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

it to come true.”

 

For a moment she made no reply; then she asked,

hardly above a whisper: “What do you mean by trusting

to it to come true?”

 

“Why—you know it will, don’t you?”

 

“Your vision of you and me together?” She burst

into a sudden hard laugh. “You choose your place well

to put it to me!”

 

“Do you mean because we’re in my wife’s brougham?

Shall we get out and walk, then? I don’t suppose you

mind a little snow?”

 

She laughed again, more gently. “No; I shan’t get

out and walk, because my business is to get to Granny’s

as quickly as I can. And you’ll sit beside me, and

we’ll look, not at visions, but at realities.”

 

“I don’t know what you mean by realities. The only

reality to me is this.”

 

She met the words with a long silence, during which

the carriage rolled down an obscure side-street and

then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth

Avenue.

 

“Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as

your mistress—since I can’t be your wife?” she asked.

 

The crudeness of the question startled him: the word

was one that women of his class fought shy of, even

when their talk flitted closest about the topic. He

noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a

recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if

it had been used familiarly in her presence in the horrible

life she had fled from. Her question pulled him up

with a jerk, and he floundered.

 

“I want—I want somehow to get away with you into

a world where words like that—categories like that—

won’t exist. Where we shall be simply two human

beings who love each other, who are the whole of life

to each other; and nothing else on earth will matter.”

 

She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh.

“Oh, my dear—where is that country? Have you ever

been there?” she asked; and as he remained sullenly

dumb she went on: “I know so many who’ve tried to

find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at

wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or

Monte Carlo—and it wasn’t at all different from the

old world they’d left, but only rather smaller and dingier

and more promiscuous.”

 

He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he

remembered the phrase she had used a little while

before.

 

“Yes, the Gorgon HAS dried your tears,” he said.

 

“Well, she opened my eyes too; it’s a delusion to say

that she blinds people. What she does is just the

contrary—she fastens their eyelids open, so that they’re

never again in the blessed darkness. Isn’t there a Chinese

torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe

me, it’s a miserable little country!”

 

The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May’s

sturdy brougham-horse was carrying them northward

as if he had been a Kentucky trotter. Archer choked

with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.

 

“Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?” he asked.

 

“For US? But there’s no US in that sense! We’re near

each other only if we stay far from each other. Then we

can be ourselves. Otherwise we’re only Newland Archer,

the husband of Ellen Olenska’s cousin, and Ellen

Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer’s wife, trying

to be happy behind the backs of the people who trust

them.”

 

“Ah, I’m beyond that,” he groaned.

 

“No, you’re not! You’ve never been beyond. And I

have,” she said, in a strange voice, “and I know what it

looks like there.”

 

He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he

groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell

that signalled orders to the coachman. He remembered

that May rang twice when she wished to stop. He

pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the

curbstone.

 

“Why are we stopping? This is not Granny’s,” Madame

Olenska exclaimed.

 

“No: I shall get out here,” he stammered, opening

the door and jumping to the pavement. By the light of

a street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive

motion she made to detain him. He closed the

door, and leaned for a moment in the window.

 

“You’re right: I ought not to have come today,” he

said, lowering his voice so that the coachman should

not hear. She bent forward, and seemed about to speak;

but he had already called out the order to drive on, and

the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner.

The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung

up, that lashed his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly he

felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived

that he had been crying, and that the wind had

frozen his tears.

 

He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a

sharp pace down Fifth Avenue to his own house.

 

XXX.

 

That evening when Archer came down before dinner

he found the drawing-room empty.

 

He and May were dining alone, all the family

engagements having been postponed since Mrs. Manson

Mingott’s illness; and as May was the more punctual

of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded

him. He knew that she was at home, for while he

dressed he had heard her moving about in her room;

and he wondered what had delayed her.

 

He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such

conjectures as a means of tying his thoughts fast to

reality. Sometimes he felt as if he had found the clue to

his father-in-law’s absorption in trifles; perhaps even

Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions,

and had conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to

defend himself against them.

 

When May appeared he thought she looked tired.

She had put on the low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial exacted on the

most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair

into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in

contrast, was wan and almost faded. But she shone on him

with her usual tenderness, and her eyes had kept the

blue dazzle of the day before.

 

“What became of you, dear?” she asked. “I was

waiting at Granny’s, and Ellen came alone, and said

she had dropped you on the way because you had to

rush off on business. There’s nothing wrong?”

 

“Only some letters I’d forgotten, and wanted to get

off before dinner.”

 

“Ah—” she said; and a moment afterward: “I’m

sorry you didn’t come to Granny’s—unless the letters

were urgent.”

 

“They were,” he rejoined, surprised at her insistence.

“Besides, I don’t see why I should have gone to your

grandmother’s. I didn’t know you were there.”

 

She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the

mantelpiece. As she stood there, lifting her long arm to

fasten a puff that had slipped from its place in her

intricate hair, Archer was struck by something languid

and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the deadly

monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also.

Then he remembered that, as he had left the house that

morning, she had called over the stairs that she would

meet him at her grandmother’s so that they might drive

home together. He had called back a cheery “Yes!”

and then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his

promise. Now he was smitten with compunction, yet

irritated that so trifling an omission should be stored

up against him after nearly two years of marriage. He

was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon,

without the temperature of passion yet with all its

exactions. If May had spoken out her grievances (he

suspected her of many) he might have laughed them

away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds

under a Spartan smile.

 

To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her

grandmother was, and she answered that Mrs. Mingott

was still improving, but had been rather disturbed by

the last news about the Beauforts.

 

“What news?”

 

“It seems they’re going to stay in New York. I believe

he’s going into an insurance business, or something.

They’re looking about for a small house.”

 

The preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion,

and they went in to dinner. During dinner their

talk moved in its usual limited circle; but Archer

noticed that his wife made no allusion to Madame Olenska,

nor to old Catherine’s reception of her. He was thankful

for the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous.

 

They went up to the library for coffee, and Archer

lit a cigar and took down a volume of Michelet. He

had taken to history in the evenings since May had

shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever

she saw him with a volume of poetry: not that he

disliked the sound of his own voice, but because he

could always foresee her comments on what he read. In

the days of their engagement she had simply (as he now

perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had

ceased to provide her with opinions she had begun to

hazard her own, with results destructive to his enjoyment

of the works commented on.

 

Seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her

workbasket, drew up an armchair to the green-shaded

student lamp, and uncovered a cushion she was

embroidering for his sofa. She was not a clever needle-woman; her large capable hands were made for riding,

rowing and open-air activities; but since other wives

embroidered cushions for their husbands she did not

wish to omit this last link in her devotion.

 

She was so placed that Archer, by merely raising his

eyes, could see her bent above her work-frame, her

ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back from her firm round

arms, the betrothal sapphire shining on her left hand

above her broad gold wedding-ring, and the right hand

slowly and laboriously stabbing the canvas. As she sat

thus, the lamplight full on her clear brow, he said to

himself with a secret dismay that he would always

know the thoughts behind it, that never, in all the years

to come, would she surprise him by an unexpected

mood, by a new idea, a weakness, a cruelty or an

emotion. She had spent her poetry and romance on

their short courting: the function was exhausted

because the need was past. Now she was simply ripening

into a copy of her mother, and mysteriously, by the

very process, trying to turn him into a Mr. Welland.

He laid down his book and stood up impatiently; and

at once she raised her head.

 

“What’s the matter?”

 

“The room is stifling: I want a little air.”

 

He had insisted that the library curtains should draw

backward and forward on a rod, so that they might be

closed in the evening, instead of remaining nailed to a

gilt cornice, and immovably looped up over layers of

lace, as in the drawing-room; and he pulled them back

and pushed up the sash, leaning out into the icy night.

The mere fact of not looking at May, seated beside his

table, under his lamp, the fact of seeing other houses,

roofs, chimneys, of getting the sense of other lives

outside his own, other cities beyond New York, and a

whole world beyond his world, cleared his brain and

made it easier to breathe.

 

After he had leaned out into the darkness for a few

minutes he heard her say: “Newland! Do shut the

window. You’ll catch your death.”

 

He pulled the sash down and turned back. “Catch

my death!” he echoed; and he felt like adding: “But

I’ve