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

end of the deserted

drive.

 

“No, please. You’re in a hurry; take the taxi. I want

immensely a long long walk by myself … through the streets,

with the lights coming out ….”

 

He laid his hand on her arm. “I say, my dear, you’re not ill?”

 

“No; I’m not ill. But you may say I am, to-night at the

Embassy.”

 

He released her and drew back. “Oh, very well,” he answered

coldly; and she understood by his tone that the knot was cut,

and that at that moment he almost hated her. She turned away,

hastening down the deserted alley, flying from him, and knowing,

as she fled, that he was still standing there motionless,

staring after her, wounded, humiliated, uncomprehending. It was

neither her fault nor his ….

XXIII

AS she fled on toward the lights of the streets a breath of

freedom seemed to blow into her face.

 

Like a weary load the accumulated hypocrisies of the last months

had dropped from her: she was herself again, Nick’s Susy, and

no one else’s. She sped on, staring with bright bewildered eyes

at the stately facades of the La Muette quarter, the

perspectives of bare trees, the awakening glitter of shop-windows holding out to her all the things she would never again

be able to buy ….

 

In an avenue of shops she paused before a milliner’s window, and

said to herself: “Why shouldn’t I earn my living by trimming

hats?” She met work-girls streaming out under a doorway, and

scattering to catch trams and omnibuses; and she looked with

newly-wakened interest at their tired independent faces. “Why

shouldn’t I earn my living as well as they do?” she thought. A

little farther on she passed a Sister of Charity with softly

trotting feet, a calm anonymous glance, and hands hidden in her

capacious sleeves. Susy looked at her and thought: “Why

shouldn’t I be a Sister, and have no money to worry about, and

trot about under a white coif helping poor people?”

 

All these strangers on whom she smiled in passing, and glanced

back at enviously, were free from the necessities that enslaved

her, and would not have known what she meant if she had told

them that she must have so much money for her dresses, so much

for her cigarettes, so much for bridge and cabs and tips, and

all kinds of extras, and that at that moment she ought to be

hurrying back to a dinner at the British Embassy, where her

permanent right to such luxuries was to be solemnly recognized

and ratified.

 

The artificiality and unreality of her life overcame her as with

stifling fumes. She stopped at a street-corner, drawing long

panting breaths as if she had been running a race. Then, slowly

and aimlessly, she began to saunter along a street of small

private houses in damp gardens that led to the Avenue du Bois.

She sat down on a bench. Not far off, the Arc de Triomphe

raised its august bulk, and beyond it a river of lights streamed

down toward Paris, and the stir of the city’s heart-beats

troubled the quiet in her bosom. But not for long. She seemed

to be looking at it all from the other side of the grave; and as

she got up and wandered down the Champs Elysees, half empty in

the evening lull between dusk and dinner, she felt as if the

glittering avenue were really changed into the Field of Shadows

from which it takes its name, and as if she were a ghost among

ghosts.

 

Halfway home, a weakness of loneliness overcame her, and she

seated herself under the trees near the Rond Point. Lines of

motors and carriages were beginning to animate the converging

thoroughfares, streaming abreast, crossing, winding in and out

of each other in a tangle of hurried pleasure-seeking. She

caught the light on jewels and shirt-fronts and hard bored eyes

emerging from dim billows of fur and velvet. She seemed to hear

what the couples were saying to each other, she pictured the

drawing-rooms, restaurants, dance-halls they were hastening to,

the breathless routine that was hurrying them along, as Time,

the old vacuum-cleaner, swept them away with the dust of their

carriage-wheels. And again the loneliness vanished in a sense

of release ….

 

At the corner of the Place de la Concorde she stopped,

recognizing a man in evening dress who was hailing a taxi.

Their eyes met, and Nelson Vanderlyn came forward. He was the

last person she cared to run across, and she shrank back

involuntarily. What did he know, what had he guessed, of her

complicity in his wife’s affairs? No doubt Ellie had blabbed it

all out by this time; she was just as likely to confide her

love-affairs to Nelson as to anyone else, now that the

Bockheimer prize was landed.

 

“Well—well—well—so I’ve caught you at it! Glad to see you,

Susy, my dear.” She found her hand cordially clasped in

Vanderlyn’s, and his round pink face bent on her with all its

old urbanity. Did nothing matter, then, in this world she was

fleeing from, did no one love or hate or remember?

 

“No idea you were in Paris—just got here myself,” Vanderlyn

continued, visibly delighted at the meeting. “Look here, don’t

suppose you’re out of a job this evening by any chance, and

would come and cheer up a lone bachelor, eh? No? You are?

Well, that’s luck for once! I say, where shall we go? One of

the places where they dance, I suppose? Yes, I twirl the light

fantastic once in a while myself. Got to keep up with the

times! Hold on, taxi! Here—I’ll drive you home first, and

wait while you jump into your toggery. Lots of time.” As he

steered her toward the carriage she noticed that he had a gouty

limp, and pulled himself in after her with difficulty.

 

“Mayn’t I come as I am, Nelson, I don’t feel like dancing.

Let’s go and dine in one of those nice smoky little restaurants

by the Place de la Bourse.”

 

He seemed surprised but relieved at the suggestion, and they

rolled off together. In a corner at Bauge’s they found a quiet

table, screened from the other diners, and while Vanderlyn

adjusted his eyeglasses to study the carte Susy stole a long

look at him. He was dressed with even more than his usual

formal trimness, and she detected, in an ultra-flat wrist-watch

and discreetly expensive waistcoat buttons, an attempt at

smartness altogether new. His face had undergone the same

change: its familiar look of worn optimism had been, as it

were, done up to match his clothes, as though a sort of moral

cosmetic had made him pinker, shinier and sprightlier without

really rejuvenating him. A thin veil of high spirits had merely

been drawn over his face, as the shining strands of hair were

skilfully brushed over his baldness.

 

“Here! Carte des vins, waiter! What champagne, Susy?” He

chose, fastidiously, the best the cellar could produce,

grumbling a little at the bourgeois character of the dishes.

“Capital food of its kind, no doubt, but coarsish, don’t you

think? Well, I don’t mind … it’s rather a jolly change from

the Luxe cooking. A new sensation—I’m all for new sensations,

ain’t you, my dear?” He re-filled their champagne glasses,

flung an arm sideways over his chair, and smiled at her with a

foggy benevolence.

 

As the champagne flowed his confidences flowed with it.

 

“Suppose you know what I’m here for—this divorce business? We

wanted to settle it quietly without a fuss, and of course Paris

is the best place for that sort of job. Live and let live; no

questions asked. None of your dirty newspapers. Great country,

this. No hypocrisy … they understand Life over here!”

 

Susy gazed and listened. She remembered that people had thought

Nelson would make a row when he found out. He had always been

addicted to truculent anecdotes about unfaithful wives, and the

very formula of his perpetual ejaculation— “Caught you at it,

eh?”—seemed to hint at a constant preoccupation with such

ideas. But now it was evident that, as the saying was, he had

“swallowed his dose” like all the others. No strong blast of

indignation had momentarily lifted him above his normal stature:

he remained a little man among little men, and his eagerness to

rebuild his life with all the old smiling optimism reminded Susy

of the patient industry of an ant remaking its ruined ant-heap.

 

“Tell you what, great thing, this liberty! Everything’s changed

nowadays; why shouldn’t marriage be too? A man can get out of a

business partnership when he wants to; but the parsons want to

keep us noosed up to each other for life because we’ve blundered

into a church one day and said ‘Yes’ before one of ‘em. No,

no—that’s too easy. We’ve got beyond that. Science, and all

these new discoveries …. I say the Ten Commandments were made

for man, and not man for the Commandments; and there ain’t a

word against divorce in ‘em, anyhow! That’s what I tell my poor

old mother, who builds everything on her Bible. Find me the

place where it says: ‘Thou shalt not sue for divorce.’ It

makes her wild, poor old lady, because she can’t; and she

doesn’t know how they happen to have left it out…. I rather

think Moses left it out because he knew more about human nature

than these snivelling modern parsons do. Not that they’ll

always bear investigating either; but I don’t care about that.

Live and let live, eh, Susy? Haven’t we all got a right to our

Affinities? I hear you’re following our example yourself.

First-rate idea: I don’t mind telling you I saw it coming on

last summer at Venice. Caught you at it, so to speak! Old

Nelson ain’t as blind as people think. Here, let’s open another

bottle to the health of Streff and Mrs. Streff!”

 

She caught the hand with which he was signalling to the

sommelier. This flushed and garrulous Nelson moved her more

poignantly than a more heroic figure. “No more champagne,

please, Nelson. Besides,” she suddenly added, “it’s not true.”

 

He stared. “Not true that you’re going to marry Altringham?”

 

“No.”

 

“By George then what on earth did you chuck Nick for? Ain’t you

got an Affinity, my dear?”

 

She laughed and shook her head.

 

“Do you mean to tell me it’s all Nick’s doing, then?”

 

“I don’t know. Let’s talk of you instead, Nelson. I’m glad

you’re in such good spirits. I rather thought—”

 

He interrupted her quickly. “Thought I’d cut up a rumpus-do

some shooting? I know—people did.” He twisted his moustache,

evidently proud of his reputation. “Well, maybe I did see red

for a day or two—but I’m a philosopher, first and last. Before

I went into banking I’d made and lost two fortunes out West.

Well, how did I build ‘em up again? Not by shooting anybody

even myself. By just buckling to, and beginning all over again.

That’s how … and that’s what I am doing now. Beginning all

over again. ” His voice dropped from boastfulness to a note

of wistful melancholy, the look of strained jauntiness fell from

his face like a mask, and for an instant she saw the real man,

old, ruined, lonely. Yes, that was it: he was lonely,

desperately lonely, foundering in such deep seas of solitude

that any presence out of the past was like a spar to which he

clung. Whatever he knew or guessed of the part she had played

in his disaster, it was not callousness that had made him greet

her with such forgiving warmth, but the same sense of smallness,

insignificance and isolation which perpetually hung like a