The Age of Innocence
him feel stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging
convention to the winds.
"I think you're the most honest woman I ever met!" he exclaimed.
"Oh, no--but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in
her voice.
"Call it what you like: you look at things as they are."
"Ah--I've had to. I've had to look at the Gorgon."
"Well--it hasn't blinded you! You've seen that she's just an old bogey
like all the others."
"She doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears."
The answer checked the pleading on Archer's lips: it seemed to come
from depths of experience beyond his reach. The slow advance of the
ferry-boat had ceased, and her bows bumped against the piles of the
slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger, and flung Archer
and Madame Olenska against each other. The young man, trembling, felt
the pressure of her shoulder, and passed his arm about her.
"If you're not blind, then, you must see that this can't last."
"What can't?"
"Our being together--and not together."
"No. You ought not to have come today," she said in an altered voice;
and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him and pressed her lips
to his. At the same moment the carriage began to move, and a gas-lamp
at the head of the slip flashed its light into the window. She drew
away, and they sat silent and motionless while the brougham struggled
through the congestion of carriages about the ferry-landing. As they
gained the street Archer began to speak hurriedly.
"Don't be afraid of me: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your
corner like that. A stolen kiss isn't what I want. Look: I'm not even
trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket. Don't suppose that I don't
understand your reasons for not wanting to let this feeling between us
dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner love-affair. I couldn't have
spoken like this yesterday, because when we've been apart, and I'm
looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up in a great
flame. But then you come; and you're so much more than I remembered,
and what I want of you is so much more than an hour or two every now
and then, with wastes of thirsty waiting between, that I can sit
perfectly still beside you, like this, with that other vision in my
mind, just quietly trusting to it to come true."
For a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper:
"What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?"
"Why--you know it will, don't you?"
"Your vision of you and me together?" She burst into a sudden hard
laugh. "You choose your place well to put it to me!"
"Do you mean because we're in my wife's brougham? Shall we get out and
walk, then? I don't suppose you mind a little snow?"
She laughed again, more gently. "No; I shan't get out and walk, because
my business is to get to Granny's as quickly as I can. And you'll sit
beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."
"I don't know what you mean by realities. The only reality to me is
this."
She met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage
rolled down an obscure side-street and then turned into the searching
illumination of Fifth Avenue.
"Is it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your
mistress--since I can't be your wife?" she asked.
The crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women
of his class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about
the topic. He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a
recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used
familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from. Her
question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
"I want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words
like that--categories like that--won't exist. Where we shall be simply
two human beings who love each other, who are the whole of life to each
other; and nothing else on earth will matter."
She drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear--where
is that country? Have you ever been there?" she asked; and as he
remained sullenly dumb she went on: "I know so many who've tried to
find it; and, believe me, they all got out by mistake at wayside
stations: at places like Boulogne, or Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it
wasn't at all different from the old world they'd left, but only rather
smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."
He had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the
phrase she had used a little while before.
"Yes, the Gorgon _has_ dried your tears," he said.
"Well, she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds
people. What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids
open, so that they're never again in the blessed darkness. Isn't there
a Chinese torture like that? There ought to be. Ah, believe me, it's a
miserable little country!"
The carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May's sturdy
brougham-horse was carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky
trotter. Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
"Then what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.
"For _us_? But there's no _us_ in that sense! We're near each other only if
we stay far from each other. Then we can be ourselves. Otherwise we're
only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen
Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind
the backs of the people who trust them."
"Ah, I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No, you're not! You've never been beyond. And I have," she said, in a
strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."
He sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain. Then he groped in the
darkness of the carriage for the little bell that signalled orders
to the coachman. He remembered that May rang twice when she wished
to stop. He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the
curbstone.
"Why are we stopping? This is not Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.
"No: I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping
to the pavement. By the light of a street-lamp he saw her startled
face, and the instinctive motion she made to detain him. He closed the
door, and leaned for a moment in the window.
"You're right: I ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his
voice so that the coachman should not hear. She bent forward, and
seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the order to drive
on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the corner. The snow
was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed his face as he
stood gazing. Suddenly he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes,
and perceived that he had been crying, and that the wind had frozen his
tears.
He thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down
Fifth Avenue to his own house.
XXX.
That evening when Archer came down before dinner he found the
drawing-room empty.
He and May were dining alone, all the family engagements having been
postponed since Mrs. Manson Mingott's illness; and as May was the more
punctual of the two he was surprised that she had not preceded him. He
knew that she was at home, for while he dressed he had heard her moving
about in her room; and he wondered what had delayed her.
He had fallen into the way of dwelling on such conjectures as a means
of tying his thoughts fast to reality. Sometimes he felt as if he had
found the clue to his father-in-law's absorption in trifles; perhaps
even Mr. Welland, long ago, had had escapes and visions, and had
conjured up all the hosts of domesticity to defend himself against them.
When May appeared he thought she looked tired. She had put on the
low-necked and tightly-laced dinner-dress which the Mingott ceremonial
exacted on the most informal occasions, and had built her fair hair
into its usual accumulated coils; and her face, in contrast, was wan
and almost faded. But she shone on him with her usual tenderness, and
her eyes had kept the blue dazzle of the day before.
"What became of you, dear?" she asked. "I was waiting at Granny's, and
Ellen came alone, and said she had dropped you on the way because you
had to rush off on business. There's nothing wrong?"
"Only some letters I'd forgotten, and wanted to get off before dinner."
"Ah--" she said; and a moment afterward: "I'm sorry you didn't come to
Granny's--unless the letters were urgent."
"They were," he rejoined, surprised at her insistence. "Besides, I
don't see why I should have gone to your grandmother's. I didn't know
you were there."
She turned and moved to the looking-glass above the mantel-piece.
As she stood there, lifting her long arm to fasten a puff that had
slipped from its place in her intricate hair, Archer was struck by
something languid and inelastic in her attitude, and wondered if the
deadly monotony of their lives had laid its weight on her also. Then he
remembered that, as he had left the house that morning, she had called
over the stairs that she would meet him at her grandmother's so that
they might drive home together. He had called back a cheery "Yes!" and
then, absorbed in other visions, had forgotten his promise. Now he was
smitten with compunction, yet irritated that so trifling an omission
should be stored up against him after nearly two years of marriage.
He was weary of living in a perpetual tepid honeymoon, without the
temperature of passion yet with all its exactions. If May had spoken
out her grievances (he suspected her of many) he might have laughed
them away; but she was trained to conceal imaginary wounds under a
Spartan smile.
To disguise his own annoyance he asked how her grandmother was, and she
answered that Mrs. Mingott was still improving, but had been rather
disturbed by the last news about the Beauforts.
"What news?"
"It seems they're going to stay in New York. I believe he's going into
an insurance business, or something. They're looking about for a small
house."
The preposterousness of the case was beyond discussion, and they went
in to dinner. During dinner their talk moved in its usual limited
circle; but Archer noticed that his wife made no allusion to Madame
Olenska, nor to old Catherine's reception of her. He was thankful for
the fact, yet felt it to be vaguely ominous.
They went up to the library for coffee, and Archer lit a cigar and took
down a volume of Michelet. He had taken to history in the evenings
since May had shown a tendency to ask him to read aloud whenever she
saw him with a volume of poetry: not that he disliked the sound of
his own voice, but because he could always foresee her comments on
what he read. In the days of their engagement she had simply (as he
now perceived) echoed what he told her; but since he had ceased to
provide her with opinions she had begun to hazard her own, with results
destructive to his enjoyment of the works commented on.
Seeing that he had chosen history she fetched her workbasket, drew up
an arm-chair to the green-shaded student lamp, and uncovered a cushion
she was embroidering for his sofa. She was not a clever needle-woman;
her large capable hands were made for riding, rowing and open-air
activities; but since other wives embroidered cushions for their
husbands she did not wish to omit this last link in her devotion.
She was so placed that Archer, by merely raising his eyes, could see
her bent above her work-frame, her ruffled elbow-sleeves slipping back
from her firm round arms, the betrothal sapphire shining on her left
hand above her broad gold wedding-ring, and the right hand slowly and
laboriously stabbing the canvas. As she sat thus, the lamplight full
on her clear brow, he said to himself with a secret dismay that he