The House of Mirth
“I can’t leave you, Lily. Come and lie on my bed. Your hands are
frozen—you must undress and be made warm.” Gerty paused with sudden
compunction. “But Mrs. Peniston—it’s past midnight! What will she
think?”
“She goes to bed. I have a latchkey. It doesn’t matter—I can’t go
back there.”
“There’s no need to: you shall stay here. But you must tell me
where you have been. Listen, Lily—it will help you to speak!” She
regained Miss Bart’s hands, and pressed them against her. “Try to
tell me—it will clear your poor head. Listen—you were dining at
Carry Fisher’s.” Gerty paused and added with a flash of heroism:
“Lawrence Selden went from here to find you.”
At the word, Lily’s face melted from locked anguish to the open
misery of a child. Her lips trembled and her gaze widened with
tears.
“He went to find me? And I missed him! Oh, Gerty, he tried to help
me. He told me—he warned me long ago—he foresaw that I should grow
hateful to myself!”
The name, as Gerty saw with a clutch at the heart, had loosened
the springs of self-pity in her friend’s dry breast, and tear by
tear Lily poured out the measure of her anguish. She had dropped
sideways in Gerty’s big arm-chair, her head buried where lately
Selden’s had leaned, in a beauty of abandonment that drove home to
Gerty’s aching senses the inevitableness of her own defeat. Ah,
it needed no deliberate purpose on Lily’s part to rob her of her
dream! To look on that prone loveliness was to see in it a natural
force, to recognize that love and power belong to such as Lily, as
renunciation and service are the lot of those they despoil. But if
Selden’s infatuation seemed a fatal necessity, the effect that his
name produced shook Gerty’s steadfastness with a last pang. Men
pass through such superhuman loves and outlive them: they are the
probation subduing the heart to human joys. How gladly Gerty would
have welcomed the ministry of healing: how willingly have soothed
the sufferer back to tolerance of life! But Lily’s self-betrayal
took this last hope from her. The mortal maid on the shore is
helpless against the siren who loves her prey: such victims are
floated back dead from their adventure.
Lily sprang up and caught her with strong hands. “Gerty, you
know him—you understand him—tell me; if I went to him, if I told
him everything—if I said: ‘I am bad through and through—I want
admiration, I want excitement, I want money—’ yes, MONEY! That’s my
shame, Gerty—and it’s known, it’s said of me—it’s what men think of
me—If I said it all to him—told him the whole story—said plainly:
‘I’ve sunk lower than the lowest, for I’ve taken what they take,
and not paid as they pay’—oh, Gerty, you know him, you can speak
for him: if I told him everything would he loathe me? Or would he
pity me, and understand me, and save me from loathing myself?”
Gerty stood cold and passive. She knew the hour of her probation
had come, and her poor heart beat wildly against its destiny. As a
dark river sweeps by under a lightning flash, she saw her chance of
happiness surge past under a flash of temptation. What prevented
her from saying: “He is like other men?” She was not so sure of
him, after all! But to do so would have been like blaspheming her
love. She could not put him before herself in any light but the
noblest: she must trust him to the height of her own passion.
“Yes: I know him; he will help you,” she said; and in a moment
Lily’s passion was weeping itself out against her breast.
There was but one bed in the little flat, and the two girls lay
down on it side by side when Gerty had unlaced Lily’s dress
and persuaded her to put her lips to the warm tea. The light
extinguished, they lay still in the darkness, Gerty shrinking
to the outer edge of the narrow couch to avoid contact with her
bed-fellow. Knowing that Lily disliked to be caressed, she had long
ago learned to check her demonstrative impulses toward her friend.
But tonight every fibre in her body shrank from Lily’s nearness:
it was torture to listen to her breathing, and feel the sheet stir
with it. As Lily turned, and settled to completer rest, a strand
of her hair swept Gerty’s cheek with its fragrance. Everything
about her was warm and soft and scented: even the stains of her
grief became her as rain-drops do the beaten rose. But as Gerty lay
with arms drawn down her side, in the motionless narrowness of an
effigy, she felt a stir of sobs from the breathing warmth beside
her, and Lily flung out her hand, groped for her friend’s, and held
it fast.
“Hold me, Gerty, hold me, or I shall think of things,” she moaned;
and Gerty silently slipped an arm under her, pillowing her head in
its hollow as a mother makes a nest for a tossing child. In the
warm hollow Lily lay still and her breathing grew low and regular.
Her hand still clung to Gerty’s as if to ward off evil dreams, but
the hold of her fingers relaxed, her head sank deeper into its
shelter, and Gerty felt that she slept.
Chapter 15
When Lily woke she had the bed to herself, and the winter light was
in the room.
She sat up, bewildered by the strangeness of her surroundings;
then memory returned, and she looked about her with a shiver.
In the cold slant of light reflected from the back wall of a
neighbouring building, she saw her evening dress and opera
cloak lying in a tawdry heap on a chair. Finery laid off is as
unappetizing as the remains of a feast, and it occurred to Lily
that, at home, her maid’s vigilance had always spared her the
sight of such incongruities. Her body ached with fatigue, and with
the constriction of her attitude in Gerty’s bed. All through her
troubled sleep she had been conscious of having no space to toss
in, and the long effort to remain motionless made her feel as if
she had spent her night in a train.
This sense of physical discomfort was the first to assert itself;
then she perceived, beneath it, a corresponding mental prostration,
a languor of horror more insufferable than the first rush of her
disgust. The thought of having to wake every morning with this
weight on her breast roused her tired mind to fresh effort. She
must find some way out of the slough into which she had stumbled:
it was not so much compunction as the dread of her morning thoughts
that pressed on her the need of action. But she was unutterably
tired; it was weariness to think connectedly. She lay back, looking
about the poor slit of a room with a renewal of physical distaste.
The outer air, penned between high buildings, brought no freshness
through the window; steam-heat was beginning to sing in a coil of
dingy pipes, and a smell of cooking penetrated the crack of the
door.
The door opened, and Gerty, dressed and hatted, entered with a cup
of tea. Her face looked sallow and swollen in the dreary light, and
her dull hair shaded imperceptibly into the tones of her skin.
She glanced shyly at Lily, asking in an embarrassed tone how she
felt; Lily answered with the same constraint, and raised herself up
to drink the tea.
“I must have been over-tired last night; I think I had a nervous
attack in the carriage,” she said, as the drink brought clearness
to her sluggish thoughts.
“You were not well; I am so glad you came here,” Gerty returned.
“But how am I to get home? And Aunt Julia—?”
“She knows; I telephoned early, and your maid has brought your
things. But won’t you eat something? I scrambled the eggs myself.”
Lily could not eat; but the tea strengthened her to rise and dress
under her maid’s searching gaze. It was a relief to her that Gerty
was obliged to hasten away: the two kissed silently, but without a
trace of the previous night’s emotion.
Lily found Mrs. Peniston in a state of agitation. She had sent for
Grace Stepney and was taking digitalis. Lily breasted the storm of
enquiries as best she could, explaining that she had had an attack
of faintness on her way back from Carry Fisher’s; that, fearing
she would not have strength to reach home, she had gone to Miss
Farish’s instead; but that a quiet night had restored her, and that
she had no need of a doctor.
This was a relief to Mrs. Peniston, who could give herself up
to her own symptoms, and Lily was advised to go and lie down,
her aunt’s panacea for all physical and moral disorders. In
the solitude of her own room she was brought back to a sharp
contemplation of facts. Her daylight view of them necessarily
differed from the cloudy vision of the night. The winged furies
were now prowling gossips who dropped in on each other for tea. But
her fears seemed the uglier, thus shorn of their vagueness; and
besides, she had to act, not rave. For the first time she forced
herself to reckon up the exact amount of her debt to Trenor; and
the result of this hateful computation was the discovery that she
had, in all, received nine thousand dollars from him. The flimsy
pretext on which it had been given and received shrivelled up
in the blaze of her shame: she knew that not a penny of it was
her own, and that to restore her self-respect she must at once
repay the whole amount. The inability thus to solace her outraged
feelings gave her a paralyzing sense of insignificance. She was
realizing for the first time that a woman’s dignity may cost more
to keep up than her carriage; and that the maintenance of a moral
attribute should be dependent on dollars and cents, made the world
appear a more sordid place than she had conceived it.
After luncheon, when Grace Stepney’s prying eyes had been
removed, Lily asked for a word with her aunt. The two ladies
went upstairs to the sitting-room, where Mrs. Peniston seated
herself in her black satin arm-chair tufted with yellow buttons,
beside a bead-work table bearing a bronze box with a miniature
of Beatrice Cenci in the lid. Lily felt for these objects the
same distaste which the prisoner may entertain for the fittings
of the court-room. It was here that her aunt received her rare
confidences, and the pink-eyed smirk of the turbaned Beatrice was
associated in her mind with the gradual fading of the smile from
Mrs. Peniston’s lips. That lady’s dread of a scene gave her an
inexorableness which the greatest strength of character could not
have produced, since it was independent of all considerations of
right or wrong; and knowing this, Lily seldom ventured to assail
it. She had never felt less like making the attempt than on the
present occasion; but she had sought in vain for any other means of
escape from an intolerable situation.
Mrs. Peniston examined her critically. “You’re a bad colour, Lily:
this incessant rushing about is beginning to tell on you,” she said.
Miss Bart saw an opening. “I don’t think it’s that, Aunt Julia;
I’ve had worries,” she replied.
“Ah,” said Mrs. Peniston, shutting her lips with the snap of a
purse closing against a beggar.
“I’m sorry to bother you with them,” Lily continued, “but I really
believe my faintness last night was brought on partly by anxious
thoughts—”
“I should have said Carry Fisher’s cook was enough to account for
it. She has a woman who was with Maria Melson in 1891—the spring of
the year we went to Aix—and I remember dining there two days before
we sailed, and feeling SURE the coppers hadn’t been scoured.”
“I don’t think I ate much; I can’t eat or sleep.” Lily paused, and
then said abruptly: “The fact is, Aunt Julia, I owe some money.”
Mrs. Peniston’s face clouded perceptibly, but did not express the
astonishment her niece had expected. She was silent, and Lily was
forced to continue: “I have been foolish——”
“No doubt you have: extremely foolish,” Mrs. Peniston interposed.
“I fail to see how any one with your income, and no expenses—not to
mention the handsome presents I’ve always given you——”
“Oh, you’ve been most generous, Aunt Julia; I shall never forget