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

the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”

 

Archer changed colour. “And Beaufort—do you say

these things to Beaufort?” he asked abruptly.

 

“I haven’t seen him for a long time. But I used to;

and he understands.”

 

“Ah, it’s what I’ve always told you; you don’t like

us. And you like Beaufort because he’s so unlike us.”

He looked about the bare room and out at the bare

beach and the row of stark white village houses strung

along the shore. “We’re damnably dull. We’ve no

character, no colour, no variety.—I wonder,” he broke out,

“why you don’t go back?”

 

Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant

rejoinder. But she sat silent, as if thinking over what he

had said, and he grew frightened lest she should answer

that she wondered too.

 

At length she said: “I believe it’s because of you.”

 

It was impossible to make the confession more

dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the

vanity of the person addressed. Archer reddened to the

temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her

words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion

might drive off on startled wings, but that might

gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.

 

“At least,” she continued, “it was you who made me

understand that under the dullness there are things so

fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most

cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I

don’t know how to explain myself”—she drew together

her troubled brows— “but it seems as if I’d

never before understood with how much that is hard

and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may

be paid.”

 

“Exquisite pleasures—it’s something to have had

them!” he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes

kept him silent.

 

“I want,” she went on, “to be perfectly honest with

you—and with myself. For a long time I’ve hoped this

chance would come: that I might tell you how you’ve

helped me, what you’ve made of me—”

 

Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He

interrupted her with a laugh. “And what do you make out

that you’ve made of me?”

 

She paled a little. “Of you?”

 

“Yes: for I’m of your making much more than you

ever were of mine. I’m the man who married one

woman because another one told him to.”

 

Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. “I thought—

you promised—you were not to say such things today.”

 

“Ah—how like a woman! None of you will ever see

a bad business through!”

 

She lowered her voice. “IS it a bad business—for

May?”

 

He stood in the window, drumming against the raised

sash, and feeling in every fibre the wistful tenderness

with which she had spoken her cousin’s name.

 

“For that’s the thing we’ve always got to think of—

haven’t we—by your own showing?” she insisted.

 

“My own showing?” he echoed, his blank eyes still

on the sea.

 

“Or if not,” she continued, pursuing her own thought

with a painful application, “if it’s not worth while to

have given up, to have missed things, so that others

may be saved from disillusionment and misery—then

everything I came home for, everything that made my

other life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because

no one there took account of them—all these things are

a sham or a dream—”

 

He turned around without moving from his place.

“And in that case there’s no reason on earth why you

shouldn’t go back?” he concluded for her.

 

Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. “Oh, IS

there no reason?”

 

“Not if you staked your all on the success of my

marriage. My marriage,” he said savagely, “isn’t going

to be a sight to keep you here.” She made no answer,

and he went on: “What’s the use? You gave me my

first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you

asked me to go on with a sham one. It’s beyond human

enduring—that’s all.”

 

“Oh, don’t say that; when I’m enduring it!” she

burst out, her eyes filling.

 

Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat

with her face abandoned to his gaze as if in the

recklessness of a desperate peril. The face exposed her as

much as if it had been her whole person, with the soul

behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it

suddenly told him.

 

“You too—oh, all this time, you too?”

 

For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and

run slowly downward.

 

Half the width of the room was still between them,

and neither made any show of moving. Archer was

conscious of a curious indifference to her bodily presence:

he would hardly have been aware of it if one of

the hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn

his gaze as on the occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept his eye on it in order

not to look at her face. Now his imagination spun

about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still

he made no effort to draw nearer. He had known the

love that is fed on caresses and feeds them; but this

passion that was closer than his bones was not to be

superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything

which might efface the sound and impression of

her words; his one thought, that he should never again

feel quite alone.

 

But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin

overcame him. There they were, close together and safe

and shut in; yet so chained to their separate destinies

that they might as well have been half the world apart.

 

“What’s the use—when you will go back?” he broke

out, a great hopeless HOW ON EARTH CAN I KEEP YOU?

crying out to her beneath his words.

 

She sat motionless, with lowered lids. “Oh—I shan’t

go yet!”

 

“Not yet? Some time, then? Some time that you

already foresee?”

 

At that she raised her clearest eyes. “I promise you:

not as long as you hold out. Not as long as we can

look straight at each other like this.”

 

He dropped into his chair. What her answer really

said was: “If you lift a finger you’ll drive me back:

back to all the abominations you know of, and all the

temptations you half guess.” He understood it as clearly

as if she had uttered the words, and the thought kept

him anchored to his side of the table in a kind of

moved and sacred submission.

 

“What a life for you!—” he groaned.

 

“Oh—as long as it’s a part of yours.”

 

“And mine a part of yours?”

 

She nodded.

 

“And that’s to be all—for either of us?”

 

“Well; it IS all, isn’t it?”

 

At that he sprang up, forgetting everything but the

sweetness of her face. She rose too, not as if to meet

him or to flee from him, but quietly, as though the

worst of the task were done and she had only to wait;

so quietly that, as he came close, her outstretched hands

acted not as a check but as a guide to him. They fell

into his, while her arms, extended but not rigid, kept

him far enough off to let her surrendered face say the

rest.

 

They may have stood in that way for a long time, or

only for a few moments; but it was long enough for her

silence to communicate all she had to say, and for him

to feel that only one thing mattered. He must do nothing

to make this meeting their last; he must leave their

future in her care, asking only that she should keep fast

hold of it.

 

“Don’t—don’t be unhappy,” she said, with a break

in her voice, as she drew her hands away; and he

answered: “You won’t go back—you won’t go back?”

as if it were the one possibility he could not bear.

 

“I won’t go back,” she said; and turning away she

opened the door and led the way into the public

dining-room.

 

The strident school-teachers were gathering up their

possessions preparatory to a straggling flight to the wharf;

across the beach lay the white steamboat at the pier;

and over the sunlit waters Boston loomed in a line of haze.

 

XXV.

 

Once more on the boat, and in the presence of others,

Archer felt a tranquillity of spirit that surprised as

much as it sustained him.

 

The day, according to any current valuation, had

been a rather ridiculous failure; he had not so much as

touched Madame Olenska’s hand with his lips, or

extracted one word from her that gave promise of farther

opportunities. Nevertheless, for a man sick with

unsatisfied love, and parting for an indefinite period from

the object of his passion, he felt himself almost

humiliatingly calm and comforted. It was the perfect balance

she had held between their loyalty to others and their

honesty to themselves that had so stirred and yet

tranquillized him; a balance not artfully calculated, as her

tears and her falterings showed, but resulting naturally

from her unabashed sincerity. It filled him with a tender

awe, now the danger was over, and made him

thank the fates that no personal vanity, no sense of

playing a part before sophisticated witnesses, had

tempted him to tempt her. Even after they had clasped

hands for goodbye at the Fall River station, and he

had turned away alone, the conviction remained with

him of having saved out of their meeting much more

than he had sacrificed.

 

He wandered back to the club, and went and sat

alone in the deserted library, turning and turning over

in his thoughts every separate second of their hours

together. It was clear to him, and it grew more clear

under closer scrutiny, that if she should finally decide

on returning to Europe—returning to her husband—it

would not be because her old life tempted her, even on

the new terms offered. No: she would go only if she

felt herself becoming a temptation to Archer, a

temptation to fall away from the standard they had both set

up. Her choice would be to stay near him as long as he

did not ask her to come nearer; and it depended on

himself to keep her just there, safe but secluded.

 

In the train these thoughts were still with him. They

enclosed him in a kind of golden haze, through which

the faces about him looked remote and indistinct: he

had a feeling that if he spoke to his fellow-travellers

they would not understand what he was saying. In this

state of abstraction he found himself, the following

morning, waking to the reality of a stifling September

day in New York. The heat-withered faces in the long

train streamed past him, and he continued to stare at

them through the same golden blur; but suddenly, as

he left the station, one of the faces detached itself, came

closer and forced itself upon his consciousness. It was,

as he instantly recalled, the face of the young man he

had seen, the day before, passing out of the Parker

House, and had noted as not conforming to type, as

not having an American hotel face.

 

The same thing struck him now; and again he became

aware of a dim stir of former associations. The

young man stood looking about him with the dazed air

of the foreigner flung upon the harsh mercies of American

travel; then he advanced toward Archer, lifted his

hat, and said in English: “Surely, Monsieur, we met in

London?”

 

“Ah,