The Age of Innocence
compromising any opinions but one's own; or one can listen, and answer
it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?
The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing. And so I have never
regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms
of the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he
lit another cigarette. "_Voyez-vous_, Monsieur, to be able to look life
in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it? But, after
all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret; and I confess that
to grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as
chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.
Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do you
suppose, for instance, there would be any opening for me in America--in
New York?"
Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York, for a young man who
had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert, and who thought the life of
ideas the only one worth living! He continued to stare at M. Rivière
perplexedly, wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and
advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.
"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered,
utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could
offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only
necessity.
A sudden flush rose under M. Rivière's sallow skin. "I--I thought it
your metropolis: is not the intellectual life more active there?" he
rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of
having asked a favour, he went on hastily: "One throws out random
suggestions--more to one's self than to others. In reality, I see no
immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added, without a
trace of constraint: "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be
taking you upstairs."
During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode.
His hour with M. Rivière had put new air into his lungs, and his
first impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day; but he was
beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately
yield to their first impulses.
"That young tutor is an interesting fellow: we had some awfully good
talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in
the hansom.
May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had
read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the
key to them.
"The little Frenchman? Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned
coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at
having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French
tutor. The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment
ordinarily defined as snobbishness, but by old New York's sense of
what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands. If
May's parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would
have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a
schoolmaster.
But Archer was on edge, and took her up.
"Common--common _where_?" he queried; and she returned with unusual
readiness: "Why, I should say anywhere but in his school-room. Those
people are always awkward in society. But then," she added disarmingly,
"I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."
Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use
of the word "common"; but he was beginning to fear his tendency to
dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all, her point of view
had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up
among, and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible. Until
a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life
differently; and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.
"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May
echoed, bewildered: "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"
"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.
But I did rather want another talk with him. He's looking for a job in
New York."
Her surprise increased with her indifference: he almost fancied that
she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."
"A job in New York? What sort of a job? People don't have French
tutors: what does he want to do?"
"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband
retorted perversely; and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "Oh,
Newland, how funny! Isn't that _French_?"
On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her
refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M. Rivière. Another
after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of
New York; and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit
M. Rivière into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.
He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many
problems would be thus negatively solved for him; but as he paid the
hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge
in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the
most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty
nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the
worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very
angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.
XXI.
The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.
The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus, and
cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour, standing at intervals
along the winding path that led to the sea, looped their garlands of
petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.
Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house
(which was also chocolate-coloured, but with the tin roof of the
verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large
targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery. On the other
side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent, with
benches and garden-seats about it. A number of ladies in summer dresses
and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or
sat upon the benches; and every now and then a slender girl in starched
muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand, and speed her shaft at
one of the targets, while the spectators interrupted their talk to
watch the result.
Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously
down upon this scene. On each side of the shiny painted steps was a
large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand. A spiky
green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border
of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums. Behind him, the
French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave
glimpses, between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors
islanded with chintz poufs, dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered
with trifles in silver.
The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the
Beauforts'. The sport, which had hitherto known no rival but croquet,
was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis; but the latter
game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,
and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes
the bow and arrow held their own.
Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle. It surprised
him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions
to it had so completely changed. It was Newport that had first brought
home to him the extent of the change. In New York, during the previous
winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow
house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule, he had dropped
back with relief into the old routine of the office, and the renewal
of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self. Then
there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey
stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage), and
the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library,
which, in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out
as he had dreamed, with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and
"sincere" arm-chairs and tables. At the Century he had found Winsett
again, and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own
set; and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to
dining out or entertaining friends at home, with an occasional evening
at the Opera or the play, the life he was living had still seemed a
fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of
unmitigated holiday-making. Archer had tried to persuade May to
spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,
appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and
Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages, and whence came
reports of enchanting scenery and a wild, almost trapper-like existence
amid woods and waters.
But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the
square boxes on the cliffs, and their son-in-law could adduce no good
reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs. Welland
rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have
worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be
allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer
had as yet found no answer.
May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with
so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer. She reminded
him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days, and as this
was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going
to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together.
But as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly
peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to
like it at all.
It was not May's fault, poor dear. If, now and then, during their
travels, they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been
restored by their return to the conditions she was used to. He had
always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been
right. He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a
perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless
sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had
represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of
an unescapable duty.
He could not say that he had been mistaken in his choice, for she had
fulfilled all that he had expected. It was undoubtedly gratifying
to be the husband of one of the handsomest and most popular young
married women in New York, especially when she was also one of the
sweetest-tempered and most reasonable of wives; and Archer had never
been insensible to such advantages. As for the momentary madness which
had fallen upon him on the eve of his marriage, he had trained himself
to regard it as the last of his discarded experiments. The idea that
he could ever, in his senses, have dreamed of marrying the Countess
Olenska had become almost unthinkable, and she remained in his memory
simply as the most plaintive and poignant of a line of ghosts.
But all these abstractions and eliminations made of his mind a rather
empty and echoing place, and he supposed that was one of the reasons
why the busy animated people on the Beaufort lawn shocked him as if
they had been children playing in a grave-yard.
He heard a murmur of skirts beside him, and the Marchioness Manson