The House of Mirth
the little ones would have pulled me down. And then I remembered—I
remembered your saying that such a life could never satisfy me;
and I was ashamed to admit to myself that it could. That is what
you did for me—that is what I wanted to thank you for. I wanted to
tell you that I have always remembered; and that I have tried—tried
hard....”
She broke off suddenly. Her tears had risen again, and in drawing
out her handkerchief her fingers touched the packet in the folds
of her dress. A wave of colour suffused her, and the words died on
her lips. Then she lifted her eyes to his and went on in an altered
voice.
“I have tried hard—but life is difficult, and I am a very useless
person. I can hardly be said to have an independent existence. I
was just a screw or a cog in the great machine I called life, and
when I dropped out of it I found I was of no use anywhere else.
What can one do when one finds that one only fits into one hole?
One must get back to it or be thrown out into the rubbish heap—and
you don’t know what it’s like in the rubbish heap!”
Her lips wavered into a smile—she had been distracted by the
whimsical remembrance of the confidences she had made to him, two
years earlier, in that very room. Then she had been planning to
marry Percy Gryce—what was it she was planning now?
The blood had risen strongly under Selden’s dark skin, but his
emotion showed itself only in an added seriousness of manner.
“You have something to tell me—do you mean to marry?” he said
abruptly.
Lily’s eyes did not falter, but a look of wonder, of puzzled
self-interrogation, formed itself slowly in their depths. In
the light of his question, she had paused to ask herself if her
decision had really been taken when she entered the room.
“You always told me I should have to come to it sooner or later!”
she said with a faint smile.
“And you have come to it now?”
“I shall have to come to it—presently. But there is something else
I must come to first.” She paused again, trying to transmit to her
voice the steadiness of her recovered smile. “There is some one
I must say goodbye to. Oh, not YOU—we are sure to see each other
again—but the Lily Bart you knew. I have kept her with me all this
time, but now we are going to part, and I have brought her back
to you—I am going to leave her here. When I go out presently she
will not go with me. I shall like to think that she has stayed with
you—and she’ll be no trouble, she’ll take up no room.”
She went toward him, and put out her hand, still smiling. “Will you
let her stay with you?” she asked.
He caught her hand, and she felt in his the vibration of feeling
that had not yet risen to his lips. “Lily—can’t I help you?” he
exclaimed.
She looked at him gently. “Do you remember what you said to me
once? That you could help me only by loving me? Well—you did love
me for a moment; and it helped me. It has always helped me. But the
moment is gone—it was I who let it go. And one must go on living.
Goodbye.”
She laid her other hand on his, and they looked at each other with
a kind of solemnity, as though they stood in the presence of death.
Something in truth lay dead between them—the love she had killed in
him and could no longer call to life. But something lived between
them also, and leaped up in her like an imperishable flame: it was
the love his love had kindled, the passion of her soul for his.
In its light everything else dwindled and fell away from her. She
understood now that she could not go forth and leave her old self
with him: that self must indeed live on in his presence, but it
must still continue to be hers.
Selden had retained her hand, and continued to scrutinize her with
a strange sense of foreboding. The external aspect of the situation
had vanished for him as completely as for her: he felt it only as
one of those rare moments which lift the veil from their faces as
they pass.
“Lily,” he said in a low voice, “you mustn’t speak in this way. I
can’t let you go without knowing what you mean to do. Things may
change—but they don’t pass. You can never go out of my life.”
She met his eyes with an illumined look. “No,” she said. “I see
that now. Let us always be friends. Then I shall feel safe,
whatever happens.”
“Whatever happens? What do you mean? What is going to happen?”
She turned away quietly and walked toward the hearth.
“Nothing at present—except that I am very cold, and that before I
go you must make up the fire for me.”
She knelt on the hearth-rug, stretching her hands to the embers.
Puzzled by the sudden change in her tone, he mechanically gathered
a handful of wood from the basket and tossed it on the fire. As he
did so, he noticed how thin her hands looked against the rising
light of the flames. He saw too, under the loose lines of her
dress, how the curves of her figure had shrunk to angularity; he
remembered long afterward how the red play of the flame sharpened
the depression of her nostrils, and intensified the blackness of
the shadows which struck up from her cheekbones to her eyes. She
knelt there for a few moments in silence; a silence which he dared
not break. When she rose he fancied that he saw her draw something
from her dress and drop it into the fire; but he hardly noticed
the gesture at the time. His faculties seemed tranced, and he was
still groping for the word to break the spell. She went up to him
and laid her hands on his shoulders. “Goodbye,” she said, and as he
bent over her she touched his forehead with her lips.
Chapter 13
The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was
a momentary revival of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on
unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant
ether which emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually
it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath
her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force,
and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther. She had
reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she
remembered that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might
rest.
That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she
entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of
an electric street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of
her veins, and she told herself that she must not sit long in the
penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet asphalt. But her
will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and
she was lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted
expenditure of energy. And besides, what was there to go home to?
Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room—that silence of the
night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most
discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral by her bed.
The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark
prospect: she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her
already. But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing
its power—she dared not go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep
it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there
had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it
to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually
fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the
chemist’s warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard
before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her
dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she
lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the
waning power of the chloral.
Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second
Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square the
lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and
then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path
where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of
electric light. One or two of these passers-by slackened their
pace to glance curiously at her lonely figure; but she was hardly
conscious of their scrutiny.
Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows
remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming
asphalt; and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over
her.
“Excuse me—are you sick?—Why, it’s Miss Bart!” a half-familiar
voice exclaimed.
Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman
with a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome
refinement which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its
common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve of
the lips.
“You don’t remember me,” she continued, brightening with the
pleasure of recognition, “but I’d know you anywhere, I’ve thought
of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart.
I was one of the girls at Miss Farish’s club—you helped me to go
to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name’s Nettie
Struther. It was Nettie Crane then—but I daresay you don’t remember
that either.”
Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane’s
timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying
incidents of her connection with Gerty’s charitable work. She had
furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the
mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money
she had used had been Gus Trenor’s.
She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not
forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself
sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther,
with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad
arm behind her back.
“Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you
feel better.”
A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from
the pressure of the supporting arm.
“I’m only tired—it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment;
and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion’s eyes, she
added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”
“YOU in trouble? I’ve always thought of you as being so high up,
where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean,
and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world,
I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and
that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But
you mustn’t sit here too long—it’s fearfully damp. Don’t you feel
strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.
“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.
Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side.
She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of
over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments
of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social
refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and
energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be
cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.
“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a
smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as
happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”
“Oh, but I can’t leave you like this—you’re not fit to go home
alone. And I can’t go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed
with a start of recollection. “You see, it’s my husband’s
night-shift—he’s a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with
has to step upstairs to get HER husband’s supper at seven. I didn’t
tell you I had a baby, did I? She’ll be four months old day after
tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn’t think I’d ever had a sick