The House of Mirth
But Lily’s methods were more delicate. She remembered that her
cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man
who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without
his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a
gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion,
instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual,
would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a
companion to make one’s tea in the train.
But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray
had been removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement
of Mr. Gryce’s limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity but
imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would
never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar. There
was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she
had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion. She had
refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she
had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a
settled look of dulness began to creep over his candid features,
she saw that extreme measures were necessary.
“And how,” she said, leaning forward, “are you getting on with your
Americana?”
His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient
film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful
operator.
“I’ve got a few new things,” he said, suffused with pleasure, but
lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers might
be in league to despoil him.
She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn
on to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which
enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember
himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could
assert a superiority that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of
his acquaintances cared for Americana, or knew anything about them;
and the consciousness of this ignorance threw Mr. Gryce’s knowledge
into agreeable relief. The only difficulty was to introduce the
topic and to keep it to the front; most people showed no desire to
have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like a merchant
whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.
But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about
Americana; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to
make the task of farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.
She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and,
prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over his
listeners’ faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze. The
“points” she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in
anticipation of this very contingency, were serving her to such
good purpose that she began to think her visit to him had been the
luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her talent
for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the
advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the
surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her
companion.
Mr. Gryce’s sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.
He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms
welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses
floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Bart’s
personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.
Mr. Gryce’s interest in Americana had not originated with himself:
it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his
own. An uncle had left him a collection already noted among
bibliophiles; the existence of the collection was the only fact
that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and the nephew took
as much pride in his inheritance as though it had been his own
work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such, and to feel a
sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any reference to
the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he
took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite
and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from
publicity.
To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all
the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American
history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded
in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he
came to regard himself as figuring prominently in the public eye,
and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited
if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling,
were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce
Americana.
Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was
discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in
proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident
person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic,
or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly
guessed that Mr. Gryce’s egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring
constant nurture from without. Miss Bart had the gift of following
an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the
surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion
took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce’s future as
combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately
introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come,
after old Jefferson Gryce’s death, to take possession of his house
in Madison Avenue—an appalling house, all brown stone without and
black walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex
that looked like a mausoleum. Lily, however, knew all about them:
young Mr. Gryce’s arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of
New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she
must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not
only contrived to put herself in the young man’s way, but had made
the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice
of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of
her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and
learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid’s
smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a kind of
impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded
with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their
annual reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties
were manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the
servants’ bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she
had never allowed herself many pleasures. Once, however, she had
had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric and
presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album in
which their letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief ornament
of her drawing-room table.
Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a
woman was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion
had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious,
with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs.
Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little likely
was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After attaining his
majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had
made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels,
the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but
on Jefferson Gryce’s death, when another large property passed
into her son’s hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his
“interests” demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly
installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose
sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week
days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men
on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce
estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into
every detail of the art of accumulation.
As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce’s only
occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not
too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such
low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of
the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all
fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the difficulties on which that fear
was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.
The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted
her from these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of
distress in her companion’s eye. His seat faced toward the door,
and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an
acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general
sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage
was apt to produce.
She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed
by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train
accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering
under a load of bags and dressing-cases.
“Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me
have your seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this
carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t some one
be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you
do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a
seat next to you and Lily.”
Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller
with a carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her
by getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle,
diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a
pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.
She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless
pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run
through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small
pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated
eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her
self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends
observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great
deal of room.
Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart’s
was at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther
displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had
come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had
been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons, without even the
alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a husband having neglected
to replenish her case before they parted that morning.
“And at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one
left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.
Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own
lips were never defiled by tobacco.
“What an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the
thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.
“Why, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you
never—— And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid
of me—I understand.”
And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a
smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her
own.
Chapter 3
Bridge at Bellomont usually lasted till the small hours; and when
Lily went to bed that night she had played too long for her own
good.
Feeling no desire for the self-communion which awaited her in her
room, she lingered on the broad stairway, looking down into the
hall below, where the last card-players were grouped about the tray