Edith Wharton - SSC 09

by Human Nature (v2. 1)

Conscious that his wife was waiting for his answer, he said: “Oh, this fellow here may be all wrong. Anyhow, he wants me to take a cure somewhere first—I’ve got the name written down.

  After that we’ll see—But wouldn’t you rather travel for a year or so? How about South Africa or India next winter?” he ventured at random, after trying to think of some point of the globe even more remote from New York.

  

  IV.

  The cure was successful, the Viennese specialist’s diagnosis proved to be correct; and the Paul Dorrances celebrated the event by two years of foreign travel. But Dorrance never felt again the unconditioned ecstasy he had tasted as he walked out from the doctor’s door into the lamplit summer streets. After that, at the very moment of re-entering his hotel, the effort of readjustment had begun; and ever since it had gone on.

  For a few months the wanderers, weary of change, had settled in Florence, captivated by an arcaded villa on a cypress-walled hill, and the new Paul Dorrance, whom it was now the other’s incessant task to study and placate, had toyed with the idea of a middle life of cultivated leisure. But he soon grew tired of his opportunities, and found it necessary to move on, and forget in strenuous travel his incapacity for assimilation and reflection. And before the two years were over the old Paul Dorrance, who had constituted himself the other’s courier and prime minister, discovered that the old and the new were one, and that the original Paul Dorrance was there, unchanged, unchangeable, and impatient to get back to his old niche because it was too late to adapt himself to any other. So the flat was reopened and the Dorrances returned to New York.

  The completeness of his identity with the old Paul Dorrance was indelibly impressed on the new one on the first evening of his return home. There he was, the same man in the same setting as when, two years earlier, he had glanced down from the same armchair and seen the diagnosis of the consulting physicians at his feet. The hour was late, the room profoundly still; no touch of outward reality intervened between him and that hallucinating vision. He almost saw the paper on the floor, and with the same gesture as before he covered his eyes to shut it out. Two years ago—and nothing was changed, after so many changes, except that he should not hear the hesitating ring at the door, should not again see Eleanor Welwood, pale and questioning, on the threshold. Eleanor Welwood did not ring his door-bell now; she had her own latch-key; she was no longer Eleanor Welwood but Eleanor Dorrance, and asleep at this moment in the bedroom which had been Dorrance’s, and was now encumbered with feminine properties, while his own were uncomfortably wedged into the cramped guest room of the flat.

  Yes—that was the only change in his life; and how aptly the change in the rooms symbolized it! During their travels, even after Dorrance’s return to health, his wife’s presence had been like a soft accompaniment of music, a painted background to the idle episodes of convalescence; now that he was about to fit himself into the familiar furrow of old habits and relations he felt as if she were already expanding and crowding him into a corner. He did not mind about the room—so he assured himself, though with a twinge of regret for the slant of winter sun which never reached the guest room; what he minded was what he now recognized as the huge practical joke that fate had played on him. He had never meant, he the healthy, vigorous, middle-aged Paul Dorrance, to marry this faded woman for whom he had so long ceased to feel anything but a friendly tenderness. It was the bogey of death, starting out from the warm folds of his closely-curtained life, that had tricked him into the marriage, and then left him to expiate his folly.

  Poor Eleanor! It was not her fault if he had imagined, in a moment of morbid retrospection, that happiness would transform and enlarge her. Under the surface changes she was still the same: a perfect companion while he was ill and lonely, an unwitting encumbrance now that (unchanged also) he was restored to the life from which his instinct of self-preservation had so long excluded her. Why had he not trusted to that instinct, which had warned him she was the woman for a sentimental parenthesis, not for the pitiless continuity of marriage? Why, even her face declared it. A lovely profile, yes; but somehow the full face was inadequate—

  Dorrance suddenly remembered another face; that of a girl they had met in Cairo the previous winter. He felt the shock of her young fairness, saw the fruity bloom of her cheeks, the light animal vigor of every movement, he heard her rich beckoning laugh, and met the eyes questioning his under the queer slant of her lids. Someone had said: “She’s had an offer from a man who can give her everything a woman wants; but she’s refused, and no one can make out why….” Dorrance knew…. She had written to him since, and he had not answered her letters. And now here he was, installed once more in the old routine he could not live without, yet from which all the old savor was gone. “I wonder why I was so scared of dying,” he thought; then the truth flashed on him. “Why, you fool, you’ve been dead all the time. That first diagnosis was the true one. Only they put it on the physical plane by mistake—” The next day he began to insert himself painfully into his furrow.

  

  V.

  One evening some two years later, as Paul Dorrance put his latchkey into his door, he said to himself reluctantly: “Perhaps I really ought to take her away for a change.”

  There was nothing nowadays that he dreaded as much as change. He had had his fill of the unexpected, and it had not agreed with him. Now that he had fitted himself once more into his furrow all he asked was to stay there. It had even become an effort, when summer came, to put off his New York habits and go with his wife to their little place in the country. And the idea that he might have to go away with her in mid-February was positively disturbing.

  For the past ten days she had been fighting a bad bronchitis, following on influenza. But “fighting” was hardly the right word. She, usually so elastic, so indomitable, had not shown her usual resiliency, and Dorrance, from the vantage ground of his recovered health, wondered a little at her lack of spirit. She mustn’t let herself go, he warned her gently. “I was in a good deal tighter place myself not so many years ago—and look at me now. Don’t you let the doctors scare you.” She had promised him again that morning that she wouldn’t, and he had gone off to his office without waiting for the physician’s visit. But during the day he began in an odd way to feel his wife’s nearness. It was as though she needed him, as though there were something she wanted to say; and he concluded that she probably knew she ought to go south, and had been afraid to tell him so. “Poor child—of course I’ll take her if the doctor says it’s really necessary.” Hadn’t he always done everything he could for her? It seemed to him that they had been married for years and years, and that as a husband he had behind him a long and irreproachable record. Why, he hadn’t even answered that girl’s letters….

  As he opened the door of the flat a strange woman in a nurse’s dress crossed the hall. Instantly Dorrance felt the alien atmosphere of the place, the sense of something absorbing and exclusive which ignores and averts itself from the common doings of men. He had felt that same atmosphere, in all its somber implications, the day he had picked up the cancer diagnosis from the floor.

  The nurse stopped to say “Pneumonia,” and hurried down the passage to his wife’s room. The doctor was coming back at nine o’clock; he had left a note in the library, the butler said. Dorrance knew what was in the note before he opened it. Precipitately, with the vertical drop of a bird of prey, death was descending on his house again. And this time there was no mistake in the diagnosis.

  The nurse said he could come in for a minute; but he wasn’t to stay long, for she didn’t like the way the temperature was rising… and there, between the chalk-white pillows, in the green-shaded light, he saw his wife’s face. What struck him first was the way it had shrunk and narrowed after a few hours of fever; then, that though it wore a just-perceptible smile of welcome, there was no sign of the tremor of illumination which usually greeted his appearance. He remembered how once, encountering that light, he had grumble
d inwardly: “I wish to God she wouldn’t always unroll a red carpet when I come in—” and then been ashamed of his thought. She never embarrassed him by any public show of feeling; that subtle play of light remained invisible to others, and his irritation was caused simply by knowing it was there. “I don’t want to be anybody’s sun and moon,” he concluded. But now she was looking at him with a new, an almost critical equality of expression. His first thought was: “Is it possible she doesn’t know me?” But her eyes met his with a glance of recognition, and he understood that the change was simply due to her being enclosed in a world of her own, complete, and independent of his.

  “Please, now—” the nurse reminded him; and obediently he stole out of the room.

  The next day there was a slight improvement; the doctors were encouraged; the day nurse said; “If only it goes on like this—”; and as Dorrance opened the door of his wife’s room he thought: “If only she looks more like her own self—!”

  But she did not. She was still in that new and self-contained world which he had immediately identified as the one he had lived in during the months when he had thought he was to die. “After all, I didn’t die,” he reminded himself; but the reminder brought no solace, for he knew exactly what his wife was feeling, he had tested the impenetrability of the barrier which shut her off from the living. “The truth is, one doesn’t only die once,” he mused, aware that he had died already; and the memory of the process, now being re-enacted before him, laid a chill on his heart. If only he could have helped her, made her understand! But the barrier was there, the transparent barrier through which everything on the hither side looked so different. And today it was he who was on the hither side.

  Then he remembered how, in his loneliness, he had yearned for the beings already so remote, the beings on the living side; and he felt for his wife the same rush of pity as when he had thought himself dying, and known what agony his death would cost her.

  That day he was allowed to stay five minutes; the next day ten; she continued to improve, and the doctors would have been perfectly satisfied if her heart had not shown signs of weakness. Hearts, however, medically speaking, are relatively easy to deal with; and to Dorrance she seemed much stronger.

  Soon the improvement became so marked that the doctor made no objection to his sitting with her for an hour or two; the nurse was sent for a walk, and Dorrance was allowed to read the morning paper to the invalid. But when he took it up his wife stretched out her hand. “No-—I want to talk to you.”

  He smiled, and met her smile. It was as if she had found a slit in the barrier and were reaching out to him. “Dear—but won’t talking tire you?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps.” She waited. “You see, I’m talking to you all the time, while I lie here……….”

  He knew—he knew! How her pangs went through him! “But you see, dear, raising your voice………..”

  She smiled incredulously, that remote behind-the-barrier smile he had felt so often on his own lips. Though she could reach through to him the dividing line was still there, and her eyes met his with a look of weary omniscience.

  “But there’s no hurry,” he argued. “Why not wait a day or two? Try to lie there and not even think.”

  “Not think!” She raised herself on a weak elbow. “I want to think every minute—every second. I want to relive everything, day by day, to the last atom of time—”

  “Time? But there’ll be plenty of time!”

  She continued to lean on her elbow, fixing her illumined eyes on him. She did not seem to hear what he said; her attention was concentrated on some secret vision of which he felt himself the mere transparent mask.

  “Well,” she exclaimed, with a sudden passionate energy, “it was worth it! I always knew—”

  Dorrance bent toward her. “What was worth—?” But she had sunk back with closed eyes, and lay there reabsorbed into the cleft of the pillows, merged in the inanimate, a mere part of the furniture of the sick room. Dorrance waited for a moment, hardly understanding the change; then he started up, rang, called, and in a few moments the professionals were in possession, the air was full of ether and camphor, the telephone ringing, the disarray of death in the room. Dorrance knew that he would never know what she had found worth it…….

  

  VI.

  He sat in his library, waiting. Waiting for what? Life was over for him now that she was dead. Until after the funeral a sort of factitious excitement had kept him on his feet. Now there was nothing left but to go over and over those last days. Every detail of them stood out before him in unbearable relief; and one of the most salient had been the unexpected appearance in the sick room of Dorrance’s former doctor—the very doctor who, with the cancer specialist, had signed the diagnosis of Dorrance’s case. Dorrance, since that day, had naturally never consulted him professionally; and it chanced that they had never met. But Eleanor’s physician, summoned at the moment of her last heart attack, without even stopping to notify Dorrance, had called in his colleague. The latter had a high standing as a consultant (the idea made Dorrance smile); and besides, what did it matter? By that time they all knew—nurses, doctors, and most of all Dorrance himself—that nothing was possible but to ease the pangs of Eleanor’s last hours. And Dorrance had met his former doctor without resentment; hardly even with surprise.

  But the doctor had not forgotten that he and his former patient had been old friends; and the day after the funeral, late in the evening, had thought it proper to ring the widower’s doorbell and present his condolences. Dorrance, at his entrance, looked up in surprise, at first resenting the intrusion, then secretly relieved at the momentary release from the fiery wheel of his own thoughts. “The man is a fool—but perhaps,” Dorrance reflected, “he’ll give me something that will make me sleep…….”

  The two men sat down, and the doctor began to talk gently of Eleanor. He had known her for many years, though not professionally. He spoke of her goodness, her charity, the many instances he had come across among his poor patients of her discreet and untiring ministrations. Dorrance, who had dreaded hearing her spoken of, and by this man above all others, found himself listening with a curious avidity to these reminiscences. He needed no one to tell him of Eleanor’s kindness, her devotion—yet at the moment such praise was sweet to him. And he took up the theme; but not without a secret stir of vindictiveness, a vague desire to make the doctor suffer for the results of his now-distant blunder. “She always gave too much of herself—that was the trouble. No one knows that better than I do. She was never really the same after those months of incessant anxiety about me that you doctors made her undergo.” He had not intended to say anything of the sort; but as he spoke the resentment he had thought extinct was fanned into flame by his words. He had forgiven the two doctors for himself, but he suddenly found he could not forgive them for Eleanor, and he had an angry wish to let them know it. “That diagnosis of yours nearly killed her, though it didn’t kill me” he concluded sardonically.

  The doctor had followed this outburst with a look of visible perplexity. In the crowded life of a fashionable physician, what room was there to remember a mistaken diagnosis? The sight of his forgetfulness made Dorrance continue with rising irritation: “The shock of it did kill her—I see that now.”

  “Diagnosis—what diagnosis?” echoed the doctor blankly.

  “I see you don’t remember,” said Dorrance.

  “Well, no; I don’t, for the moment.”

  “I’ll remind you, then. When you came to see me with that cancer specialist four or five years ago, one of you dropped your diagnosis by mistake in going out—”

  “Oh, that?” The doctor’s face lit up with sudden recollection. “Of course! The diagnosis of the other poor fellow we’d been to see before coming to you. I remember it all now. Your wife—Mrs. Welwood then, wasn’t she?—brought the paper back to me a few hours later—before I’d even missed it. I think she said you’d picked it up after we left, and thought it w
as meant for you.” The doctor gave an easy retrospective laugh. “Luckily I was able to reassure her at once.” He leaned back comfortably in his armchair and shifted his voice to the pitch of condolence. “A beautiful life, your wife’s was. I only wish it had been in our power to prolong it. But these cases of heart failure… you must tell yourself that at least you had a few happy years; and so many of us haven’t even that.” The doctor stood up and held out his hand.

  “Wait a moment, please,” Dorrance said hurriedly. “There’s something I want to ask you.” His brain was whirling so that he could not remember what he had started to say. “I can’t sleep—” he began.

  “Yes?” said the doctor, assuming a professional look, but with a furtive glance at his wrist watch.

  Dorrance’s throat felt dry and his head empty. He struggled with the difficulty of ordering his thoughts, and fitting rational words to them.

  “Yes—but no matter about my sleeping. What I meant was: do I understand you to say that the diagnosis you dropped in leaving was not intended for me?”

  The doctor stared. “Good Lord, no—of course it wasn’t. You never had a symptom. Didn’t we both tell you so at the time?”

  “Yes,” Dorrance slowly acquiesced.

  “Well, if you didn’t believe us, your scare was a short one, anyhow,” the doctor continued with a mild jocularity; and he put his hand out again.

  “Oh, wait,” Dorrance repeated. “What I really wanted to ask was what day you said my wife returned the diagnosis to you? But I suppose you don’t remember.”

  The doctor reflected. “Yes, I do; it all comes back to me now. It was the very same day. We called on you in the morning, didn’t we?”

  “Yes; at nine o’clock,” said Dorrance, the dryness returning to his throat.