The Glimpses of the Moon by Edith Wharton (best ereader for pdf .TXT) 📕
"After all, we owe them this!" she mused.
Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had notrepeated his question; but she was still on the trail of thethought he had started. A year--yes, she was sure now thatwith a little management they could have a whole year of it!"It" was their marriage, their being together, and away frombores and bothers, in a comradeship of which both of them hadlong ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at least hadnever imagined the deeper harmony.
It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of theheterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think"literary"--that the young man
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and had concluded that she perhaps suspected him of being an
obstacle to her son’s aspirations. He had no idea of playing
that part, but was not sorry to appear to; for he was sincerely
attached to Coral Hicks, and hoped for her a more human fate
than that of becoming Prince Anastasius’s consort.
This evening, however, he was struck by the beaming alacrity of
the aide-de-camp’s greeting. Whatever cloud had hung between
them had lifted: the Teutoburg clan, for one reason or another,
no longer feared or distrusted him. The change was conveyed in
a mere hand-pressure, a brief exchange of words, for the aide-de-camp was hastening after a well-known dowager of the old
Roman world, whom he helped into a large coronetted brougham
which looked as if it had been extracted, for some ceremonial
purpose, from a museum of historic vehicles. And in an instant
it flashed on Lansing that this lady had been the person chosen
to lay the Prince’s offer at Miss Hicks’s feet.
The discovery piqued him; and instead of making straight for his
own room he went up to Mrs. Hicks’s drawing-room.
The room was empty, but traces of elaborate tea pervaded it, and
an immense bouquet of stiff roses lay on the centre table. As
he turned away, Eldorada Tooker, flushed and tear-stained,
abruptly entered.
“Oh, Mr. Lansing—we were looking everywhere for you.”
“Looking for me?”
“Yes. Coral especially … she wants to see you. She wants you
to come to her own sitting-room.”
She led him across the ante-chamber and down the passage to the
separate suite which Miss Hicks inhabited. On the threshold
Eldorada gasped out emotionally: “You’ll find her looking
lovely—” and jerked away with a sob as he entered.
Coral Hicks was never lovely: but she certainly looked
unusually handsome. Perhaps it was the long dress of black
velvet which, outlined against a shaded lamp, made her strong
build seem slenderer, or perhaps the slight flush on her dusky
cheek: a bloom of womanhood hung upon her which she made no
effort to dissemble. Indeed, it was one of her originalities
that she always gravely and courageously revealed the utmost of
whatever mood possessed her.
“How splendid you look!” he said, smiling at her.
She threw her head back and gazed him straight in the eyes.
“That’s going to be my future job.”
“To look splendid?”
“Yes.”
“And wear a crown?”
“And wear a crown ….”
They continued to consider each other without speaking. Nick’s
heart contracted with pity and perplexity.
“Oh, Coral—it’s not decided?”
She scrutinized him for a last penetrating moment; then she
looked away. “I’m never long deciding.”
He hesitated, choking with contradictory impulses, and afraid to
formulate any, lest they should either mislead or pain her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he questioned lamely; and instantly
perceived his blunder.
She sat down, and looked up at him under brooding lashes—had he
ever noticed the thickness of her lashes before?
“Would it have made any difference if I had told you?”
“Any difference—?”
“Sit down by me,” she commanded. “I want to talk to you. You
can say now whatever you might have said sooner. I’m not
married yet: I’m still free.”
“You haven’t given your answer?”
“It doesn’t matter if I have.”
The retort frightened him with the glimpse of what she still
expected of him, and what he was still so unable to give.
“That means you’ve said yes?” he pursued, to gain time.
“Yes or no—it doesn’t matter. I had to say something. What I
want is your advice.”
“At the eleventh hour?”
“Or the twelfth.” She paused. “What shall I do?” she
questioned, with a sudden accent of helplessness.
He looked at her as helplessly. He could not say: “Ask
yourself—ask your parents.” Her next word would sweep away
such frail hypocrisies. Her “What shall I do?” meant “What are
you going to do?” and he knew it, and knew that she knew it.
“I’m a bad person to give any one matrimonial advice,” he began,
with a strained smile; “but I had such a different vision for
you.”
“What kind of a vision?” She was merciless.
“Merely what people call happiness, dear.”
“‘People call’—you see you don’t believe in it yourself! Well,
neither do I—in that form, at any rate. “
He considered. “I believe in trying for it—even if the trying’s
the best of it.”
“Well, I’ve tried, and failed. And I’m twenty-two, and I never
was young. I suppose I haven’t enough imagination.” She drew a
deep breath. “Now I want something different.” She appeared to
search for the word. “I want to be—prominent,” she declared.
“Prominent?”
She reddened swarthily. “Oh, you smile—you think it’s
ridiculous: it doesn’t seem worth while to you. That’s because
you’ve always had all those things. But I haven’t. I know what
father pushed up from, and I want to push up as high again—
higher. No, I haven’t got much imagination. I’ve always liked
Facts. And I find I shall like the fact of being a Princess—
choosing the people I associate with, and being up above all
these European grandees that father and mother bow down to,
though they think they despise them. You can be up above these
people by just being yourself; you know how. But I need a
platform—a sky-scraper. Father and mother slaved to give me my
education. They thought education was the important thing; but,
since we’ve all three of us got mediocre minds, it has just
landed us among mediocre people. Don’t you suppose I see
through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything
we’re surrounded with? That’s why I want to buy a place at the
very top, where I shall be powerful enough to get about me the
people I want, the big people, the right people, and to help
them I want to promote culture, like those Renaissance women
you’re always talking about. I want to do it for Apex City; do
you understand? And for father and mother too. I want all
those titles carved on my tombstone. They’re facts, anyhow!
Don’t laugh at me ….” She broke off with one of her clumsy
smiles, and moved away from him to the other end of the room.
He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her
harsh positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and
he thought: “What a pity!”
Aloud he said: “I don’t feel like laughing at you. You’re a
great woman.”
“Then I shall be a great Princess.”
“Oh—but you might have been something so much greater!”
Her face flamed again. “Don’t say that!”
He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re the only man with whom I can imagine the other
kind of greatness.”
It moved him—moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying
to himself: “Good God, if she were not so hideously rich—” and
then of yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all
that he and she might do with those very riches which he
dreaded. After all, there was nothing mean in her ideals they
were hard and material, in keeping with her primitive and
massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility. And when
she spoke of “the other kind of greatness” he knew that she
understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying
something to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There
was not a drop of guile in her, except that which her very
honesty distilled.
“The other kind of greatness?” he repeated.
“Well, isn’t that what you said happiness was? I wanted to be
happy … but one can’t choose.”
He went up to her. “No, one can’t choose. And how can anyone
give you happiness who hasn’t got it himself?” He took her
hands, feeling how large, muscular and voluntary they were, even
as they melted in his palms.
“My poor Coral, of what use can I ever be to you? What you need
is to be loved.”
She drew back and gave him one of her straight strong glances:
“No,” she said gallantly, “but just to love.”
IN the persistent drizzle of a Paris winter morning Susy Lansing
walked back alone from the school at which she had just
deposited the four eldest Fulmers to the little house in Passy
where, for the last two months, she had been living with them.
She had on ready-made boots, an old waterproof and a last year’s
hat; but none of these facts disturbed her, though she took no
particular pride in them. The truth was that she was too busy
to think much about them. Since she had assumed the charge of
the Fulmer children, in the absence of both their parents in
Italy, she had had to pass through such an arduous
apprenticeship of motherhood that every moment of her waking
hours was packed with things to do at once, and other things to
remember to do later. There were only five Fulmers; but at
times they were like an army with banners, and their power of
self-multiplication was equalled only by the manner in which
they could dwindle, vanish, grow mute, and become as it were a
single tumbled brown head bent over a book in some corner of the
house in which nobody would ever have thought of hunting for
them—and which, of course, were it the bonne’s room in the
attic, or the subterranean closet where the trunks were kept,
had been singled out by them for that very reason.
These changes from ubiquity to invisibility would have seemed to
Susy, a few months earlier, one of the most maddening of many
characteristics not calculated to promote repose. But now she
felt differently. She had grown interested in her charges, and
the search for a clue to their methods, whether tribal or
individual, was as exciting to her as the development of a
detective story.
What interested her most in the whole stirring business was the
discovery that they had a method. These little creatures,
pitched upward into experience on the tossing waves of their
parents’ agitated lives, had managed to establish a rough-and-ready system of self-government. Junie, the eldest (the one who
already chose her mother’s hats, and tried to put order in her
wardrobe) was the recognized head of the state. At twelve she
knew lots of things which her mother had never thoroughly
learned, and Susy, her temporary mother, had never even guessed
at: she spoke with authority on all vital subjects, from
castor-oil to flannel underclothes, from the fair sharing of
stamps or marbles to the number of helpings of rice-pudding or
jam which each child was entitled to.
There was hardly any appeal from her verdict; yet each of her
subjects revolved in his or her own orbit of independence,
according to laws which Junie acknowledged and respected; and
the interpreting of this mysterious charter of rights and
privileges had not been without difficulty for Susy.
Besides this, there were material difficulties to deal with.
The six of them, and the breathless bonne who cooked and slaved
for them all, had but a slim budget to live on; and, as Junie
remarked, you’d have thought the boys ate their shoes, the way
they vanished. They ate, certainly, a great deal else, and
mostly of a nourishing and expensive kind. They had definite
views about the amount and quality of their food, and were
capable of concerted rebellion
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