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

I don’t wish to insist—but I

foresee that I’m much too rich not to become stingy.”

 

She gave a slight shrug. “At present there’s nothing I loathe

more than pearls and chinchilla, or anything else in the world

that’s expensive and enviable ….”

 

Suddenly she broke off, colouring with the consciousness that

she had said exactly the kind of thing that all the women who

were trying for him (except the very cleverest) would be sure to

say; and that he would certainly suspect her of attempting the

conventional comedy of disinterestedness, than which nothing was

less likely to deceive or to flatter him.

 

His twinkling eyes played curiously over her face, and she went

on, meeting them with a smile: “But don’t imagine, all the

same, that if I should … decide … it would be altogether for

your beaux yeux ….”

 

He laughed, she thought, rather drily. “No,” he said, “I don’t

suppose that’s ever likely to happen to me again.”

 

“Oh, Streff—” she faltered with compunction. It was odd-once

upon a time she had known exactly what to say to the man of the

moment, whoever he was, and whatever kind of talk he required;

she had even, in the difficult days before her marriage, reeled

off glibly enough the sort of lime-light sentimentality that

plunged poor Fred Gillow into such speechless beatitude. But

since then she had spoken the language of real love, looked with

its eyes, embraced with its hands; and now the other trumpery

art had failed her, and she was conscious of bungling and

groping like a beginner under Strefford’s ironic scrutiny.

 

They had reached their obscure destination and he opened the

door and glanced in.

 

“It’s jammed—not a table. And stifling! Where shall we go?

Perhaps they could give us a room to ourselves—” he suggested.

 

She assented, and they were led up a cork-screw staircase to a

squat-ceilinged closet lit by the arched top of a high window,

the lower panes of which served for the floor below. Strefford

opened the window, and Susy, throwing her cloak on the divan,

leaned on the balcony while he ordered luncheon.

 

On the whole she was glad they were to be alone. Just because

she felt so sure of Strefford it seemed ungenerous to keep him

longer in suspense. The moment had come when they must have a

decisive talk, and in the crowded rooms below it would have been

impossible.

 

Strefford, when the waiter had brought the first course and left

them to themselves, made no effort to revert to personal

matters. He turned instead to the topic always most congenial

to him: the humours and ironies of the human comedy, as

presented by his own particular group. His malicious commentary

on life had always amused Susy because of the shrewd flashes of

philosophy he shed on the social antics they had so often

watched together. He was in fact the one person she knew

(excepting Nick) who was in the show and yet outside of it; and

she was surprised, as the talk proceeded, to find herself so

little interested in his scraps of gossip, and so little amused

by his comments on them.

 

With an inward shrug of discouragement she said to herself that

probably nothing would ever really amuse her again; then, as she

listened, she began to understand that her disappointment arose

from the fact that Strefford, in reality, could not live without

these people whom he saw through and satirized, and that the

rather commonplace scandals he narrated interested him as much

as his own racy considerations on them; and she was filled with

terror at the thought that the inmost core of the richly-decorated life of the Countess of Altringham would be just as

poor and low-ceilinged a place as the little room in which he

and she now sat, elbow to elbow yet so unapproachably apart.

 

If Strefford could not live without these people, neither could

she and Nick; but for reasons how different! And if his

opportunities had been theirs, what a world they would have

created for themselves! Such imaginings were vain, and she

shrank back from them into the present. After all, as Lady

Altringham she would have the power to create that world which

she and Nick had dreamed … only she must create it alone.

Well, that was probably the law of things. All human happiness

was thus conditioned and circumscribed, and hers, no doubt, must

always be of the lonely kind, since material things did not

suffice for it, even though it depended on them as Grace

Fulmer’s, for instance, never had. Yet even Grace Fulmer had

succumbed to Ursula’s offer, and had arrived at Ruan the day

before Susy left, instead of going to Spain with her husband and

Violet Melrose. But then Grace was making the sacrifice for her

children, and somehow one had the feeling that in giving up her

liberty she was not surrendering a tittle of herself. All the

difference was there ….

 

“How I do bore you!” Susy heard Strefford exclaim. She became

aware that she had not been listening: stray echoes of names of

places and people—Violet Melrose, Ursula, Prince Altineri,

others of their group and persuasion—had vainly knocked at her

barricaded brain; what had he been telling her about them? She

turned to him and their eyes met; his were full of a melancholy

irony.

 

“Susy, old girl, what’s wrong?”

 

She pulled herself together. “I was thinking, Streff, just

now—when I said I hated the very sound of pearls and

chinchilla—how impossible it was that you should believe me; in

fact, what a blunder I’d made in saying it.”

 

He smiled. “Because it was what so many other women might be

likely to say so awfully unoriginal, in fact?”

 

She laughed for sheer joy at his insight. “It’s going to be

easier than I imagined,” she thought. Aloud she rejoined: “Oh,

Streff—how you’re always going to find me out! Where on earth

shall I ever hide from you?”

 

“Where?” He echoed her laugh, laying his hand lightly on hers.

“In my heart, I’m afraid.”

 

In spite of the laugh his accent shook her: something about it

took all the mockery from his retort, checked on her lips the:

“What? A valentine!” and made her suddenly feel that, if he

were afraid, so was she. Yet she was touched also, and wondered

half exultingly if any other woman had ever caught that

particular deep inflexion of his shrill voice. She had never

liked him as much as at that moment; and she said to herself,

with an odd sense of detachment, as if she had been rather

breathlessly observing the vacillations of someone whom she

longed to persuade but dared not: “Now—NOW, if he speaks, I

shall say yes!”

 

He did not speak; but abruptly, and as startlingly to her as if

she had just dropped from a sphere whose inhabitants had other

methods of expressing their sympathy, he slipped his arm around

her and bent his keen ugly melting face to hers ….

 

It was the lightest touch—in an instant she was free again.

But something within her gasped and resisted long after his arm

and his lips were gone, and he was proceeding, with a too-studied ease, to light a cigarette and sweeten his coffee.

 

He had kissed her …. Well, naturally: why not? It was not

the first time she had been kissed. It was true that one didn’t

habitually associate Streff with such demonstrations; but she

had not that excuse for surprise, for even in Venice she had

begun to notice that he looked at her differently, and avoided

her hand when he used to seek it.

 

No—she ought not to have been surprised; nor ought a kiss to

have been so disturbing. Such incidents had punctuated the

career of Susy Branch: there had been, in particular, in far-off discarded times, Fred Gillow’s large but artless embraces.

Well—nothing of that kind had seemed of any more account than

the click of a leaf in a woodland walk. It had all been merely

epidermal, ephemeral, part of the trivial accepted “business” of

the social comedy. But this kiss of Strefford’s was what Nick’s

had been, under the New Hampshire pines, on the day that had

decided their fate. It was a kiss with a future in it: like a

ring slipped upon her soul. And now, in the dreadful pause that

followed—while Strefford fidgeted with his cigarette-case and

rattled the spoon in his cup, Susy remembered what she had seen

through the circle of Nick’s kiss: that blue illimitable

distance which was at once the landscape at their feet and the

future in their souls ….

 

Perhaps that was what Strefford’s sharply narrowed eyes were

seeing now, that same illimitable distance that she had lost

forever—perhaps he was saying to himself, as she had said to

herself when her lips left Nick’s: “Each time we kiss we shall

see it all again ….” Whereas all she herself had felt was the

gasping recoil from Strefford’s touch, and an intenser vision of

the sordid room in which he and she sat, and of their two

selves, more distant from each other than if their embrace had

been a sudden thrusting apart ….

 

The moment prolonged itself, and they sat numb. How long had it

lasted? How long ago was it that she had thought: “It’s going

to be easier than I imagined”? Suddenly she felt Strefford’s

queer smile upon her, and saw in his eyes a look, not of

reproach or disappointment, but of deep and anxious

comprehension. Instead of being angry or hurt, he had seen, he

had understood, he was sorry for her!

 

Impulsively she slipped her hand into his, and they sat silent

for another moment. Then he stood up and took her cloak from

the divan. “Shall we go now! I’ve got cards for the private

view of the Reynolds exhibition at the Petit Palais. There are

some portraits from Altringham. It might amuse you.”

 

In the taxi she had time, through their light rattle of talk, to

readjust herself and drop back into her usual feeling of

friendly ease with him. He had been extraordinarily

considerate, for anyone who always so undisguisedly sought his

own satisfaction above all things; and if his considerateness

were just an indirect way of seeking that satisfaction now,

well, that proved how much he cared for her, how necessary to

his happiness she had become. The sense of power was undeniably

pleasant; pleasanter still was the feeling that someone really

needed her, that the happiness of the man at her side depended

on her yes or no. She abandoned herself to the feeling,

forgetting the abysmal interval of his caress, or at least

saying to herself that in time she would forget it, that really

there was nothing to make a fuss about in being kissed by anyone

she liked as much as Streff ….

 

She had guessed at once why he was taking her to see the

Reynoldses. Fashionable and artistic Paris had recently

discovered English eighteenth century art. The principal

collections of England had yielded up their best examples of the

great portrait painter’s work, and the private view at the Petit

Palais was to be the social event of the afternoon. Everybody—

Strefford’s everybody and Susy’s—was sure to be there; and

these, as she knew, were the occasions that revived Strefford’s

intermittent interest in art. He really liked picture shows as

much as the races, if one could be sure of seeing as many people

there. With Nick how different it would have been! Nick hated

openings and varnishing days, and worldly aesthetics in general;

he would have waited till the tide of fashion had ebbed, and

slipped off with