Happily, at any rate, even in the vulgarest light publicity could ever shed, there would be the great fact of the way Doyne was “coming out.” He was coming out too beautifully—better yet than such a partisan as Withermore could have supposed. Yet, all the while, as well, how would this partisan have represented to any one else the special state of his own consciousness? It wasn’t a thing to talk about—it was only a thing to feel. There were moments, for instance, when, as he bent over his papers, the light breath of his dead host was as distinctly in his hair as his own elbows were on the table before him. There were moments when, had he been able to look up, the other side of the table would have shown him this companion as vividly as the shaded lamplight showed him his page. That he couldn’t at such a juncture look up was his own affair, for the situation was ruled—that was but natural—by deep delicacies and fine timidities, the dread of too sudden or too rude an advance. What was intensely in the air was that if Doyne was there it was not nearly so much for himself as for the young priest of his altar. He hovered and lingered, he came and went, he might almost have been, among the books and the papers, a hushed, discreet librarian, doing the particular things, rendering the quiet aid, liked by men of letters.
Withermore himself, meanwhile, came and went, changed his place, wandered on quests either definite or vague; and more than once, when, taking a book down from a shelf and finding in it marks of Doyne’s pencil, he got drawn on and lost, he had heard documents on the table behind him gently shifted and stirred, had literally, on his return, found some letter he had mislaid pushed again into view, some wilderness cleared by the opening of an old journal at the very date he wanted. How should he have gone so, on occasion, to the special box or drawer, out of fifty receptacles, that would help him, had not his mystic assistant happened, in fine prevision, to tilt its lid, or to pull it half open, in just the manner that would catch his eye?—in spite, after all, of the fact of lapses and intervals in which, could one have really looked, one would have seen somebody standing before the fire a trifle detached and over-erect—somebody fixing one the least bit harder than in life.
III
That this auspicious relation had in fact existed, had continued, for two or three weeks, was sufficiently proved by the dawn of the distress with which our young man found himself aware that he had, for some reason, from a certain evening, begun to miss it. The sign of that was an abrupt, surprised sense—on the occasion of his mislaying a marvellous unpublished page which, hunt where he would, remained stupidly, irrecoverably lost—that his protected state was, after all, exposed to some confusion and even to some depression. If, for the joy of the business, Doyne and he had, from the start, been together, the situation had, within a few days of his first new suspicion of it, suffered the odd change of their ceasing to be so. That was what was the matter, he said to himself, from the moment an impression of mere mass and quantity struck him as taking, in his happy outlook at his material, the place of his pleasant assumption of a clear course and a lively pace. For five nights he struggled; then, never at his table, wandering about the room, taking up his references only to lay them down, looking out of the window, poking the fire, thinking strange thoughts and listening for signs and sounds not as he suspected or imagined, but as he vainly desired and invoked them, he made up his mind that he was, for the time at least, forsaken.
The extraordinary thing thus became that it made him not only sad not to feel Doyne’s presence, but in a high degree uneasy. It was stranger, somehow, that he shouldn’t be there than it had ever been that he was—so strange indeed at last that Withermore’s nerves found themselves quite inconsequently affected. They had taken kindly enough to what was of an order impossible to explain, perversely reserving their sharpest state for the return to the normal, the supersession of the false. They were remarkably beyond control when, finally, one night, after resisting an hour or two, he simply edged out of the room. It had only now, for the first time, become impossible to him to remain there. Without design, but panting a little and positively as a man scared, he passed along his usual corridor and reached the top of the staircase. From this point he saw Mrs. Doyne looking up at him from the bottom quite as if she had known he would come; and the most singular thing of all was that, though he had been conscious of no notion to resort to her, had only been prompted to relieve himself by escape, the sight of her position made him recognize it as just, quickly feel it as a part of some monstrous oppression that was closing over both of them. It was wonderful how, in the mere modern London hall, between the Tottenham Court Road rugs and the electric light, it came up to him from the tall black lady, and went again from him down to her, that he knew what she meant by looking as if he would know. He descended straight, she turned into her own little lower room, and there, the next thing, with the door shut, they were, still in silence and with queer faces, confronted over confessions that had taken sudden life from these two or three movements. Withermore gasped as it came to him why he had lost his friend. “He has been with you?”
With this it was all out—out so far that neither had to explain and that, when “What do you suppose is the matter?” quickly passed between them, one appeared to have said it as much as the other. Withermore looked about at the small, bright room in which, night after night, she had been living her life as he had been living his own upstairs. It was pretty, cosy, rosy; but she had by turns felt in it what he had felt and heard in it what he had heard. Her effect there—fantastic black, plumed and extravagant, upon deep pink—was that of some “decadent” coloured print, some poster of the newest school. “You understood he had left me?” he asked.
She markedly wished to make it clear. “This evening—yes. I’ve made things out.”
“You knew—before—that he was with me?”
She hesitated again. “I felt he wasn’t with me. But on the stairs—”
“Yes?”
“Well—he passed, more than once. He was in the house. And at your door—”
“Well?” he went on as she once more faltered.
“If I stopped I could sometimes tell. And from your face,” she added, “to-night, at any rate, I knew your state.”
“And that was why you came out?”
“I thought you’d come to me.”
He put out to her, on this, his hand, and they thus, for a minute, in silence, held each other clasped. There was no peculiar presence for either, now—nothing more peculiar than that of each for the other. But the place had suddenly become as if consecrated, and Withermore turned over it again his anxiety. “What is then the matter?”
“I only want to do the real right thing,” she replied after a moment.
“And are we not doing it?”
“I wonder. Are you not?”
He wondered too. “To the best of my belief. But we must think.”
“We must think,” she echoed. And they did think—thought, with intensity, the rest of that evening together, and thought, independently—Withermore at least could answer for himself—during many days that followed. He intermitted for a little his visits and his work, trying, in meditation, to catch himself in the act of some mistake that might have accounted for their disturbance. Had he taken, on some important point—or looked as if he might take—some wrong line or wrong view? had he somewhere benightedly falsified or inadequately insisted? He went back at last with the idea of having guessed two or three questions he might have been on the way to muddle; after which he had, above stairs, another period of agitation, presently followed by another interview, below, with Mrs. Doyne, who was still troubled and flushed.
“He’s there?”
“He’s there.”
“I knew it!” she returned in an odd gloom of triumph. Then as to make it clear: “He has not been again with me.”
“Nor with me again to help,” said Withermore.
She considered. “Not to help?”
“I can’t make it out—I’m at sea. Do what I will, I feel I’m wrong.
”
She covered him a moment with her pompous pain. “How do you feel it?” “
Why, by things that happen. The strangest things. I can’t describe them—and you wouldn’t believe them.”
“Oh yes, I would!” Mrs. Doyne murmured.
“Well, he intervenes.” Withermore tried to explain. “However I turn, I find him.”
She earnestly followed. “‘Find’ him?”
“I meet him. He seems to rise there before me.”
Mrs. Doyne, staring, waited a little. “Do you mean you see him?”
“I feel as if at any moment I may. I’m baffled. I’m checked.” Then he added: “I’m afraid.”
“Of him?” asked Mrs. Doyne.
He thought. “Well—of what I’m doing.”
“Then what, that’s so awful, are you doing?”
“What you proposed to me. Going into his life.”
She showed, in her gravity, now, a new alarm. “And don’t you like that?”
“Doesn’t he? That’s the question. We lay him bare. We serve him up. What is it called? We give him to the world.”
Poor Mrs. Doyne, as if on a menace to her hard atonement, glared at this for an instant in deeper gloom. “And why shouldn’t we?”
“Because we don’t know. There are natures, there are lives, that shrink. He mayn’t wish it,” said Withermore. “We never asked him.”
“How could we?”
He was silent a little. “Well, we ask him now. That’s, after all, what our start has, so far, represented. We’ve put it to him.”
“Then—if he has been with us—we’ve had his answer.”
Withermore spoke now as if he knew what to believe. “He hasn’t been ‘with’ us—he has been against us.”
“Then why did you think—”
“What I did think, at first—that what he wishes to make us feel is his sympathy? Because, in my original simplicity, I was mistaken. I was—I don’t know what to call it—so excited and charmed that I didn’t understand. But I understand at last. He only wanted to communicate. He strains forward out of his darkness; he reaches toward us out of his mystery; he makes us dim signs out of his horror.”
“‘Horror’?” Mrs. Doyne gasped with her fan up to her mouth.
“At what we’re doing.” He could by this time piece it all together. “I see now that at first—”
“Well, what?”
“One had simply to feel he was there, and therefore not indifferent. And the beauty of that misled me. But he’s there as a protest.”
“Against my Life?” Mrs. Doyne wailed.
“Against any Life. He’s there to save his Life. He’s there to be let alone.”
“So you give up?” she almost shrieked.
He could only meet her. “He’s there as a warning.”
For a moment, on this, they looked at each other deep. “You are afraid!” she at last brought out.
It affected him, but he insisted. “He’s there as a curse!”
With that they parted, but only for two or three days; her last word to him continuing to sound so in his ears that, between his need really to satisfy her and another need presently to be noted, he felt that he might not yet take up his stake. He finally went back at his usual hour and found her in her usual place. “Yes, I am afraid,” he announced as if he had turned that well over and knew now all it meant. “But I gather that you’re not.”
She faltered, reserving her word. “What is it you fear?”
“Well, that if I go on I shall see him.”
“And then—?”
“Oh, then,” said George Withermore, “I should give up!”
She weighed it with her lofty but earnest air. “I think, you know, we must have a clear sign.”
“You wish me to try again?”
She hesitated. “You see what it means—for me—to give up.”
“Ah, but you needn’t,” Withermore said.
She seemed to wonder, but in a moment she went on. “It would mean that he won’t take from me—” But she dropped for despair.
“Well, what?”
“Anything,” said poor Mrs. Doyne.
He faced her a moment more. “I’ve thought myself of the clear sign. I’ll try again.”
As he was leaving her, however, she remembered. “I’m only afraid that to-night there’s nothing ready—no lamp and no fire.”
“Never mind,” he said from the foot of the stairs; “I’ll find things.”
To which she answered that the door of the room would probably, at any rate, be open; and retired again as if to wait for him. She had not long to wait; though, with her own door wide and her attention fixed, she may not have taken the time quite as it appeared to her visitor. She heard him, after an interval, on the stair, and he presently stood at her entrance, where, if he had not been precipitate, but rather, as to step and sound, backward and vague, he showed at least as livid and blank.
“I give up.”
“Then you’ve seen him?”
“On the threshold—guarding it.”
“Guarding it?” She glowed over her fan. “Distinct?”
“Immense. But dim. Dark. Dreadful,” said poor George Withermore.
She continued to wonder. “You didn’t go in?”
The young man turned away. “He forbids!”
“You say I needn’t,” she went on after a moment. “Well then, need I?”
“See him?” George Withermore asked.
She waited an instant. “Give up.”
“You must decide.” For himself he could at last but drop upon the sofa with his bent face in his hands. He was not quite to know afterwards how long he had sat so; it was enough that what he did next know was that he was alone among her favourite objects. Just as he gained his feet, however, with this sense and that of the door standing open to the hall, he found himself afresh confronted, in the light, the warmth, the rosy space, with her big black perfumed presence. He saw at a glance, as she offered him a huger, bleaker stare over the mask of her fan that she had been above; and so it was that, for the last time, they faced together their strange question. “You’ve seen him?” Withermore asked.
He was to infer later on from the extraordinary way she closed her eyes and, as if to steady herself, held them tight and long, in silence, that beside the unutterable vision of Ashton Doyne’s wife his own might rank as an escape. He knew before she spoke that all was over. “I give up.”
1 Garments.
2 Samuel Johnson, whose biographer was James Boswell, and Sir Walter Scott, whose biographer was his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart.
The Lady’s Maid’s Bell
by EDITH WHARTON
Edith Wharton (1862–1937) is another American (and a friend of Henry James) who wrote compellingly of life among the upper classes. She is best remembered for her novels and novella, such as Ethan Frome (1911) and The Age of Innocence (1920)—the latter work won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, making Wharton the first women to win a Pulitzer in any category. However, Wharton was also a prolific author of short stories, with twelve collections published during her lifetime. Her strong interest in ghosts is evident from the titles of two such collections: Tales of Men and Ghosts (1910) and Ghosts (1937). The following, one of her first ghost stories, appeared in her collection The Descent of Man and Other Stories (1904) and has been widely analyzed for its subtle themes of feminism and abortion.
I
It was the autumn after I had the typhoid.1 I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment-agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though—or I thought so at the time. A Mrs. Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the Stat
es, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, “Why, Hartley,” says she, “I believe I’ve got the very place for you. Come in to-morrow and we’ll talk about it.”
The next day, when I called, she told me the lady she’d in mind was a niece of hers, a Mrs. Brympton, a youngish lady, but something of an invalid, who lived all the year round at her country-place on the Hudson, owing to not being able to stand the fatigue of town life.
“Now, Hartley,” Mrs. Railton said, in that cheery way that always made me feel things must be going to take a turn for the better—“now understand me; it’s not a cheerful place I’m sending you to. The house is big and gloomy; my niece is nervous, vaporish; her husband—well, he’s generally away; and the two children are dead. A year ago, I would as soon have thought of shutting a rosy active girl like you into a vault; but you’re not particularly brisk yourself just now, are you? and a quiet place, with country air and wholesome food and early hours, ought to be the very thing for you. Don’t mistake me,” she added, for I suppose I looked a trifle downcast; “you may find it dull, but you won’t be unhappy. My niece is an angel. Her former maid, who died last spring, had been with her twenty years and worshipped the ground she walked on. She’s a kind mistress to all, and where the mistress is kind, as you know, the servants are generally good-humored, so you’ll probably get on well enough with the rest of the household. And you’re the very woman I want for my niece: quiet, well-mannered, and educated above your station. You read aloud well, I think? That’s a good thing; my niece likes to be read to. She wants a maid that can be something of a companion: her last was, and I can’t say how she misses her. It’s a lonely life … Well, have you decided?”
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