The Glimpses of the Moon - Edith Wharton (short novels in english txt) 📗

drawing-room, in the very house where her honeymoon

might have been spent; and no one had asked her where she had

come from, or why she was alone, or what was the key to the

tragedy written on her shrinking face ….

 

That was the way of the world they lived in. Nobody questioned,

nobody wondered any more-because nobody had time to remember.

The old risk of prying curiosity, of malicious gossip, was

virtually over: one was left with one’s drama, one’s disaster,

on one’s hands, because there was nobody to stop and notice the

little shrouded object one was carrying. As Susy watched the

two people before her, each so frankly unaffected by her

presence, Violet Melrose so engrossed in her feverish pursuit of

notoriety, Fulmer so plunged in the golden sea of his success,

she felt like a ghost making inaudible and imperceptible appeals

to the grosser senses of the living.

 

“If I wanted to be alone,” she thought, “I’m alone enough, in

all conscience.” There was a deathly chill in such security.

She turned to Fulmer.

 

“And Grace?”

 

He beamed back without sign of embarrassment. “Oh, she’s here,

naturally—we’re in Paris, kids and all. In a pension, where we

can polish up the lingo. But I hardly ever lay eyes on her,

because she’s as deep in music as I am in paint; it was as big a

chance for her as for me, you see, and she’s making the most of

it, fiddling and listening to the fiddlers. Well, it’s a

considerable change from New Hampshire.” He looked at her

dreamily, as if making an intense effort to detach himself from

his dream, and situate her in the fading past. “Remember the

bungalow? And Nick—ah, how’s Nick?” he brought out

triumphantly.

 

“Oh, yes—darling Nick?” Mrs. Melrose chimed in; and Susy, her

head erect, her cheeks aflame, declared with resonance: “Most

awfully well—splendidly!”

 

“He’s not here, though?” from Fulmer.

 

“No. He’s off travelling—cruising.”

 

Mrs. Melrose’s attention was faintly roused. “With anybody

interesting?”

 

“No; you wouldn’t know them. People we met ….” She did not

have to continue, for her hostess’s gaze had again strayed.

 

“And you’ve come for your clothes, I suppose, darling? Don’t

listen to people who say that skirts are to be wider. I’ve

discovered a new woman—a Genius—and she absolutely swathes

you…. Her name’s my secret; but we’ll go to her together.”

 

Susy rose from her engulphing armchair. “Do you mind if I go up

to my room? I’m rather tired—coming straight through.”

 

“Of course, dear. I think there are some people coming to

dinner … Mrs. Match will tell you. She has such a memory ….

Fulmer, where on earth are those cartoons of the music-room?”

 

Their voices pursued Susy upstairs, as, in Mrs. Match’s

perpendicular wake, she mounted to the white-panelled room with

its gay linen hangings and the low bed heaped with more

cushions.

 

“If we’d come here,” she thought, “everything might have been

different.” And she shuddered at the sumptuous memories of the

Palazzo Vanderlyn, and the great painted bedroom where she had

met her doom.

 

Mrs. Match, hoping she would find everything, and mentioning

that dinner was not till nine, shut her softly in among her

terrors.

 

“Find everything?” Susy echoed the phrase. Oh, yes, she would

always find everything: every time the door shut on her now,

and the sound of voices ceased, her memories would be there

waiting for her, every one of them, waiting quietly, patiently,

obstinately, like poor people in a doctor’s office, the people

who are always last to be attended to, but whom nothing will

discourage or drive away, people to whom time is nothing,

fatigue nothing, hunger nothing, other engagements nothing: who

just wait …. Thank heaven, after all, that she had not found

the house empty, if, whenever she returned to her room, she was

to meet her memories there!

 

It was just a week since Nick had left her. During that week,

crammed with people, questions, packing, explaining, evading,

she had believed that in solitude lay her salvation. Now she

understood that there was nothing she was so unprepared for, so

unfitted for. When, in all her life, had she ever been alone?

And how was she to bear it now, with all these ravening memories

besetting her!

 

Dinner not till nine? What on earth was she to do till nine

o’clock? She knelt before her boxes, and feverishly began to

unpack.

 

Gradually, imperceptibly, the subtle influences of her old life

were stealing into her. As she pulled out her tossed and

crumpled dresses she remembered Violet’s emphatic warning:

“Don’t believe the people who tell you that skirts are going to

be wider.” Were hers, perhaps, too wide as it was? She looked

at her limp raiment, piling itself up on bed and sofa, and

understood that, according to Violet’s standards, and that of

all her set, those dresses, which Nick had thought so original

and exquisite, were already commonplace and dowdy, fit only to

be passed on to poor relations or given to one’s maid. And Susy

would have to go on wearing them till they fell to bits-or

else …. Well, or else begin the old life again in some new

form ….

 

She laughed aloud at the turn of her thoughts. Dresses? How

little they had mattered a few short weeks ago! And now,

perhaps, they would again be one of the foremost considerations

in her life. How could it be otherwise, if she were to return

again to her old dependence on Ellie Vanderlyn, Ursula Gillow,

Violet Melrose? And beyond that, only the Bockheimers and their

kind awaited her ….

 

A knock on the door—what a relief! It was Mrs. Match again,

with a telegram. To whom had Susy given her new address? With

a throbbing heart she tore open the envelope and read:

 

“Shall be in Paris Friday for twenty-four hours where can I see

you write Nouveau Luxe.”

 

Ah, yes—she remembered now: she had written to Strefford! And

this was his answer: he was coming. She dropped into a chair,

and tried to think. What on earth had she said in her letter?

It had been mainly, of course, one of condolence; but now she

remembered having added, in a precipitate postscript: “I can’t

give your message to Nick, for he’s gone off with the Hickses-I

don’t know where, or for how long. It’s all right, of course:

it was in our bargain.”

 

She had not meant to put in that last phrase; but as she sealed

her letter to Strefford her eye had fallen on Nick’s missive,

which lay beside it. Nothing in her husband’s brief lines had

embittered her as much as the allusion to Strefford. It seemed

to imply that Nick’s own plans were made, that his own future

was secure, and that he could therefore freely and handsomely

take thought for hers, and give her a pointer in the right

direction. Sudden rage had possessed her at the thought: where

she had at first read jealousy she now saw only a cold

providence, and in a blur of tears she had scrawled her

postscript to Strefford. She remembered that she had not even

asked him to keep her secret. Well—after all, what would it

matter if people should already know that Nick had left her?

Their parting could not long remain a mystery, and the fact that

it was known might help her to keep up a presence of

indifference.

 

“It was in the bargain—in the bargain,” rang through her brain

as she re-read Strefford’s telegram. She understood that he had

snatched the time for this hasty trip solely in the hope of

seeing her, and her eyes filled. The more bitterly she thought

of Nick the more this proof of Strefford’s friendship moved her.

 

The clock, to her relief, reminded her that it was time to dress

for dinner. She would go down presently, chat with Violet and

Fulmer, and with Violet’s other guests, who would probably be

odd and amusing, and too much out of her world to embarrass her

by awkward questions. She would sit at a softly-lit table,

breathe delicate scents, eat exquisite food (trust Mrs. Match!),

and be gradually drawn again under the spell of her old

associations. Anything, anything but to be alone ….

 

She dressed with even more than her habitual care, reddened her

lips attentively, brushed the faintest bloom of pink over her

drawn cheeks, and went down—to meet Mrs. Match coming up with a

tray.

 

“Oh, Madam, I thought you were too tired …. I was bringing it

up to you myself—just a little morsel of chicken.”

 

Susy, glancing past her, saw, through the open door, that the

lamps were not lit in the drawing-room.

 

“Oh, no, I’m not tired, thank you. I thought Mrs. Melrose

expected friends at dinner!”

 

“Friends at dinner-to-night?” Mrs. Match heaved a despairing

sigh. Sometimes, the sigh seemed to say, her mistress put too

great a strain upon her. “Why, Mrs. Melrose and Mr. Fulmer were

engaged to dine in Paris. They left an hour ago. Mrs. Melrose

told me she’d told you,” the housekeeper wailed.

 

Susy kept her little fixed smile. “I must have misunderstood.

In that case … well, yes, if it’s no trouble, I believe I will

have my tray upstairs. “

 

Slowly she turned, and followed the housekeeper up into the

dread solitude she had just left.

XIV

THE next day a lot of people turned up unannounced for luncheon.

They were not of the far-fetched and the exotic, in whom Mrs.

Melrose now specialized, but merely commonplace fashionable

people belonging to Susy’s own group, people familiar with the

amusing romance of her penniless marriage, and to whom she had

to explain (though none of them really listened to the

explanation) that Nick was not with her just now but had gone

off cruising … cruising in the AEgean with friends … getting

up material for his book (this detail had occurred to her in the

night).

 

It was the kind of encounter she had most dreaded; but it

proved, after all, easy enough to go through compared with those

endless hours of turning to and fro, the night before, in the

cage of her lonely room. Anything, anything, but to be

alone ….

 

Gradually, from the force of habit, she found herself actually

in tune with the talk of the luncheon table, interested in the

references to absent friends, the light allusions to last year’s

loves and quarrels, scandals and absurdities. The women, in

their pale summer dresses, were so graceful, indolent and sure

of themselves, the men so easy and good-humoured! Perhaps,

after all, Susy reflected, it was the world she was meant for,

since the other, the brief Paradise of her dreams, had already

shut its golden doors upon her. And then, as they sat on the

terrace after luncheon, looking across at the yellow tree-tops

of the park, one of the women said something—made just an

allusion—that Susy would have let pass unnoticed in the old

days, but that now filled her with a sudden deep disgust ….

She stood up and wandered away, away from them all through the

fading garden.

 

Two days later Susy and Strefford sat on the terrace of the

Tuileries above the Seine. She had asked him to meet her there,

with the desire to avoid the crowded halls and drawing-room of

the Nouveau Luxe where, even at that supposedly “dead” season,

people one knew were always drifting to and fro; and they sat on

a bench in the pale sunlight, the discoloured leaves heaped at

their feet, and no one to share their solitude but a lame

working-man and a haggard woman who were lunching