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

real things of

his life had happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six

years ago, had broken to him, with a blushing

circumlocution that would have caused the young women of

the new generation to smile, the news that she was to

have a child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too

delicate to be taken to church in midwinter, had been

christened by their old friend the Bishop of New York,

the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so long the

pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had

first staggered across the floor shouting “Dad,” while

May and the nurse laughed behind the door; there their

second child, Mary (who was so like her mother), had

announced her engagement to the dullest and most

reliable of Reggie Chivers’s many sons; and there Archer

had kissed her through her wedding veil before they

went down to the motor which was to carry them to

Grace Church—for in a world where all else had reeled

on its foundations the “Grace Church wedding”

remained an unchanged institution.

 

It was in the library that he and May had always

discussed the future of the children: the studies of

Dallas and his young brother Bill, Mary’s incurable

indifference to “accomplishments,” and passion for

sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward

“art” which had finally landed the restless and curious

Dallas in the office of a rising New York architect.

 

The young men nowadays were emancipating

themselves from the law and business and taking up all sorts

of new things. If they were not absorbed in state politics

or municipal reform, the chances were that they

were going in for Central American archaeology, for

architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen

and learned interest in the prerevolutionary buildings

of their own country, studying and adapting Georgian

types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the

word “Colonial.” Nobody nowadays had “Colonial”

houses except the millionaire grocers of the suburbs.

 

But above all—sometimes Archer put it above all—it

was in that library that the Governor of New York,

coming down from Albany one evening to dine and

spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,

banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his

eye-glasses: “Hang the professional politician! You’re

the kind of man the country wants, Archer. If the

stable’s ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got

to lend a hand in the cleaning.”

 

“Men like you—” how Archer had glowed at the

phrase! How eagerly he had risen up at the call! It was

an echo of Ned Winsett’s old appeal to roll his sleeves

up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man

who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons

to follow him was irresistible.

 

Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men

like himself WERE what his country needed, at least in

the active service to which Theodore Roosevelt had

pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,

for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been

reelected, and had dropped back thankfully into

obscure if useful municipal work, and from that again to

the writing of occasional articles in one of the

reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country

out of its apathy. It was little enough to look back on;

but when he remembered to what the young men of his

generation and his set had looked forward—the narrow

groove of money-making, sport and society to

which their vision had been limited—even his small

contribution to the new state of things seemed to count,

as each brick counts in a well-built wall. He had done

little in public life; he would always be by nature a

contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high

things to contemplate, great things to delight in; and

one great man’s friendship to be his strength and pride.

 

He had been, in short, what people were beginning

to call “a good citizen.” In New York, for many years

past, every new movement, philanthropic, municipal or

artistic, had taken account of his opinion and wanted

his name. People said: “Ask Archer” when there was a

question of starting the first school for crippled children,

reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the

Grolier Club, inaugurating the new Library, or getting

up a new society of chamber music. His days were full,

and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a

man ought to ask.

 

Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life.

But he thought of it now as a thing so unattainable

and improbable that to have repined would have been

like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize

in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets in HIS

lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had

been too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen

Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one might think

of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she

had become the composite vision of all that he had

missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept

him from thinking of other women. He had been what

was called a faithful husband; and when May had

suddenly died—carried off by the infectious pneumonia

through which she had nursed their youngest child—he

had honestly mourned her. Their long years together had

shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage was

a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing

from that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites.

Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and

mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.

 

His eyes, making the round of the room—done over

by Dallas with English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets,

bits of chosen blue-and-white and pleasantly shaded

electric lamps—came back to the old Eastlake writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to

his first photograph of May, which still kept its place

beside his inkstand.

 

There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in

her starched muslin and flapping Leghorn, as he had

seen her under the orange-trees in the Mission garden.

And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;

never quite at the same height, yet never far below it:

generous, faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in

imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her

youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without

her ever being conscious of the change. This hard bright

blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently

unaltered. Her incapacity to recognise change made her

children conceal their views from her as Archer concealed

his; there had been, from the first, a joint pretence

of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy,

in which father and children had unconsciously

collaborated. And she had died thinking the world a good

place, full of loving and harmonious households like

her own, and resigned to leave it because she was

convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would

continue to inculcate in Dallas the same principles and

prejudices which had shaped his parents’ lives, and that

Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her) would

transmit the sacred trust to little Bill. And of Mary she

was sure as of her own self. So, having snatched little

Bill from the grave, and given her life in the effort, she

went contentedly to her place in the Archer vault in St.

Mark’s, where Mrs. Archer already lay safe from the

terrifying “trend” which her daughter-in-law had never

even become aware of.

 

Opposite May’s portrait stood one of her daughter.

Mary Chivers was as tall and fair as her mother, but

large-waisted, flat-chested and slightly slouching, as the

altered fashion required. Mary Chivers’s mighty feats

of athleticism could not have been performed with the

twenty-inch waist that May Archer’s azure sash so

easily spanned. And the difference seemed symbolic;

the mother’s life had been as closely girt as her figure.

Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more

intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant

views. There was good in the new order too.

 

The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the

photographs, unhooked the transmitter at his elbow.

How far they were from the days when the legs of the

brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York’s

only means of quick communication!

 

“Chicago wants you.”

 

Ah—it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who

had been sent to Chicago by his firm to talk over the

plan of the Lakeside palace they were to build for a

young millionaire with ideas. The firm always sent

Dallas on such errands.

 

“Hallo, Dad—Yes: Dallas. I say—how do you feel

about sailing on Wednesday? Mauretania: Yes, next

Wednesday as ever is. Our client wants me to look at

some Italian gardens before we settle anything, and has

asked me to nip over on the next boat. I’ve got to be

back on the first of June—” the voice broke into a

joyful conscious laugh—“so we must look alive. I say,

Dad, I want your help: do come.”

 

Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice

was as near by and natural as if he had been lounging

in his favourite armchair by the fire. The fact would

not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for long-distance

telephoning had become as much a matter of course as

electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the

laugh did startle him; it still seemed wonderful that

across all those miles and miles of country—forest,

river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and busy indifferent

millions—Dallas’s laugh should be able to say:

“Of course, whatever happens, I must get back on the

first, because Fanny Beaufort and I are to be married

on the fifth.”

 

The voice began again: “Think it over? No, sir: not a

minute. You’ve got to say yes now. Why not, I’d like to

know? If you can allege a single reason—No; I knew it.

Then it’s a go, eh? Because I count on you to ring up

the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you’d better

book a return on a boat from Marseilles. I say,

Dad; it’ll be our last time together, in this kind of

way—. Oh, good! I knew you would.”

 

Chicago rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace

up and down the room.

 

It would be their last time together in this kind of

way: the boy was right. They would have lots of other

“times” after Dallas’s marriage, his father was sure; for

the two were born comrades, and Fanny Beaufort,

whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to

interfere with their intimacy. On the contrary, from

what he had seen of her, he thought she would be

naturally included in it. Still, change was change, and

differences were differences, and much as he felt himself

drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was

tempting to seize this last chance of being alone with

his boy.

 

There was no reason why he should not seize it,

except the profound one that he had lost the habit of

travel. May had disliked to move except for valid reasons,

such as taking the children to the sea or in the

mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving

the house in Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable

quarters at the Wellands’ in Newport. After Dallas

had taken his degree she had thought it her duty to

travel for six months; and the whole family had made

the old-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland

and Italy. Their time being limited (no one knew why)

they had omitted France. Archer remembered Dallas’s

wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont Blanc

instead of Rheims and Chartres. But Mary and Bill wanted

mountain-climbing, and had