The Age of Innocence

by Edith Wharton

  VI.

  That evening, after Mr. Jackson had taken himself away, and the ladieshad retired to their chintz-curtained bedroom, Newland Archer mountedthoughtfully to his own study. A vigilant hand had, as usual, kept thefire alive and the lamp trimmed; and the room, with its rows and rowsof books, its bronze and steel statuettes of "The Fencers" on themantelpiece and its many photographs of famous pictures, lookedsingularly home-like and welcoming.

  As he dropped into his armchair near the fire his eyes rested on alarge photograph of May Welland, which the young girl had given him inthe first days of their romance, and which had now displaced all theother portraits on the table. With a new sense of awe he looked at thefrank forehead, serious eyes and gay innocent mouth of the youngcreature whose soul's custodian he was to be. That terrifying productof the social system he belonged to and believed in, the young girl whoknew nothing and expected everything, looked back at him like astranger through May Welland's familiar features; and once more it wasborne in on him that marriage was not the safe anchorage he had beentaught to think, but a voyage on uncharted seas.

  The case of the Countess Olenska had stirred up old settled convictionsand set them drifting dangerously through his mind. His ownexclamation: "Women should be free--as free as we are," struck to theroot of a problem that it was agreed in his world to regard asnon-existent. "Nice" women, however wronged, would never claim thekind of freedom he meant, and generous-minded men like himself weretherefore--in the heat of argument--the more chivalrously ready toconcede it to them. Such verbal generosities were in fact only ahumbugging disguise of the inexorable conventions that tied thingstogether and bound people down to the old pattern. But here he waspledged to defend, on the part of his betrothed's cousin, conduct that,on his own wife's part, would justify him in calling down on her allthe thunders of Church and State. Of course the dilemma was purelyhypothetical; since he wasn't a blackguard Polish nobleman, it wasabsurd to speculate what his wife's rights would be if he WERE. ButNewland Archer was too imaginative not to feel that, in his case andMay's, the tie might gall for reasons far less gross and palpable.What could he and she really know of each other, since it was his duty,as a "decent" fellow, to conceal his past from her, and hers, as amarriageable girl, to have no past to conceal? What if, for some oneof the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they shouldtire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? He reviewedhis friends' marriages--the supposedly happy ones--and saw none thatanswered, even remotely, to the passionate and tender comradeship whichhe pictured as his permanent relation with May Welland. He perceivedthat such a picture presupposed, on her part, the experience, theversatility, the freedom of judgment, which she had been carefullytrained not to possess; and with a shiver of foreboding he saw hismarriage becoming what most of the other marriages about him were: adull association of material and social interests held together byignorance on the one side and hypocrisy on the other. LawrenceLefferts occurred to him as the husband who had most completelyrealised this enviable ideal. As became the high-priest of form, hehad formed a wife so completely to his own convenience that, in themost conspicuous moments of his frequent love-affairs with other men'swives, she went about in smiling unconsciousness, saying that "Lawrencewas so frightfully strict"; and had been known to blush indignantly,and avert her gaze, when some one alluded in her presence to the factthat Julius Beaufort (as became a "foreigner" of doubtful origin) hadwhat was known in New York as "another establishment."

  Archer tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quitesuch an ass as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poorGertrude; but the difference was after all one of intelligence and notof standards. In reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphicworld, where the real thing was never said or done or even thought, butonly represented by a set of arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, whoknew exactly why Archer had pressed her to announce her daughter'sengagement at the Beaufort ball (and had indeed expected him to do noless), yet felt obliged to simulate reluctance, and the air of havinghad her hand forced, quite as, in the books on Primitive Man thatpeople of advanced culture were beginning to read, the savage bride isdragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.

  The result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre ofthis elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutablefor her very frankness and assurance. She was frank, poor darling,because she had nothing to conceal, assured because she knew of nothingto be on her guard against; and with no better preparation than this,she was to be plunged overnight into what people evasively called "thefacts of life."

  The young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in theradiant good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship,her grace and quickness at games, and the shy interest in books andideas that she was beginning to develop under his guidance. (She hadadvanced far enough to join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King,but not to feel the beauty of Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She wasstraightforward, loyal and brave; she had a sense of humour (chieflyproved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he suspected, in the depthsof her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling that it would be a joyto waken. But when he had gone the brief round of her he returneddiscouraged by the thought that all this frankness and innocence wereonly an artificial product. Untrained human nature was not frank andinnocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an instinctiveguile. And he felt himself oppressed by this creation of factitiouspurity, so cunningly manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and auntsand grandmothers and long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed tobe what he wanted, what he had a right to, in order that he mightexercise his lordly pleasure in smashing it like an image made of snow.

  There was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were thosehabitual to young men on the approach of their wedding day. But theywere generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and self-abasementof which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (asThackeray's heroes so often exasperated him by doing) that he had not ablank page to offer his bride in exchange for the unblemished one shewas to give to him. He could not get away from the fact that if he hadbeen brought up as she had they would have been no more fit to findtheir way about than the Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all hisanxious cogitations, see any honest reason (any, that is, unconnectedwith his own momentary pleasure, and the passion of masculine vanity)why his bride should not have been allowed the same freedom ofexperience as himself.

  Such questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind;but he was conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precisionwere due to the inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska. Here hewas, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure thoughtsand cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which raisedall the special problems he would have preferred to let lie. "HangEllen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire and began toundress. He could not really see why her fate should have the leastbearing on his; yet he dimly felt that he had only just begun tomeasure the risks of the championship which his engagement had forcedupon him.

  A few days later the bolt fell.

  The Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formaldinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, anda Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with thewords "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the hospitableAmerican fashion, which treats strangers as if they were royalties, orat least as their ambassadors.

  The guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination inwhich the initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, whowere asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts, onwhom there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson andhis sister Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were someof the most fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant"young married" set; the Lawre
nce Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth(the lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and youngMorris Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The companyindeed was perfectly assorted, since all the members belonged to thelittle inner group of people who, during the long New York season,disported themselves together daily and nightly with apparentlyundiminished zest.

  Forty-eight hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one hadrefused the Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr.Jackson and his sister. The intended slight was emphasised by the factthat even the Reggie Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, wereamong those inflicting it; and by the uniform wording of the notes, inall of which the writers "regretted that they were unable to accept,"without the mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinarycourtesy prescribed.

  New York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant inits resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers,butlers and cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people werefree; and it was thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. LovellMingott's invitations to make cruelly clear their determination not tomeet the Countess Olenska.

  The blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met itgallantly. Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, whoconfided it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealedpassionately and authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painfulperiod of inward resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to hisinstances (as she always did), and immediately embracing his cause withan energy redoubled by her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvetbonnet and said: "I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."

  The New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid,in which, as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called "plainpeople"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable families who(as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the Jacksons) hadbeen raised above their level by marriage with one of the ruling clans.People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as they used tobe; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth Avenue, andJulius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old traditions tolast much longer.

  Firmly narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratumwas the compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands,Chiverses and Mansons so actively represented. Most people imaginedthem to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves (at leastthose of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of theprofessional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families couldlay claim to that eminence.

  "Don't tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all thismodern newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there isone, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong to it; no, nor theNewlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers andgreat-grandfathers were just respectable English or Dutch merchants,who came to the colonies to make their fortune, and stayed here becausethey did so well. One of your great-grandfathers signed theDeclaration, and another was a general on Washington's staff, andreceived General Burgoyne's sword after the battle of Saratoga. Theseare things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank orclass. New York has always been a commercial community, and there arenot more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic originin the real sense of the word."

  Mrs. Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York,knew who these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of WashingtonSquare, who came of an old English county family allied with the Pittsand Foxes; the Lannings, who had intermarried with the descendants ofCount de Grasse, and the van der Luydens, direct descendants of thefirst Dutch governor of Manhattan, and related by pre-revolutionarymarriages to several members of the French and British aristocracy.

  The Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but livelyMiss Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among familyportraits and Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan,allied to the best names in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van derLuydens, who stood above all of them, had faded into a kind ofsuper-terrestrial twilight, from which only two figures impressivelyemerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der Luyden.

  Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother hadbeen the granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Islandfamily, who had fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland,after the war, with his bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughterof the Earl of St. Austrey. The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacsof Maryland, and their aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas,had always remained close and cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden hadmore than once paid long visits to the present head of the house ofTrevenna, the Duke of St. Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall andat St. Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequentlyannounced his intention of some day returning their visit (without theDuchess, who feared the Atlantic).

  Mr. and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, theirplace in Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudsonwhich had been one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government tothe famous first Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still"Patroon." Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldomopened, and when they came to town they received in it only their mostintimate friends.

  "I wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenlypausing at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa is fond of you; and ofcourse it's on account of dear May that I'm taking this step--and alsobecause, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no such thing asSociety left."