The Hermit and the Wild Woman, and Other Stories

by Edith Wharton

  When they returned in the spring, I heard that they had bought the Brereton house, for what seemed to my inexperienced ears a very large sum. But Ned, whom I met one day at the club, explained to me convincingly that it was really the most economical thing they could do. “You don’t understand about such things, dear boy, living in your Diogenes tub; but wait till there’s a Mrs. Diogenes. I can assure you it’s a lot cheaper than building, which is what Daisy would have preferred, and of course,” he added, his color rising as our eyes met, “of course, once the Academy’s going, I shall have to make my head-quarters here; and I suppose even you won’t grudge me a roof over my head.”

  The Brereton roof was a vast one, with a marble balustrade about it; and I could quite understand, without Ned’s halting explanation, that “under the circumstances” it would be necessary to defer what he called “our work—” “Of course, after we’ve rallied from this amputation, we shall grow fresh supplies—I mean my wife’s investments will,” he laughingly corrected, “and then we’ll have no big outlays ahead and shall know exactly where we stand. After all, my dear fellow, charity begins at home!”

  IV

  THE Halidons floated off to Europe for the summer. In due course their return was announced in the social chronicle, and walking up Fifth Avenue one afternoon I saw the back of the Brereton house sheathed in scaffolding, and realized that they were adding a wing.

  I did not look up Halidon, nor did I hear from him till the middle of the winter. Once or twice, meanwhile, I had seen him in the back of his wife’s opera box; but Mrs. Halidon had grown so resplendent that she reduced her handsome husband to a supernumerary. In January the papers began to talk of the Halidon ball; and in due course I received a card for it. I was not a frequenter of balls, and had no intention of going to this one; but when the day came some obscure impulse moved me to set aside my rule, and toward midnight I presented myself at Ned’s illuminated portals.

  I shall never forget his look when I accosted him on the threshold of the big new ballroom. With celibate egoism I had rather fancied he would be gratified by my departure from custom; but one glance showed me my mistake. He smiled warmly, indeed, and threw into his hand-clasp an artificial energy of welcome—“You of all people—my dear fellow! Have you seen Daisy?”—but the look behind the smile made me feel cold in the crowded room.

  Nor was Mrs. Halidon’s greeting calculated to restore my circulation. “Have you come to spy on us?” her frosty smile seemed to say; and I crept home early, wondering if she had not found me out.

  It was the following week that Halidon turned up one day in my office. He looked pale and thinner, and for the first time I noticed a dash of gray in his hair. I was startled at the change in him, but I reflected that it was nearly a year since we had looked at each other by daylight, and that my shaving-glass had doubtless a similar tale to tell.

  He fidgeted about the office, told me a funny story about his little boy, and then dropped into a chair.

  “Look here,” he said, “I want to go into business.”

  “Business?” I stared.

  “Well, why not? I suppose men have gone to work, even at my age, and not made a complete failure of it. The fact is, I want to make some money.” He paused, and added: “I’ve heard of an opportunity to pick up for next to nothing a site for the Academy, and if I could lay my hands on a little cash—”

  “Do you want to speculate?” I interposed.

  “Heaven forbid! But don’t you see that, if I had a fixed job—so much a quarter—I could borrow the money and pay it off gradually?”

  I meditated upon this astounding proposition. “Do you really think it’s wise to buy a site before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Well—seeing ahead a little?”

  His face fell for a moment, but he rejoined cheerfully: “It’s an exceptional chance, and after all, I shall see ahead if I can get regular work. I can put by a little every month, and by and bye, when our living expenses diminish, my wife means to come forward—her idea would be to give the building—”

  He broke off and drummed on the table, waiting nervously for me to speak. He did not say on what grounds he still counted on a diminution of his household expenses, and I had not the cruelty to press this point; but I murmured, after a moment: “I think you’re right—I should try to buy the land.”

  We discussed his potentialities for work, which were obviously still an unknown quantity, and the conference ended in my sending him to a firm of real-estate brokers who were looking out for a partner with a little money to invest. Halidon had a few thousands of his own, which he decided to embark in the venture; and thereafter, for the remaining months of the winter, he appeared punctually at a desk in the brokers’ office, and sketched plans of the Academy on the back of their business paper. The site for the future building had meanwhile been bought, and I rather deplored the publicity which Ned gave to the fact; but, after all, since this publicity served to commit him more deeply, to pledge him conspicuously to the completion of his task, it was perhaps a wise instinct of self-coercion that had prompted him.

  It was a dull winter in realty, and toward spring, when the market began to revive, one of the Halidon children showed symptoms of a delicate throat, and the fashionable doctor who humoured the family ailments counselled—nay, commanded—a prompt flight to the Mediterranean.

  “He says a New York spring would be simply criminal—and as for those ghastly southern places, my wife won’t hear of them; so we’re off. But I shall be back in July, and I mean to stick to the office all summer.”

  He was true to his word, and reappeared just as all his friends were deserting town. For two torrid months he sat at his desk, drawing fresh plans of the Academy, and waiting for the wind-fall of a “big deal”; but in September he broke down from the effect of the unwonted confinement, and his indignant wife swept him off to the mountains.

  “Why Ned should work when we have the money—I wish he would sell that wretched piece of land!” And sell it he did one day: I chanced on a record of the transaction in the realty column of the morning paper. He afterward explained the sale to me at length. Owing to some spasmodic effort at municipal improvement, there had been an unforeseen rise in the adjoining property, and it would have been foolish—yes, I agreed that it would have been foolish. He had made $10,000 on the sale, and that would go toward paying off what he had borrowed for the original purchase. Meanwhile he could be looking about for another site.

  Later in the winter he told me it was a bad time to look. His position in the real-estate business enabled him to follow the trend of the market, and that trend was obstinately upward. But of course there would be a reaction—and he was keeping his eyes open.

  As the resuscitated Academy scheme once more fell into abeyance, I saw Halidon less and less frequently; and we had not met for several months, when one day of June, my morning paper startled me with the announcement that the President had appointed Edward Halidon of New York to be Civil Commissioner of our newly acquired Eastern possession, the Manana Islands. “The unhealthy climate of the islands, and the defective sanitation of the towns, make it necessary that vigorous measures should be taken to protect the health of the American citizens established there, and it is believed that Mr. Halidon’s large experience of Eastern life and well-known energy of character—” I read the paragraph twice; then I dropped the paper, and projected myself through the subway to Halidon’s office. But he was not there; he had not been there for a month. One of the clerks believed he was in Washington.

  “It’s true, then!” I said to myself. “But Mrs. Halidon in the Mananas—?”

  A day or two later Ned appeared in my office. He looked better than when we had last met, and there was a determined line about his lips.

  “My wife? Heaven forbid! You don’t suppose I should think of taking her? But the job is a tremendously interesting one, and it’s the kind of work I believe I can do—the only kind,” he added, smi
ling rather ruefully.

  “But my dear Ned—”

  He faced me with a look of quiet resolution. “I think I’ve been through all the buts. It’s an infernal climate, of course, but then I am used to the East—I know what precautions to take. And it would be a big thing to clean up that Augean stable.”

  “But consider your wife and children—”

  He met this with deliberation. “I have considered my children—that’s the point. I don’t want them to be able to say, when they look back: ‘He was content to go on living on that money—’”

  “My dear Ned—”

  “That’s the one thing they shan’t say of me,” he pressed on vehemently. “I’ve tried other ways—but I’m no good at business. I see now that I shall never make money enough to carry out the scheme myself; but at least I can clear out, and not go on being his pensioner—seeing his dreams turned into horses and carpets and clothes—”

  He broke off, and leaning on my desk hid his face in his hands. When he looked up again his flush of wrath had subsided.

  “Just understand me—it’s not her fault. Don’t fancy I’m trying for an instant to shift the blame. A woman with children simply obeys the instinct of her sex; she puts them first—and I wouldn’t have it otherwise. As far as she’s concerned there were no conditions attached—there’s no reason why she should make any sacrifice.” He paused, and added painfully: “The trouble is, I can’t make her see that I am differently situated.”

  “But, Ned, the climate—what are you going to gain by chucking yourself away?”

  He lifted his brows. “That’s a queer argument from you. And, besides, I’m up to the tricks of all those ague-holes. And I’ve got to live, you see: I’ve got something to put through.” He saw my look of enquiry, and added with a shy, poignant laugh—how I hear it still!—: “I don’t mean only the job in hand, though that’s enough in itself; but Paul’s work—you understand.—It won’t come in my day, of course—I’ve got to accept that—but my boy’s a splendid chap” (the boy was three), “and I tell you what it is, old man, I believe when he grows up he’ll put it through.”

  Halidon went to the Mananas, and for two years the journals brought me incidental reports of the work he was accomplishing. He certainly had found a job to his hand: official words of commendation rang through the country, and there were lengthy newspaper leaders on the efficiency with which our representative was prosecuting his task in that lost corner of our colonies. Then one day a brief paragraph announced his death—“one of the last victims of the pestilence he had so successfully combated.”

  That evening, at my club, I heard men talking of him. One said: “What’s the use of a fellow wasting himself on a lot of savages?” and another wiseacre opined: “Oh, he went off because there was friction at home. A fellow like that, who knew the East, would have got through all right if he’d taken the proper precautions. I saw him before he left, and I never saw a man look less as if he wanted to live.”

  I turned on the last speaker, and my voice made him drop his lighted cigar on his complacent knuckles.

  “I never knew a man,” I exclaimed, “who had better reasons for wanting to live!”

  A handsome youth mused: “Yes, his wife is very beautiful—but it doesn’t follow—”

  And then some one nudged him, for they knew I was Halidon’s friend.

  THE PRETEXT

  I

  MRS. RANSOM, when the front door had closed on her visitor, passed with a spring from the drawing-room to the narrow hall, and thence up the narrow stairs to her bedroom.

  Though slender, and still light of foot, she did not always move so quickly: hitherto, in her life, there had not been much to hurry for, save the recurring domestic tasks that compel haste without fostering elasticity; but some impetus of youth revived, communicated to her by her talk with Guy Dawnish, now found expression in her girlish flight upstairs, her girlish impatience to bolt herself into her room with her throbs and her blushes.

  Her blushes? Was she really blushing?

  She approached the cramped eagle-topped mirror above her plain prim dressing-table: just such a meagre concession to the weakness of the flesh as every old-fashioned house in Wentworth counted among its relics. The face reflected in this unflattering surface—for even the mirrors of Wentworth erred on the side of depreciation—did not seem, at first sight, a suitable theatre for the display of the tenderer emotions, and its owner blushed more deeply as the fact was forced upon her.

  Her fair hair had grown too thin—it no longer quite hid the blue veins in her candid forehead—a forehead that one seemed to see turned toward professorial desks, in large bare halls where a snowy winter light fell uncompromisingly on rows of “thoughtful women.” Her mouth was thin, too, and a little strained; her lips were too pale; and there were lines in the corners of her eyes. It was a face which had grown middle-aged while it waited for the joys of youth.

  Well—but if she could still blush? Instinctively she drew back a little, so that her scrutiny became less microscopic, and the pretty lingering pink threw a veil over her pallor, the hollows in her temples, the faint wrinkles of inexperience about her lips and eyes. How a little colour helped! It made her eyes so deep and shining. She saw now why bad women rouged…. Her redness deepened at the thought.

  But suddenly she noticed for the first time that the collar of her dress was cut too low. It showed the shrunken lines of the throat. She rummaged feverishly in a tidy scentless drawer, and snatching out a bit of black velvet, bound it about her neck. Yes—that was better. It gave her the relief she needed. Relief—contrast—that was it! She had never had any, either in her appearance or in her setting. She was as flat as the pattern of the wall-paper—and so was her life. And all the people about her had the same look. Wentworth was the kind of place where husbands and wives gradually grew to resemble each other—one or two of her friends, she remembered, had told her lately that she and Ransom were beginning to look alike….

  But why had she always, so tamely, allowed her aspect to conform to her situation? Perhaps a gayer exterior would have provoked a brighter fate. Even now—she turned back to the glass, loosened the tight strands of hair above her brow, ran the fine end of the comb under them with a rapid frizzing motion, and then disposed them, more lightly and amply, above her eager face. Yes—it was really better; it made a difference. She smiled at herself with a timid coquetry, and her lips seemed rosier as she smiled. Then she laid down the comb and the smile faded. It made a difference, certainly—but was it right to try to make one’s hair look thicker and wavier than it really was? Between that and rouging the ethical line seemed almost impalpable, and the spectre of her rigid New England ancestry rose reprovingly before her. She was sure that none of her grandmothers had ever simulated a curl or encouraged a blush. A blush, indeed! What had any of them ever had to blush for in all their frozen lives? And what, in Heaven’s name, had she? She sat down in the stiff mahogany rocking-chair beside her work-table and tried to collect herself. From childhood she had been taught to “collect herself”—but never before had her small sensations and aspirations been so widely scattered, diffused over so vague and uncharted an expanse. Hitherto they had lain in neatly sorted and easily accessible bundles on the high shelves of a perfectly ordered moral consciousness. And now—now that for the first time they needed collecting—now that the little winged and scattered bits of self were dancing madly down the vagrant winds of fancy, she knew no spell to call them to the fold again. The best way, no doubt—if only her bewilderment permitted—was to go back to the beginning—the beginning, at least, of to-day’s visit—to recapitulate, word for word and look for look….

  She clasped her hands on the arms of the chair, checked its swaying with a firm thrust of her foot, and fixed her eyes upon the inward vision….

  To begin with, what had made to-day’s visit so different from the others? It became suddenly vivid to her that there had been many, almost daily, others, since Guy
Dawnish’s coming to Wentworth. Even the previous winter—the winter of his arrival from England—his visits had been numerous enough to make Wentworth aware that—very naturally—Mrs. Ransom was “looking after” the stray young Englishman committed to her husband’s care by an eminent Q. C. whom the Ransoms had known on one of their brief London visits, and with whom Ransom had since maintained professional relations. All this was in the natural order of things, as sanctioned by the social code of Wentworth. Every one was kind to Guy Dawnish—some rather importunately so, as Margaret Ransom had smiled to observe—but it was recognized as fitting that she should be kindest, since he was in a sense her property, since his people in England, by profusely acknowledging her kindness, had given it the domestic sanction without which, to Wentworth, any social relation between the sexes remained unhallowed and to be viewed askance. Yes! And even this second winter, when the visits had become so much more frequent, so admitted a part of the day’s routine, there had not been, from any one, a hint of surprise or of conjecture….

  Mrs. Ransom smiled with a faint bitterness. She was protected by her age, no doubt—her age and her past, and the image her mirror gave back to her….

  Her door-handle turned suddenly, and the bolt’s resistance was met by an impatient knock.

  “Margaret!”

  She started up, her brightness fading, and unbolted the door to admit her husband.

  “Why are you locked in? Why, you’re not dressed yet!” he exclaimed.

  It was possible for Ransom to reach his dressing-room by a slight circuit through the passage; but it was characteristic of the relentless domesticity of their relation that he chose, as a matter of course, the directer way through his wife’s bedroom. She had never before been disturbed by this practice, which she accepted as inevitable, but had merely adapted her own habits to it, delaying her hasty toilet till he was safely in his room, or completing it before she heard his step on the stair; since a scrupulous traditional prudery had miraculously survived this massacre of all the privacies.