The House of Mirth
by flowers and presents—and—and—lots of other things that cost;
the girl pays it by tips and cards too—oh, yes, I’ve had to take
up bridge again—and by going to the best dress-makers, and having
just the right dress for every occasion, and always keeping herself
fresh and exquisite and amusing!”
She leaned back for a moment, closing her eyes, and as she sat
there, her pale lips slightly parted, and the lids dropped above
her fagged brilliant gaze, Gerty had a startled perception of the
change in her face—of the way in which an ashen daylight seemed
suddenly to extinguish its artificial brightness. She looked up,
and the vision vanished.
“It doesn’t sound very amusing, does it? And it isn’t—I’m sick to
death of it! And yet the thought of giving it all up nearly kills
me—it’s what keeps me awake at night, and makes me so crazy for
your strong tea. For I can’t go on in this way much longer, you
know—I’m nearly at the end of my tether. And then what can I do—how
on earth am I to keep myself alive? I see myself reduced to the
fate of that poor Silverton woman—slinking about to employment
agencies, and trying to sell painted blotting-pads to Women’s
Exchanges! And there are thousands and thousands of women trying to
do the same thing already, and not one of the number who has less
idea how to earn a dollar than I have!”
She rose again with a hurried glance at the clock. “It’s late, and
I must be off—I have an appointment with Carry Fisher. Don’t look
so worried, you dear thing—don’t think too much about the nonsense
I’ve been talking.” She was before the mirror again, adjusting
her hair with a light hand, drawing down her veil, and giving a
dexterous touch to her furs. “Of course, you know, it hasn’t come
to the employment agencies and the painted blotting-pads yet;
but I’m rather hard up just for the moment, and if I could find
something to do—notes to write and visiting-lists to make up, or
that kind of thing—it would tide me over till the legacy is paid.
And Carry has promised to find somebody who wants a kind of social
secretary—you know she makes a specialty of the helpless rich.”
* * * * *
Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her anxiety.
She was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money: money to
meet the vulgar weekly claims which could neither be deferred nor
evaded. To give up her apartment, and shrink to the obscurity of a
boarding-house, or the provisional hospitality of a bed in Gerty
Farish’s sitting-room, was an expedient which could only postpone
the problem confronting her; and it seemed wiser as well as more
agreeable to remain where she was and find some means of earning
her living. The possibility of having to do this was one which she
had never before seriously considered, and the discovery that, as a
bread-winner, she was likely to prove as helpless and ineffectual
as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe shock to her self-confidence.
Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation,
as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate
any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined that
such gifts would be of value to seekers after social guidance;
but there was unfortunately no specific head under which the
art of saying and doing the right thing could be offered in the
market, and even Mrs. Fisher’s resourcefulness failed before the
difficulty of discovering a workable vein in the vague wealth of
Lily’s graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of indirect expedients for
enabling her friends to earn a living, and could conscientiously
assert that she had put several opportunities of this kind before
Lily; but more legitimate methods of bread-winning were as much out
of her line as they were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she
was generally called upon to assist. Lily’s failure to profit by
the chances already afforded her might, moreover, have justified
the abandonment of farther effort on her behalf; but Mrs. Fisher’s
inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at creating artificial
demands in response to an actual supply. In the pursuance of this
end she at once started on a voyage of discovery in Miss Bart’s
behalf; and as the result of her explorations she now summoned the
latter with the announcement that she had “found something.”
* * * * *
Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend’s
plight, and her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her
that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she
could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a
life completely reorganized and detached from its old associations;
whereas all Lily’s energies were centred in the determined effort
to hold fast to those associations, to keep herself visibly
identified with them, as long as the illusion could be maintained.
Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to Gerty, she could not judge
it as harshly as Selden, for instance, might have done. She had
not forgotten the night of emotion when she and Lily had lain in
each other’s arms, and she had seemed to feel her very heart’s
blood passing into her friend. The sacrifice she had made had
seemed unavailing enough; no trace remained in Lily of the subduing
influences of that hour; but Gerty’s tenderness, disciplined by
long years of contact with obscure and inarticulate suffering,
could wait on its object with a silent forbearance which took no
account of time. She could not, however, deny herself the solace of
taking anxious counsel with Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his
return from Europe, she had renewed her old relation of cousinly
confidence.
Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their
relation. He found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding
and devoted, but with a quickened intelligence of the heart which
he recognized without seeking to explain it. To Gerty herself it
would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk
freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had passed in the secrecy
of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of the
struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a
deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general current
of human understanding.
It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that
Gerty had the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.
The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had
lingered on through the dowdy animation of his cousin’s tea-hour,
conscious of something in her voice and eye which solicited a word
apart; and as soon as the last visitor was gone Gerty opened her
case by asking how lately he had seen Miss Bart.
Selden’s perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of
surprise.
“I haven’t seen her at all—I’ve perpetually missed seeing her since
she came back.”
This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still
hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by
adding: “I’ve wanted to see her—but she seems to have been absorbed
by the Gormer set since her return from Europe.”
“That’s all the more reason: she’s been very unhappy.”
“Unhappy at being with the Gormers?”
“Oh, I don’t defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too is
at an end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind since
Bertha Dorset quarrelled with her.”
“Ah——” Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window,
where he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while
his cousin continued to explain: “Judy Trenor and her own family
have deserted her too—and all because Bertha Dorset has said such
horrible things. And she is very poor—you know Mrs. Peniston cut
her off with a small legacy, after giving her to understand that
she was to have everything.”
“Yes—I know,” Selden assented curtly, turning back into the room,
but only to stir about with restless steps in the circumscribed
space between door and window. “Yes—she’s been abominably treated;
but it’s unfortunately the precise thing that a man who wants to
show his sympathy can’t say to her.”
His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. “There
would be other ways of showing your sympathy,” she suggested.
Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little sofa
which projected from the hearth. “What are you thinking of, you
incorrigible missionary?” he asked.
Gerty’s colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only
answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying: “I am thinking of
the fact that you and she used to be great friends—that she used to
care immensely for what you thought of her—and that, if she takes
your staying away as a sign of what you think now, I can imagine
its adding a great deal to her unhappiness.”
“My dear child, don’t add to it still more—at least to
your conception of it—by attributing to her all sorts of
susceptibilities of your own.” Selden, for his life, could not
keep a note of dryness out of his voice; but he met Gerty’s look
of perplexity by saying more mildly: “But, though you immensely
exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss Bart, you
can’t exaggerate my readiness to do it—if you ask me to.” He laid
his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between them, on
the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges of meaning
which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection. Gerty had the
feeling that he measured the cost of her request as plainly as she
read the significance of his reply; and the sense of all that was
suddenly clear between them made her next words easier to find.
“I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you
had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has
never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always been
on ease and luxury—how she has hated what was shabby and ugly and
uncomfortable. She can’t help it—she was brought up with those
ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of them. But
now all the things she cared for have been taken from her, and the
people who taught her to care for them have abandoned her too; and
it seems to me that if some one could reach out a hand and show her
the other side—show her how much is left in life and in herself——”
Gerty broke off, abashed at the sound of her own eloquence, and
impeded by the difficulty of giving precise expression to her vague
yearning for her friend’s retrieval. “I can’t help her myself:
she’s passed out of my reach,” she continued. “I think she’s afraid
of being a burden to me. When she was last here, two weeks ago, she
seemed dreadfully worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher
was trying to find something for her to do. A few days later she
wrote me that she had taken a position as private secretary, and
that I was not to be anxious, for everything was all right, and
she would come in and tell me about it when she had time; but she
has never come, and I don’t like to go to her, because I am afraid
of forcing myself on her when I’m not wanted. Once, when we were
children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and thrown
my arms about her, she said: ‘Please don’t kiss me unless I ask you
to, Gerty’—and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since then I’ve
always waited to be asked.”
Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which
his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it against
any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin ended, he
said with a slight smile: “Since you’ve learned the wisdom of
waiting, I don’t see why you urge me to rush in—” but the troubled
appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take leave: “Still,
I’ll do what you wish, and not hold you responsible for my failure.”