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

already yawned their way

in Dallas’s wake through the English cathedrals; and

May, always fair to her children, had insisted on holding

the balance evenly between their athletic and artistic

proclivities. She had indeed proposed that her husband

should go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the

Italian lakes after they had “done” Switzerland; but

Archer had declined. “We’ll stick together,” he said;

and May’s face had brightened at his setting such a

good example to Dallas.

 

Since her death, nearly two years before, there had

been no reason for his continuing in the same routine.

His children had urged him to travel: Mary Chivers

had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad and

“see the galleries.” The very mysteriousness of such a

cure made her the more confident of its efficacy. But

Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories,

by a sudden startled shrinking from new things.

 

Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a

deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty

was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything

else. At least that was the view that the men of his

generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between

right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and

the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen.

There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily

subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its

daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.

Archer hung there and wondered… .

 

What was left of the little world he had grown up in,

and whose standards had bent and bound him? He

remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence

Lefferts’s, uttered years ago in that very room: “If

things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying

Beaufort’s bastards.”

 

It was just what Archer’s eldest son, the pride of his

life, was doing; and nobody wondered or reproved.

Even the boy’s Aunt Janey, who still looked so exactly

as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her

mother’s emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink

cotton-wool, and carried them with her own twitching

hands to the future bride; and Fanny Beaufort, instead

of looking disappointed at not receiving a “set” from a

Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned

beauty, and declared that when she wore them she

should feel like an Isabey miniature.

 

Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at

eighteen, after the death of her parents, had won its

heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty

years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid

of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was

pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any

one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake

up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father’s

past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered

so obscure an incident in the business life of New

York as Beaufort’s failure, or the fact that after his

wife’s death he had been quietly married to the notorious

Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new

wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was

subsequently heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia;

and a dozen years later American travellers were

handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where

he represented a large insurance agency. He and his

wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day

their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in

charge of May Archer’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland,

whose husband had been appointed the girl’s

guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly

relationship with Newland Archer’s children, and nobody

was surprised when Dallas’s engagement was announced.

 

Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the

distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays

were too busy—busy with reforms and “movements,”

with fads and fetishes and frivolities—to bother much

about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s

past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the

social atoms spun around on the same plane?

 

Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at

the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart

beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.

 

It was long since it had thus plunged and reared

under his widening waistcoat, leaving him, the next

minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. He

wondered if it was thus that his son’s conducted itself

in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort—and decided

that it was not. “It functions as actively, no doubt, but

the rhythm is different,” he reflected, recalling the cool

composure with which the young man had announced

his engagement, and taken for granted that his family

would approve.

 

“The difference is that these young people take it for

granted that they’re going to get whatever they want,

and that we almost always took it for granted that we

shouldn’t. Only, I wonder—the thing one’s so certain

of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as

wildly?”

 

It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the

spring sunshine held Archer in his open window, above

the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendome. One

of the things he had stipulated—almost the only one—

when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was

that, in Paris, he shouldn’t be made to go to one of the

newfangled “palaces.”

 

“Oh, all right—of course,” Dallas good-naturedly

agreed. “I’ll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place—

the Bristol say—” leaving his father speechless at hearing

that the century-long home of kings and emperors

was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one

went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local

colour.

 

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient

years, the scene of his return to Paris; then the

personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to

see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska’s life.

Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household

had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak

of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers

and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs

from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river

under the great bridges, and the life of art and study

and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.

Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as

he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate:

a mere grey speck of a man compared with the

ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being… .

 

Dallas’s hand came down cheerily on his shoulder.

“Hullo, father: this is something like, isn’t it?” They

stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the

young man continued: “By the way, I’ve got a message

for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past five.”

 

He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have

imparted any casual item of information, such as the hour

at which their train was to leave for Florence the next

evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in

his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother

Mingott’s malice.

 

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Dallas pursued. “Fanny made

me swear to do three things while I was in Paris: get

her the score of the last Debussy songs, go to the

Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know

she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent

her over from Buenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny

hadn’t any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used

to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I

believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort’s.

And she’s our cousin, of course. So I rang her up

this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I

were here for two days and wanted to see her.”

 

Archer continued to stare at him. “You told her I

was here?”

 

“Of course—why not?” Dallas’s eye brows went up

whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his

arm through his father’s with a confidential pressure.

 

“I say, father: what was she like?”

 

Archer felt his colour rise under his son’s unabashed

gaze. “Come, own up: you and she were great pals,

weren’t you? Wasn’t she most awfully lovely?”

 

“Lovely? I don’t know. She was different.”

 

“Ah—there you have it! That’s what it always comes

to, doesn’t it? When she comes, SHE’S DIFFERENT—and

one doesn’t know why. It’s exactly what I feel about

Fanny.”

 

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. “About

Fanny? But, my dear fellow—I should hope so! Only I

don’t see—”

 

“Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric! Wasn’t she—

once—your Fanny?”

 

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.

He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer,

yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even

the rudiments of reserve. “What’s the use of making

mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ‘em out,”

he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But

Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their

banter.

 

“My Fanny?”

 

“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything

for: only you didn’t,” continued his surprising son.

 

“I didn’t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

 

“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother

said—”

 

“Your mother?”

 

“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent

for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we

were safe with you, and always would be, because

once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing

you most wanted.”

 

Archer received this strange communication in silence.

His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged

sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a

low voice: “She never asked me.”

 

“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other

anything, did you? And you never told each other

anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed

at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb

asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing

more about each other’s private thoughts than we

ever have time to find out about our own.—I say,

Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If

you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s.

I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”

 

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He

preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings

through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the

packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate

lifetime.

 

After a little while he did not regret Dallas’s

indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart

to know that, after all, some one had guessed and

pitied… . And that it should have been his wife moved

him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate

insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no

doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain

frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more?

For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs

Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled

by… .

 

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska

waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and

when he had died, some years before, she had made no

change in her way of living. There was nothing now to

keep her and Archer apart—and that afternoon he was

to see her.

 

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde

and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had

once told him that she often went there, and he