The Age of Innocence
theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."
"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs.
Carfry and Miss Harle won't. They'll wear caps like my mother's--and
shawls; very soft shawls."
"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"
"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly
developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.
She pushed back her chair with a sigh. "That's dear of you, Newland;
but it doesn't help me much."
He had an inspiration. "Why not wear your wedding-dress? That can't be
wrong, can it?"
"Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it's gone to Paris to be made
over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."
"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up. "Look here--the fog's lifting.
If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a
glimpse of the pictures."
The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months'
wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely
summarised as "blissful."
They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had
not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her
own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was
for mountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan they
punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and
August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which
some one had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the
mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; and
May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: "It
would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn't have to be
in New York."
But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had
expected. She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an
enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand
at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis; and when they finally got
back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered
_his_ clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she
looked forward to sailing.
In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops; and
she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris _cafés chantants_
where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Élysées,
she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant
terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret
to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.
Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It
was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as
all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice
the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied.
There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest
notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that
May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would
be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity
would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might
even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it
altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good.
But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as
hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly
outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him
made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be
loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of
the same virtues.
All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her
simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed
and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were
on the same fine mould as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of
all his old traditions and reverences.
Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,
though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at
once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no
fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life
would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within
it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife
would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.
And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would
be filled.
All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive
from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister
lived. Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends'
hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always
travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty
unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only, just
after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of
queer Europeanised Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in
palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the
fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun
in the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women,
deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need
of retailing to every one they met, and the magnificent young officers
and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their
confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up
among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics,
to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such a
society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no
other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.
Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of
St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognising him,
had said: "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American
would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting
was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May's English
aunt, the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had
purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their
arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to
these unknown relatives.
"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at
this season, and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said
to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her
sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her
to the London grime.
"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,
with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented; and he was struck
again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American
women for the social advantages of dress.
"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown,
and their defiance of it." And he understood for the first time the
earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her
hair to charm him, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and
ordering her extensive wardrobe.
He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small
one. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long
chilly drawing-room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was
her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a
small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,
pronouncing a French name as she did so.
Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like
a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more
voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he
perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an
extreme and infantile shyness.
"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes
implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was
calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even
when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and
the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their
desire to put her at her ease.
In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing
affair. Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her
ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her
references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to
admiration, her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon
abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and
accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until
the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the
drawing-room.
The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a
meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed
off to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,
and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his
last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out,
had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrow for
Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake
Leman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Rivière,
who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till
he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Rivière added with
simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.
It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without
one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a
man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have
called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an
intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his
animation.
His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post,
and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career;
but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into
journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at
length--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his
listener--into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that,
however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt _grenier_,
been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed
to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Mérimée in
his mother's house. He had obviously always been desperately poor and
anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for), and
it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation,
in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned
Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one
who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love
that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of
vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so
richly in his poverty.
"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's
intellectual liberty, not to enslave one's powers of appreciation,
one's critical independence? It was because of that that I abandoned
journalism, and took to so much duller work: tutoring and private
secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course; but one
preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's _quant
à soi_. And when one hears good talk one can join in it without