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

in Venice to take the midnight express for Genoa.

 

The whole of his past, and above all the tendency, on which he

had once prided himself, to live in the present and take

whatever chances it offered, now made it harder for him to act.

He began to see that he had never, even in the closest relations

of life, looked ahead of his immediate satisfaction. He had

thought it rather fine to be able to give himself so intensely

to the fullness of each moment instead of hurrying past it in

pursuit of something more, or something else, in the manner of

the over-scrupulous or the under-imaginative, whom he had always

grouped together and equally pitied. It was not till he had

linked his life with Susy’s that he had begun to feel it

reaching forward into a future he longed to make sure of, to

fasten upon and shape to his own wants and purposes, till, by an

imperceptible substitution, that future had become his real

present, his all-absorbing moment of time.

 

Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed

him. He had never before thought about putting together broken

bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an

earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon

for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He

simply did not know how.

 

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree

oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and

laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet

definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties

instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on

others. The making of the substance called character was a

process about as slow and arduous as the building of the

Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was

mainly useful to lodge one’s descendants in, after they too were

dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct was the one which had made the

world, made man, and caused his fugitive joys to linger like

fading frescoes on imperishable walls ….

XXI

ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events

had followed the course foreseen by Susy.

 

She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her

divorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier

to make than she had expected, the kiss less difficult to

receive.

 

She had gone to the dinner a-quiver with the mortification of

learning that her husband was still with the Hickses. Morally

sure of it though she had been, the discovery was a shock, and

she measured for the first time the abyss between fearing and

knowing. No wonder he had not written—the modern husband did

not have to: he had only to leave it to time and the newspapers

to make known his intentions. Susy could imagine Nick’s saying

to himself, as he sometimes used to say when she reminded him of

an unanswered letter: “But there are lots of ways of answering

a letter—and writing doesn’t happen to be mine.”

 

Well—he had done it in his way, and she was answered. For a

minute, as she laid aside the paper, darkness submerged her, and

she felt herself dropping down into the bottomless anguish of

her dreadful vigil in the Palazzo Vanderlyn. But she was weary

of anguish: her healthy body and nerves instinctively rejected

it. The wave was spent, and she felt herself irresistibly

struggling back to light and life and youth. He didn’t want

her! Well, she would try not to want him! There lay all the

old expedients at her hand—the rouge for her white lips, the

atropine for her blurred eyes, the new dress on her bed, the

thought of Strefford and his guests awaiting her, and of the

conclusions that the diners of the Nouveau Luxe would draw from

seeing them together. Thank heaven no one would say: “Poor old

Susy—did you know Nick had chucked her?” They would all say:

“Poor old Nick! Yes, I daresay she was sorry to chuck him; but

Altringham’s mad to marry her, and what could she do? “

 

And once again events had followed the course she had foreseen.

Seeing her at Lord Altringham’s table, with the Ascots and the

old Duchess of Dunes, the interested spectators could not but

regard the dinner as confirming the rumour of her marriage. As

Ellie said, people didn’t wait nowadays to announce their

“engagements” till the tiresome divorce proceedings were over.

Ellie herself, prodigally pearled and ermined, had floated in

late with Algie Bockheimer in her wake, and sat, in conspicuous

tete-a-tete, nodding and signalling her sympathy to Susy.

Approval beamed from every eye: it was awfully exciting, they

all seemed to say, seeing Susy Lansing pull it off! As the

party, after dinner, drifted from the restaurant back into the

hall, she caught, in the smiles and hand-pressures crowding

about her, the scarcely-repressed hint of official

congratulations; and Violet Melrose, seated in a corner with

Fulmer, drew her down with a wan jade-circled arm, to whisper

tenderly: “It’s most awfully clever of you, darling, not to be

wearing any jewels.”

 

In all the women’s eyes she read the reflected lustre of the

jewels she could wear when she chose: it was as though their

glitter reached her from the far-off bank where they lay sealed

up in the Altringham strong-box. What a fool she had been to

think that Strefford would ever believe she didn’t care for

them!

 

The Ambassadress, a blank perpendicular person, had been a shade

less affable than Susy could have wished; but then there was

Lady Joan—and the girl was handsome, alarmingly handsome to

account for that: probably every one in the room had guessed

it. And the old Duchess of Dunes was delightful. She looked

rather like Strefford in a wig and false pearls (Susy was sure

they were as false as her teeth); and her cordiality was so

demonstrative that the future bride found it more difficult to

account for than Lady Ascot’s coldness, till she heard the old

lady, as they passed into the hall, breathe in a hissing whisper

to her nephew: “Streff, dearest, when you have a minute’s time,

and can drop in at my wretched little pension, I know you can

explain in two words what I ought to do to pacify those awful

money-lenders …. And you’ll bring your exquisite American to

see me, won’t you! … No, Joan Senechal’s too fair for my

taste …. Insipid…”

“

 

Yes: the taste of it all was again sweet on her lips. A few

days later she began to wonder how the thought of Strefford’s

endearments could have been so alarming. To be sure he was not

lavish of them; but when he did touch her, even when he kissed

her, it no longer seemed to matter. An almost complete absence

of sensation had mercifully succeeded to the first wild flurry

of her nerves.

 

And so it would be, no doubt, with everything else in her new

life. If it failed to provoke any acute reactions, whether of

pain or pleasure, the very absence of sensation would make for

peace. And in the meanwhile she was tasting what, she had begun

to suspect, was the maximum of bliss to most of the women she

knew: days packed with engagements, the exhilaration of

fashionable crowds, the thrill of snapping up a jewel or a

bibelot or a new “model” that one’s best friend wanted, or of

being invited to some private show, or some exclusive

entertainment, that one’s best friend couldn’t get to. There

was nothing, now, that she couldn’t buy, nowhere that she

couldn’t go: she had only to choose and to triumph. And for a

while the surface-excitement of her life gave her the illusion

of enjoyment.

 

Strefford, as she had expected, had postponed his return to

England, and they had now been for nearly three weeks together

in their new, and virtually avowed, relation. She had fancied

that, after all, the easiest part of it would be just the being

with Strefford—the falling back on their old tried friendship

to efface the sense of strangeness. But, though she had so soon

grown used to his caresses, he himself remained curiously

unfamiliar: she was hardly sure, at times, that it was the old

Strefford she was talking to. It was not that his point of view

had changed, but that new things occupied and absorbed him. In

all the small sides of his great situation he took an almost

childish satisfaction; and though he still laughed at both its

privileges and its obligations, it was now with a jealous

laughter.

 

It amused him inexhaustibly, for instance, to be made up to by

all the people who had always disapproved of him, and to unite

at the same table persons who had to dissemble their annoyance

at being invited together lest they should not be invited at

all. Equally exhilarating was the capricious favouring of the

dull and dowdy on occasions when the brilliant and disreputable

expected his notice. It enchanted him, for example, to ask the

old Duchess of Dunes and Violet Melrose to dine with the Vicar

of Altringham, on his way to Switzerland for a month’s holiday,

and to watch the face of the Vicar’s wife while the Duchess

narrated her last difficulties with book-makers and money-lenders, and Violet proclaimed the rights of Love and Genius to

all that had once been supposed to belong exclusively to

Respectability and Dulness.

 

Susy had to confess that her own amusements were hardly of a

higher order; but then she put up with them for lack of better,

whereas Strefford, who might have had what he pleased, was

completely satisfied with such triumphs.

 

Somehow, in spite of his honours and his opportunities, he

seemed to have shrunk. The old Strefford had certainly been a

larger person, and she wondered if material prosperity were

always a beginning of ossification. Strefford had been much

more fun when he lived by his wits. Sometimes, now, when he

tried to talk of politics, or assert himself on some question of

public interest, she was startled by his limitations. Formerly,

when he was not sure of his ground, it had been his way to turn

the difficulty by glib nonsense or easy irony; now he was

actually dull, at times almost pompous. She noticed too, for

the first time, that he did not always hear clearly when several

people were talking at once, or when he was at the theatre; and

he developed a habit of saying over and over again: “Does so-and-so speak indistinctly? Or am I getting deaf, I wonder?”

which wore on her nerves by its suggestion of a corresponding

mental infirmity.

 

These thoughts did not always trouble her. The current of idle

activity on which they were both gliding was her native element

as well as his; and never had its tide been as swift, its waves

as buoyant. In his relation to her, too, he was full of tact

and consideration. She saw that he still remembered their

frightened exchange of glances after their first kiss; and the

sense of this little hidden spring of imagination in him was

sometimes enough for her thirst.

 

She had always had a rather masculine punctuality in keeping her

word, and after she had promised Strefford to take steps toward

a divorce she had promptly set about doing it. A sudden

reluctance prevented her asking the advice of friends like Ellie

Vanderlyn, whom she knew to be in the thick of the same

negotiations, and all she could think of was to consult a young

American lawyer practicing in Paris, with whom she felt she

could talk the more easily because he was not from New