The Age of Innocence
the latter part of the winter. Mr. Welland was a mild and silent man,
with no opinions but with many habits. With these habits none might
interfere; and one of them demanded that his wife and daughter should
always go with him on his annual journey to the south. To preserve an
unbroken domesticity was essential to his peace of mind; he would not
have known where his hair-brushes were, or how to provide stamps for
his letters, if Mrs. Welland had not been there to tell him.
As all the members of the family adored each other, and as Mr. Welland
was the central object of their idolatry, it never occurred to his wife
and May to let him go to St. Augustine alone; and his sons, who were
both in the law, and could not leave New York during the winter, always
joined him for Easter and travelled back with him.
It was impossible for Archer to discuss the necessity of May's
accompanying her father. The reputation of the Mingotts' family
physician was largely based on the attack of pneumonia which Mr.
Welland had never had; and his insistence on St. Augustine was
therefore inflexible. Originally, it had been intended that May's
engagement should not be announced till her return from Florida, and
the fact that it had been made known sooner could not be expected
to alter Mr. Welland's plans. Archer would have liked to join the
travellers and have a few weeks of sunshine and boating with his
betrothed; but he too was bound by custom and conventions. Little
arduous as his professional duties were, he would have been convicted
of frivolity by the whole Mingott clan if he had suggested asking for
a holiday in mid-winter; and he accepted May's departure with the
resignation which he perceived would have to be one of the principal
constituents of married life.
He was conscious that Madame Olenska was looking at him under lowered
lids. "I have done what you wished--what you advised," she said
abruptly.
"Ah--I'm glad," he returned, embarrassed by her broaching the subject
at such a moment.
"I understand--that you were right," she went on a little breathlessly;
"but sometimes life is difficult ... perplexing..."
"I know."
"And I wanted to tell you that I _do_ feel you were right; and that I'm
grateful to you," she ended, lifting her opera-glass quickly to her
eyes as the door of the box opened and Beaufort's resonant voice broke
in on them.
Archer stood up, and left the box and the theatre.
Only the day before he had received a letter from May Welland in
which, with characteristic candour, she had asked him to "be kind to
Ellen" in their absence. "She likes you and admires you so much--and
you know, though she doesn't show it, she's still very lonely and
unhappy. I don't think Granny understands her, or uncle Lovell Mingott
either; they really think she's much worldlier and fonder of society
than she is. And I can quite see that New York must seem dull to her,
though the family won't admit it. I think she's been used to lots
of things we haven't got; wonderful music, and picture shows, and
celebrities--artists and authors and all the clever people you admire.
Granny can't understand her wanting anything but lots of dinners and
clothes--but I can see that you're almost the only person in New York
who can talk to her about what she really cares for."
His wise May--how he had loved her for that letter! But he had not
meant to act on it; he was too busy, to begin with, and he did not
care, as an engaged man, to play too conspicuously the part of Madame
Olenska's champion. He had an idea that she knew how to take care of
herself a good deal better than the ingenuous May imagined. She had
Beaufort at her feet, Mr. van der Luyden hovering above her like a
protecting deity, and any number of candidates (Lawrence Lefferts among
them) waiting their opportunity in the middle distance. Yet he never
saw her, or exchanged a word with her, without feeling that, after all,
May's ingenuousness almost amounted to a gift of divination. Ellen
Olenska was lonely and she was unhappy.
XIV.
As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,
the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom he
cared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level of
club and chop-house banter.
He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabby
round-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward the
Beaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock at a
little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not in the
mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declined on
the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh, well so
have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprentice too."
They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here,
what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box
of yours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Lefferts
seems so smitten by."
Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What the
devil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all,
why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett to manifest
such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was a journalist.
"It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.
"Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "The
fact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty to
settle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell down
her area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushed
in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifully
bandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was too
dazzled to ask her name."
A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothing extraordinary
in the tale: any woman would have done as much for a neighbour's child.
But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded,
carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor Mrs. Winsett
into forgetting to ask who she was.
"That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."
"Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't know
Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."
"They would be, if you'd let them."
"Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to the obstinate
unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent the fashionable, and
both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.
"I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in our
slum?"
"Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any of
our little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in his
own picture of her.
"H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well,
here's my corner."
He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him and
musing on his last words.
Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the most
interesting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they had
allowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are
still struggling.
Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had never
seen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt of
journalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett
had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand that
his wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or
might merely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening
clothes, or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social
observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought it
cleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped to
consider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items
in a modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring
"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed
their clothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping
on the number of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less
self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulated
by Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's lean
bearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his corner
and carry him off for a long talk.
Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters,
untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but after
publishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations,
of which one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away,
and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per
contract) to make room for more marketable material, he had abandoned
his real calling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly,
where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England
love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.
On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he was
inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterile
bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. His
conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, and
feel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained
still less, and though their common fund of intellectual interests and
curiosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of views
usually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.
"The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had once
said. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got only one
ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be in
my time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't _you_ get into
touch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."
Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash
the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the
others--Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, in
America, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he could
hardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look at
the career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."
"Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they' yourselves?"
Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholy
fate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipal
or state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort of thing
was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the
emigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.
"Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little local
patches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing and
cross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition
that your forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful little
minority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You're
like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of a
Gentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you roll
up your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate ...
God! If I could emigrate ..."
Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation
back to books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.
Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no
more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down into the
muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But you couldn't
make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of