 | The Letters |  |
2. THE LETTERS
641
IN THREE PARTS: PART II
By EDITH WHARTON
Author of "The House of Mirth," etc.
THE story opens in the August CENTURY, with a scene between Vincent Deering, an American artist living in Paris, and Lizzie West, who for two years has been day-governess to the artist's young daughter, a discouraging pupil, mainly because she is neglected by an indolent, novel-reading mother. In the privacy of the studio, Lizzie West tells the artist that she must resign her fruitless charge. Deering pleads that in such case little Juliet will be hopelessly neglected, and in the teacher's wavering attitude he kisses her and establishes a relation of confidence and affection, which is discreetly cultivated, until, through the sudden death of Mrs. Deering, the teacher has reason to expect a devotion without evasion or concealment. But Deering's reserved attitude awakens feelings of uncertainty, until the affectionate interview which precedes his departure for America to settle his late wife's estate. His fervent letters of farewell from train and steamer, and one on his arrival in New York, make her eager for the next. This is the situation at the opening of the part which follows.—
IV
MISS MACY's room was next to Miss West's, and the Southerner's knock often appealed to Lizzie's hospitality when Mme. Clopin's early curfew had driven her boarders from the salon. It sounded thus one evening just as Lizzie, tired from an unusually long day of tuition, was in the act of removing her dress. She was in too indulgent a mood to withhold her "Come in," and as Miss Macy crossed the threshold, Lizzie felt that Vincent Deering's first letter—the letter from the train—had slipped from her loosened bodice to the floor.
Miss Macy, as promptly noting the fact, darted forward to recover the let-
Lizzie blushed with annoyance. "It's too stupid, having no pockets! If one gets a letter as she is going out in the morning, she has to carry it in her blouse all day."
Miss Macy looked at her with swimming eyes. "It's warm from your heart!" she breathed, reluctantly yielding up the missive.
Lizzie laughed, for she knew better: she knew it was the letter that had warmed her heart. Poor Andora Macy! She would never know. Her bleak bosom would never take fire from such a contact. Lizzie looked at her with kind eyes, secretly chafing at the injustice of fate.
The next evening, on her return home, she found Andora hovering in the entrance hall.
"I thought you'd like me to put this in your own hand," Miss Macy whispered significantly, pressing a letter upon Lizzie. "I couldn't bear to see it lying on the table with the others."
It was Deering's letter from the steamer. Lizzie blushed to the forehead, but without resenting Andora's divination. She could not have breathed a word of her bliss, but she was not altogether sorry to have it guessed, and pity for Andora's destitution yielded to the pleasure of using it as a mirror for her own abundance. DEERING wrote again on reaching New York, a long, fond, dissatisfied letter, vague in its indication of his own projects, specific in the expression of his love. Lizzie brooded over every syllable of it till they formed the undercurrent of all her waking thoughts, and murmured through her midnight dreams; but she would have been happier if they had shed some definite light on the future.
That would come, no doubt, when he had had time to look about and get his bearings. She counted up the days that must elapse before she received his next letter, and stole down early to peep at the papers, and learn when the next American mail was due. At length the happy date arrived, and she hurried distractedly through the day's work, trying to conceal her impatience by the endearments she bestowed upon her pupils. It was easier, in her present mood, to kiss them than to keep them at their grammars.
That evening, on Mme. Clopin's threshold, her heart beat so wildly that she had to lean a moment against the door-post before entering. But on the hall table, where the letters lay, there was none for her.
She went over them with a feverish hand, her heart dropping down and down, as she had sometimes fallen down an endless stairway in a dream—the very same stairway up which she had seemed to fly when she climbed the long hill to Deering's door. Then it suddenly struck her that Andora might have found and secreted her letter, and with a spring she was on the actual stairs and rattling Miss Macy's door-handle.
"You've a letter for me, haven't you?" she panted.
Miss Macy, turning from the toilet-table, inclosed her in attenuated arms. "Oh, darling, did you expect one to-day?"
"Do give it to me!" Lizzie pleaded with burning eyes.
"But I haven't any! There hasn't been a sign of a letter for you."
"I know there is. There must be," Lizzie persisted, stamping her foot.
"But, dearest, I've watched for you, and there's been nothing, absolutely nothing."
Day after day, for the ensuing weeks, the same scene reenacted itself with endless variations. Lizzie, after the first sharp spasm of disappointment, made no effort to conceal her anxiety from Miss Macy, and the fond Andora was charged to keep a vigilant eye upon the postman's coming, and to spy on the bonne for possible negligence or perfidy. But these elaborate precautions remained fruitless, and no letter from Deering came.
During the first fortnight of silence Lizzie exhausted all the ingenuities of explanation. She marveled afterward at the reasons she had found for Deering's silence: there were moments when she almost argued herself into thinking it more natural than his continuing to write. There was only one reason which her intelligence consistently rejected, and that was the possibility that he had forgotten
"BUT ON THE HALL TABLE, WHERE THE LETTERS LAY,
THERE WAS NONE FOR HER
In the first weeks of silence she wrote again and again to Deering, entreating him for a word, for a mere sign of life. From the first she had shrunk from seeming to assert any claim on his future, yet in her aching bewilderment she now charged herself with having been too possessive, too exacting in her tone. She told herself that his fastidiousness shrank from any but a "light touch," and that hers had not been light enough. She should have kept to the character of the "little friend," the artless consciousness in which tormented genius may find an escape from its complexities; and instead, she had dramatized their relation, exaggerated her own part in it, presumed, forsooth, to share the front of the stage with him, instead of being content to serve as scenery or chorus.
But though to herself she admitted, and even insisted on, the episodical nature of the experience, on the fact that for Deering it could be no more than an incident, she was still convinced that his sentiment for her, however fugitive, had been genuine.
His had not been the attitude of the unscrupulous male seeking a vulgar "advantage." For a moment he had really needed her, and if he was silent now, it was perhaps because he feared that she had mistaken the nature of the need and built vain hopes on its possible duration.
It was of the very essence of Lizzie's devotion that it sought instinctively the larger freedom of its object; she could not conceive of love under any form of exaction or compulsion. To make this clear to Deering became an overwhelming need, and in a last short letter she explicitly freed him from whatever sentimental obligation its predecessors might have seemed to impose. In this studied communication she playfully accused herself of having unwittingly sentimentalized their relation, affirming, in self-defense, a retrospective astuteness, a sense of the impermanence of the tenderer sentiments, that almost put Deering in the fatuous position of having mistaken coquetry for surrender. And she ended gracefully with a plea for the continuance of the friendly regard which she had "always understood" to be the basis of their sympathy. The document, when completed, seemed to her worthy of what she conceived to be Deering's conception of a woman of the world, and she found a spectral satisfaction in the thought of making her final appearance before him in that distinguished character. But she was never destined to learn what effect the appearance produced; for the letter, like those it sought to excuse, remained unanswered.
V
THE fresh spring sunshine which had so often attended Lizzie West on her dusty climb up the hill of St.-Cloud beamed on her, some two years later, in a scene and a situation of altered import.
The horse-chestnuts of the Champs-Elysees filtered its rays through the symmetrical umbrage inclosing the graveled space about Daurent's restaurant, and Miss West, seated at a table within that privileged circle, presented to the light a hat much better able to sustain its scrutiny than those which had sheltered the brow of Juliet Deering's instructress.
Her dress was in keeping with the hat, and both belonged to a situation rich in such possibilities as the act of a leisurely luncheon at Daurent's in the opening week of the Salon. Her companions, of both sexes, confirmed and emphasized this impression by an elaborateness of garb and an ease of attitude implying the largest range of selection between the forms of Parisian idleness; and even Andora Macy, seated opposite, as in the place of co-hostess or companion, reflected, in coy grays and mauves, the festal note of the occasion.
This note reverberated persistently in the ears of a solitary gentleman straining for glimpses of the group from a table wedged in the remotest corner of the garden; but to Miss West herself the occurrence did not rise above the usual. For nearly a year she had been acquiring the habit of such situations, and the act of offering a luncheon at Daurent's to her cousins, the Harvey Mearses of Providence, and their friend Mr. Jackson Benn, produced in her no emotion beyond the languid glow which Mr. Benn's presence was beginning to impart to such scenes.
"It's frightful, the way you've got used to it," Andora Macy had wailed in the first days of her friend's transfigured fortune, when Lizzie West had waked one morning to find herself among the heirs of an old and miserly cousin whose testamentary dispositions had formed, since her earliest childhood, the subject of pleasantry and conjecture in her own improvident family. Old Hezron Mears had never given any sign of life to the luckless Wests; had perhaps hardly been conscious of including them in the carefully drawn will which, following the old American convention, scrupulously divided his hoarded millions among his kin. It was by a mere genealogical accident that Lizzie, falling just within the golden circle, found herself possessed of a pittance sufficient to release her from the prospect of a long gray future in Mme. Clopin's pension.
The release had seemed wonderful at first; yet she presently found that it had destroyed her former world without giving her a new one. On the ruins of the old pension life bloomed the only flower that had ever sweetened her path; and beyond the sense of present ease, and the removal of anxiety for the future, her reconstructed existence blossomed with no compensating joys. She had hoped great things from the opportunity to rest, to travel, to look about her, above all, in various artful feminine ways, to be "nice" to the companions of her less privileged state; but such widenings of scope left her, as it were, but the more conscious of the empty margin of personal life beyond them. It was not till she woke to the leisure of her new days that she had the full sense of what was gone from them.
Their very emptiness made her strain to pack them with transient sensations: she was like the possessor of an unfurnished house, with random furniture and bric-a-brac perpetually pouring in "on approval." It was in this experimental character that Mr. Jackson Benn had fixed her attention, and the languid effort of her imagination to adjust him to her requirements was seconded by the fond complicity of Andora and the smiling approval of her cousins. Lizzie did not discourage these demonstrations: she suffered serenely Andora's allusions to Mr. Benn's infatuation, and Mrs. Mears's casual boast of his business standing. All the better if they could drape his narrow square-shouldered frame and round unwinking countenance in the trailing mists of sentiment: Lizzie looked and listened, not unhopeful of the miracle.
"I never saw anything like the way these Frenchmen stare! Doesn't it make you nervous, Lizzie?" Mrs. Mears broke out suddenly, ruffling her feather boa about an outraged bosom. Mrs. Mears was still in that stage of development when her countrywomen taste to the full
"A LEISURELY LUNCHEON AT
DAURENT'S IN THE OPENING WEEK OF THE SALON"
the peril of being exposed to the gaze of the licentious Gaul.
Lizzie roused herself from the contemplation of Mr. Benn's round baby cheeks and the square blue jaw resting on his perpendicular collar. "Is some one staring at me?" she asked with a smile.
"Don't turn round, whatever you do! There—just over there, between the rhododendrons—the tall fair man alone at that table. Really, Harvey, I think you ought to speak to the head-waiter, or something; though I suppose in one of these places they'd only laugh at you," Mrs. Mears shudderingly concluded.
Her husband, as if inclining to this probability, continued the undisturbed dissection of his chicken wing; but Mr. Benn, perhaps aware that his situation demanded a more punctilious attitude, sternly revolved upon the parapet of his high collar in the direction of Mrs. Mears's glance.
"What, that fellow all alone over there? Why, he's not French; he's an American," he then proclaimed with a perceptible relaxing of the facial muscles.
"Oh!" murmured Mrs. Mears, as perceptibly disappointed, and Mr. Benn continued carelessly: "He came over on the steamer with me. He's some kind of an artist—a fellow named Deering. He was staring at me, I guess: wondering whether I was going to remember him. Why, how d' 'e do? How are you? Why, yes, of course; with pleasure—my friends, Mrs. Harvey Mears—Mr. Mears; my friends Miss Macy and Miss West."
"I have the pleasure of knowing Miss West," said Vincent Deering with a smile.
VI
EVEN through his smile Lizzie had seen, in the first moment, how changed he was; and the impression of the change deepened to the point of pain when, a few days later, in reply to his brief note, she accorded him a private hour.
That the first sight of his writing—the first answer to his letters—should have come, after three long years, in the shape of this impersonal line, too curt to be called humble, yet confessing to a consciousness of the past by the studied avoidance of its language! As she read, her mind flashed back over what she had dreamed his letters would be, over the exquisite answers she had composed above his name. There was nothing exquisite in the conventional lines before her; but dormant nerves began to throb again at the mere touch of the paper he had touched, and she threw the little note into the fire before she dared to reply to it.
A SOLITARY GENTLEMAN STRAINING FOR GLIMPSES OF THE GROUP"
Now that he was actually before her again, he became, as usual, the one live spot in her consciousness. Once more her tormented throbbing self sank back passive and numb, but now with all its power of suffering mysteriously transferred to the presence, so known, yet so unknown, at the opposite corner of her hearth. She was still Lizzie West, and he was still Vincent Deering; but the Styx rolled between them, and she saw his face through its fog. It was his face, really, rather than his words, that told her, as she furtively studied it, the tale of failure and slow discouragement which had so blurred its handsome lines. She kept afterward no precise memory of the actual details of his narrative: the pain it evidently cost him to impart it was so much the sharpest fact in her new vision of him. Confusedly, however, she gathered that on reaching America he had found his wife's small property gravely impaired; and that, while lingering on to secure what remained of it, he had contrived to sell a picture or two, and had even known a brief moment of success, during which he received orders and set up a studio. But inexplicably the tide had ebbed, his work remained on his hands, and a tedious illness, with its miserable sequel of debt, soon wiped out his small advantage. There followed a period of eclipse, still more vaguely pictured, during which she was allowed to infer that he had tried his hand at divers means of livelihood, accepting employment from a fashionable house-decorator, designing wall-papers, illustrating magazine articles, and acting for a time, she dimly understood, as the social tout of a new hotel desirous of advertising its restaurant. These disjointed facts were strung on a slender thread of personal allusions—references to friends who had been kind (jealously, she guessed them to be women), and to enemies who had darkly schemed against him. But, true to his tradition of "correctness," he carefully avoided the mention of names, and left her trembling conjectures to grope dimly through an alien crowded world in which there seemed little room for her small shy presence.
As she listened, her private pang was merged in the intolerable sense of his unhappiness. Nothing he had said explained or excused his conduct to her; but he had suffered, he had been lonely, had been humiliated, and she suddenly felt, with a fierce maternal rage, that there was no conceivable justification for any scheme of things in which such facts were possible. She could not have said why: she simply knew that it hurt too much to see him hurt.
Gradually it came to her that her unconsciousness of any personal grievance was due to her having so definitely determined her own future. She was glad she had decided, as she now felt she had, to marry Jackson Benn, if only for the sense of detachment it gave her in dealing with the case of Vincent Deering. Her personal safety insured her the requisite impartiality, and justified her in dwelling as long as she chose on the last lines of a chapter to which her own act had deliberately fixed the close. Any lingering hesitations as to the finality of her decision were dispelled by the imminent need of making it known to Deering; and when her visitor paused in his reminiscences to say, with a sigh, "But many things have happened to you too," his words did not so much evoke the sense of her altered fortunes as the image of the protector to whom she was about to intrust them.
"Yes, many things; it's three years," she answered.
Deering sat leaning forward, in his sad exiled elegance, his eyes gently bent on hers; and at his side she saw the solid form of Mr. Jackson Benn, with shoulders preternaturally squared by the cut of his tight black coat, and a tall shiny collar sustaining his baby cheeks and hard blue chin. Then the vision faded as Deering began to speak.
"Three years," he repeated, musingly taking up her words. "I've so often wondered what they'd brought you."
She lifted her head with a quick blush, and the terrified wish that he should not, at the cost of all his notions of correctness, lapse into the blunder of becoming "personal."
"You've wondered?" She smiled back bravely.
"Do you suppose I haven't?" His look dwelt on her. "Yes, I daresay that was what you thought of me."
She had her answer pat—"Why, frankly, you know, I didn't think of you." But the mounting tide of her poor dishonored memories swept it indignantly away. If it was his correctness to ignore, it could never be hers to disavow.
" Was that what you thought of me?" she heard him repeat in a tone of sad insistence; and at that, with a quick lift of her head, she resolutely answered: "How could I know what to think? I had no word from you."
If she had expected, and perhaps almost hoped, that this answer would create a difficulty for him, the gaze of quiet fortitude with which he met it proved that she had underestimated his resources.
"No, you had no word. I kept my vow," he said.
"Your vow?"
"That you shouldn't have a word—not a syllable. Oh, I kept it through everything!"
Lizzie's heart was sounding in her ears the old confused rumor of the sea of life, but through it she desperately tried to distinguish the still small voice of reason.
"What was your vow? Why shouldn't I have had a syllable from you?"
He sat motionless, still holding her with a look so gentle that it almost seemed forgiving.
Then abruptly he rose, and crossing the space between them, sat down in a chair at her side. The deliberation of his movement might have implied a forgetfulness of changed conditions, and Lizzie, as if thus viewing it, drew slightly back; but he appeared not to notice her recoil, and his eyes, at last leaving her face, slowly and approvingly made the round of the small bright drawing-room. "This is charming. Yes, things have changed for you," he said.
A moment before she had prayed that he might be spared the error of a vain return upon the past. It was as if all her retrospective tenderness, dreading to see him at such a disadvantage, rose up to protect him from it. But his evasiveness exasperated her, and suddenly she felt the inconsistent desire to hold him fast, face to face with his own words.
Before she could reiterate her question, however, he had met her with another.
"You did think of me, then? Why are you afraid to tell me that you did?"
The unexpectedness of the challenge wrung an indignant cry from her.
"Didn't my letters tell you so enough?"
"Ah, your letters!" Keeping her gaze on his in a passion of unrelenting fixity, she could detect in him no confusion, not the least quiver of a sensitive nerve. He only gazed back at her more sadly.
"They went everywhere with me—your letters," he said.
"Yet you never answered them." At last the accusation trembled to her lips.
"Yet I never answered them."
"Did you ever so much as read them, I wonder?"
All the demons of self-torture were up in her now, and she loosed them on him, as if to escape from their rage.
Deering hardly seemed to hear her question. He merely shifted his attitude, leaning a little nearer to her, but without attempting, by the least gesture, to remind her of the privileges which such nearness had once implied.
"There were beautiful, wonderful things in them," he said, smiling.
She felt herself stiffen under his smile.
"You've waited three years to tell me so!"
He looked at her with grave surprise. "And do you resent my telling you even now?"
His parries were incredible. They left her with a breathless sense of thrusting at emptiness, and a desperate, almost vindic-
"No. Only I wonder you should take the trouble to tell me, when at the time—"
And now, with a sudden turn, he gave her the final surprise of meeting her squarely on her own ground.
"When at the time I didn't? But how could I—at the time?"
"Why couldn't you? You've not yet told me?"
He gave her again his look of disarming patience. "Do I need to? Hasn't my whole wretched story told you?"
"Told me why you never answered my letters?"
"Yes, since I could only answer them in one way—by protesting my love and my longing."
There was a long pause of resigned expectancy on his part, on hers, of a wild confused reconstruction of her shattered past. "You mean, then, that you didn't write because—"
"Because I found, when I reached America, that I was a pauper; that my wife's money was gone, and that what I could earn—I've so little gift that way!—was barely enough to keep Juliet clothed and educated. It was as if an iron door had been suddenly locked and barred between us."
Lizzie felt herself driven back, panting upon the last defenses of her incredulity. "You might at least have told me— have explained. Do you think I shouldn't have understood?"
He did not hesitate. "You would have understood. It wasn't that."
"What was it then?" she quavered.
"It's wonderful you shouldn't see! Simply that I couldn't write you that. Anything else—not that!"
"And so you preferred to let me suffer?"
There was a shade of reproach in his eyes. "I suffered too," he said.
It was his first direct appeal to her compassion, and for a moment it nearly unsettled the delicate poise of her sympathies, and sent them trembling in the direction of scorn and irony. But even as the impulse rose, it was stayed by another sensation. Once again, as so often in the past, she became aware of a fact which, in his absence, she always failed to reckon with—the fact of the deep irreducible difference between his image in her mind and his actual self, the mysterious alteration in her judgment produced by the inflections of his voice, the look of his eyes, the whole complex pressure of his personality. She had phrased it once self-reproachfully by saying to herself that she "never could remember him," so completely did the sight of him supersede the counterfeit about which her fancy wove its perpetual wonders. Bright and breathing as that counterfeit was, it became a gray figment of the mind at the touch of his presence; and on this occasion the immediate result was to cause her to feel his possible unhappiness with an intensity beside which her private injury paled.
"I suffered horribly," he repeated, "and all the more that I couldn't make a sign, couldn't cry out my misery. There was only one escape from it all—to hold my tongue, and pray that you might hate me."
The blood rushed to Lizzie's forehead. "Hate you—you prayed that I might hate you?"
He rose from his seat, and moving closer, lifted her hand gently in his. "Yes; because your letters showed me that, if you didn't, you'd be unhappier still."
Her hand lay motionless, with the warmth of his flowing through it, and her thoughts, too—her poor fluttering stormy thoughts—felt themselves suddenly penetrated by the same soft current of communion.
"And I meant to keep my resolve," he went on, slowly releasing his clasp. "I meant to keep it even after the random stream of things swept me back here in your way; but when I saw you the other day, I felt that what had been possible at a distance was impossible now that we were near each other. How was it possible to see you and want you to hate me?"
He had moved away, but not to resume his seat. He merely paused at a little distance, his hand resting on a chair-back, in the transient attitude that precedes departure.
Lizzie's heart contracted. He was going, then, and this was his farewell. He was going, and she could find no word to detain him but the senseless stammer "I never hated you."
He considered her with his faint grave
Lizzie sat silent, spellbound, as she listened, by the sudden evocation of Mr. Jackson Benn. He stood there again, between herself and Deering, perpendicular and reproachful, but less solid and sharply outlined than before, with a look in his small hard eyes that desperately wailed for reembodiment.
Deering was continuing his farewell speech. "You're rich now, you're free. You will marry." She vaguely saw him holding out his hand.
"It's not true that I'm engaged!" she broke out. They were the last words she had meant to utter; they were hardly related to her conscious thoughts; but she felt her whole will suddenly gathered up in the irrepressible impulse to repudiate and fling away from her forever the spectral claim of Mr. Jackson Benn.
(To be continued)
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