The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (the speed reading book TXT) 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
- Performer: 0375753206
Book online «The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (the speed reading book TXT) 📗». Author Edith Wharton
in Dallas’s wake through the English cathedrals; and
May, always fair to her children, had insisted on holding
the balance evenly between their athletic and artistic
proclivities. She had indeed proposed that her husband
should go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the
Italian lakes after they had “done” Switzerland; but
Archer had declined. “We’ll stick together,” he said;
and May’s face had brightened at his setting such a
good example to Dallas.
Since her death, nearly two years before, there had
been no reason for his continuing in the same routine.
His children had urged him to travel: Mary Chivers
had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad and
“see the galleries.” The very mysteriousness of such a
cure made her the more confident of its efficacy. But
Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories,
by a sudden startled shrinking from new things.
Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a
deep rut he had sunk. The worst of doing one’s duty
was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything
else. At least that was the view that the men of his
generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between
right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and
the reverse, had left so little scope for the unforeseen.
There are moments when a man’s imagination, so easily
subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its
daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny.
Archer hung there and wondered… .
What was left of the little world he had grown up in,
and whose standards had bent and bound him? He
remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence
Lefferts’s, uttered years ago in that very room: “If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying
Beaufort’s bastards.”
It was just what Archer’s eldest son, the pride of his
life, was doing; and nobody wondered or reproved.
Even the boy’s Aunt Janey, who still looked so exactly
as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her
mother’s emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink
cotton-wool, and carried them with her own twitching
hands to the future bride; and Fanny Beaufort, instead
of looking disappointed at not receiving a “set” from a
Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned
beauty, and declared that when she wore them she
should feel like an Isabey miniature.
Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at
eighteen, after the death of her parents, had won its
heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty
years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid
of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was
pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any
one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake
up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father’s
past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered
so obscure an incident in the business life of New
York as Beaufort’s failure, or the fact that after his
wife’s death he had been quietly married to the notorious
Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new
wife, and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was
subsequently heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia;
and a dozen years later American travellers were
handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where
he represented a large insurance agency. He and his
wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day
their orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in
charge of May Archer’s sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland,
whose husband had been appointed the girl’s
guardian. The fact threw her into almost cousinly
relationship with Newland Archer’s children, and nobody
was surprised when Dallas’s engagement was announced.
Nothing could more dearly give the measure of the
distance that the world had travelled. People nowadays
were too busy—busy with reforms and “movements,”
with fads and fetishes and frivolities—to bother much
about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody’s
past, in the huge kaleidoscope where all the
social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at
the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart
beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.
It was long since it had thus plunged and reared
under his widening waistcoat, leaving him, the next
minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. He
wondered if it was thus that his son’s conducted itself
in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort—and decided
that it was not. “It functions as actively, no doubt, but
the rhythm is different,” he reflected, recalling the cool
composure with which the young man had announced
his engagement, and taken for granted that his family
would approve.
“The difference is that these young people take it for
granted that they’re going to get whatever they want,
and that we almost always took it for granted that we
shouldn’t. Only, I wonder—the thing one’s so certain
of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as
wildly?”
It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the
spring sunshine held Archer in his open window, above
the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendome. One
of the things he had stipulated—almost the only one—
when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was
that, in Paris, he shouldn’t be made to go to one of the
newfangled “palaces.”
“Oh, all right—of course,” Dallas good-naturedly
agreed. “I’ll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place—
the Bristol say—” leaving his father speechless at hearing
that the century-long home of kings and emperors
was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one
went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local
colour.
Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient
years, the scene of his return to Paris; then the
personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to
see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska’s life.
Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household
had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak
of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers
and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs
from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river
under the great bridges, and the life of art and study
and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting.
Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as
he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate:
a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being… .
Dallas’s hand came down cheerily on his shoulder.
“Hullo, father: this is something like, isn’t it?” They
stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the
young man continued: “By the way, I’ve got a message
for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past five.”
He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have
imparted any casual item of information, such as the hour
at which their train was to leave for Florence the next
evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in
his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother
Mingott’s malice.
“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Dallas pursued. “Fanny made
me swear to do three things while I was in Paris: get
her the score of the last Debussy songs, go to the
Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know
she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent
her over from Buenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny
hadn’t any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used
to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I
believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort’s.
And she’s our cousin, of course. So I rang her up
this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I
were here for two days and wanted to see her.”
Archer continued to stare at him. “You told her I
was here?”
“Of course—why not?” Dallas’s eye brows went up
whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his
arm through his father’s with a confidential pressure.
“I say, father: what was she like?”
Archer felt his colour rise under his son’s unabashed
gaze. “Come, own up: you and she were great pals,
weren’t you? Wasn’t she most awfully lovely?”
“Lovely? I don’t know. She was different.”
“Ah—there you have it! That’s what it always comes
to, doesn’t it? When she comes, SHE’S DIFFERENT—and
one doesn’t know why. It’s exactly what I feel about
Fanny.”
His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. “About
Fanny? But, my dear fellow—I should hope so! Only I
don’t see—”
“Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric! Wasn’t she—
once—your Fanny?”
Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation.
He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer,
yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even
the rudiments of reserve. “What’s the use of making
mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ‘em out,”
he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But
Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their
banter.
“My Fanny?”
“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything
for: only you didn’t,” continued his surprising son.
“I didn’t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother
said—”
“Your mother?”
“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent
for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we
were safe with you, and always would be, because
once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing
you most wanted.”
Archer received this strange communication in silence.
His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged
sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a
low voice: “She never asked me.”
“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other
anything, did you? And you never told each other
anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed
at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb
asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing
more about each other’s private thoughts than we
ever have time to find out about our own.—I say,
Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If
you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s.
I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”
Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He
preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings
through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the
packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.
After a little while he did not regret Dallas’s
indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart
to know that, after all, some one had guessed and
pitied… . And that it should have been his wife moved
him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate
insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no
doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain
frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more?
For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs
Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled
by… .
A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska
waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and
when he had died, some years before, she had made no
change in her way of living. There was nothing now to
keep her and Archer apart—and that afternoon he was
to see her.
He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde
and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had
once told him that she often went there, and he
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