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

that I believe Nat

is beginning to forget this, and to believe that it was Mrs.

Melrose who stopped short in front of his picture on the opening

day, and screamed out: ‘This is genius!’ It seems funny he

should care so much, when I’ve always known he had genius-and

he has known it too. But they’re all so kind to him; and Mrs.

Melrose especially. And I suppose it makes a thing sound new to

hear it said in a new voice.”

 

Susy looked at her meditatively. “And how should you feel if

Nat liked too much to hear Mrs. Melrose say it? Too much, I

mean, to care any longer what you felt or thought?”

 

Her friend’s worn face flushed quickly, and then paled: Susy

almost repented the question. But Mrs. Fulmer met it with a

tranquil dignity. “You haven’t been married long enough, dear,

to understand … how people like Nat and me feel about such

things … or how trifling they seem, in the balance … the

balance of one’s memories.”

 

Susy stood up again, and flung her arms about her friend. “Oh,

Grace,” she laughed with wet eyes, “how can you be as wise as

that, and yet not have sense enough to buy a decent hat?” She

gave Mrs. Fulmer a quick embrace and hurried away. She had

learned her lesson after all; but it was not exactly the one she

had come to seek.

 

The week she had allowed herself had passed, and still there was

no word from Nick. She allowed herself yet another day, and

that too went by without a letter. She then decided on a step

from which her pride had hitherto recoiled; she would call at

the bank and ask for Nick’s address. She called, embarrassed

and hesitating; and was told, after enquiries in the post-office

department, that Mr. Nicholas Lansing had given no address since

that of the Palazzo Vanderlyn, three months previously. She

went back to Versailles that afternoon with the definite

intention of writing to Strefford unless the next morning’s post

brought a letter.

 

The next morning brought nothing from Nick, but a scribbled

message from Mrs. Melrose: would Susy, as soon as possible,

come into her room for a word, Susy jumped up, hurried through

her bath, and knocked at her hostess’s door. In the immense low

bed that faced the rich umbrage of the park Mrs. Melrose lay

smoking cigarettes and glancing over her letters. She looked up

with her vague smile, and said dreamily: “Susy darling, have

you any particular plans—for the next few months, I mean?”

 

Susy coloured: she knew the intonation of old, and fancied she

understood what it implied.

 

“Plans, dearest? Any number … I’m tearing myself away the day

after tomorrow … to the Gillows’ moor, very probably,” she

hastened to announce.

 

Instead of the relief she had expected to read on Mrs. Melrose’s

dramatic countenance she discovered there the blankest

disappointment.

 

“Oh, really? That’s too bad. Is it absolutely settled—?”

 

“As far as I’m concerned,” said Susy crisply.

 

The other sighed. “I’m too sorry. You see, dear, I’d meant to

ask you to stay on here quietly and look after the Fulmer

children. Fulmer and I are going to Spain next week—I want to

be with him when he makes his studies, receives his first

impressions; such a marvellous experience, to be there when he

and Velasquez meet!” She broke off, lost in prospective

ecstasy. “And, you see, as Grace Fulmer insists on coming with

us—”

 

“Ah, I see.”

 

“Well, there are the five children—such a problem,” sighed the

benefactress. “If you were at a loose end, you know, dear,

while Nick’s away with his friends, I could really make it worth

your while ….”

 

“So awfully good of you, Violet; only I’m not, as it happens.”

 

Oh the relief of being able to say that, gaily, firmly and even

truthfully! Take charge of the Fulmer children, indeed! Susy

remembered how Nick and she had fled from them that autumn

afternoon in New Hampshire. The offer gave her a salutary

glimpse of the way in which, as the years passed, and she lost

her freshness and novelty, she would more and more be used as a

convenience, a stop-gap, writer of notes, runner of errands,

nursery governess or companion. She called to mind several

elderly women of her acquaintance, pensioners of her own group,

who still wore its livery, struck its attitudes and chattered

its jargon, but had long since been ruthlessly relegated to

these slave-ant offices. Never in the world would she join

their numbers.

 

Mrs. Melrose’s face fell, and she looked at Susy with the

plaintive bewilderment of the wielder of millions to whom

everything that cannot be bought is imperceptible.

 

“But I can’t see why you can’t change your plans,” she murmured

with a soft persistency.

 

“Ah, well, you know”—Susy paused on a slow inward smile—

“they’re not mine only, as it happens.”

 

Mrs. Melrose’s brow clouded. The unforeseen complication of

Mrs. Fulmer’s presence on the journey had evidently tried her

nerves, and this new obstacle to her arrangements shook her

faith in the divine order of things.

 

“Your plans are not yours only? But surely you won’t let Ursula

Gillow dictate to you? … There’s my jade pendant; the one you

said you liked the other day …. The Fulmers won’t go with me,

you understand, unless they’re satisfied about the children; the

whole plan will fall through. Susy darling, you were always too

unselfish; I hate to see you sacrificed to Ursula.”

 

Susy’s smile lingered. Time was when she might have been glad

to add the jade pendant to the collection already enriched by

Ellie Vanderlyn’s sapphires; more recently, she would have

resented the offer as an insult to her newly-found principles.

But already the mere fact that she might henceforth, if she

chose, be utterly out of reach of such bribes, enabled her to

look down on them with tolerance. Oh, the blessed moral freedom

that wealth conferred! She recalled Mrs. Fulmer’s

uncontrollable cry: “The most wonderful thing of all is not

having to contrive and skimp, and give up something every single

minute!” Yes; it was only on such terms that one could call

one’s soul one’s own. The sense of it gave Susy the grace to

answer amicably: “If I could possibly help you out, Violet, I

shouldn’t want a present to persuade me. And, as you say,

there’s no reason why I should sacrifice myself to Ursula—or to

anybody else. Only, as it happens”—she paused and took the

plunge—“I’m going to England because I’ve promised to see a

friend.” That night she wrote to Strefford.

XVI

STRETCHED out under an awning on the deck of the Ibis, Nick

Lansing looked up for a moment at the vanishing cliffs of Malta

and then plunged again into his book.

 

He had had nearly three weeks of drug-taking on the Ibis. The

drugs he had absorbed were of two kinds: visions of fleeing

landscapes, looming up from the blue sea to vanish into it

again, and visions of study absorbed from the volumes piled up

day and night at his elbow. For the first time in months he was

in reach of a real library, just the kind of scholarly yet

miscellaneous library, that his restless and impatient spirit

craved. He was aware that the books he read, like the fugitive

scenes on which he gazed, were merely a form of anesthetic: he

swallowed them with the careless greed of the sufferer who seeks

only to still pain and deaden memory. But they were beginning

to produce in him a moral languor that was not disagreeable,

that, indeed, compared with the fierce pain of the first days,

was almost pleasurable. It was exactly the kind of drug that he

needed.

 

There is probably no point on which the average man has more

definite views than on the uselessness of writing a letter that

is hard to write. In the line he had sent to Susy from Genoa

Nick had told her that she would hear from him again in a few

days; but when the few days had passed, and he began to consider

setting himself to the task, he found fifty reasons for

postponing it.

 

Had there been any practical questions to write about it would

have been different; he could not have borne for twenty-four

hours the idea that she was in uncertainty as to money. But

that had all been settled long ago. From the first she had had

the administering of their modest fortune. On their marriage

Nick’s own meagre income, paid in, none too regularly, by the

agent who had managed for years the dwindling family properties,

had been transferred to her: it was the only wedding present he

could make. And the wedding cheques had of course all been

deposited in her name. There were therefore no “business”

reasons for communicating with her; and when it came to reasons

of another order the mere thought of them benumbed him.

 

For the first few days he reproached himself for his inertia;

then he began to seek reasons for justifying it. After all, for

both their sakes a waiting policy might be the wisest he could

pursue. He had left Susy because he could not tolerate the

conditions on which he had discovered their life together to be

based; and he had told her so. What more was there to say?

 

Nothing was changed in their respective situations; if they came

together it could be only to resume the same life; and that, as

the days went by, seemed to him more and more impossible. He

had not yet reached the point of facing a definite separation;

but whenever his thoughts travelled back over their past life he

recoiled from any attempt to return to it. As long as this

state of mind continued there seemed nothing to add to the

letter he had already written, except indeed the statement that

he was cruising with the Hickses. And he saw no pressing reason

for communicating that.

 

To the Hickses he had given no hint of his situation. When

Coral Hicks, a fortnight earlier, had picked him up in the

broiling streets of Genoa, and carried him off to the Ibis, he

had thought only of a cool dinner and perhaps a moonlight sail.

Then, in reply to their friendly urging, he had confessed that

he had not been well—had indeed gone off hurriedly for a few

days’ change of air—and that left him without defence against

the immediate proposal that he should take his change of air on

the Ibis. They were just off to Corsica and Sardinia, and from

there to Sicily: he could rejoin the railway at Naples, and be

back at Venice in ten days.

 

Ten days of respite—the temptation was irresistible. And he

really liked the kind uncomplicated Hickses. A wholesome

honesty and simplicity breathed through all their opulence, as

if the rich trappings of their present life still exhaled the

fragrance of their native prairies. The mere fact of being with

such people was like a purifying bath. When the yacht touched

at Naples he agreed since they were so awfully kind—to go on to

Sicily. And when the chief steward, going ashore at Naples for

the last time before they got up steam, said: “Any letters for

the post, sir?” he answered, as he had answered at each previous

halt: “No, thank you: none.”

 

Now they were heading for Rhodes and Crete—Crete, where he had

never been, where he had so often longed to go. In spite of the

lateness of the season the weather was still miraculously fine:

the short waves danced ahead under a sky without a cloud, and