The House of Mirth
three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue
her present way of living, without earning any additional money,
all incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point.
She hid her eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance
of that ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss
Silverton’s dowdy figure take its despondent way.
It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that
she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper
impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward
conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to
be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading
by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption
in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there
was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at
her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth
down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which
possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and
ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence,
without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could
cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked
back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any
real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown
hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal
existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had
grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than
another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing
traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could
draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever
form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the
concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or
in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made
up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of
broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching
it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human
striving.
Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to
Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she
knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild
centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had
come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.
The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up
the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them,
seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It
was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant
margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the
frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a
cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the
lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.
Yes—but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well
as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I KNEW HE
KNEW ABOUT ME. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal
possible—it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves
believes her to be! Well—Selden had twice been ready to stake his
faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for
his endurance. The very quality of his love had made it the more
impossible to recall to life. If it had been a simple instinct of
the blood, the power of her beauty might have revived it. But the
fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably wound up with
inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as impossible to
restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed. Selden
had given her of his best; but he was as incapable as herself of an
uncritical return to former states of feeling.
There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory
of his faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman
can live on her memories. As she held Nettie Struther’s child in
her arms the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and
run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all
her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness. Yes—it
was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of
it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached
herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now
remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed
her. It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful
fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities
of the future were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled
by the intense cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken
through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and
action, and to see exactly what she would do in all the long
days to come. There was the cheque in her desk, for instance—she
meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor; but she foresaw
that when the morning came she would put off doing so, would slip
into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified her—she
dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence
Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing?
She knew the strength of the opposing impulses—she could feel
the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh
compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong,
to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only
life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost
possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the
loving and foregoing in the world!
She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her
writing-desk, enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to
her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it,
without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his
name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk. After that
she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing,
till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness
of the hour. In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and
the rumble of the “elevated” came only at long intervals through
the deep unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal separation
from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely
confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel,
and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands
against her eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to
symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the
world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless
universe.
But this was the verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so
near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she
remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The
little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon
her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of
her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must
fall asleep at once; but as soon as she had lain down every nerve
started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a
great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and
her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without
knowing where to take refuge.
She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness
was possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred
different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could
still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion
would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities;
but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant
had been forced into her veins.
She could bear it—yes, she could bear it; but what strength would
be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared—the next day
pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to
follow—they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut
them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion.
She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass;
but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the
supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the
dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase
it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so—she remembered
the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep
without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred:
the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few
drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure
for her the rest she so desperately needed....
She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely—the
physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her
mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes
contract in a blaze of light—darkness, darkness was what she must
have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the
contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.
She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first
effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would
take—the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach
of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over
her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect
increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look
down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug
seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to
be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping
into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But
gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she
wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited.
She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about—she had
returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be so
difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength
to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had
been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her.
She had been unhappy, and now she was happy—she had felt herself
alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.
She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she
suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was
odd—but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm: she felt
the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not
know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the
fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.
She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to
pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound
should disturb the sleeping child.
As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she
must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life
clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered
vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not
remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and
say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.
Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold
her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought