The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  His friends had gathered that, whenever this regrettable contingency should occur, he meant to dispose of the business and continue his life of free experiment. As often happens in just such cases, however, it was not the moment for a sale, and Merrick had to take over the management of the foundry. Some two years later he had a chance to free himself; but when it came he did not choose to take it. This tame sequel to an inspiriting start was disappointing to some of us, and I was among those disposed to regret Merrick’s drop to the level of the prosperous. Then I went away to a big engineering job in China, and from there to Africa, and spent the next twelve years out of sight and sound of New York doings.

  During that long interval I heard of no new phase in Merrick’s evolution, but this did not surprise me, as I had never expected from him actions resonant enough to cross the globe. All I knew— and this did surprise me—was that he had not married, and that he was still in the iron business. All through those years, however, I never ceased to wish, in certain situations and at certain turns of thought, that Merrick were in reach, that I could tell this or that to Merrick. I had never, in the interval, found any one with just his quickness of perception and just his sureness of response.

  After dinner, therefore, we irresistibly drew together. In Mrs. Cumnor’s big easy drawing-room cigars were allowed, and there was no break in the communion of the sexes; and, this being the case, I ought to have sought a seat beside one of the ladies among whom we were allowed to remain. But, as had generally happened of old when Merrick was in sight, I found myself steering straight for him past all minor ports of call.

  There had been no time, before dinner, for more than the barest expression of satisfaction at meeting, and our seats had been at opposite ends of the longish table, so that we got our first real look at each other in the secluded corner to which Mrs. Cumnor’s vigilance now directed us.

  Merrick was still handsome in his stooping tawny way: handsomer perhaps, with thinnish hair and more lines in his face, than in the young excess of his good looks. He was very glad to see me and conveyed his gladness by the same charming smile; but as soon as we began to talk I felt a change. It was not merely the change that years and experience and altered values bring. There was something more fundamental the matter with Merrick, something dreadful, unforeseen, unaccountable: Merrick had grown conventional and dull.

  In the glow of his frank pleasure in seeing me I was ashamed to analyze the nature of the change; but presently our talk began to flag—fancy a talk with Merrick flagging!—and self-deception became impossible as I watched myself handing out platitudes with the gesture of the salesman offering something to a purchaser “equally good.” The worst of it was that Merrick—Merrick, who had once felt everything!—didn’t seem to feel the lack of spontaneity in my remarks, but hung on them with a harrowing faith in the resuscitating power of our past. It was as if he hugged the empty vessel of our friendship without perceiving that the last drop of its essence was dry.

  But after all, I am exaggerating. Through my surprise and disappointment I felt a certain sense of well-being in the mere physical presence of my old friend. I liked looking at the way his dark hair waved away from the forehead, at the tautness of his dry brown cheek, the thoughtful backward tilt of his head, the way his brown eyes mused upon the scene through lowered lids. All the past was in his way of looking and sitting, and I wanted to stay near him, and felt that he wanted me to stay; but the devil of it was that neither of us knew what to talk about.

  It was this difficulty which caused me, after a while, since I could not follow Merrick’s talk, to follow his eyes in their roaming circuit of the room.

  At the moment when our glances joined, his had paused on a lady seated at some distance from our corner. Immersed, at first, in the satisfaction of finding myself again with Merrick, I had been only half aware of this lady, as of one of the few persons present whom I did not know, or had failed to remember. There was nothing in her appearance to challenge my attention or to excite my curiosity, and I don’t suppose I should have looked at her again if I had not noticed that my friend was doing so.

  She was a woman of about forty-seven, with fair faded hair and a young figure. Her gray dress was handsome but ineffective, and her pale and rather serious face wore a small unvarying smile which might have been pinned on with her ornaments. She was one of the women in whom increasing years show rather what they have taken than what they have bestowed, and only on looking closely did one see that what they had taken must have been good of its kind.

  Phil Cumnor and another man were talking to her, and the very intensity of the attention she bestowed on them betrayed the straining of rebellious thoughts. She never let her eyes stray or her smile drop; and at the proper moment I saw she was ready with the proper sentiment.

  The party, like most of those that Mrs. Cumnor gathered about her, was not composed of exceptional beings. The people of the old vanished New York set were not exceptional: they were mostly cut on the same convenient and unobtrusive pattern; but they were often exceedingly “nice.” And this obsolete quality marked every look and gesture of the lady I was scrutinizing.

  While these reflections were passing through my mind I was aware that Merrick’s eyes rested still on her. I took a cross-section of his look and found in it neither surprise nor absorption, but only a certain sober pleasure just about at the emotional level of the rest of the room. If he continued to look at her, his expression seemed to say, it was only because, all things considered, there were fewer reasons for looking at anybody else.

  This made me wonder what were the reasons for looking at her; and as a first step toward enlightenment I said:—“I’m sure I’ve seen the lady over there in gray—”

  Merrick detached his eyes and turned them on me with a wondering look.

  “Seen her? You know her.” He waited. “Don’t you know her? It’s Mrs. Reardon.”

  I wondered that he should wonder, for I could not remember, in the Cumnor group or elsewhere, having known any one of the name he mentioned.

  “But perhaps,” he continued, “you hadn’t heard of her marriage? You knew her as Mrs. Trant.”

  I gave him back his stare. “Not Mrs. Philip Trant?”

  “Yes; Mrs. Philip Trant.”

  “Not Paulina?”

  “Yes—Paulina,” he said, with a just perceptible delay before the name.

  In my surprise I continued to stare at him. He averted his eyes from mine after a moment, and I saw that they had strayed back to her. “You find her so changed?” he asked.

  Something in his voice acted as a warning signal, and I tried to reduce my astonishment to less unbecoming proportions. “I don’t find that she looks much older.”

  “No. Only different?” he suggested, as if there were nothing new to him in my perplexity.

  “Yes—awfully different.”

  “I suppose we’re all awfully different. To you, I mean—coming from so far?”

  “I recognized all the rest of you,” I said, hesitating. “And she used to be the one who stood out most.”

  There was a flash, a wave, a stir of something deep down in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “That’s the difference.”

  “I see it is. She—she looks worn down. Soft but blurred, like the figures in that tapestry behind her.”

  He glanced at her again, as if to test the exactness of my analogy.

  “Life wears everybody down,” he said.

  “Yes—except those it makes more distinct. They’re the rare ones, of course; but she was rare.”

  He stood up suddenly, looking old and tired. “I believe I’ll be off. I wish you’d come down to my place for Sunday.... No, don’t shake hands—I want to slide away unawares.”

  He had backed away to the threshold and was turning the noiseless door-knob. Even Mrs. Cumnor’s door-knobs had tact and didn’t tell.

  “Of course I’ll come,” I promised warmly. In the last ten minutes he had begun to interest me again.
r />   “All right. Good-bye.” Half through the door he paused to add:—“She remembers you. You ought to speak to her.”

  “I’m going to. But tell me a little more.” I thought I saw a shade of constraint on his face, and did not add, as I had meant to: “Tell me—because she interests me—what wore her down?” Instead, I asked: “How soon after Trant’s death did she remarry?”

  He seemed to make an effort of memory. “It was seven years ago, I think.”

  “And is Reardon here to-night?”

  “Yes; over there, talking to Mrs. Cumnor.”

  I looked across the broken groupings and saw a large glossy man with straw-colored hair and a red face, whose shirt and shoes and complexion seemed all to have received a coat of the same expensive varnish.

  As I looked there was a drop in the talk about us, and I heard Mr. Reardon pronounce in a big booming voice: “What I say is: what’s the good of disturbing things? Thank the Lord, I’m content with what I’ve got!”

  “Is that her husband? What’s he like?”

  “Oh, the best fellow in the world,” said Merrick, going.

  II

  Merrick had a little place at Riverdale, where he went occasionally to be near the Iron Works, and where he hid his week-ends when the world was too much with him.

  Here, on the following Saturday afternoon I found him awaiting me in a pleasant setting of books and prints and faded parental furniture.

  We dined late, and smoked and talked afterward in his book-walled study till the terrier on the hearth-rug stood up and yawned for bed. When we took the hint and moved toward the staircase I felt, not that I had found the old Merrick again, but that I was on his track, had come across traces of his passage here and there in the thick jungle that had grown up between us. But I had a feeling that when I finally came on the man himself he might be dead....

  As we started up stairs he turned back with one of his abrupt shy movements, and walked into the study.

  “Wait a bit!” he called to me.

  I waited, and he came out in a moment carrying a limp folio.

  “It’s typewritten. Will you take a look at it? I’ve been trying to get to work again,” he explained, thrusting the manuscript into my hand.

  “What? Poetry, I hope?” I exclaimed.

  He shook his head with a gleam of derision. “No—just general considerations. The fruit of fifty years of inexperience.”

  He showed me to my room and said good-night.

  The following afternoon we took a long walk inland, across the hills, and I said to Merrick what I could of his book. Unluckily there wasn’t much to say. The essays were judicious, polished and cultivated; but they lacked the freshness and audacity of his youthful work. I tried to conceal my opinion behind the usual generalizations, but he broke through these feints with a quick thrust to the heart of my meaning.

  “It’s worn down—blurred? Like the figures in the Cumnors’ tapestry?”

  I hesitated. “It’s a little too damned resigned,” I said.

  “Ah,” he exclaimed, “so am I. Resigned.” He switched the bare brambles by the roadside. “A man can’t serve two masters.”

  “You mean business and literature?”

  “No; I mean theory and instinct. The gray tree and the green. You’ve got to choose which fruit you’ll try; and you don’t know till afterward which of the two has the dead core.”

  “How can anybody be sure that only one of them has?”

  “I’m sure,” said Merrick sharply.

  We turned back to the subject of his essays, and I was astonished at the detachment with which he criticized and demolished them. Little by little, as we talked, his old perspective, his old standards came back to him; but with the difference that they no longer seemed like functions of his mind but merely like attitudes assumed or dropped at will. He could still, with an effort, put himself at the angle from which he had formerly seen things; but it was with the effort of a man climbing mountains after a sedentary life in the plain.

  I tried to cut the talk short, but he kept coming back to it with nervous insistence, forcing me into the last retrenchments of hypocrisy, and anticipating the verdict I held back. I perceived that a great deal—immensely more than I could see a reason for—had hung for him on my opinion of his book.

  Then, as suddenly, his insistence dropped and, as if ashamed of having forced himself so long on my attention, he began to talk rapidly and uninterestingly of other things.

  We were alone again that evening, and after dinner, wishing to efface the impression of the afternoon, and above all to show that I wanted him to talk about himself, I reverted to his work. “You must need an outlet of that sort. When a man’s once had it in him, as you have—and when other things begin to dwindle—”

  He laughed. “Your theory is that a man ought to be able to return to the Muse as he comes back to his wife after he’s ceased to interest other women?”

  “No; as he comes back to his wife after the day’s work is done.” A new thought came to me as I looked at him. “You ought to have had one,” I added.

  He laughed again. “A wife, you mean? So that there’d have been some one waiting for me even if the Muse decamped?” He went on after a pause: “I’ve a notion that the kind of woman worth coming back to wouldn’t be much more patient than the Muse. But as it happens I never tried—because, for fear they’d chuck me, I put them both out-of-doors together.”

  He turned his head and looked past me with a queer expression at the low paneled door at my back. “Out of that very door they went—the two of ’em, on a rainy night like this: and one stopped and looked back, to see if I wasn’t going to call her—and I didn’t—and so they both went....”

  III

  “The Muse?” (said Merrick refilling my glass and stooping to pat the terrier as he went back to his chair)—“well, you’ve met the Muse in the little volume of sonnets you used to like; and you’ve met the woman too, and you used to like her; though you didn’t know her when you saw her the other evening....

  “No, I won’t ask you how she struck you when you talked to her: I know. She struck you like that stuff I gave you to read last night. She’s conformed—I’ve conformed—the mills have caught us and ground us: ground us, oh, exceedingly small!

  “But you remember what she was; and that’s the reason why I’m telling you this now....

  “You may recall that after my father’s death I tried to sell the Works. I was impatient to free myself from anything that would keep me tied to New York. I don’t dislike my trade, and I’ve made, in the end, a fairly good thing of it; but industrialism was not, at that time, in the line of my tastes, and I know now that it wasn’t what I was meant for. Above all, I wanted to get away, to see new places and rub up against different ideas. I had reached a time of life—the top of the first hill, so to speak—where the distance draws one, and everything in the foreground seems tame and stale. I was sick to death of the particular set of conformities I had grown up among; sick of being a pleasant popular young man with a long line of dinners on my list, and the dead certainty of meeting the same people, or their prototypes, at all of them.

  “Well—I failed to sell the Works, and that increased my discontent. I went through moods of cold unsociability, alternating with sudden flushes of curiosity, when I gloated over stray scraps of talk overheard in railway stations and omnibuses, when strange faces that I passed in the street tantalized me with fugitive promises. I wanted to be among things that were unexpected and unknown; and it seemed to me that nobody about me understood in the least what I felt, but that somewhere just out of reach there was some one who did, and whom I must find or despair....

  “It was just then that, one evening, I saw Mrs. Trant for the first time.

  “Yes: I know—you wonder what I mean. I’d known her, of course, as a girl; I’d met her several times after her marriage; and I’d lately been thrown with her, quite intimately and continuously, during a succession of country-h
ouse visits. But I had never, as it happened, really seen her....

  “It was at a dinner at the Cumnors’; and there she was, in front of the very tapestry we saw her against the other evening, with people about her, and her face turned from me, and nothing noticeable or different in her dress or manner; and suddenly she stood out for me against the familiar unimportant background, and for the first time I saw a meaning in the stale phrase of a picture’s walking out of its frame. For, after all, most people are just that to us: pictures, furniture, the inanimate accessories of our little island-area of sensation. And then sometimes one of these graven images moves and throws out live filaments toward us, and the line they make draws us across the world as the moon-track seems to draw a boat across the water....

  “There she stood; and as this queer sensation came over me I felt that she was looking steadily at me, that her eyes were voluntarily, consciously resting on me with the weight of the very question I was asking.

  “I went over and joined her, and she turned and walked with me into the music-room. Earlier in the evening some one had been singing, and there were low lights there, and a few couples still sitting in those confidential corners of which Mrs. Cumnor has the art; but we were under no illusion as to the nature of these presences. We knew that they were just painted in, and that the whole of life was in us two, flowing back and forward between us. We talked, of course; we had the attitudes, even the words, of the others: I remember her telling me her plans for the spring and asking me politely about mine! As if there were the least sense in plans, now that this thing had happened!