The Age of Innocence
Mr. Jackson had helped himself to a slice of the tepid filet which the
mournful butler had handed him with a look as sceptical as his own, and
had rejected the mushroom sauce after a scarcely perceptible sniff. He
looked baffled and hungry, and Archer reflected that he would probably
finish his meal on Ellen Olenska.
Mr. Jackson leaned back in his chair, and glanced up at the candlelit
Archers, Newlands and van der Luydens hanging in dark frames on the
dark walls.
"Ah, how your grandfather Archer loved a good dinner, my dear Newland!"
he said, his eyes on the portrait of a plump full-chested young man in
a stock and a blue coat, with a view of a white-columned country-house
behind him. "Well--well--well ... I wonder what he would have said to
all these foreign marriages!"
Mrs. Archer ignored the allusion to the ancestral cuisine and Mr.
Jackson continued with deliberation: "No, she was _not_ at the ball."
"Ah--" Mrs. Archer murmured, in a tone that implied: "She had that
decency."
"Perhaps the Beauforts don't know her," Janey suggested, with her
artless malice.
Mr. Jackson gave a faint sip, as if he had been tasting invisible
Madeira. "Mrs. Beaufort may not--but Beaufort certainly does, for she
was seen walking up Fifth Avenue this afternoon with him by the whole
of New York."
"Mercy--" moaned Mrs. Archer, evidently perceiving the uselessness of
trying to ascribe the actions of foreigners to a sense of delicacy.
"I wonder if she wears a round hat or a bonnet in the afternoon," Janey
speculated. "At the Opera I know she had on dark blue velvet, perfectly
plain and flat--like a night-gown."
"Janey!" said her mother; and Miss Archer blushed and tried to look
audacious.
"It was, at any rate, in better taste not to go to the ball," Mrs.
Archer continued.
A spirit of perversity moved her son to rejoin: "I don't think it was a
question of taste with her. May said she meant to go, and then decided
that the dress in question wasn't smart enough."
Mrs. Archer smiled at this confirmation of her inference. "Poor Ellen,"
she simply remarked; adding compassionately: "We must always bear in
mind what an eccentric bringing-up Medora Manson gave her. What can you
expect of a girl who was allowed to wear black satin at her coming-out
ball?"
"Ah--don't I remember her in it!" said Mr. Jackson; adding: "Poor
girl!" in the tone of one who, while enjoying the memory, had fully
understood at the time what the sight portended.
"It's odd," Janey remarked, "that she should have kept such an ugly
name as Ellen. I should have changed it to Elaine." She glanced about
the table to see the effect of this.
Her brother laughed. "Why Elaine?"
"I don't know; it sounds more--more Polish," said Janey, blushing.
"It sounds more conspicuous; and that can hardly be what she wishes,"
said Mrs. Archer distantly.
"Why not?" broke in her son, growing suddenly argumentative. "Why
shouldn't she be conspicuous if she chooses? Why should she slink
about as if it were she who had disgraced herself? She's 'poor Ellen'
certainly, because she had the bad luck to make a wretched marriage;
but I don't see that that's a reason for hiding her head as if she were
the culprit."
"That, I suppose," said Mr. Jackson, speculatively, "is the line the
Mingotts mean to take."
The young man reddened. "I didn't have to wait for their cue, if that's
what you mean, sir. Madame Olenska has had an unhappy life: that
doesn't make her an outcast."
"There are rumours," began Mr. Jackson, glancing at Janey.
"Oh, I know: the secretary," the young man took him up. "Nonsense,
mother; Janey's grown-up. They say, don't they," he went on, "that the
secretary helped her to get away from her brute of a husband, who kept
her practically a prisoner? Well, what if he did? I hope there isn't a
man among us who wouldn't have done the same in such a case."
Mr. Jackson glanced over his shoulder to say to the sad butler:
"Perhaps ... that sauce ... just a little, after all--"; then, having
helped himself, he remarked: "I'm told she's looking for a house. She
means to live here."
"I hear she means to get a divorce," said Janey boldly.
"I hope she will!" Archer exclaimed.
The word had fallen like a bombshell in the pure and tranquil
atmosphere of the Archer dining-room. Mrs. Archer raised her delicate
eye-brows in the particular curve that signified: "The butler--" and
the young man, himself mindful of the bad taste of discussing such
intimate matters in public, hastily branched off into an account of his
visit to old Mrs. Mingott.
After dinner, according to immemorial custom, Mrs. Archer and Janey
trailed their long silk draperies up to the drawing-room, where, while
the gentlemen smoked below stairs, they sat beside a Carcel lamp with
an engraved globe, facing each other across a rosewood work-table with
a green silk bag under it, and stitched at the two ends of a tapestry
band of field-flowers destined to adorn an "occasional" chair in the
drawing-room of young Mrs. Newland Archer.
While this rite was in progress in the drawing-room, Archer settled Mr.
Jackson in an armchair near the fire in the Gothic library and handed
him a cigar. Mr. Jackson sank into the armchair with satisfaction, lit
his cigar with perfect confidence (it was Newland who bought them),
and stretching his thin old ankles to the coals, said: "You say the
secretary merely helped her to get away, my dear fellow? Well, he was
still helping her a year later, then; for somebody met 'em living at
Lausanne together."
Newland reddened. "Living together? Well, why not? Who had the right
to make her life over if she hadn't? I'm sick of the hypocrisy that
would bury alive a woman of her age if her husband prefers to live with
harlots."
He stopped and turned away angrily to light his cigar. "Women ought to
be free--as free as we are," he declared, making a discovery of which
he was too irritated to measure the terrific consequences.
Mr. Sillerton Jackson stretched his ankles nearer the coals and emitted
a sardonic whistle.
"Well," he said after a pause, "apparently Count Olenski takes your
view; for I never heard of his having lifted a finger to get his wife
back."
VI.
That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladies
had retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mounted
thoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept
the fire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and
rows of books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on
the mantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, looked
singularly home-like and welcoming.
As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on a
large photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him
in the first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all
the other portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at
the frank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the young
creature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying product
of the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl
who knew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like a
stranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it was
borne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had been
taught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.
The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled
convictions and set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His
own exclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck
to the root of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard
as non-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim
the kind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself
were therefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready
to concede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only a
humbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied things
together and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he was
pledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct
that, on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on
her all the thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was
purely hypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it
was absurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he _were_.
But Newland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case
and May's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.
What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,
as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as a
marriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some one
of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should
tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewed
his friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none that
answered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship which
he pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceived
that such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, the
versatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefully
trained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw his
marriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: a
dull association of material and social interests held together by
ignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. Lawrence Lefferts
occurred to him as the husband who had most completely realised this
enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of form, he had formed a wife
so completely to his own convenience that, in the most conspicuous
moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men's wives, she
went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrence was so
frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly, and avert
her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the fact that Julius
Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) had what was
known in New York as "another establishment."
Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not
quite such an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor
Gertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and
not of standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic
world, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, but
only represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland,
who knew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter's
engagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do no
less), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of having
had her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man that
people of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride is
dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.
The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of
this elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable
for her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling,
because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothing
to be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this,
she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "the
facts of life."
The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the
radiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,
her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and
ideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She had
advanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,
but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was