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

patch of

paleness to which the moonlight was beginning to give the form

of a white house-front.

 

“Oh, come when we’d five to choose from. At least if you count

the Chicago flat.”

 

“So we had—you wonder!” He laid his hand on hers, and his

touch renewed the sense of marvelling exultation which the

deliberate survey of their adventure always roused in her ….

It was characteristic that she merely added, in her steady

laughing tone: “Or, not counting the flat—for I hate to brag-just consider the others: Violet Melrose’s place at Versailles,

your aunt’s villa at Monte Carlo—and a moor!”

 

She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet

with a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he

shouldn’t accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have

no desire to do so. “Poor old Fred!” he merely remarked; and

she breathed out carelessly: “Oh, well—”

 

His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they

stood silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was

aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the

moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore.

 

Nick Lansing spoke at last. “Versailles in May would have been

impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within

twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it’s

exactly the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So—

with all respect to you—it wasn’t much of a mental strain to

decide on Como.”

 

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity.

“It took a good deal of argument to convince you that we could

face the ridicule of Como!”

 

“Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at

least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this

place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then

it’s-as good as any other.”

 

She sighed out a blissful assent. “And I must say that Streffy

has done things to a turn. Even the cigars—who do you suppose

gave him those cigars?” She added thoughtfully: “You’ll miss

them when we have to go.”

 

“Oh, I say, don’t let’s talk to-night about going. Aren’t we

outside of time and space …? Smell that guinea-a-bottle stuff

over there: what is it? Stephanotis?”

 

“Y-yes …. I suppose so. Or gardenias …. Oh, the fire-flies! Look … there, against that splash of moonlight on the

water. Apples of silver in a network of gold ….” They

leaned together, one flesh from shoulder to finger-tips, their

eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples.

 

“I could bear,” Lansing remarked, “even a nightingale at this

moment ….”

 

A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long

liquid whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above

their heads.

 

“It’s a little late in the year for them: they’re ending just

as we begin.”

 

Susy laughed. “I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye

to each other as sweetly.”

 

It was in her husband’s mind to answer: “They’re not saying

good-bye, but only settling down to family cares.” But as this

did not happen to be in his plan, or in Susy’s, he merely echoed

her laugh and pressed her closer.

 

The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The

ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a

silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the moon was

turning from gold to white in a sky powdered with vanishing

stars. Across the lake the lights of a little town went out,

one after another, and the distant shore became a floating

blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with

the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a

great white moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The

nightingales had paused and the trickle of the fountain behind

the house grew suddenly insistent.

 

When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. “I have

been thinking,” she said, “that we ought to be able to make it

last at least a year longer.”

 

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or

disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood

her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

 

“You mean,” he enquired after a pause, “without counting your

grandmother’s pearls?”

 

“Yes—without the pearls.”

 

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper:

“Tell me again just how.”

 

“Let’s sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best.” He

stretched himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on

a heap of boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee.

Just above her, when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of

moonflooded sky incrusted like silver in a sharp black

patterning of plane-boughs. All about them breathed of peace

and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so acute that it

was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of bills

and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.

“People with a balance can’t be as happy as all this,” Susy

mused, letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

 

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch’s bugbear;

they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing’s.

She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies

of mankind and as the people one always had to put one’s self

out for. The greater part of her life having been passed among

them, she knew nearly all that there was to know about them, and

judged them with the contemptuous lucidity of nearly twenty

years of dependence. But at the present moment her animosity

was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but by

the fact that she had got out of those very people more—yes,

ever so much more—than she and Nick, in their hours of most

reckless planning, had ever dared to hope for.

 

“After all, we owe them this!” she mused.

 

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not

repeated his question; but she was still on the trail of the

thought he had started. A year—yes, she was sure now that

with a little management they could have a whole year of it!

“It” was their marriage, their being together, and away from

bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which both of them had

long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at least had

never imagined the deeper harmony.

 

It was at one of their earliest meetings—at one of the

heterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think

“literary”—that the young man who chanced to sit next to her,

and of whom it was vaguely rumoured that he had “written,” had

presented himself to her imagination as the sort of luxury to

which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have treated

herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of

picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it

was one of her chief grievances against her rich friends that

they disposed of theirs so unimaginatively.

 

“I’d rather have a husband like that than a steam-yacht!” she

had thought at the end of her talk with the young man who had

written, and as to whom it had at once been clear to her that

nothing his pen had produced, or might hereafter set down, would

put him in a position to offer his wife anything more costly

than a row-boat.

 

“His wife! As if he could ever have one! For he’s not the kind

to marry for a yacht either.” In spite of her past, Susy had

preserved enough inner independence to detect the latent signs

of it in others, and also to ascribe it impulsively to those of

the opposite sex who happened to interest her. She had a

natural contempt for people who gloried in what they need only

have endured. She herself meant eventually to marry, because

one couldn’t forever hang on to rich people; but she was going

to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of

wealth with at least a minimum of companionableness.

 

She had at once perceived young Lansing’s case to be exactly the

opposite: he was as poor as he could be, and as companionable

as it was possible to imagine. She therefore decided to see as

much of him as her hurried and entangled life permitted; and

this, thanks to a series of adroit adjustments, turned out to be

a good deal. They met frequently all the rest of that winter;

so frequently that Mrs. Fred Gillow one day abruptly and sharply

gave Susy to understand that she was “making herself

ridiculous.”

 

“Ah—” said Susy with a long breath, looking her friend and

patroness straight in the painted eyes.

 

“Yes,” cried Ursula Gillow in a sob, “before you interfered Nick

liked me awfully … and, of course, I don’t want to reproach

you … but when I think ….”

 

Susy made no answer. How could she, when she thought? The

dress she had on had been given her by Ursula; Ursula’s motor

had carried her to the feast from which they were both

returning. She counted on spending the following August with

the Gillows at Newport … and the only alternative was to go to

California with the Bockheimers, whom she had hitherto refused

even to dine with.

 

“Of course, what you fancy is perfect nonsense, Ursula; and as

to my interfering—” Susy hesitated, and then murmured: “But if

it will make you any happier I’ll arrange to see him less

often ….” She sounded the lowest depths of subservience in

returning Ursula’s tearful kiss ….

 

Susy Branch had a masculine respect for her word; and the next

day she put on her most becoming hat and sought out young Mr.

Lansing in his lodgings. She was determined to keep her promise

to Ursula; but she meant to look her best when she did it.

 

She knew at what time the young man was likely to be found, for

he was doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopaedia (V to X),

and had told her what hours were dedicated to the hateful task.

“Oh, if only it were a novel!” she thought as she mounted his

dingy stairs; but immediately reflected that, if it were the

kind that she could bear to read, it probably wouldn’t bring him

in much more than his encyclopaedia. Miss Branch had her

standards in literature ….

 

The apartment to which Mr. Lansing admitted her was a good deal

cleaner, but hardly less dingy, than his staircase. Susy,

knowing him to be addicted to Oriental archaeology, had pictured

him in a bare room adorned by a single Chinese bronze of

flawless shape, or by some precious fragment of Asiatic pottery.

But such redeeming features were conspicuously absent, and no

attempt had been made to disguise the decent indigence of the

bed-sitting-room.

 

Lansing welcomed his visitor with every sign of pleasure, and

with apparent indifference as to what she thought of his

furniture. He seemed to be conscious only of his luck in seeing

her on a day when they had not expected to meet. This made Susy

all the sorrier to execute her promise, and the gladder that she

had put on her prettiest hat; and for a moment or two she looked

at him in silence from under its conniving brim.

 

Warm as their mutual liking was, Lansing had never said a word

of love to her; but this was no deterrent to his visitor, whose

habit it was to speak her meaning clearly when there