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

had a

fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he

could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For

an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery

through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one

the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour,

filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty.

After all, his life had been too starved… .

 

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself

saying: “But I’m only fifty-seven—” and then he

turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late;

but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of

comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.

 

He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were

to meet; and together they walked again across the

Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to

the Chamber of Deputies.

 

Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his

father’s mind, was talking excitedly and abundantly of

Versailles. He had had but one previous glimpse of it,

during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all

the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to

go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous

enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other

up on his lips.

 

As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and

inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive,

he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence

that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an

equal. “That’s it: they feel equal to things—they know

their way about,” he mused, thinking of his son as the

spokesman of the new generation which had swept

away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

 

Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father’s

arm. “Oh, by Jove,” he exclaimed.

 

They had come out into the great tree-planted space

before the Invalides. The dome of Mansart floated

ethereally above the budding trees and the long grey

front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays

of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol

of the race’s glory.

 

Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square

near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides;

and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost

obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up.

Now, by some queer process of association, that golden

light became for him the pervading illumination in

which she lived. For nearly thirty years, her life—of

which he knew so strangely little—had been spent in

this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense

and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the

theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must

have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she

must have frequented, the people she must have talked

with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and

associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a

setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he

remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to

him: “Ah, good conversation—there is nothing like it,

is there?”

 

Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him,

for nearly thirty years; and that fact gave the measure

of his ignorance of Madame Olenska’s existence. More

than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the

long interval among people he did not know, in a

society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would

never wholly understand. During that time he had been

living with his youthful memory of her; but she had

doubtless had other and more tangible companionship.

Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something

apart; but if she had, it must have been like a

relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to

pray every day… .

 

They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were

walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the

building. It was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its

splendour and its history; and the fact gave one an idea

of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as

this were left to the few and the indifferent.

 

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked

here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers

were rare in the little square into which they had turned.

Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

 

“It must be here,” he said, slipping his arm through

his father’s with a movement from which Archer’s shyness

did not shrink; and they stood together looking up

at the house.

 

It was a modern building, without distinctive character,

but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up

its wide cream-coloured front. On one of the upper

balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops of

the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still

lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

 

“I wonder which floor—?” Dallas conjectured; and

moving toward the porte-cochere he put his head into

the porter’s lodge, and came back to say: “The fifth. It

must be the one with the awnings.”

 

Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows

as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained.

 

“I say, you know, it’s nearly six,” his son at length

reminded him.

 

The father glanced away at an empty bench under

the trees.

 

“I believe I’ll sit there a moment,” he said.

 

“Why—aren’t you well?” his son exclaimed.

 

“Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go

up without me.”

 

Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I

say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”

 

“I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.

 

“If you don’t she won’t understand.”

 

“Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”

 

Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

 

“But what on earth shall I say?”

 

“My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to

say?” his father rejoined with a smile.

 

“Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and

prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like

lifts.”

 

His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s

enough.”

 

Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an

incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted

doorway.

 

Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze

at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it

would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the

fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall,

and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured

Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step

and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people

were right who said that his boy “took after him.”

 

Then he tried to see the persons already in the

room—for probably at that sociable hour there would

be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale

and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and

hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it… . He

thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the

fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.

 

“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he

suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last

shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted

to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.

 

He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening

dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length

a light shone through the windows, and a moment later

a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the

awnings, and closed the shutters.

 

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for,

Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone

to his hotel.

 

A Note on the Text

 

The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large

installments in The Pictorial Review, from July to

October 1920. It was published that same year in book

form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and in

London. Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation,

and spelling changes and revisions between the serial

and book publication, and more than thirty subsequent

changes were made after the second impression of the

book edition had been run off. This authoritative text

is reprinted from the Library of America edition of

Novels by Edith Wharton, and is based on the sixth

impression of the first edition, which incorporates the

last set of extensive revisions that are obviously authorial.

 

End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Age of Innocence by Wharton