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

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“I’ll say anything you like; or nothing. I won’t open

my mouth unless you tell me to. What harm can it do

to anybody? All I want is to listen to you,” he

stammered.

 

She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an

enamelled chain. “Oh, don’t calculate,” he broke out; “give

me the day! I want to get you away from that man. At

what time was he coming?”

 

Her colour rose again. “At eleven.”

 

“Then you must come at once.”

 

“You needn’t be afraid—if I don’t come.”

 

“Nor you either—if you do. I swear I only want to

hear about you, to know what you’ve been doing. It’s a

hundred years since we’ve met—it may be another

hundred before we meet again.”

 

She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face. “Why

didn’t you come down to the beach to fetch me, the

day I was at Granny’s?” she asked.

 

“Because you didn’t look round—because you didn’t

know I was there. I swore I wouldn’t unless you looked

round.” He laughed as the childishness of the confession

struck him.

 

“But I didn’t look round on purpose.”

 

“On purpose?”

 

“I knew you were there; when you drove in I

recognised the ponies. So I went down to the beach.”

 

“To get away from me as far as you could?”

 

She repeated in a low voice: “To get away from you

as far as I could.”

 

He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction.

“Well, you see it’s no use. I may as well tell you,”

he added, “that the business I came here for was just to

find you. But, look here, we must start or we shall miss

our boat.”

 

“Our boat?” She frowned perplexedly, and then

smiled. “Oh, but I must go back to the hotel first: I

must leave a note—”

 

“As many notes as you please. You can write here.”

He drew out a note-case and one of the new stylographic

pens. “I’ve even got an envelope—you see how

everything’s predestined! There—steady the thing on

your knee, and I’ll get the pen going in a second. They

have to be humoured; wait—” He banged the hand

that held the pen against the back of the bench. “It’s

like jerking down the mercury in a thermometer: just a

trick. Now try—”

 

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper

which he had laid on his note-case, began to write.

Archer walked away a few steps, staring with radiant

unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn,

paused to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a note on her knee on a bench in

the Common.

 

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope,

wrote a name on it, and put it into her pocket. Then

she too stood up.

 

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near

the club Archer caught sight of the plush-lined “herdic”

which had carried his note to the Parker House,

and whose driver was reposing from this effort by

bathing his brow at the corner hydrant.

 

“I told you everything was predestined! Here’s a cab

for us. You see!” They laughed, astonished at the miracle

of picking up a public conveyance at that hour, and

in that unlikely spot, in a city where cab-stands were

still a “foreign” novelty.

 

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was

time to drive to the Parker House before going to the

steamboat landing. They rattled through the hot streets

and drew up at the door of the hotel.

 

Archer held out his hand for the letter. “Shall I take

it in?” he asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her

head, sprang out and disappeared through the glazed

doors. It was barely half-past ten; but what if the

emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how

else to employ his time, were already seated among the

travellers with cooling drinks at their elbows of whom

Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

 

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic. A

Sicilian youth with eyes like Nastasia’s offered to shine

his boots, and an Irish matron to sell him peaches; and

every few moments the doors opened to let out hot

men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at

him as they went by. He marvelled that the door should

open so often, and that all the people it let out should

look so like each other, and so like all the other hot

men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth

of the land, were passing continuously in and out of

the swinging doors of hotels.

 

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not

relate to the other faces. He caught but a flash of it, for

his pacings had carried him to the farthest point of his

beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel that he

saw, in a group of typical countenances—the lank and

weary, the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and

mild—this other face that was so many more things at

once, and things so different. It was that of a young

man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or

worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more

conscious; or perhaps seeming so because he was so

different. Archer hung a moment on a thin thread of

memory, but it snapped and floated off with the disappearing

face—apparently that of some foreign business

man, looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He

vanished in the stream of passersby, and Archer

resumed his patrol.

 

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within

view of the hotel, and his unaided reckoning of the

lapse of time led him to conclude that, if Madame

Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be

because she had met the emissary and been waylaid by

him. At the thought Archer’s apprehension rose to

anguish.

 

“If she doesn’t come soon I’ll go in and find her,” he

said.

 

The doors swung open again and she was at his side.

They got into the herdic, and as it drove off he took

out his watch and saw that she had been absent just

three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that

made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed

cobblestones to the wharf.

 

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat

they found that they had hardly anything to say to each

other, or rather that what they had to say communicated

itself best in the blessed silence of their release

and their isolation.

 

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves

and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it

seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar

world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask

Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling:

the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage

from which they might never return. But he was afraid

to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate

balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no

wish to betray that trust. There had been days and

nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and

burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to

Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him

like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they

were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed

to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a

touch may sunder.

 

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a

breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into

long oily undulations, then into ripples tipped with

spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but

ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant

promontories with light-houses in the sun. Madame

Olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in

the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a

long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered,

and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her

expression. She seemed to take their adventure as a

matter of course, and to be neither in fear of unexpected

encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated

by their possibility.

 

In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had

hoped they would have to themselves, they found a

strident party of innocent-looking young men and

women—school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told

them—and Archer’s heart sank at the idea of having to

talk through their noise.

 

“This is hopeless—I’ll ask for a private room,” he

said; and Madame Olenska, without offering any objection,

waited while he went in search of it. The room

opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming

in at the windows. It was bare and cool, with a

table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned

by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage.

No more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever

offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer fancied

he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused

smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite

to him. A woman who had run away from her husband—

and reputedly with another man—was likely to have

mastered the art of taking things for granted; but

something in the quality of her composure took the edge

from his irony. By being so quiet, so unsurprised and

so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions

and make him feel that to seek to be alone was

the natural thing for two old friends who had so much

to say to each other… .

 

XXIV.

 

They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute

intervals between rushes of talk; for, the spell once

broken, they had much to say, and yet moments when

saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues

of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own

affairs, not with conscious intention but because he did

not want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on

the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she

talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

 

She had grown tired of what people called “society”;

New York was kind, it was almost oppressively

hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had

welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty

she had found herself, as she phrased it, too “different”

to care for the things it cared about—and so she had

decided to try Washington, where one was supposed to

meet more varieties of people and of opinion. And on

the whole she should probably settle down in Washington,

and make a home there for poor Medora, who

had worn out the patience of all her other relations just

at the time when she most needed looking after and

protecting from matrimonial perils.

 

“But Dr. Carver—aren’t you afraid of Dr. Carver? I

hear he’s been staying with you at the Blenkers’.”

 

She smiled. “Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr.

Carver is a very clever man. He wants a rich wife to

finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good

advertisement as a convert.”

 

“A convert to what?”

 

“To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But,

do you know, they interest me more than the blind

conformity to tradition—somebody else’s tradition—that

I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have

discovered America only to make it into a copy of another

country.” She smiled across the table. “Do you suppose

Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble

just to go to