The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (top 100 novels .txt) 📖

himself a nasty cut. She

rushed in bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with

his knee all beautifully bandaged, and was so sympathetic

and beautiful that my wife was too dazzled to

ask her name.”

 

A pleasant glow dilated Archer’s heart. There was

nothing extraordinary in the tale: any woman would

have done as much for a neighbour’s child. But it was

just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushed in bareheaded,

carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poor

Mrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.

 

“That is the Countess Olenska—a granddaughter of

old Mrs. Mingott’s.”

 

“Whew—a Countess!” whistled Ned Winsett. “Well,

I didn’t know Countesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts

ain’t.”

 

“They would be, if you’d let them.”

 

“Ah, well—” It was their old interminable argument

as to the obstinate unwillingness of the “clever people”

to frequent the fashionable, and both men knew that

there was no use in prolonging it.

 

“I wonder,” Winsett broke off, “how a Countess

happens to live in our slum?”

 

“Because she doesn’t care a hang about where she

lives—or about any of our little social sign-posts,” said

Archer, with a secret pride in his own picture of her.

 

“H’m—been in bigger places, I suppose,” the other

commented. “Well, here’s my corner.”

 

He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood

looking after him and musing on his last words.

 

Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they

were the most interesting thing about him, and always

made Archer wonder why they had allowed him to

accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men are

still struggling.

 

Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and

child, but he had never seen them. The two men always

met at the Century, or at some haunt of journalists and

theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsett

had proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to

understand that his wife was an invalid; which might

be true of the poor lady, or might merely mean that she

was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes, or in

both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of social

observances: Archer, who dressed in the evening

because he thought it cleaner and more comfortable to

do so, and who had never stopped to consider that

cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items in

a modest budget, regarded Winsett’s attitude as part of

the boring “Bohemian” pose that always made fashionable

people, who changed their clothes without talking

about it, and were not forever harping on the number

of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and less

self-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was

always stimulated by Winsett, and whenever he caught

sight of the journalist’s lean bearded face and melancholy

eyes he would rout him out of his corner and

carry him off for a long talk.

 

Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a

pure man of letters, untimely born in a world that had

no need of letters; but after publishing one volume of

brief and exquisite literary appreciations, of which one

hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away,

and the balance eventually destroyed by the publishers

(as per contract) to make room for more marketable

material, he had abandoned his real calling, and taken

a sub-editorial job on a women’s weekly, where fashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New England

love-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

 

On the subject of “Hearth-fires” (as the paper was

called) he was inexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath

his fun lurked the sterile bitterness of the still young

man who has tried and given up. His conversation

always made Archer take the measure of his own life,

and feel how little it contained; but Winsett’s, after all,

contained still less, and though their common fund of

intellectual interests and curiosities made their talks

exhilarating, their exchange of views usually remained

within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

 

“The fact is, life isn’t much a fit for either of us,”

Winsett had once said. “I’m down and out; nothing to

be done about it. I’ve got only one ware to produce,

and there’s no market for it here, and won’t be in my

time. But you’re free and you’re well-off. Why don’t

you get into touch? There’s only one way to do it: to

go into politics.”

 

Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one

saw at a flash the unbridgeable difference between men

like Winsett and the others—Archer’s kind. Every one

in polite circles knew that, in America, “a gentleman

couldn’t go into politics.” But, since he could hardly

put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively:

“Look at the career of the honest man in American

politics! They don’t want us.”

 

“Who’s `they’? Why don’t you all get together and

be `they’ yourselves?”

 

Archer’s laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly

condescending smile. It was useless to prolong the

discussion: everybody knew the melancholy fate of the

few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in

municipal or state politics in New York. The day was

past when that sort of thing was possible: the country

was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant, and

decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

 

“Culture! Yes—if we had it! But there are just a few

little local patches, dying out here and there for lack

of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising: the last remnants

of the old European tradition that your forebears brought

with them. But you’re in a pitiful little minority: you’ve

got no centre, no competition, no audience. You’re like

the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: `The

Portrait of a Gentleman.’ You’ll never amount to anything,

any of you, till you roll up your sleeves and get

right down into the muck. That, or emigrate … God!

If I could emigrate …”

 

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned

the conversation back to books, where Winsett, if

uncertain, was always interesting. Emigrate! As if a

gentleman could abandon his own country! One could no

more do that than one could roll up one’s sleeves and

go down into the muck. A gentleman simply stayed at

home and abstained. But you couldn’t make a man like

Winsett see that; and that was why the New York of

literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first

shake made it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out,

in the end, to be a smaller box, with a more monotonous

pattern, than the assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.

 

The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for

more yellow roses. In consequence of this search he

arrived late at the office, perceived that his doing so

made no difference whatever to any one, and was filled

with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his

life. Why should he not be, at that moment, on the

sands of St. Augustine with May Welland? No one was

deceived by his pretense of professional activity. In

old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair

was the head, and which were mainly engaged in

the management of large estates and “conservative”

investments, there were always two or three young

men, fairly well-off, and without professional ambition,

who, for a certain number of hours of each day, sat at

their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading

the newspapers. Though it was supposed to be

proper for them to have an occupation, the crude fact

of money-making was still regarded as derogatory, and

the law, being a profession, was accounted a more

gentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these

young men had much hope of really advancing in his

profession, or any earnest desire to do so; and over

many of them the green mould of the perfunctory was

already perceptibly spreading.

 

It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading

over him too. He had, to be sure, other tastes and

interests; he spent his vacations in European travel,

cultivated the “clever people” May spoke of, and

generally tried to “keep up,” as he had somewhat wistfully

put it to Madame Olenska. But once he was married,

what would become of this narrow margin of life in

which his real experiences were lived? He had seen

enough of other young men who had dreamed his

dream, though perhaps less ardently, and who had

gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of

their elders.

 

From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame

Olenska, asking if he might call that afternoon,

and begging her to let him find a reply at his club; but

at the club he found nothing, nor did he receive any

letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified

him beyond reason, and though the next morning

he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a

florist’s window-pane, he left it there. It was only on

the third morning that he received a line by post from

the Countess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated

from Skuytercliff, whither the van der Luydens had

promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his

steamer.

 

“I ran away,” the writer began abruptly (without the

usual preliminaries), “the day after I saw you at the

play, and these kind friends have taken me in. I wanted

to be quiet, and think things over. You were right in

telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safe

here. I wish that you were with us.” She ended with a

conventional “Yours sincerely,” and without any allusion

to the date of her return.

 

The tone of the note surprised the young man. What

was Madame Olenska running away from, and why

did she feel the need to be safe? His first thought was

of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected

that he did not know her epistolary style, and that it

might run to picturesque exaggeration. Women always

exaggerated; and moreover she was not wholly at her

ease in English, which she often spoke as if she were

translating from the French. “Je me suis evadee—” put

in that way, the opening sentence immediately suggested

that she might merely have wanted to escape

from a boring round of engagements; which was very

likely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and

easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.

 

It amused him to think of the van der Luydens’

having carried her off to Skuytercliff on a second visit,

and this time for an indefinite period. The doors of

Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors,

and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered

to the few thus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his

last visit to Paris, the delicious play of Labiche, “Le

Voyage de M. Perrichon,” and he remembered M.

Perrichon’s dogged and undiscouraged attachment to

the young man whom he had pulled out of the glacier.

The van der Luydens had rescued Madame Olenska

from a doom almost as icy; and though there were

many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer

knew that beneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate

determination to go on rescuing her.

 

He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she

was away; and almost immediately remembered that,

only the day before, he had refused an invitation to

spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiverses

at their house on the Hudson, a few miles below

Skuytercliff.

 

He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly

parties at Highbank, with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing,

long tramps in the snow, and a general flavour of

mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He had just

received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and had preferred the