The House of Mirth
In this desultory yet agitated fashion life went on through Lily’s
teens: a zig-zag broken course down which the family craft glided
on a rapid current of amusement, tugged at by the underflow of
a perpetual need—the need of more money. Lily could not recall
the time when there had been money enough, and in some vague way
her father seemed always to blame for the deficiency. It could
certainly not be the fault of Mrs. Bart, who was spoken of by her
friends as a “wonderful manager.” Mrs. Bart was famous for the
unlimited effect she produced on limited means; and to the lady and
her acquaintances there was something heroic in living as though
one were much richer than one’s bank-book denoted.
Lily was naturally proud of her mother’s aptitude in this line: she
had been brought up in the faith that, whatever it cost, one must
have a good cook, and be what Mrs. Bart called “decently dressed.”
Mrs. Bart’s worst reproach to her husband was to ask him if he
expected her to “live like a pig”; and his replying in the negative
was always regarded as a justification for cabling to Paris for an
extra dress or two, and telephoning to the jeweller that he might,
after all, send home the turquoise bracelet which Mrs. Bart had
looked at that morning.
Lily knew people who “lived like pigs,” and their appearance and
surroundings justified her mother’s repugnance to that form of
existence. They were mostly cousins, who inhabited dingy houses
with engravings from Cole’s Voyage of Life on the drawing-room
walls, and slatternly parlour-maids who said “I’ll go and see”
to visitors calling at an hour when all right-minded persons are
conventionally if not actually out. The disgusting part of it was
that many of these cousins were rich, so that Lily imbibed the idea
that if people lived like pigs it was from choice, and through the
lack of any proper standard of conduct. This gave her a sense of
reflected superiority, and she did not need Mrs. Bart’s comments on
the family frumps and misers to foster her naturally lively taste
for splendour.
Lily was nineteen when circumstances caused her to revise her view
of the universe.
The previous year she had made a dazzling debut fringed by a heavy
thunder-cloud of bills. The light of the debut still lingered on
the horizon, but the cloud had thickened; and suddenly it broke.
The suddenness added to the horror; and there were still times
when Lily relived with painful vividness every detail of the day
on which the blow fell. She and her mother had been seated at the
luncheon-table, over the CHAUFROIX and cold salmon of the previous
night’s dinner: it was one of Mrs. Bart’s few economies to consume
in private the expensive remnants of her hospitality. Lily was
feeling the pleasant languor which is youth’s penalty for dancing
till dawn; but her mother, in spite of a few lines about the mouth,
and under the yellow waves on her temples, was as alert, determined
and high in colour as if she had risen from an untroubled sleep.
In the centre of the table, between the melting MARRONS GLACES
and candied cherries, a pyramid of American Beauties lifted their
vigorous stems; they held their heads as high as Mrs. Bart, but
their rose-colour had turned to a dissipated purple, and Lily’s
sense of fitness was disturbed by their reappearance on the
luncheon-table.
“I really think, mother,” she said reproachfully, “we might
afford a few fresh flowers for luncheon. Just some jonquils or
lilies-of-the-valley—”
Mrs. Bart stared. Her own fastidiousness had its eye fixed on the
world, and she did not care how the luncheon-table looked when
there was no one present at it but the family. But she smiled at
her daughter’s innocence.
“Lilies-of-the-valley,” she said calmly, “cost two dollars a dozen
at this season.”
Lily was not impressed. She knew very little of the value of money.
“It would not take more than six dozen to fill that bowl,” she
argued.
“Six dozen what?” asked her father’s voice in the doorway.
The two women looked up in surprise; though it was a Saturday, the
sight of Mr. Bart at luncheon was an unwonted one. But neither
his wife nor his daughter was sufficiently interested to ask an
explanation.
Mr. Bart dropped into a chair, and sat gazing absently at the
fragment of jellied salmon which the butler had placed before him.
“I was only saying,” Lily began, “that I hate to see faded flowers
at luncheon; and mother says a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley would
not cost more than twelve dollars. Mayn’t I tell the florist to
send a few every day?”
She leaned confidently toward her father: he seldom refused her
anything, and Mrs. Bart had taught her to plead with him when her
own entreaties failed.
Mr. Bart sat motionless, his gaze still fixed on the salmon, and
his lower jaw dropped; he looked even paler than usual, and his
thin hair lay in untidy streaks on his forehead. Suddenly he looked
at his daughter and laughed. The laugh was so strange that Lily
coloured under it: she disliked being ridiculed, and her father
seemed to see something ridiculous in the request. Perhaps he
thought it foolish that she should trouble him about such a trifle.
“Twelve dollars—twelve dollars a day for flowers? Oh, certainly, my
dear—give him an order for twelve hundred.” He continued to laugh.
Mrs. Bart gave him a quick glance.
“You needn’t wait, Poleworth—I will ring for you,” she said to the
butler.
The butler withdrew with an air of silent disapproval, leaving the
remains of the CHAUFROIX on the sideboard.
“What is the matter, Hudson? Are you ill?” said Mrs. Bart severely.
She had no tolerance for scenes which were not of her own making,
and it was odious to her that her husband should make a show of
himself before the servants.
“Are you ill?” she repeated.
“Ill?—— No, I’m ruined,” he said.
Lily made a frightened sound, and Mrs. Bart rose to her feet.
“Ruined——?” she cried; but controlling herself instantly, she
turned a calm face to Lily.
“Shut the pantry door,” she said.
Lily obeyed, and when she turned back into the room her father was
sitting with both elbows on the table, the plate of salmon between
them, and his head bowed on his hands.
Mrs. Bart stood over him with a white face which made her hair
unnaturally yellow. She looked at Lily as the latter approached:
her look was terrible, but her voice was modulated to a ghastly
cheerfulness.
“Your father is not well—he doesn’t know what he is saying. It
is nothing—but you had better go upstairs; and don’t talk to the
servants,” she added.
Lily obeyed; she always obeyed when her mother spoke in that
voice. She had not been deceived by Mrs. Bart’s words: she knew
at once that they were ruined. In the dark hours which followed,
that awful fact overshadowed even her father’s slow and difficult
dying. To his wife he no longer counted: he had become extinct
when he ceased to fulfil his purpose, and she sat at his side
with the provisional air of a traveller who waits for a belated
train to start. Lily’s feelings were softer: she pitied him in a
frightened ineffectual way. But the fact that he was for the most
part unconscious, and that his attention, when she stole into the
room, drifted away from her after a moment, made him even more of a
stranger than in the nursery days when he had never come home till
after dark. She seemed always to have seen him through a blur—first
of sleepiness, then of distance and indifference—and now the fog
had thickened till he was almost indistinguishable. If she could
have performed any little services for him, or have exchanged with
him a few of those affecting words which an extensive perusal of
fiction had led her to connect with such occasions, the filial
instinct might have stirred in her; but her pity, finding no active
expression, remained in a state of spectatorship, overshadowed by
her mother’s grim unflagging resentment. Every look and act of Mrs.
Bart’s seemed to say: “You are sorry for him now—but you will feel
differently when you see what he has done to us.”
It was a relief to Lily when her father died.
Then a long winter set in. There was a little money left, but to
Mrs. Bart it seemed worse than nothing—the mere mockery of what
she was entitled to. What was the use of living if one had to live
like a pig? She sank into a kind of furious apathy, a state of
inert anger against fate. Her faculty for “managing” deserted her,
or she no longer took sufficient pride in it to exert it. It was
well enough to “manage” when by so doing one could keep one’s own
carriage; but when one’s best contrivance did not conceal the fact
that one had to go on foot, the effort was no longer worth making.
Lily and her mother wandered from place to place, now paying long
visits to relations whose house-keeping Mrs. Bart criticized, and
who deplored the fact that she let Lily breakfast in bed when the
girl had no prospects before her, and now vegetating in cheap
continental refuges, where Mrs. Bart held herself fiercely aloof
from the frugal tea-tables of her companions in misfortune. She was
especially careful to avoid her old friends and the scenes of her
former successes. To be poor seemed to her such a confession of
failure that it amounted to disgrace; and she detected a note of
condescension in the friendliest advances.
Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of
Lily’s beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though
it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance.
It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which
their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though
it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she
tried to instil into the latter a sense of the responsibility that
such a charge involved. She followed in imagination the career
of other beauties, pointing out to her daughter what might be
achieved through such a gift, and dwelling on the awful warning of
those who, in spite of it, had failed to get what they wanted: to
Mrs. Bart, only stupidity could explain the lamentable denouement
of some of her examples. She was not above the inconsistency of
charging fate, rather than herself, with her own misfortunes; but
she inveighed so acrimoniously against love-matches that Lily would
have fancied her own marriage had been of that nature, had not Mrs.
Bart frequently assured her that she had been “talked into it”—by
whom, she never made clear.
Lily was duly impressed by the magnitude of her opportunities. The
dinginess of her present life threw into enchanting relief the
existence to which she felt herself entitled. To a less illuminated
intelligence Mrs. Bart’s counsels might have been dangerous; but
Lily understood that beauty is only the raw material of conquest,
and that to convert it into success other arts are required. She
knew that to betray any sense of superiority was a subtler form of
the stupidity her mother denounced, and it did not take her long
to learn that a beauty needs more tact than the possessor of an
average set of features.
Her ambitions were not as crude as Mrs. Bart’s. It had been among
that lady’s grievances that her husband—in the early days, before
he was too tired—had wasted his evenings in what she vaguely
described as “reading poetry”; and among the effects packed off to
auction after his death were a score or two of dingy volumes which
had struggled for existence among the boots and medicine bottles of
his dressing-room shelves. There was in Lily a vein of sentiment,
perhaps transmitted from this source, which gave an idealizing
touch to her most prosaic purposes. She liked to think of her
beauty as a power for good, as giving her the opportunity to attain
a position where she should make her influence felt in the vague