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

often—how often—had yielded, and performed

the required service, rather than risk the consequences of

estrangement. To that, at least, thank heaven, she need never

stoop again.

 

But as she hurriedly packed her trunks at Versailles, scraped

together an adequate tip for Mrs. Match, and bade good-bye to

Violet (grown suddenly fond and demonstrative as she saw her

visitor safely headed for the station)—as Susy went through the

old familiar mummery of the enforced leave-taking, there rose in

her so deep a disgust for the life of makeshifts and

accommodations, that if at that moment Nick had reappeared and

held out his arms to her, she was not sure she would have had

the courage to return to them.

 

In her London solitude the thirst for independence grew fiercer.

Independence with ease, of course. Oh, her hateful useless love

of beauty … the curse it had always been to her, the blessing

it might have been if only she had had the material means to

gratify and to express it! And instead, it only gave her a

morbid loathing of that hideous hotel bedroom drowned in yellow

rain-light, of the smell of soot and cabbage through the window,

the blistered wall-paper, the dusty wax bouquets under glass

globes, and the electric lighting so contrived that as you

turned on the feeble globe hanging from the middle of the

ceiling the feebler one beside the bed went out!

 

What a sham world she and Nick had lived in during their few

months together! What right had either of them to those

exquisite settings of the life of leisure: the long white house

hidden in camellias and cypresses above the lake, or the great

rooms on the Giudecca with the shimmer of the canal always

playing over their frescoed ceilings! Yet she had come to

imagine that these places really belonged to them, that they

would always go on living, fondly and irreproachably, in the

frame of other people’s wealth …. That, again, was the curse

of her love of beauty, the way she always took to it as if it

belonged to her!

 

Well, the awakening was bound to come, and it was perhaps better

that it should have come so soon. At any rate there was no use

in letting her thoughts wander back to that shattered fool’s

paradise of theirs. Only, as she sat there and reckoned up the

days till Strefford arrived, what else in the world was there to

think of?

 

Her future and his?

 

But she knew that future by heart already! She had not spent

her life among the rich and fashionable without having learned

every detail of the trappings of a rich and fashionable

marriage. She had calculated long ago just how many dinner-dresses, how many tea-gowns and how much lacy lingerie would go

to make up the outfit of the future Countess of Altringham. She

had even decided to which dressmaker she would go for her

chinchilla cloak-for she meant to have one, and down to her

feet, and softer and more voluminous and more extravagantly

sumptuous than Violet’s or Ursula’s … not to speak of silver

foxes and sables … nor yet of the Altringham jewels.

 

She knew all this by heart; had always known it. It all

belonged to the make-up of the life of elegance: there was

nothing new about it. What had been new to her was just that

short interval with Nick—a life unreal indeed in its setting,

but so real in its essentials: the one reality she had ever

known. As she looked back on it she saw how much it had given

her besides the golden flush of her happiness, the sudden

flowering of sensuous joy in heart and body. Yes—there had

been the flowering too, in pain like birth-pangs, of something

graver, stronger, fuller of future power, something she had

hardly heeded in her first light rapture, but that always came

back and possessed her stilled soul when the rapture sank: the

deep disquieting sense of something that Nick and love had

taught her, but that reached out even beyond love and beyond

Nick.

 

Her nerves were racked by the ceaseless swish, swish of the rain

on the dirty panes and the smell of cabbage and coal that came

in under the door when she shut the window. This nauseating

foretaste of the luncheon she must presently go down to was more

than she could bear. It brought with it a vision of the dank

coffee-room below, the sooty Smyrna rug, the rain on the sky-light, the listless waitresses handing about food that tasted as

if it had been rained on too. There was really no reason why

she should let such material miseries add to her depression ….

 

She sprang up, put on her hat and jacket, and calling for a taxi

drove to the London branch of the Nouveau Luxe hotel. It was

just one o’clock and she was sure to pick up a luncheon, for

though London was empty that great establishment was not. It

never was. Along those sultry velvet-carpeted halls, in that

great flowered and scented dining-room, there was always a come-and-go of rich aimless people, the busy people who, having

nothing to do, perpetually pursue their inexorable task from one

end of the earth to the other.

 

Oh, the monotony of those faces—the faces one always knew,

whether one knew the people they belonged to or not! A fresh

disgust seized her at the sight of them: she wavered, and then

turned and fled. But on the threshold a still more familiar

figure met her: that of a lady in exaggerated pearls and

sables, descending from an exaggerated motor, like the motors in

magazine advertisements, the huge arks in which jewelled

beauties and slender youths pause to gaze at snowpeaks from an

Alpine summit.

 

It was Ursula Gillow—dear old Ursula, on her way to Scotland—

and she and Susy fell on each other’s necks. It appeared that

Ursula, detained till the next evening by a dressmaker’s delay,

was also out of a job and killing time, and the two were soon

smiling at each other over the exquisite preliminaries of a

luncheon which the head-waiter had authoritatively asked Mrs.

Gillow to “leave to him, as usual.”

 

Ursula was in a good humour. It did not often happen; but when

it did her benevolence knew no bounds.

 

Like Mrs. Melrose, like all her tribe in fact, she was too much

absorbed in her own affairs to give more than a passing thought

to any one else’s; but she was delighted at the meeting with

Susy, as her wandering kind always were when they ran across

fellow-wanderers, unless the meeting happened to interfere with

choicer pleasures. Not to be alone was the urgent thing; and

Ursula, who had been forty-eight hours alone in London, at once

exacted from her friend a promise that they should spend the

rest of the day together. But once the bargain struck her mind

turned again to her own affairs, and she poured out her

confidences to Susy over a succession of dishes that manifested

the head-waiter’s understanding of the case.

 

Ursula’s confidences were always the same, though they were

usually about a different person. She demolished and rebuilt

her sentimental life with the same frequency and impetuosity as

that with which she changed her dressmakers, did over her

drawing-rooms, ordered new motors, altered the mounting of her

jewels, and generally renewed the setting of her life. Susy

knew in advance what the tale would be; but to listen to it over

perfect coffee, an amber-scented cigarette at her lips, was

pleasanter than consuming cold mutton alone in a mouldy coffee-room. The contrast was so soothing that she even began to take

a languid interest in her friend’s narrative.

 

After luncheon they got into the motor together and began a

systematic round of the West End shops: furriers, jewellers and

dealers in old furniture. Nothing could be more unlike Violet

Melrose’s long hesitating sessions before the things she thought

she wanted till the moment came to decide. Ursula pounced on

silver foxes and old lacquer as promptly and decisively as on

the objects of her surplus sentimentality: she knew at once

what she wanted, and valued it more after it was hers.

 

“And now—I wonder if you couldn’t help me choose a grand

piano?” she suggested, as the last antiquarian bowed them out.

 

“A piano?”

 

“Yes: for Ruan. I’m sending one down for Grace Fulmer. She’s

coming to stay … did I tell you? I want people to hear her.

I want her to get engagements in London. My dear, she’s a

Genius.”

 

“A Genius—Grace!” Susy gasped. “I thought it was Nat ….”

 

“Nat—Nat Fulmer? Ursula laughed derisively. “Ah, of course—

you’ve been staying with that silly Violet! The poor thing is

off her head about Nat—it’s really pitiful. Of course he has

talent: I saw that long before Violet had ever heard of him.

Why, on the opening day of the American Artists’ exhibition,

last winter, I stopped short before his ‘Spring Snow-Storm’

(which nobody else had noticed till that moment), and said to

the Prince, who was with me: ‘The man has talent.’ But

genius—why, it’s his wife who has genius! Have you never heard

Grace play the violin? Poor Violet, as usual, is off on the

wrong tack. I’ve given Fulmer my garden-house to do—no doubt

Violet told you—because I wanted to help him. But Grace is my

discovery, and I’m determined to make her known, and to have

every one understand that she is the genius of the two. I’ve

told her she simply must come to Ruan, and bring the best

accompanyist she can find. You know poor Nerone is dreadfully

bored by sport, though of course he goes out with the guns. And

if one didn’t have a little art in the evening …. Oh, Susy,

do you mean to tell me you don’t know how to choose a piano? I

thought you were so fond of music!”

 

“I am fond of it; but without knowing anything about it—in the

way we’re all of us fond of the worthwhile things in our stupid

set,” she added to herself—since it was obviously useless to

impart such reflections to Ursula.

 

“But are you sure Grace is coming?” she questioned aloud.

 

“Quite sure. Why shouldn’t she? I wired to her yesterday. I’m

giving her a thousand dollars and all her expenses.”

 

It was not till they were having tea in a Piccadilly tea-room

that Mrs. Gillow began to manifest some interest in her

companion’s plans. The thought of losing Susy became suddenly

intolerable to her. The Prince, who did not see why he should

be expected to linger in London out of season, was already at

Ruan, and Ursula could not face the evening and the whole of the

next day by herself.

 

“But what are you doing in town, darling, I don’t remember if

I’ve asked you,” she said, resting her firm elbows on the tea-table while she took a light from Susy’s cigarette.

 

Susy hesitated. She had foreseen that the time must soon come

when she should have to give some account of herself; and why

should she not begin by telling Ursula?

 

But telling her what?

 

Her silence appeared to strike Mrs. Gillow as a reproach, and

she continued with compunction: “And Nick? Nick’s with you?

How is he, I thought you and he still were in Venice with Ellie

Vanderlyn.”

 

“We were, for a few weeks.” She steadied her voice. “It was

delightful. But now we’re both on our own again—for a while.”

 

Mrs. Gillow scrutinized her more searchingly. “Oh, you’re alone

here, then; quite alone?”

 

“Yes: Nick’s cruising with some friends in the Mediterranean.”

 

Ursula’s shallow gaze