The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (the speed reading book TXT) 📗
- Author: Edith Wharton
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fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he
could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For
an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery
through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one
the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendour,
filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty.
After all, his life had been too starved… .
Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself
saying: “But I’m only fifty-seven—” and then he
turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late;
but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of
comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.
He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were
to meet; and together they walked again across the
Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to
the Chamber of Deputies.
Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his
father’s mind, was talking excitedly and abundantly of
Versailles. He had had but one previous glimpse of it,
during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all
the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to
go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous
enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other
up on his lips.
As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and
inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive,
he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence
that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an
equal. “That’s it: they feel equal to things—they know
their way about,” he mused, thinking of his son as the
spokesman of the new generation which had swept
away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.
Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father’s
arm. “Oh, by Jove,” he exclaimed.
They had come out into the great tree-planted space
before the Invalides. The dome of Mansart floated
ethereally above the budding trees and the long grey
front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays
of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol
of the race’s glory.
Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square
near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides;
and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost
obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up.
Now, by some queer process of association, that golden
light became for him the pervading illumination in
which she lived. For nearly thirty years, her life—of
which he knew so strangely little—had been spent in
this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense
and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the
theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must
have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she
must have frequented, the people she must have talked
with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and
associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a
setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he
remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to
him: “Ah, good conversation—there is nothing like it,
is there?”
Archer had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him,
for nearly thirty years; and that fact gave the measure
of his ignorance of Madame Olenska’s existence. More
than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the
long interval among people he did not know, in a
society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would
never wholly understand. During that time he had been
living with his youthful memory of her; but she had
doubtless had other and more tangible companionship.
Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something
apart; but if she had, it must have been like a
relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to
pray every day… .
They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were
walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the
building. It was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its
splendour and its history; and the fact gave one an idea
of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as
this were left to the few and the indifferent.
The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked
here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers
were rare in the little square into which they had turned.
Dallas stopped again, and looked up.
“It must be here,” he said, slipping his arm through
his father’s with a movement from which Archer’s shyness
did not shrink; and they stood together looking up
at the house.
It was a modern building, without distinctive character,
but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up
its wide cream-coloured front. On one of the upper
balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops of
the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still
lowered, as though the sun had just left it.
“I wonder which floor—?” Dallas conjectured; and
moving toward the porte-cochere he put his head into
the porter’s lodge, and came back to say: “The fifth. It
must be the one with the awnings.”
Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows
as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained.
“I say, you know, it’s nearly six,” his son at length
reminded him.
The father glanced away at an empty bench under
the trees.
“I believe I’ll sit there a moment,” he said.
“Why—aren’t you well?” his son exclaimed.
“Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go
up without me.”
Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I
say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”
“I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.
“If you don’t she won’t understand.”
“Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”
Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.
“But what on earth shall I say?”
“My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to
say?” his father rejoined with a smile.
“Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and
prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like
lifts.”
His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s
enough.”
Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an
incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted
doorway.
Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze
at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it
would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the
fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall,
and then ushered into the drawing-room. He pictured
Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step
and his delightful smile, and wondered if the people
were right who said that his boy “took after him.”
Then he tried to see the persons already in the
room—for probably at that sociable hour there would
be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale
and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and
hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it… . He
thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the
fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.
“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he
suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last
shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted
to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening
dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length
a light shone through the windows, and a moment later
a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the
awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for,
Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone
to his hotel.
A Note on the Text
The Age of Innocence first appeared in four large
installments in The Pictorial Review, from July to
October 1920. It was published that same year in book
form by D. Appleton and Company in New York and in
London. Wharton made extensive stylistic, punctuation,
and spelling changes and revisions between the serial
and book publication, and more than thirty subsequent
changes were made after the second impression of the
book edition had been run off. This authoritative text
is reprinted from the Library of America edition of
Novels by Edith Wharton, and is based on the sixth
impression of the first edition, which incorporates the
last set of extensive revisions that are obviously authorial.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Age of Innocence by Wharton
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