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

I wouldn’t

put my hand in the fire … well, that there hadn’t been

tit for tat … with the young champion… .” Mr.

Letterblair unlocked a drawer and pushed a folded

paper toward Archer. “This report, the result of discreet

enquiries …” And then, as Archer made no

effort to glance at the paper or to repudiate the suggestion,

the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: “I don’t

say it’s conclusive, you observe; far from it. But straws

show … and on the whole it’s eminently satisfactory

for all parties that this dignified solution has been

reached.”

 

“Oh, eminently,” Archer assented, pushing back the

paper.

 

A day or two later, on responding to a summons

from Mrs. Manson Mingott, his soul had been more

deeply tried.

 

He had found the old lady depressed and querulous.

 

“You know she’s deserted me?” she began at once;

and without waiting for his reply: “Oh, don’t ask me

why! She gave so many reasons that I’ve forgotten

them all. My private belief is that she couldn’t face the

boredom. At any rate that’s what Augusta and my

daughters-in-law think. And I don’t know that I

altogether blame her. Olenski’s a finished scoundrel; but

life with him must have been a good deal gayer than it

is in Fifth Avenue. Not that the family would admit

that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue de

la Paix thrown in. And poor Ellen, of course, has no

idea of going back to her husband. She held out as

firmly as ever against that. So she’s to settle down in

Paris with that fool Medora… . Well, Paris is Paris;

and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing.

But she was as gay as a bird, and I shall miss her.”

Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down

her puffy cheeks and vanished in the abysses of her

bosom.

 

“All I ask is,” she concluded, “that they shouldn’t

bother me any more. I must really be allowed to digest

my gruel… .” And she twinkled a little wistfully at

Archer.

 

It was that evening, on his return home, that May

announced her intention of giving a farewell dinner to

her cousin. Madame Olenska’s name had not been

pronounced between them since the night of her flight

to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with

surprise.

 

“A dinner—why?” he interrogated.

 

Her colour rose. “But you like Ellen—I thought you’d

be pleased.”

 

“It’s awfully nice—your putting it in that way. But I

really don’t see—”

 

“I mean to do it, Newland,” she said, quietly rising

and going to her desk. “Here are the invitations all

written. Mother helped me—she agrees that we ought

to.” She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and

Archer suddenly saw before him the embodied image

of the Family.

 

“Oh, all right,” he said, staring with unseeing eyes at

the list of guests that she had put in his hand.

 

When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May

was stooping over the fire and trying to coax the logs

to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate

tiles.

 

The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden’s

orchids had been conspicuously disposed in various

receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver. Mrs.

Newland Archer’s drawing-room was generally thought

a great success. A gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which

the primulas and cinerarias were punctually renewed,

blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have preferred a bronze reduction of

the Venus of Milo); the sofas and armchairs of pale

brocade were cleverly grouped about little plush tables

densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and

efflorescent photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded

lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.

 

“I don’t think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted

up,” said May, rising flushed from her struggle, and

sending about her a glance of pardonable pride. The

brass tongs which she had propped against the side of

the chimney fell with a crash that drowned her husband’s

answer; and before he could restore them Mr.

and Mrs. van der Luyden were announced.

 

The other guests quickly followed, for it was known

that the van der Luydens liked to dine punctually. The

room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing

to Mrs. Selfridge Merry a small highly-varnished

Verbeckhoven “Study of Sheep,” which Mr. Welland

had given May for Christmas, when he found Madame

Olenska at his side.

 

She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her

dark hair seem denser and heavier than ever. Perhaps

that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of

amber beads about her neck, reminded him suddenly of

the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at children’s

parties, when Medora Manson had first brought

her to New York.

 

The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or

her dress was perhaps unbecoming: her face looked

lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as

he did at that minute. Their hands met, and he thought

he heard her say: “Yes, we’re sailing tomorrow in the

Russia—”; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening

doors, and after an interval May’s voice: “Newland!

Dinner’s been announced. Won’t you please take Ellen

in?”

 

Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he

noticed that the hand was ungloved, and remembered

how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he

had sat with her in the little Twenty-third Street drawing-room. All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed

to have taken refuge in the long pale fingers and faintly

dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself:

“If it were only to see her hand again I should have to

follow her—.”

 

It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to

a “foreign visitor” that Mrs. van der Luyden could

suffer the diminution of being placed on her host’s left.

The fact of Madame Olenska’s “foreignness” could

hardly have been more adroitly emphasised than by

this farewell tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted

her displacement with an affability which left no doubt

as to her approval. There were certain things that had

to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely and

thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York

code, was the tribal rally around a kinswoman about

to be eliminated from the tribe. There was nothing on

earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have

done to proclaim their unalterable affection for the

Countess Olenska now that her passage for Europe

was engaged; and Archer, at the head of his table, sat

marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her

popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her

silenced, her past countenanced, and her present irradiated

by the family approval. Mrs. van der Luyden

shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her

nearest approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden,

from his seat at May’s right, cast down the table glances

plainly intended to justify all the carnations he had sent

from Skuytercliff.

 

Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a

state of odd imponderability, as if he floated somewhere

between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at

nothing so much as his own share in the proceedings.

As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to

another he saw all the harmless-looking people engaged

upon May’s canvasbacks as a band of dumb conspirators,

and himself and the pale woman on his right as

the centre of their conspiracy. And then it came over

him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams,

that to all of them he and Madame Olenska were

lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to “foreign”

vocabularies. He guessed himself to have been, for

months, the centre of countless silently observing eyes

and patiently listening ears, he understood that, by

means as yet unknown to him, the separation between

himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved,

and that now the whole tribe had rallied about his wife

on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or

had ever imagined anything, and that the occasion of

the entertainment was simply May Archer’s natural

desire to take an affectionate leave of her friend and

cousin.

 

It was the old New York way of taking life “without

effusion of blood”: the way of people who dreaded

scandal more than disease, who placed decency above

courage, and who considered that nothing was more

ill-bred than “scenes,” except the behaviour of those

who gave rise to them.

 

As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind

Archer felt like a prisoner in the centre of an armed

camp. He looked about the table, and guessed at the

inexorableness of his captors from the tone in which,

over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing

with Beaufort and his wife. “It’s to show me,” he

thought, “what would happen to ME—” and a deathly

sense of the superiority of implication and analogy over

direct action, and of silence over rash words, closed in

on him like the doors of the family vault.

 

He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden’s startled

eyes.

 

“You think it laughable?” she said with a pinched

smile. “Of course poor Regina’s idea of remaining in

New York has its ridiculous side, I suppose;” and

Archer muttered: “Of course.”

 

At this point, he became conscious that Madame

Olenska’s other neighbour had been engaged for some

time with the lady on his right. At the same moment he

saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der

Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick

glance down the table. It was evident that the host and

the lady on his right could not sit through the whole

meal in silence. He turned to Madame Olenska, and

her pale smile met him. “Oh, do let’s see it through,” it

seemed to say.

 

“Did you find the journey tiring?” he asked in a

voice that surprised him by its naturalness; and she

answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom travelled

with fewer discomforts.

 

“Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train,”

she added; and he remarked that she would not suffer

from that particular hardship in the country she was

going to.

 

“I never,” he declared with intensity, “was more

nearly frozen than once, in April, in the train between

Calais and Paris.”

 

She said she did not wonder, but remarked that,

after all, one could always carry an extra rug, and that

every form of travel had its hardships; to which he

abruptly returned that he thought them all of no account

compared with the blessedness of getting away.

She changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly

rising in pitch: “I mean to do a lot of travelling myself

before long.” A tremor crossed her face, and leaning

over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: “I say, Reggie,

what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next

month, I mean? I’m game if you are—” at which Mrs.

Reggie piped up that she could not think of letting

Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she

was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week;

and her husband placidly observed that by that time he

would have to be practising for the International Polo

match.

 

But Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase “round

the world,” and having once circled the globe in his

steam-yacht, he seized the opportunity to send down

the table several striking items concerning the shallowness

of the Mediterranean ports. Though, after all, he

added, it didn’t matter; for when you’d seen Athens

and Smyrna and Constantinople, what else was there?

And Mrs. Merry said