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

cold

fog on her own horizon. Suddenly she too felt old—old and

unspeakably tired.

 

“It’s been nice seeing you, Nelson. But now I must be getting

home.”

 

He offered no objection, but asked for the bill, resumed his

jaunty air while he scattered largesse among the waiters, and

sauntered out behind her after calling for a taxi.

 

They drove off in silence. Susy was thinking: “And Clarissa?”

but dared not ask. Vanderlyn lit a cigarette, hummed a dance-tune, and stared out of the window. Suddenly she felt his hand

on hers.

 

“Susy—do you ever see her?”

 

“See—Ellie?”

 

He nodded, without turning toward her.

 

“Not often … sometimes ….”

 

“If you do, for God’s sake tell her I’m happy … happy as a

king … tell her you could see for yourself that I was ….”

His voice broke in a little gasp. “I … I’ll be damned if …

if she shall ever be unhappy about me … if I can help it ….”

The cigarette dropped from his fingers, and with a sob he

covered his face.

 

“Oh, poor Nelson—poor Nelson, ” Susy breathed. While their cab

rattled across the Place du Carrousel, and over the bridge, he

continued to sit beside her with hidden face. At last he pulled

out a scented handkerchief, rubbed his eyes with it, and groped

for another cigarette.

 

“I’m all right! Tell her that, will you, Susy? There are some

of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever forget; but they

make me feel kindly to her, and not angry. I didn’t know it

would be so, beforehand—but it is …. And now the thing’s

settled I’m as right as a trivet, and you can tell her so ….

Look here, Susy …” he caught her by the arm as the taxi drew

up at her hotel …. “Tell her I understand, will you? I’d

rather like her to know that …. “

 

“I’ll tell her, Nelson,” she promised; and climbed the stairs

alone to her dreary room.

 

Susy’s one fear was that Strefford, when he returned the next

day, should treat their talk of the previous evening as a fit of

“nerves” to be jested away. He might, indeed, resent her

behaviour too deeply to seek to see her at once; but his

easygoing modern attitude toward conduct and convictions made

that improbable. She had an idea that what he had most minded

was her dropping so unceremoniously out of the Embassy Dinner.

 

But, after all, why should she see him again? She had had

enough of explanations during the last months to have learned

how seldom they explain anything. If the other person did not

understand at the first word, at the first glance even,

subsequent elucidations served only to deepen the obscurity.

And she wanted above all—and especially since her hour with

Nelson Vanderlyn—to keep herself free, aloof, to retain her

hold on her precariously recovered self. She sat down and wrote

to Strefford—and the letter was only a little less painful to

write than the one she had despatched to Nick. It was not that

her own feelings were in any like measure engaged; but because,

as the decision to give up Strefford affirmed itself, she

remembered only his kindness, his forbearance, his good humour,

and all the other qualities she had always liked in him; and

because she felt ashamed of the hesitations which must cause him

so much pain and humiliation. Yes: humiliation chiefly. She

knew that what she had to say would hurt his pride, in whatever

way she framed her renunciation; and her pen wavered, hating its

task. Then she remembered Vanderlyn’s words about his wife:

“There are some of our old times I don’t suppose I shall ever

forget—” and a phrase of Grace Fulmer’s that she had but half

grasped at the time: “You haven’t been married long enough to

understand how trifling such things seem in the balance of one’s

memories.”

 

Here were two people who had penetrated farther than she into

the labyrinth of the wedded state, and struggled through some of

its thorniest passages; and yet both, one consciously, the other

half-unaware, testified to the mysterious fact which was already

dawning on her: that the influence of a marriage begun in

mutual understanding is too deep not to reassert itself even in

the moment of flight and denial.

 

“The real reason is that you’re not Nick” was what she would

have said to Strefford if she had dared to set down the bare

truth; and she knew that, whatever she wrote, he was too acute

not to read that into it.

 

“He’ll think it’s because I’m still in love with Nick … and

perhaps I am. But even if I were, the difference doesn’t seem

to lie there, after all, but deeper, in things we’ve shared that

seem to be meant to outlast love, or to change it into something

different.” If she could have hoped to make Strefford

understand that, the letter would have been easy enough to

write—but she knew just at what point his imagination would

fail, in what obvious and superficial inferences it would rest

 

“Poor Streff—poor me!” she thought as she sealed the letter.

 

After she had despatched it a sense of blankness descended on

her. She had succeeded in driving from her mind all vain

hesitations, doubts, returns upon herself: her healthy system

naturally rejected them. But they left a queer emptiness in

which her thoughts rattled about as thoughts might, she

supposed, in the first moments after death—before one got used

to it. To get used to being dead: that seemed to be her

immediate business. And she felt such a novice at it—felt so

horribly alive! How had those others learned to do without

living? Nelson—well, he was still in the throes; and probably

never would understand, or be able to communicate, the lesson

when he had mastered it. But Grace Fulmer—she suddenly

remembered that Grace was in Paris, and set forth to find her.

XXIV

NICK LANSING had walked out a long way into the Campagna. His

hours were seldom his own, for both Mr. and Mrs. Hicks were

becoming more and more addicted to sudden and somewhat imperious

demands upon his time; but on this occasion he had simply

slipped away after luncheon, and taking the tram to the Porta

Salaria, had wandered on thence in the direction of the Ponte

Nomentano.

 

He wanted to get away and think; but now that he had done it the

business proved as unfruitful as everything he had put his hand

to since he had left Venice. Think—think about what? His

future seemed to him a negligible matter since he had received,

two months earlier, the few lines in which Susy had asked him

for her freedom.

 

The letter had been a shock—though he had fancied himself so

prepared for it—yet it had also, in another sense, been a

relief, since, now that at last circumstances compelled him to

write to her, they also told him what to say. And he had said it

as briefly and simply as possible, telling her that he would put

no obstacle in the way of her release, that he held himself at

her lawyer’s disposal to answer any further communication—and

that he would never forget their days together, or cease to

bless her for them.

 

That was all. He gave his Roman banker’s address, and waited

for another letter; but none came. Probably the “formalities,”

whatever they were, took longer than he had supposed; and being

in no haste to recover his own liberty, he did not try to learn

the cause of the delay. From that moment, however, he

considered himself virtually free, and ceased, by the same

token, to take any interest in his own future. His life seemed

as flat as a convalescent’s first days after the fever has

dropped.

 

The only thing he was sure of was that he was not going to

remain in the Hickses’ employ: when they left Rome for Central

Asia he had no intention of accompanying them. The part of Mr.

Buttles’ successor was becoming daily more intolerable to him,

for the very reasons that had probably made it most gratifying

to Mr. Buttles. To be treated by Mr. and Mrs. Hicks as a paid

oracle, a paraded and petted piece of property, was a good deal

more distasteful than he could have imagined any relation with

these kindly people could be. And since their aspirations had

become frankly social he found his task, if easier, yet far less

congenial than during his first months with them. He preferred

patiently explaining to Mrs. Hicks, for the hundredth time, that

Sassanian and Saracenic were not interchangeable terms, to

unravelling for her the genealogies of her titled guests, and

reminding her, when she “seated” her dinner-parties, that Dukes

ranked higher than Princes. No—the job was decidedly

intolerable; and he would have to look out for another means of

earning his living. But that was not what he had really got

away to think about. He knew he should never starve; he had

even begun to believe again in his book. What he wanted to

think of was Susy—or rather, it was Susy that he could not help

thinking of, on whatever train of thought he set out.

 

Again and again he fancied he had established a truce with the

past: had come to terms—the terms of defeat and failure with

that bright enemy called happiness. And, in truth, he had

reached the point of definitely knowing that he could never

return to the kind of life that he and Susy had embarked on. It

had been the tragedy, of their relation that loving her roused

in him ideals she could never satisfy. He had fallen in love

with her because she was, like himself, amused, unprejudiced and

disenchanted; and he could not go on loving her unless she

ceased to be all these things. From that circle there was no

issue, and in it he desperately revolved.

 

If he had not heard such persistent rumours of her remarriage

to Lord Altringham he might have tried to see her again; but,

aware of the danger and the hopelessness of a meeting, he was,

on the whole, glad to have a reason for avoiding it. Such, at

least, he honestly supposed to be his state of mind until he

found himself, as on this occasion, free to follow out his

thought to its end. That end, invariably, was Susy; not the

bundle of qualities and defects into which his critical spirit

had tried to sort her out, but the soft blur of identity, of

personality, of eyes, hair, mouth, laugh, tricks of speech and

gesture, that were all so solely and profoundly her own, and yet

so mysteriously independent of what she might do, say, think, in

crucial circumstances. He remembered her once saying to him:

“After all, you were right when you wanted me to be your

mistress,” and the indignant stare of incredulity with which he

had answered her. Yet in these hours it was the palpable image

of her that clung closest, till, as invariably happened, his

vision came full circle, and feeling her on his breast he wanted

her also in his soul.

 

Well—such all-encompassing loves were the rarest of human

experiences; he smiled at his presumption in wanting no other.

Wearily he turned, and tramped homeward through the winter

twilight ….

 

At the door of the hotel he ran across the Prince of Teutoburg’s

aide-de-camp. They had not met for some days, and Nick had a

vague feeling that if the Prince’s matrimonial designs took

definite shape he himself was not likely, after all, to be their

chosen exponent. He had surprised, now and then, a certain