasant a way

of spending the summer. She reminded him that he had

always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this

was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure

he was going to like it better than ever now that they

were to be there together. But as