The New York Stories of Edith Wharton

by Edith Wharton

  Breakfast over, he glanced through the papers with the leisurely eye of a man before whom the human comedy is likely to go on unrolling itself for many years. “Nothing to be in a hurry about, after all,” was his half-conscious thought. That line which had so haunted him lately, about “Time’s wingèd chariot,” relapsed into the region of pure aesthetics, now that in his case the wings were apparently to be refurled. “No reason whatever why you shouldn’t live to be an old man.” That was pleasant hearing, at forty-nine. What did they call an old man, nowadays? He had always imagined that he shouldn’t care to live to be an old man: now he began by asking himself what he understood by the term “old.” Nothing that applied to himself, certainly; even if he were to be mysteriously metamorphosed into an old man at some far distant day—what then? It was too far off to visualize, it did not affect his imagination. Why, old age no longer began short of seventy; almost every day the papers told of hearty old folk celebrating their hundredth birthdays—sometimes by remarriage. Dorrance lost himself in pleasant musings over the increased longevity of the race, evoking visions of contemporaries of his grandparents, infirm and toothless at an age which found their descendants still carnivorous and alert.

  The papers read, his mind drifted agreeably among the rich possibilities of travel. A busy man ordered to interrupt his work could not possibly stay in New York. Names suggestive of idleness and summer clothes floated before him: the West Indies, the Canaries, Morocco—why not Morocco, where he had never been? And from there he could work his way up through Spain. He rose to reach for a volume from the shelves where his travel books were ranged—but as he stood fluttering its pages, in a state of almost thoughtless beatitude, something twitched him out of his dream. “I suppose I ought to tell her—” he said aloud.

  Certainly he ought to tell her; but the mere thought let loose a landslide of complications, obligations, explanations...their suffocating descent made him gasp for breath. He leaned against the desk, closing his eyes.

  But of course she would understand. The doctors said he was going to be all right—that would be enough for her. She would see the necessity of his going away for some months; a year perhaps. She couldn’t go with him; that was certain! So what was there to make a fuss about? Gradually, insidiously, there stole into his mind the thought—at first a mere thread of a suggestion—that this might be the moment to let her see, oh, ever so gently, that things couldn’t go on forever—nothing did—and that, at his age, and with this new prospect of restored health, a man might reasonably be supposed to have his own views, his own plans; might think of marriage; marriage with a young girl; children; a place in the country...his mind wandered into that dream as it had into the dream of travel....

  Well, meanwhile he must let her know what the diagnosis was. She had been awfully worried about him, he knew, though all along she had kept up so bravely. (Should he, in the independence of his recovered health, confess under his breath that her celebrated “braveness” sometimes got a little on his nerves?) Yes, it had been hard for her; harder than for anyone; he owed it to her to tell her at once that everything was all right; all right as far as he was concerned. And in her beautiful unselfishness nothing else would matter to her—at first. Poor child! He could hear her happy voice! “Really—really and truly? They both said so? You’re sure? Oh, of course I’ve always known...haven’t I always told you?” Bless her, yes; but he’d known all along what she was thinking.... He turned to the desk, and took up the telephone.

  As he did so, his glance lit on a sheet of paper on the rug at his feet. He had keen eyes: he saw at once that the letterhead bore the name of the eminent consultant whom his own physician had brought in that morning. Perhaps the paper was one of the three or four prescriptions they had left with him; a chance gust from door or window might have snatched it from the table where the others lay. He stooped and picked it up—

  That was the truth, then. That paper on the floor held his fate. The two doctors had written out their diagnosis, and forgotten to pocket it when they left. There were their two signatures; and the date. There was no mistake.... Paul Dorrance sat for a long time with the paper on the desk before him. He propped his chin on his locked hands, shut his eyes, and tried to grope his way through the illimitable darkness....

  Anything, anything but the sights and sounds of the world outside! If he had had the energy to move he would have jumped up, drawn the curtains shut, and cowered in his armchair in absolute blackness till he could come to some sort of terms with this new reality—for him henceforth the sole reality. For what did anything matter now except that he was doomed—was dying? That these two scoundrels had known it, and had lied to him? And that, having lied to him, in their callous professional haste, they had tossed his death sentence down before him, forgotten to carry it away, left it there staring up at him from the floor?

  Yes; it would be easier to bear in a pitch-black room, a room from which all sights and sounds, all suggestions of life, were excluded. But the effort of getting up to draw the curtains was too great. It was easier to go on sitting there, in the darkness created by pressing his fists against his lids. “Now, then, my good fellow—this is what it’ll be like in the grave....”

  Yes; but if he had known the grave was there, so close, so all-including, so infinitely more important and real than any of the trash one had tossed the years away for; if somebody had told him...he might have done a good many things differently, put matters in a truer perspective, discriminated, selected, weighed.... Or, no! A thousand times no! Be beaten like that? Go slinking off to his grave before it was dug for him? His folly had been that he had not packed enough into life; that he had always been sorting, discriminating, trying for a perspective, choosing, weighing—God! When there was barely time to seize life before the cup that held it was cracked, and gulp it down while you had a throat that could swallow!

  Ah, well—no use in retrospection. What was done was done: what undone must remain so to all eternity. Eternity—what did the word mean? How could the least fringe of its meaning be grasped by ephemeral creatures groping blindly through a few short years to the grave? Ah, the pity of it—pity, pity! That was the feeling that rose to the surface of his thoughts. Pity for all the millions of blind gropers like himself, the millions and millions who thought themselves alive, as he had, and suddenly found themselves dead: as he had! Poor mortals all, with that seed of annihilation that made them brothers—how he longed to help them, how he winced at the thought that he must so often have hurt them, brushing by in his fatuous vitality! How many other lives had he used up in his short span of living? Not consciously, of course—that was the worst of it! The old nurse who had slaved for him when he was a child, and then vanished from his life, to be found again, years after, poor, neglected, dying—well, for her he had done what he could. And that thin young man in his office, with the irritating cough, who might perhaps have been saved if he had been got away sooner? Stuck on to the end because there was a family to support—of course! And the old book-keeper whom Dorrance had inherited from his father, who was deaf and half blind, and wouldn’t go either till he had to be gently told—? All that had been, as it were, the stuff out of which he, Paul Dorrance, had built up his easy, affluent, successful life. But, no, what nonsense! He had been fair enough, kind enough, whenever he found out what was wrong; only he hadn’t really pitied them, had considered his debt discharged when he had drawn a check or rung up a Home for Incurables. Whereas pity, he now saw—oh, curse it, he was talking like a Russian novel! Nonsense...nonsense...everybody’s turn came sooner or later. The only way to reform the world was to reform Death out of it. And instead of that, Death was always there, was there now, at the door, in the room, at his elbow...his Death, his own private and particular end-of-everything. Now! He snatched his hands away from his face. They were wet.

  A bell rang hesitatingly and the door opened behind him. He heard the servant say: “Mrs. Welwood.” He stood up, blinking at the harsh impact
of light and life. “Mrs. Welwood.” Everything was going on again, going on again...people were behaving exactly as if he were not doomed...the door shut.

  “Eleanor!”

  She came up to him quickly. How close, alive, oppressive everyone seemed! She seldom came to his flat—he wondered dully why she had come today.

  She stammered: “What has happened? You promised to telephone at ten. I’ve been ringing and ringing. They said nobody answered....”

  Ah, yes; he remembered now. He looked at the receiver. It lay on the desk, where he had dropped it when his eye had lit on that paper. All that had happened in his other life—before.... Well, here she was. How pale she looked, her eyelids a little swollen. And yet how strong, how healthy—how obviously undiseased. Queer! She’d been crying too! Instinctively he turned, and put himself between her and the light.

  “What’s all the fuss about, dear?” he began jauntily.

  She colored a little, hesitating as if he had caught her at fault. “Why, it’s nearly one o’clock; and you told me the consultation was to be at nine. And you promised....”

  Oh, yes; of course. He had promised.... With the hard morning light on her pale face and thin lips, she looked twenty years older. Older than what? After all, she was well over forty, and had never been beautiful. Had he ever thought her beautiful? Poor Eleanor—oh, poor Eleanor!

  “Well, yes; it’s my fault,” he conceded. “I suppose I telephoned to somebody” (this fib to gain time) “and forgot to hang up the receiver. There it lies; I’m convicted!” He took both her hands—how they trembled!—and drew her to him.

  This was Eleanor Welwood, for fifteen years past the heaviest burden on his conscience. As he stood there, holding her hands, he tried to recover a glimpse of the beginnings, and of his own state of mind at the time. He had been captivated; but never to the point of wishing she were free to marry him. Her husband was a pleasant enough fellow; they all belonged to the same little social group; it was a delightful relation, just as it was. And Dorrance had the pretext of his old mother, alone and infirm, who lived with him and whom he could not leave. It was tacitly understood that old Mrs. Dorrance’s habits must not be disturbed by any change in the household. So love, on his part, imperceptibly cooled (or should he say ripened?) into friendship; and when his mother’s death left him free, there still remained the convenient obstacle of Horace Welwood. Horace Welwood did not die; but one day, as the phrase is, he “allowed” his wife to divorce him. The news had cost Dorrance a sleepless night or two. The divorce was obtained by Mrs. Welwood, discreetly, in a distant and accommodating state; but it was really Welwood who had repudiated his wife, and because of Paul Dorrance. Dorrance knew this, and was aware that Mrs. Welwood knew he knew it. But he had kept his head, she had silenced her heart; and life went on as before, except that since the divorce it was easier to see her, and he could telephone to her house whenever he chose. And they continued to be the dearest of friends.

  He had often gone over all this in his mind, with an increasing satisfaction in his own shrewdness. He had kept his freedom, kept his old love’s devotion—or as much of it as he wanted—and proved to himself that life was not half bad if you knew how to manage it. That was what he used to think—and then, suddenly, two or three hours ago, he had begun to think differently about everything, and what had seemed shrewdness now unmasked itself as a pitiless egotism.

  He continued to look at Mrs. Welwood, as if searching her face for something it was essential he should find there. He saw her lips begin to tremble, the tears still on her lashes, her features gradually dissolving in a blur of apprehension and incredulity. “Ah—this is beyond her! She won’t be ‘brave’ now,” he thought with an uncontrollable satisfaction. It seemed necessary, at the moment, that someone should feel the shock of his doom as he was feeling it—should die with him, at least morally, since he had to die. And the strange insight which had come to him—this queer “behind-the-veil” penetration he was suddenly conscious of—had already told him that most of the people he knew, however sorry they might think they were, would really not be in the least affected by his fate, would remain as inwardly unmoved as he had been when, in the plenitude of his vigor, someone had said before him: “Ah, poor so-and-so—didn’t you know? The doctors say it’s all up with him.”

  With Eleanor it was different. As he held her there under his eyes he could almost trace the course of his own agony in her paling dissolving face, could almost see her as she might one day look if she were his widow—his widow! Poor thing. At least if she were that she could proclaim her love and her anguish, could abandon herself to open mourning on his grave. Perhaps that was the only comfort it was still in his power to give her...or in hers to give him. For the grave might be less cold if watered by her warm tears. The thought made his own well up, and he pressed her closer. At that moment his first wish was to see how she would look if she were really happy. His friend—his only friend! How he would make up to her now for his past callousness!

  “Eleanor—”

  “Oh, won’t you tell me?” she entreated.

  “Yes. Of course. Only I want you to promise me something first—”

  “Yes....”

  “To do what I want you to—whatever I want you to.”

  She could not still the trembling of her hands, though he pressed them so close. She could scarcely articulate: “Haven’t I, always—?”

  Slowly he pronounced: “I want you to marry me.”

  Her trembling grew more violent, and then subsided. The shadow of her terrible fear seemed to fall from her, as the shadow of living falls from the face of the newly dead. Her face looked young and transparent; he watched the blood rise to her lips and cheeks.

  “Oh, Paul, Paul—then the news is good?”

  He felt a slight shrinking at her obtuseness. After all, she was alive (it wasn’t her fault), she was merely alive, like all the rest.... Magnanimously he rejoined: “Never mind about the news now.” But to himself he muttered: “Sancta Simplicitas!”

  She had thought he had asked her to marry him because the news was good!

  II

  They were married almost immediately, and with as little circumstance as possible. Dorrance’s ill-health, already vaguely known of in his immediate group of friends, was a sufficient pretext for hastening and simplifying the ceremony; and the next day the couple sailed for France.

  Dorrance had not seen again the two doctors who had pronounced his doom. He had forbidden Mrs. Welwood to speak of the diagnosis, to him or to anyone else. “For God’s sake, don’t let’s dramatize the thing,” he commanded her; and she acquiesced.

  He had shown her the paper as soon as she had promised to marry him; and had hastened, as she read it, to inform her that of course he had no intention of holding her to her promise. “I only wanted to hear you say ‘yes,’” he explained, on a note of emotion so genuine that it deceived himself as completely as it did her. He was sure she would not accept his offer to release her; if he had not been sure he might not have dared to make it. For he understood now that he must marry her; he simply could not live out these last months alone. For a moment his thoughts had played sentimentally with the idea that he was marrying her to acquit an old debt, to make her happy before it was too late; but that delusion had been swept away like a straw on the torrent of his secret fears. A new form of egotism, fiercer and more impatient than the other, was dictating his words and gestures—and he knew it. He was marrying simply to put a sentinel between himself and the presence lurking on his threshold—with the same blind instinct of self-preservation which had made men, in old days, propitiate death by the lavish sacrifice of life. And, confident as he was, he had felt an obscure dread of her failing him till his ring was actually on her finger; and a great ecstasy of reassurance and gratitude as he walked out into the street with that captive hand on his arm. Could it be that together they would be able to cheat death after all?

  They landed at Genoa, and traveled b
y slow stages toward the Austrian Alps. The journey seemed to do Dorrance good; he was bearing the fatigue better than he had expected; and he was conscious that his attentive companion noted the improvement, though she forbore to emphasize it. “Above all, don’t be too cheerful,” he had warned her, half smilingly, on the day when he had told her of his doom. “Marry me if you think you can stand it; but don’t try to make me think I’m going to get well.”

  She had obeyed him to the letter, watching over his comfort, sparing him all needless fatigue and agitation, carefully serving up to him, on the bright surface of her vigilance, the flowers of travel stripped of their thorns. The very qualities which had made her a perfect mistress—self-effacement, opportuneness, the art of being present and visible only when he required her to be—made her (he had to own it) a perfect wife for a man cut off from everything but the contemplation of his own end.

  They were bound for Vienna, where a celebrated specialist was said to have found new ways of relieving the suffering caused by such cases as Dorrance’s—sometimes even (though Dorrance and his wife took care not to mention this to each other) of checking the disease, even holding it for years in abeyance. “I owe it to the poor child to give the thing a trial,” the invalid speciously argued, disguising his own passionate impatience to put himself in the great man’s hands. “If she wants to drag out her life with a half-dead man, why should I prevent her?” he thought, trying to sum up all the hopeful possibilities on which the new diagnostician might base his verdict....“Certainly,” Dorrance thought, “I have had less pain lately....”