As he reached the landing he saw that the ballroom doors were open and all the lustres lit. His mother and Mr Moffatt stood in the middle of the shining floor, looking up at the walls; and Paul’s heart gave a wondering bound, for there, set in great gilt panels, were the tapestries that had always hung in the gallery at Saint Désert.
‘Well, Senator, it feels good to shake your fist again!’ his step-father said, taking him in a friendly grasp; and his mother, who looked handsomer and taller and more splendidly dressed than ever, exclaimed: ‘Mercy! how they’ve cut his hair!’ before she bent to kiss him.
‘Oh, mother, mother!’ he burst out, feeling, between his mother’s face and the others, hardly less familiar, on the walls, that he was really at home again, and not in a strange house.
‘Gracious, how you squeeze!’ she protested, loosening his arms. ‘But you look splendidly – and how you’ve grown!’ She turned away from him and began to inspect the tapestries critically. ‘Somehow they look smaller here,’ she said with a tinge of disappointment.
Mr Moffatt gave a slight laugh and walked slowly down the room, as if to study its effect. As he turned back his wife said: ‘I didn’t think you’d ever get them.’
He laughed again, more complacently. ‘Well, I don’t know as I ever should have, if General Arlington hadn’t happened to bust up.’
They both smiled, and Paul, seeing his mother’s softened face, stole his hand in hers and began: ‘Mother, I took a prize in composition –’
‘Did you? You must tell me about it tomorrow. No, I really must rush off now and dress – I haven’t even placed the dinner-cards.’ She freed her hand, and as she turned to go Paul heard Mr Moffatt say: ‘Can’t you ever give him a minute’s time, Undine?’
She made no answer, but sailed through the door with her head high, as she did when anything annoyed her; and Paul and his step-father stood alone in the illuminated ballroom.
Mr Moffatt smiled good-naturedly at the little boy and then turned back to the contemplation of the hangings.
‘I guess you know where those come from, don’t you?’ he asked in a tone of satisfaction.
‘Oh, yes,’ Paul answered eagerly, with a hope he dared not utter that since the tapestries were there, his French father might be coming too.
‘You’re a smart boy to remember them. I don’t suppose you ever thought you’d see them here?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Paul, embarrassed.
‘Well, I guess you wouldn’t have if their owner hadn’t been in a pretty tight place. It was like drawing teeth for him to let them go.’
Paul flushed up, and again the iron grasp was on his heart. He hadn’t, hitherto, actually disliked Mr Moffatt, who was always in a good humour, and seemed less busy and absent-minded than his mother; but at that instant he felt a rage of hate for him. He turned away and burst into tears.
‘Why, hullo, old chap – why, what’s up?’ Mr Moffatt was on his knees beside the boy, and the arms embracing him were firm and friendly. But Paul, for the life of him, couldn’t answer: he could only sob and sob as the great surges of loneliness broke over him.
‘Is it because your mother hadn’t time for you? Well, she’s like that, you know; and you and I have got to lump it,’ Mr Moffatt continued, getting to his feet. He stood looking down at the boy with a queer smile. ‘If we two chaps stick together it won’t be so bad – we can keep each other warm, don’t you see? I like you first-rate, you know; when you’re big enough I mean to put you in my business. And it looks as if one of these days you’d be the richest boy in America …’
The lamps were lit, the vases full of flowers, the footmen assembled on the landing and in the vestibule below, when Undine descended to the drawing-room. As she passed the ballroom door she glanced in approvingly at the tapestries. They really looked better than she had been willing to admit: they made her ballroom the handsomest in Paris. But something had put her out on the way up from Deauville, and the simplest way of easing her nerves had been to affect indifference to the tapestries. Now she had quite recovered her good humour, and as she glanced down the list of guests she was awaiting she said to herself with a sigh of satisfaction, that she was glad she had put on her rubies.
For the first time since her marriage to Moffatt she was about to receive in her house the people she most wished to see there. The beginnings had been a little difficult; their first attempt in New York was so unpromising that she feared they might not be able to live down the sensational details of their reunion, and had insisted on her husband’s taking her back to Paris. But her apprehensions were unfounded. It was only necessary to give people the time to pretend they had forgotten; and already they were all pretending beautifully. The French world had of course held out longest; it had strongholds she might never capture. But already seceders were beginning to show themselves, and her dinner-list that evening was graced with the names of an authentic Duke and a not-too-damaged Countess. In addition, of course, she had the Shallums, the Chauncey Ellings, May Beringer, Dicky Bowles, Walsingham Popple, and the rest of the New York frequenters of the Nouveau Luxe; she had even, at the last minute, had the amusement of adding Peter Van Degen to their number. In the evening there were to be Spanish dancing and Russian singing; and Dicky Bowles had promised her a Grand Duke for her next dinner, if she could secure the new tenor who always refused to sing in private houses.
Even now, however, she was not always happy. She had everything she wanted, but she still felt, at times, that there were other things she might want if she knew about them. And there had been moments lately when she had had to confess to herself that Moffatt did not fit into the picture. At first she had been dazzled by his success and subdued by his authority. He had given her all she had ever wished for, and more than she had ever dreamed of having: he had made up to her for all her failures and blunders, and there were hours when she still felt his dominion and exulted in it. But there were others when she saw his defects and was irritated by them: when his loudness and redness, his misplaced joviality, his familiarity with the servants, his alternating swagger and ceremony with her friends, jarred on perceptions that had developed in her unawares. Now and then she caught herself thinking that his two predecessors – who were gradually becoming merged in her memory – would have said this or that differently, behaved otherwise in such and such a case. And the comparison was almost always to Moffatt’s disadvantage.
This evening, however, she thought of him indulgently. She was pleased with his clever stroke in capturing the Saint Désert tapestries, which General Arlington’s sudden bankruptcy, and a fresh gambling scandal of Hubert’s, had compelled their owner to part with. She knew that Raymond de Chelles had told the dealers he would sell his tapestries to anyone but Mr Elmer Moffatt, or a buyer acting for him; and it amused her to think that, thanks to Elmer’s astuteness, they were under her roof after all, and that Raymond and all his clan were by this time aware of it. These facts disposed her favourably toward her husband, and deepened the sense of well-being with which – according to her invariable habit – she walked up to the mirror above the mantelpiece and studied the image it reflected.
She was still lost in this pleasing contemplation when her husband entered, looking stouter and redder than ever, in evening clothes that were a little too tight. His shirt front was as glossy as his baldness, and in his buttonhole he wore the red ribbon bestowed on him for waiving his claim to a Velasquez that was wanted for the Louvre. He carried a newspaper in his hand, and stood looking about the room with a complacent eye.
‘Well, I guess this is all right,’ he said, and she answered briefly: ‘Don’t forget you’re to take down Madame de Follerive; and for goodness’ sake don’t call her “Countess”.’
‘Why, she is one, ain’t she?’ he returned good-humouredly.
‘I wish you’d put that newspaper away,’ she continued; his habit of leaving old newspapers about the drawing-room annoyed her.
‘Oh, that reminds me –’ instead of obeying
her he unfolded the paper. ‘I brought it in to show you something. Jim Driscoll’s been appointed Ambassador to England.’
‘Jim Driscoll –!’ She caught up the paper and stared at the paragraph he pointed to. Jim Driscoll – that pitiful nonentity, with his stout mistrustful commonplace wife! It seemed extraordinary that the government should have hunted up such insignificant people. And immediately she had a great vague vision of the splendours they were going to – all the banquets and ceremonies and precedences …
‘I shouldn’t say she’d want to, with so few jewels –’ She dropped the paper and turned to her husband. ‘If you had a spark of ambition, that’s the kind of thing you’d try for. You could have got it just as easily as not!’
He laughed and thrust his thumbs in his waistcoat armholes with the gesture she disliked. ‘As it happens, it’s about the one thing I couldn’t.’
‘You couldn’t? Why not?’
‘Because you’re divorced. They won’t have divorced Ambassadresses.’
‘They won’t? Why not, I’d like to know?’
‘Well, I guess the court ladies are afraid there’d be too many pretty women in the Embassies,’ he answered jocularly.
She burst into an angry laugh, and the blood flamed up into her face. ‘I never heard of anything so insulting!’ she cried, as if the rule had been invented to humiliate her.
There was a noise of motors backing and advancing in the court, and she heard the first voices on the stairs. She turned to give herself a last look in the glass, saw the blaze of her rubies, the glitter of her hair, and remembered the brilliant names on her list.
But under all the dazzle a tiny black cloud remained. She had learned that there was something she could never get, something that neither beauty nor influence nor millions could ever buy for her. She could never be an Ambassador’s wife; and as she advanced to welcome her first guests she said to herself that it was the one part she was really made for.
ALSO BY EDITH WHARTON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
One of Wharton’s most famous novels—the first by a woman to win the Pulitzer Prize—exquisitely details a tragic struggle between love and responsibility in Gilded Age New York. Newland Archer, a young, aristocratic lawyer, is engaged to the cloistered, beautiful May Welland. But when May’s cousin Ellen arrives from Europe, fleeing her failed marriage to a Polish count, her worldly and independent nature intrigues Archer. Trapped by his passionless relationship with May and the social conventions that forbid a relationship with the disgraced Ellen, Archer finds himself torn between possibility and duty. Wharton’s profound understanding of her characters’ lives makes the triangle of Archer, May, and Ellen come to life with an irresistible urgency. A wry, incisive look at the ways in which desire and emotion must negotiate the complex rules of society, The Age of Innocence is one of Wharton’s most moving works.
Fiction/Literature
ETHAN FROME
Wharton’s most widely read work is a tightly constructed and almost unbearably heartbreaking story of forbidden love in a snowbound New England village. This brilliantly wrought, tragic novella explores the repressed emotions and destructive passions of working-class people far removed from the elevated social milieu usually inhabited by Edith Wharton’s characters. Ethan Frome is a poor farmer, trapped in a marriage to a suspicious, sickly, and controlling wife, Zeena. But when Zeena’s young cousin Mattie enters their household as a servant, Ethan’s loneliness is briefly lightened. Zeena’s suspiciousness sharpens, however, and the window of hope in Ethan’s bleak life begins inexorably to close. A last-minute, desperate attempt to escape fate leads to unforeseen consequences for all three. Ethan Frome is an unforgettable story with the force of myth, featuring realistic and haunting characters as vivid as any Wharton ever conjured.
Fiction/Literature
THE HOUSE OF MIRTH
Set among the glittering salons of Gilded Age New York, this novel is a moving indictment of society’s soul-crushing limitations as they bring about the downfall of a talented woman too spirited and conflicted to be contained by them. The beautiful, much-desired Lily Bart has been raised to be one of the perfect wives of the wealthy upper class, but her drive and her spark of independent character prevent her from conforming enough to succeed in those circles. Her desire for a comfortable life means that she will not marry for love without money, but her resistance to the rules of the social elite endangers her many marriage proposals and leads her into a dramatic downward spiral into debt and dishonor. One of Wharton’s most bracing and nuanced portraits of the life of women in a hostile, highly ordered world, The House of Mirth unfolds with the force of classical tragedy.
Fiction/Literature
VINTAGE CLASSICS
Available wherever books are sold.
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AVAILABLE FROM VINTAGE CLASSICS
PERSUASION
by Jane Austen
Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish Sir Walter Elliot, is a woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen she fell in was engaged to a naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But he had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded to give him up. Eight years later, Wentworth has returned, a rich man and still unwed. Anne’s never-diminished love is muffled by her pride, and he seems cold and unforgiving. What happens as the two are thrown together in the social world of Bath—and as an eager new suitor appears for Anne—is wittily told in a masterpiece that is one of the most entrancing novels in the English language.
Fiction/Literature
JANE EYRE
by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë’s most beloved novel describes the passionate love between the courageous orphan Jane Eyre and the brilliant, brooding, and domineering Rochester. The loneliness and cruelty of Jane’s childhood strengthens her natural independence and spirit, which prove invaluable when she takes a position as a governess at Thornfield Hall. But after she falls in love with her sardonic employer, her discovery of his terrible secret forces her to make a heart-wrenching choice. Ever since its publication in 1847, Jane Eyre has enthralled every kind of reader, from the most critical and cultivated to the youngest and most unabashedly romantic. It lives as one of the great triumphs of storytelling and as a moving and unforgettable portrayal of a woman’s quest for self-respect.
Fiction/Literature
VILLETTE
by Charlotte Brontë
Charlotte Brontë’s final masterpiece powerfully portrays a woman struggling to reconcile love, jealousy, and a fierce desire for independence. Having fled a harrowing past in England, Lucy Snowe begins a new life teaching at a boarding school in the great capital of a foreign country. There, as she tries to achieve independence from both outer necessity and inward grief, she finds that her feelings for a worldly doctor and a dictatorial professor threaten her hard-won self-possession. Published in 1853, Charlotte Brontë’s last novel was written in the wake of her grief at the deaths of her siblings. It has a dramatic force comparable to that of Jane Eyre, as well as a striking modernity of psychological insight and a revolutionary understanding of human loneliness.
Fiction/Literature
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
by Emily Brontë
Published in 1847, the year before Emily Brontë’s death at the age of thirty, Wuthering Heights has proved to be one of the nineteenth century’s most popular yet disturbing masterpieces. The windswept moors are the unforgettable setting of this tale of the love between the foundling Heathcliff and his wealthy benefactor’s daughter, Catherine. Through Catherine’s betrayal of Heathcliff and his bitter vengeance, their mythic passion haunts the next generation even after their deaths. Incorporating elements of many genres—from gothic novels and ghost stories to poetic allegory—and transcending them all, Wuthering Heights is a mystifying tour de force.
Fiction/Literature
THE SHADOW-LINE
by Joseph Conrad
The
masterpiece of Joseph Conrad’s later years, the autobiographical short novel The Shadow-Line depicts a young man at a crossroads in his life, facing a desperate crisis that marks the “shadow-line” between youth and maturity. This brief but intense story is a dramatically fictionalized account of Conrad’s first command as a young sea captain trapped aboard a becalmed, fever-wracked, and seemingly haunted ship. With no wind in sight and his crew disabled by malaria, the narrator discovers that the medicine necessary to save the sick men is missing and its absence has been deliberately concealed. Meanwhile, his increasingly frightened first mate is convinced that the malignant ghost of the previous captain has cursed them. Suspenseful, atmospheric, and deceptively simple, Conrad’s tale of the sea reflects the complex themes of his most famous novels, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
Fiction/Literature
THE ORIGINAL FRANKENSTEIN
by Mary Shelley (with Percy Shelley)
Working from the earliest surviving draft of Frankenstein, Charles E. Robinson presents two versions of the classic novel—as Mary Shelley originally wrote it and a subsequent version clearly indicating Percy Shelley’s amendments and contributions. For the first time we can hear Mary’s sole voice, which is much more colloquial, fast-paced, and sounds more modern than what readers have known up till now. We can also see for the first time the extent of Percy Shelley’s contribution—some 5,000 words out of 72,000—and his stylistic and thematic changes. His occasionally florid prose is in marked contrast to the directness of Mary’s writing. Interesting, too, are Percy’s suggestions that humanize the monster, thus shaping many of the major themes of the novel as we read it today. With these two versions of Frankenstein, we are allowed an exciting new perspective on one of literature’s greatest works.
Fiction/Literature
DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
by Robert Louis Stevenson
“I knew myself, at the first breath of this new life, to be more wicked, tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil; and the thought, in that moment, braced and delighted me like wine.” A good man takes a potion that turns him into a freak of pure evil. A reasonable scientist is transformed—through the agency of science itself—into the living embodiment of unreason. Like the vampire and the werewolf, the sundered personae of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde have worked their way into our collective unconscious, expressing both our ambivalence with science and our deepest questions about what is knowable in human nature. Here is the book that introduced them, at once a prototype for the modern detective story and a brooding novel of psychological horror. This edition of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde has an introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.
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