The Age of Innocence
to the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the
hotel that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and
weary, the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other
face that was so many more things at once, and things so different. It
was that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat,
or worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.
He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him. At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.
"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.
The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.
Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.
As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.
As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer
was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to
take their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear
of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.
In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would
have to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking
young men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.
"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in
search of it. The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea
coming in at the windows. It was bare and cool, with a table covered
with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles
and a blueberry pie under a cage. No more guileless-looking _cabinet
particulier_ ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him. A woman who had run
away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely to
have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....
XXIV.
They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between
rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say,
and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long
duologues of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not
with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of
her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped
hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.
She had grown tired of what people called "society"; New York was kind,
it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way
in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty
she had found herself, as she phrased it, too "different" to care for
the things it cared about--and so she had decided to try Washington,
where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion.
And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and
make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all
her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after
and protecting from matrimonial perils.
"But Dr. Carver--aren't you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he's been
staying with you at the Blenkers'."
She smiled. "Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever
man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a
good advertisement as a convert."
"A convert to what?"
"To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they
interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition--somebody
else's tradition--that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid
to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another
country." She smiled across the table. "Do you suppose Christopher
Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with
the Selfridge Merrys?"
Archer changed colour. "And Beaufort--do you say these things to
Beaufort?" he asked abruptly.
"I haven't seen him for a long time. But I used to; and he understands."
"Ah, it's what I've always told you; you don't like us. And you like
Beaufort because he's so unlike us." He looked about the bare room and
out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung
along the shore. "We're damnably dull. We've no character, no colour,
no variety.--I wonder," he broke out, "why you don't go back?"
Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she sat
silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened
lest she should answer that she wondered too.
At length she said: "I believe it's because of you."
It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in
a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. Archer
reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her
words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive
off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it
were left undisturbed.
"At least," she continued, "it was you who made me understand that
under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate
that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in
comparison. I don't know how to explain myself"--she drew together her
troubled brows--"but it seems as if I'd never before understood with
how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures
may be paid."
"Exquisite pleasures--it's something to have had them!" he felt like
retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.
"I want," she went on, "to be perfectly honest with you--and with
myself. For a long time I've hoped this chance would come: that I might
tell you how you've helped me, what you've made of me--"
Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with a
laugh. "And what do you make out that you've made of me?"
She paled a little. "Of you?"
"Yes: for I'm of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I'm
the man who married one woman because another one told him to."
Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. "I thought--you promised--you
were not to say such things today."
"Ah--how like a woman! None of you will ever see a bad business
through!"
She lowered her voice. "_is_ it a bad business--for May?"
He stood in the window, drumming against the raised sash, and feeling
in every fibre the wistful tenderness with which she had spoken her
cousin's name.
"For that's the thing we've always got to think of--haven't we--by your
own showing?" she insisted.
"My own showing?" he echoed, his blank eyes still on the sea.
"Or if not," she continued, pursuing her own thought with a painful
application, "if it's not worth while to have given up, to have
missed things, so that others may be saved from disillusionment and
misery--then everything I came home for, everything that made my other
life seem by contrast so bare and so poor because no one there took
account of them--all these things are a sham or a dream--"
He turned around without moving from his place. "And in that case
there's no reason on earth why you shouldn't go back?" he concluded for
her.
Her eyes were clinging to him desperately. "Oh, _is_ there no reason?"
"Not if you staked your all on the success of my marriage. My
marriage," he said savagely, "isn't going to be a sight to keep you
here." She made no answer, and he went on: "What's the use? You gave me
my first glimpse of a real life, and at the same moment you asked me to
go on with a sham one. It's beyond human enduring--that's all."
"Oh, don't say that; when I'm enduring it!" she burst out, her eyes
filling.
Her arms had dropped along the table, and she sat with her face
abandoned to his gaze as if in the recklessness of a desperate peril.
The face exposed her as much as if it had been her whole person, with
the soul behind it: Archer stood dumb, overwhelmed by what it suddenly
told him.
"You too--oh, all this time, you too?"
For answer, she let the tears on her lids overflow and run slowly
downward.
Half the width of the room was still between them, and neither made any
show of moving. Archer was conscious of a curious indifference to her
bodily presence: he would hardly have been aware of it if one of the
hands she had flung out on the table had not drawn his gaze as on the
occasion when, in the little Twenty-third Street house, he had kept
his eye on it in order not to look at her face. Now his imagination
spun about the hand as about the edge of a vortex; but still he made no
effort to draw nearer. He had known the love that is fed on caresses
and feeds them; but this passion that was closer than his bones was not
to be superficially satisfied. His one terror was to do anything which
might efface the sound and impression of her words; his one thought,
that he should never again feel quite alone.
But after a moment the sense of waste and ruin overcame him. There they
were, close together and safe and shut in; yet so chained to their
separate destinies that they might as well have been half the world
apart.
"What's the use--when you will go back?" he broke out, a great hopeless