The House of Mirth
Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of
sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think
it’s just flightiness—and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart,
she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty
of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.” She glanced
tentatively at Selden’s motionless profile, and resumed with a
slight sigh: “Well, all I can say is, I wish she’d give ME some of
her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now,
for instance. She could make a very good thing out of the Brys
if she managed them properly, and I should know just how to look
after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton.”
She met Selden’s sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.
“Well, what’s the use of mincing matters? We all know that’s what
Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good
time she has to provide occupation for George. At first I thought
Lily was going to play her cards well THIS time, but there are
rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here and at Cannes,
and I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a break any day. Lily’s
only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly—oh, very badly.
The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it’s necessary that
George’s attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And
I’m bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he’d marry her
tomorrow if he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But
you know him—he’s as blind as he’s jealous; and of course Lily’s
present business is to keep him blind. A clever woman might know
just the right moment to tear off the bandage: but Lily isn’t
clever in that way, and when George does open his eyes she’ll
probably contrive not to be in his line of vision.”
Selden tossed away his cigarette. “By Jove—it’s time for my train,”
he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs.
Fisher’s surprised comment—“Why, I thought of course you were at
Monte!”—a murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his
head-quarters.
“The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now,” he heard irrelevantly
flung after him.
Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel
overlooking the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of
gaping portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport
them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the
steep white road to the station to land him safely in the afternoon
express for Nice; and not till he was installed in the corner of
an empty carriage, did he exclaim to himself, with a reaction of
self-contempt: “What the deuce am I running away from?”
The pertinence of the question checked Selden’s fugitive impulse
before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like
an emotional coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.
He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business
letters to Nice, and at Nice he would quietly await them. He was
already annoyed with himself for having left Monte Carlo, where he
had intended to pass the week which remained to him before sailing;
but it would now be difficult to return on his steps without an
appearance of inconsistency from which his pride recoiled. In his
inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the probability
of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself from
her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance;
and viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a
reassuring object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated
mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves
from which he had resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could
be entirely excluded from his life, the pressure of new and varied
impressions, with which no thought of her was connected, would soon
complete the work of separation. Mrs. Fisher’s conversation had,
indeed, operated to that end; but the treatment was too painful
to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies were untried; and
Selden thought he could trust himself to return gradually to a
reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.
Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in
his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned
him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment
there was a hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very
face he was fleeing.
Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and
Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage,
and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before
the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were
hastening to Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the
Duchess of Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan
evidently improvised—in spite of Lord Hubert’s protesting “Oh, I
say, you know,”—for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry’s
endeavour to capture the Duchess.
During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for
a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite
to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had
elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys’
conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality
of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the
fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now
its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization
which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance.
The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity
of youth is chilled into its final shape.
He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she
took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had
not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such
facility sickened him—but he told himself that it was with the
pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well—would
eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt
himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the
thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and
long DETOURS, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a
point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible,
suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts
since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at
an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious
impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under
which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.
And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted
itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even
after Mrs. Fisher’s elucidating flashes, he still felt himself
agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with
neglecting her opportunities! To Selden’s exasperated observation
she was only too completely alive to them. She was “perfect”
to every one: subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance,
good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods, brightly companionable
to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident
footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously
self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely
obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it
flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation
must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that was
the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the
brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her
unconsciousness that the ground was failing her.
On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for
the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the
general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism.
How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera—any
one with a grain of imagination—with the whole Mediterranean to
choose from: but then, if one’s estimate of a place depended on
the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be
made of the tyranny of the stomach—the way a sluggish liver or
insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the
universe, overshadow everything in reach—chronic dyspepsia ought
to be among the “statutory causes”; a woman’s life might be ruined
by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and
tragic—like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the
tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh—the reason
they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss
Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone
to art and poetry—the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for
him. Oh, she could make him believe anything—ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset
was aware of it—oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn’t see! But she
could hold her tongue—she’d had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an
intimate friend—she wouldn’t hear a word against her. Only it hurts
a woman’s pride—there are some things one doesn’t get used to....
All this in confidence, of course? Ah—and there were the ladies
signalling from the balcony of the hotel.... He plunged across the
Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative cigar.
The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening,
by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light
of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on
a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still
in his company, to the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of
crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness of the waters.
The night was soft and persuasive. Overhead hung a summer sky
furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon,
pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay
a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of
the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade, snatches
of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and
the backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of
the season.
Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands
facing the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and
then found a point of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the
Promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of the
water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface; but
the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and seemed
to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than the show itself.
After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and, dropping
alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty
cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden
saw two persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the
cab, and drive off in it toward the centre of the town. The
moonlight touched them as they paused to enter the carriage, and he
recognized Mrs. Dorset and young Silverton.