Betton studied the ironic “Unknown” for an appreciable space of time; then he broke into a laugh. He had suddenly recalled Vyse’s similar experience with “Hester Macklin,” and the light he was able to throw on that episode was searching enough to penetrate all the dark corners of his own adventure. He felt a rush of heat to the ears; catching sight of himself in the glass, he saw a ridiculous congested countenance, and dropped into a chair to hide it between his fists. He was roused by the opening of the door, and Vyse appeared.
“Oh, I beg pardon—you’re ill?” said the secretary.
Betton’s only answer was an inarticulate murmur of derision; then he pushed forward the letter with the imprint of the Dead Letter Office.
“Look at that,” he jeered.
Vyse peered at the envelope, and turned it over slowly in his hands. Betton’s eyes, fixed on him, saw his face decompose like a substance touched by some powerful acid. He clung to the envelope as if to gain time.
“It’s from the young lady you’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs?” he asked at length.
“It’s from the young lady I’ve been writing to at Swazee Springs.”
“Well—I suppose she’s gone away,” continued Vyse, rebuilding his countenance rapidly.
“Yes; and in a community numbering perhaps a hundred and fifty souls, including the dogs and chickens, the local post-office is so ignorant of her movements that my letter has to be sent to the Dead Letter Office.”
Vyse meditated on this; then he laughed in turn. “After all, the same thing happened to me—with ‘Hester Macklin,’ I mean,” he suggested sheepishly.
“Just so,” said Betton, bringing down his clenched fist on the table. “Just so,” he repeated, in italics.
He caught his secretary’s glance, and held it with his own for a moment. Then he dropped it as, in pity, one releases something scared and squirming.
“The very day my letter was returned from Swazee Springs she wrote me this from there,” he said, holding up the last Florida missive.
“Ha! That’s funny,” said Vyse, with a damp forehead.
“Yes, it’s funny,” said Betton. He leaned back, his hands in his pockets, staring up at the ceiling, and noticing a crack in the cornice. Vyse, at the corner of the writing-table, waited.
“Shall I get to work?” he began, after a silence measurable by minutes. Betton’s gaze descended from the cornice.
“I’ve got your seat, haven’t I?” he said politely, rising and moving away from the table.
Vyse, with a quick gleam of relief, slipped into the vacant chair, and began to stir about among the papers.
“How’s your father?” Betton asked from the hearth.
“Oh, better—better, thank you. He’ll pull out of it.”
“But you had a sharp scare for a day or two?”
“Yes—it was touch and go when I got there.”
Another pause, while Vyse began to classify the letters.
“And I suppose,” Betton continued in a steady tone, “your anxiety made you forget your usual precautions—whatever they were—about this Florida correspondence, and before you’d had time to prevent it the Swazee post-office blundered?”
Vyse lifted his head with a quick movement. “What do you mean?” he asked, pushing back his chair.
“I mean that you saw I couldn’t live without flattery, and that you’ve been ladling it out to me to earn your keep.”
Vyse sat motionless and shrunken, digging the blotting-pad with his pen. “What on earth are you driving at?” he repeated.
“Though why the deuce,” Betton continued in the same steady tone, “you should need to do this kind of work when you’ve got such faculties at your service—those letters were wonderful, my dear fellow! Why in the world don’t you write novels, instead of writing to other people about them?”
Vyse straightened himself with an effort. “What are you talking about, Betton? Why the devil do you think I wrote those letters?”
Betton held back his answer with a brooding face. “Because I wrote ‘Hester Macklin’s’—to myself!”
Vyse sat stock-still, without the least outcry of wonder. “Well—?” he finally said, in a low tone.
“And because you found me out (you see, you can’t even feign surprise!)—because you saw through it at a glance, knew at once that the letters were faked. And when you’d foolishly put me on my guard by pointing out to me that they were a clumsy forgery, and had then suddenly guessed that I was the forger, you drew the natural inference that I had to have popular approval, or at least had to make you think I had it. You saw that, to me, the worst thing about the failure of the book was having you know it was a failure. And so you applied your superior—your immeasurably superior—abilities to carrying on the humbug, and deceiving me as I’d tried to deceive you. And you did it so successfully that I don’t see why the devil you haven’t made your fortune writing novels!”
Vyse remained silent, his head slightly bent under the mounting tide of Betton’s denunciation.
“The way you differentiated your people—characterized them—avoided my stupid mistake of making the women’s letters too short and too logical, of letting my different correspondents use the same expressions: the amount of ingenuity and art you wasted on it! I swear, Vyse, I’m sorry that damned post-office went back on you,” Betton went on, piling up the waves of his irony.
But at this height they suddenly paused, drew back on themselves, and began to recede before the sight of Vyse’s misery. Something warm and emotional in Betton’s nature—a lurking kindliness, perhaps, for any one who tried to soothe and smooth his writhing ego—softened his eye as it rested on the figure of his secretary.
“Look here, Vyse—I’m not sorry—not altogether sorry this has happened!” He moved across the room, and laid his hand on Vyse’s drooping shoulder. “In a queer illogical way it evens up things, as it were. I did you a shabby turn once, years ago—oh, out of sheer carelessness, of course—about that novel of yours I promised to give to Apthorn. If I had given it, it might not have made any difference—I’m not sure it wasn’t too good for success—but anyhow, I dare say you thought my personal influence might have helped you, might at least have got you a quicker hearing. Perhaps you thought it was because the thing was so good that I kept it back, that I felt some nasty jealousy of your superiority. I swear to you it wasn’t that—I clean forgot it. And one day when I came home it was gone: you’d sent and taken it away. And I’ve always thought since that you might have owed me a grudge—and not unjustly; so this...this business of the letters...the sympathy you’ve shown...for I suppose it is sympathy...?”
Vyse startled and checked him by a queer crackling laugh.
“It’s not sympathy?” broke in Betton, the moisture drying out of his voice. He withdrew his hand from Vyse’s shoulder. “What is it, then? The joy of uncovering my nakedness? An eye for an eye? Is it that?”
Vyse rose from his seat, and with a mechanical gesture swept into a heap all the letters he had sorted.
“I’m stone broke, and wanted to keep my job—that’s what it is,” he said wearily...
AUTRES TEMPS...
MRS. LIDCOTE, as the huge menacing mass of New York defined itself far off across the waters, shrank back into her corner of the deck and sat listening with a kind of unreasoning terror to the steady onward drive of the screws.
She had set out on the voyage quietly enough,—in what she called her “reasonable” mood,—but the week at sea had given her too much time to think of things and had left her too long alone with the past.
When she was alone, it was always the past that occupied her. She couldn’t get away from it, and she didn’t any longer care to. During her long years of exile she had made her terms with it, had learned to accept the fact that it would always be there, huge, obstructing, encumbering, bigger and more dominant than anything the future could ever conjure up. And, at any rate, she was sure of it, she understood it, knew how to
reckon with it; she had learned to screen and manage and protect it as one does an afflicted member of one’s family.
There had never been any danger of her being allowed to forget the past. It looked out at her from the face of every acquaintance, it appeared suddenly in the eyes of strangers when a word enlightened them: “Yes, the Mrs. Lidcote, don’t you know?” It had sprung at her the first day out, when, across the dining-room, from the captain’s table, she had seen Mrs. Lorin Boulger’s revolving eye-glass pause and the eye behind it grow as blank as a dropped blind. The next day, of course, the captain had asked: “You know your ambassadress, Mrs. Boulger?” and she had replied that, No, she seldom left Florence, and hadn’t been to Rome for more than a day since the Boulgers had been sent to Italy. She was so used to these phrases that it cost her no effort to repeat them. And the captain had promptly changed the subject.
No, she didn’t, as a rule, mind the past, because she was used to it and understood it. It was a great concrete fact in her path that she had to walk around every time she moved in any direction. But now, in the light of the unhappy event that had summoned her from Italy,—the sudden unanticipated news of her daughter’s divorce from Horace Pursh and remarriage with Wilbour Barkley—the past, her own poor miserable past, started up at her with eyes of accusation, became, to her disordered fancy, like the afflicted relative suddenly breaking away from nurses and keepers and publicly parading the horror and misery she had, all the long years, so patiently screened and secluded.
Yes, there it had stood before her through the agitated weeks since the news had come—during her interminable journey from India, where Leila’s letter had overtaken her, and the feverish halt in her apartment in Florence, where she had had to stop and gather up her possessions for a fresh start—there it had stood grinning at her with a new balefulness which seemed to say: “Oh, but you’ve got to look at me now, because I’m not only your own past but Leila’s present.”
Certainly it was a master-stroke of those arch-ironists of the shears and spindle to duplicate her own story in her daughter’s. Mrs. Lidcote had always somewhat grimly fancied that, having so signally failed to be of use to Leila in other ways, she would at least serve her as a warning. She had even abstained from defending herself, from making the best of her case, had stoically refused to plead extenuating circumstances, lest Leila’s impulsive sympathy should lead to deductions that might react disastrously on her own life. And now that very thing had happened, and Mrs. Lidcote could hear the whole of New York saying with one voice: “Yes, Leila’s done just what her mother did. With such an example what could you expect?”
Yet if she had been an example, poor woman, she had been an awful one; she had been, she would have supposed, of more use as a deterrent than a hundred blameless mothers as incentives. For how could any one who had seen anything of her life in the last eighteen years have had the courage to repeat so disastrous an experiment?
Well, logic in such cases didn’t count, example didn’t count, nothing probably counted but having the same impulses in the blood; and that was the dark inheritance she had bestowed upon her daughter. Leila hadn’t consciously copied her; she had simply “taken after” her, had been a projection of her own long-past rebellion.
Mrs. Lidcote had deplored, when she started, that the Utopia was a slow steamer, and would take eight full days to bring her to her unhappy daughter; but now, as the moment of reunion approached, she would willingly have turned the boat about and fled back to the high seas. It was not only because she felt still so unprepared to face what New York had in store for her, but because she needed more time to dispose of what the Utopia had already given her. The past was bad enough, but the present and future were worse, because they were less comprehensible, and because, as she grew older, surprises and inconsequences troubled her more than the worst certainties.
There was Mrs. Boulger, for instance. In the light, or rather the darkness, of new developments, it might really be that Mrs. Boulger had not meant to cut her, but had simply failed to recognize her. Mrs. Lidcote had arrived at this hypothesis simply by listening to the conversation of the persons sitting next to her on deck—two lively young women with the latest Paris hats on their heads and the latest New York ideas in them. These ladies, as to whom it would have been impossible for a person with Mrs. Lidcote’s old-fashioned categories to determine whether they were married or unmarried, “nice” or “horrid,” or any one or other of the definite things which young women, in her youth and her society, were conveniently assumed to be, had revealed a familiarity with the world of New York that, again according to Mrs. Lidcote’s traditions, should have implied a recognized place in it. But in the present fluid state of manners what did anything imply except what their hats implied—that no one could tell what was coming next?
They seemed, at any rate, to frequent a group of idle and opulent people who executed the same gestures and revolved on the same pivots as Mrs. Lidcote’s daughter and her friends: their Coras, Matties and Mabels seemed at any moment likely to reveal familiar patronymics, and once one of the speakers, summing up a discussion of which Mrs. Lidcote had missed the beginning, had affirmed with headlong confidence: “Leila? Oh, Leila’s all right.”
Could it be her Leila, the mother had wondered, with a sharp thrill of apprehension? If only they would mention surnames! But their talk leaped elliptically from allusion to allusion, their unfinished sentences dangled over bottomless pits of conjecture, and they gave their bewildered hearer the impression not so much of talking only of their intimates, as of being intimate with every one alive.
Her old friend Franklin Ide could have told her, perhaps; but here was the last day of the voyage, and she hadn’t yet found courage to ask him. Great as had been the joy of discovering his name on the passenger-list and seeing his friendly bearded face in the throng against the taffrail at Cherbourg, she had as yet said nothing to him except, when they had met: “Of course I’m going out to Leila.”
She had said nothing to Franklin Ide because she had always instinctively shrunk from taking him into her confidence. She was sure he felt sorry for her, sorrier perhaps than any one had ever felt; but he had always paid her the supreme tribute of not showing it. His attitude allowed her to imagine that compassion was not the basis of his feeling for her, and it was part of her joy in his friendship that it was the one relation seemingly unconditioned by her state, the only one in which she could think and feel and behave like any other woman.
Now, however, as the problem of New York loomed nearer, she began to regret that she had not spoken, had not at least questioned him about the hints she had gathered on the way. He did not know the two ladies next to her, he did not even, as it chanced, know Mrs. Lorin Boulger; but he knew New York, and New York was the sphinx whose riddle she must read or perish.
Almost as the thought passed through her mind his stooping shoulders and grizzled head detached themselves against the blaze of light in the west, and he sauntered down the empty deck and dropped into the chair at her side.
“You’re expecting the Barkleys to meet you, I suppose?” he asked.
It was the first time she had heard any one pronounce her daughter’s new name, and it occurred to her that her friend, who was shy and inarticulate, had been trying to say it all the way over and had at last shot it out at her only because he felt it must be now or never.
“I don’t know. I cabled, of course. But I believe she’s at—they’re at—his place somewhere.”
“Oh, Barkley’s; yes, near Lenox, isn’t it? But she’s sure to come to town to meet you.”
He said it so easily and naturally that her own constraint was relieved, and suddenly, before she knew what she meant to do, she had burst out: “She may dislike the idea of seeing people.”
Ide, whose absent short-sighted gaze had been fixed on the slowly gliding water, turned in his seat to stare at his companion.
“Who? Leila?” he said with an incredulous laugh.
&nbs
p; Mrs. Lidcote flushed to her faded hair and grew pale again. “It took me a long time—to get used to it,” she said.
His look grew gently commiserating. “I think you’ll find—” he paused for a word—“that things are different now—altogether easier.”
“That’s what I’ve been wondering—ever since we started.” She was determined now to speak. She moved nearer, so that their arms touched, and she could drop her voice to a murmur. “You see, it all came on me in a flash. My going off to India and Siam on that long trip kept me away from letters for weeks at a time; and she didn’t want to tell me beforehand—oh, I understand that, poor child! You know how good she’s always been to me; how she’s tried to spare me. And she knew, of course, what a state of horror I’d be in. She knew I’d rush off to her at once and try to stop it. So she never gave me a hint of anything, and she even managed to muzzle Susy Suffern—you know Susy is the one of the family who keeps me informed about things at home. I don’t yet see how she prevented Susy’s telling me; but she did. And her first letter, the one I got up at Bangkok, simply said the thing was over—the divorce, I mean—and that the very next day she’d—well, I suppose there was no use waiting; and he seems to have behaved as well as possible, to have wanted to marry her as much as—”
“Who? Barkley?” he helped her out. “I should say so! Why what do you suppose—” He interrupted himself. “He’ll be devoted to her, I assure you.”
“Oh, of course; I’m sure he will. He’s written me—really beautifully. But it’s a terrible strain on a man’s devotion. I’m not sure that Leila realizes—”
The New York Stories of Edith Wharton Page 33