Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Edith Wharton

  Perhaps that faculty of unawareness was what gave her eyes their transparency, and her face the look of representing a type rather than a person; as if she might have been chosen to pose for a Civic Virtue or a Greek goddess. The blood that ran so close to her fair skin might have been a preserving fluid rather than a ravaging element; yet her look of indestructible youthfulness made her seem neither hard nor dull, but only primitive and pure. In the thick of this meditation Archer suddenly felt himself looking at her with the startled gaze of a stranger, and plunged into a reminiscence of the wedding-breakfast and of Granny Mingott’s immense and triumphant pervasion of it.

  May settled down to frank enjoyment of the subject. “I was surprised, though—weren’t you?—that aunt Medora came after all. Ellen wrote that they were neither of them well enough to take the journey; I do wish it had been she who had recovered! Did you see the exquisite old lace she sent me?”

  He had known that the moment must come sooner or later, but he had somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.

  “Yes—I—no: it was beautiful,” he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if, whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.

  “Aren’t you tired? It will be good to have some tea when we arrive—I’ m sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready,” he rattled on, taking her hand in his; and her mind rushed away instantly to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the Beauforts had sent, and which “went” so perfectly with uncle Lovell Mingott’s trays and side-dishes.

  In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station, and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.

  “Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens—they’ve sent their man over from Skuytercliff to meet us,” Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.

  “I’m extremely sorry, sir,” said this emissary, “that a little accident has occurred at the Miss du Lacs‘: a leak in the watertank. It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this morning, sent a house-maid up by the early train to get the Patroon’s house ready. It will be quite comfortable, I think you’ll find, sir; and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over, so that it will be exactly the same as if you’d been at Rhinebeck.”

  Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic accents: “It’ll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you—” and May’s eager voice broke out, covering the embarrassed silence: “The same as Rhinebeck? The Patroon’s house? But it will be a hundred thousand times better—wont it, Newland? It’s too dear and kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it.”

  And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman, and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly: “Only fancy, I’ve never been inside it—have you? The van der Luydens show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen, it seems, and she told me what a darling little place it was: she says it’s the only house she’s seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly happy in.”

  “Well—that’s what we’re going to be, isn’t it?” cried her husband gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile: “Ah, it’s just our luck beginning—the wonderful luck we’re always going to have together!”

  20

  “OF COURSE WE MUST dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest,” Archer said; and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging-house breakfast-table.

  In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew; and these two they had sedulously avoided, in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not “dignified” to force oneself on the notice of one’s acquaintances in foreign countries.

  Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe, had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle, and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travelers with an air of such impenetrable reserve, that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a “foreigner” other than those employed in hotels and railway-stations. Their own compatriots—save those previously known or properly accredited—they treated with an even more pronounced disdain; so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott, their months abroad were spent in an unbroken tête-à-tète. But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing; and one night at Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose names, dress and social situation were already intimately known to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs. Archer had a bottle of liniment. The other lady—the intruder’s sister, Mrs. Carfry—had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer, who never traveled without a complete family pharmacy, was fortunately able to produce the required remedy.

  Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were traveling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies, who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health.

  When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle again. Nothing, to Mrs. Archer’s mind, would have been more “undignified” than to force oneself on the notice of a “foreigner” to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the “delightful Americans” who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at Brown’s Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macramé lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer said, it made “another thing of London” to know Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought “only right” to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer’s last word had been “You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry.”

  Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry, with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine; and it was over this invitation that May Archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.

  “It’s all very well for you, Newland; you know them. But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I’ve never met. And what shall I wear?”

  Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her. She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever. The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features; or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.

  “Wear, dearest? I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris last week.”

  “Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan’t know which to wear.” She pouted a little. “I’ve never dined out in London; and I don’t want to be ridiculous.”

  He tried to enter into her perplexity. “But don’t Englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the evening?”

  “Newland! How can you ask such funny questions? When they go to the theater in old ball-dresses and bare heads.”

  “Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle won’t. They’ll wear caps like my mother’s—and shawls; very soft shawls.”
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  “Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?”

  “Not as well as you, dear,” he rejoined, wondering what had suddenly developed in her Janey’s morbid interest in clothes.

  She pushed back her chair with a sigh. “That’s dear of you, Newland; but it doesn’t help me much.”

  He had an inspiration. “Why not wear your wedding-dress? That can’t be wrong, can it?”

  “Oh, dearest! If I only had it here! But it’s gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worthae hasn’t sent it back.”

  “Oh, well—” said Archer, getting up. “Look here—the fog’s lifting. If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures.”

  The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months’ wedding-tour which May, in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarized as “blissful.”

  They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection, Archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting. Her own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering in July and swimming in August. This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald, and August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast, which someone had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the mountains, Archer had pointed southward and said: “There’s Italy;” and May, her feet in a gentian-bed, had smiled cheerfully, and replied: “It would be lovely to go there next winter, if only you didn’t have to be in New York.”

  But in reality traveling interested her even less than he had expected. She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking, riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn-tennis; and when they finally got back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered his clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing.

  In London nothing interested her but the theaters and the shops; and she found the theaters less exciting than the Paris cafés chantants where, under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Élysées, she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an audience of cocottes, and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.

  Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage. It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammeled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May’s only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.

  All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind. If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled; but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mold as her face, she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.

  Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel, though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion; but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting. He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on, as it always had, outside the domestic circle; and within it there would be nothing small and stifling—coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open. And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled.

  All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington, where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived. Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends’ hospitality: in conformity with the family tradition he had always traveled as a sight-seer and looker-on, affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only, just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanized Americans, dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces, and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club; but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival. These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need for retailing to everyone they met, and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences, were too different from the people Archer had grown up among, too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long. To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question; and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.

  Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St. Austrey, and the Duke, instantly and cordially recognizing him, had said: “Look me up, won’t you?”—but no proper-spirited American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on, and the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May’s English aunt, the banker’s wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact, they had purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.

  “Probably there’ll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry‘s—London’s a desert at this season, and you’ve made yourself much too beautiful,” Archer said to May, who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her to the London grime.

  “I don’t want them to think that we dress like savages,” she replied, with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented: and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.

  “It’s their armor,” he thought, “their defense against the unknown, and their defiance of it.” And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May, who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm, had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.

  He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry’s to be a small one. Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing room, only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs. Carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor, pronouncing a French name as she did so.

  Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her: she seemed larger, fairer, more vo luminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her; and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness.

  “What on earth will they expect me to talk about?” her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms. But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart; and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her ease.

  In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair. Archer noticed that his wife’s way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references, so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration, her conversation wa
s a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor, who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English, gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies, to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing room.

  The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew, who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed. But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine, and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett. The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption, and had had to leave Harrowaf for Switzerland, where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Léman. Being a bookish youth, he had been entrusted to M. Rivière, who had brought him back to England, and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M. Rivière added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.

  It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one, so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty, with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness; but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.

  His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post, and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career; but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism, then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful), and at length—after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener—into tutoring English youths in Switzerland. Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt grenier, been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honor) and had often talked with Mérimée in his mother’s house.ag He had obviously always been des perately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for) and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in fact, seemed, materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett’s; but he had lived in a world in which, as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally. As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death, Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.