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

when Susy’s catering fell beneath

their standard. All this made her life a hurried and harassing

business, but never— what she had most feared it would be a

dull or depressing one.

 

It was not, she owned to herself, that the society of the Fulmer

children had roused in her any abstract passion for the human

young. She knew—had known since Nick’s first kiss—how she

would love any child of his and hers; and she had cherished poor

little Clarissa Vanderlyn with a shrinking and wistful

solicitude. But in these rough young Fulmers she took a

positive delight, and for reasons that were increasingly clear

to her. It was because, in the first place, they were all

intelligent; and because their intelligence had been fed only on

things worth caring for. However inadequate Grace Fulmer’s

bringing-up of her increasing tribe had been, they had heard in

her company nothing trivial or dull: good music, good books and

good talk had been their daily food, and if at times they

stamped and roared and crashed about like children unblessed by

such privileges, at others they shone with the light of poetry

and spoke with the voice of wisdom.

 

That had been Susy’s discovery: for the first time she was

among awakening minds which had been wakened only to beauty.

>From their cramped and uncomfortable household Grace and Nat

Fulmer had managed to keep out mean envies, vulgar admirations,

shabby discontents; above all the din and confusion the great

images of beauty had brooded, like those ancestral figures that

stood apart on their shelf in the poorest Roman households.

 

No, the task she had undertaken for want of a better gave Susy

no sense of a missed vocation: “mothering” on a large scale

would never, she perceived, be her job. Rather it gave her, in

odd ways, the sense of being herself mothered, of taking her

first steps in the life of immaterial values which had begun to

seem so much more substantial than any she had known.

 

On the day when she had gone to Grace Fulmer for counsel and

comfort she had little guessed that they would come to her in

this form. She had found her friend, more than ever distracted

and yet buoyant, riding the large untidy waves of her life with

the splashed ease of an amphibian. Grace was probably the only

person among Susy’s friends who could have understood why she

could not make up her mind to marry Altringham; but at the

moment Grace was too much absorbed in her own problems to pay

much attention to her friend’s, and, according to her wont, she

immediately “unpacked” her difficulties.

 

Nat was not getting what she had hoped out of his European

opportunity. Oh, she was enough of an artist herself to know

that there must be fallow periods—that the impact of new

impressions seldom produced immediate results. She had allowed

for all that. But her past experience of Nat’s moods had taught

her to know just when he was assimilating, when impressions were

fructifying in him. And now they were not, and he knew it as

well as she did. There had been too much rushing about, too

much excitement and sterile flattery … Mrs. Melrose? Well,

yes, for a while … the trip to Spain had been a love-journey,

no doubt. Grace spoke calmly, but the lines of her face

sharpened: she had suffered, oh horribly, at his going to Spain

without her. Yet she couldn’t, for the children’s sake, afford

to miss the big sum that Ursula Gillow had given her for her

fortnight at Ruan. And her playing had struck people, and led,

on the way back, to two or three profitable engagements in

private houses in London. Fashionable society had made “a

little fuss” about her, and it had surprised and pleased Nat,

and given her a new importance in his eyes. “He was beginning

to forget that I wasn’t only a nursery-maid, and it’s been a

good thing for him to be reminded … but the great thing is

that with what I’ve earned he and I can go off to southern Italy

and Sicily for three months. You know I know how to manage …

and, alone with me, Nat will settle down to work: to observing,

feeling, soaking things in. It’s the only way. Mrs. Melrose

wants to take him, to pay all the expenses again-well she

shan’t. I’ll pay them.” Her worn cheek flushed with triumph.

“And you’ll see what wonders will come of it …. Only there’s

the problem of the children. Junie quite agrees that we can’t

take them ….”

 

Thereupon she had unfolded her idea. If Susy was at a loose

end, and hard up, why shouldn’t she take charge of the children

while their parents were in Italy? For three months at most-Grace could promise it shouldn’t be longer. They couldn’t pay

her much, of course, but at least she would be lodged and fed.

“And, you know, it will end by interesting you—I’m sure it

will,” the mother concluded, her irrepressible hopefulness

rising even to this height, while Susy stood before her with a

hesitating smile.

 

Take care of five Fulmers for three months! The prospect cowed

her. If there had been only Junie and Geordie, the oldest and

youngest of the band, she might have felt less hesitation. But

there was Nat, the second in age, whose motor-horn had driven

her and Nick out to the hillside on their fatal day at the

Fulmers’ and there were the twins, Jack and Peggy, of whom she

had kept memories almost equally disquieting. To rule this

uproarious tribe would be a sterner business than trying to

beguile Clarissa Vanderlyn’s ladylike leisure; and she would

have refused on the spot, as she had refused once before, if the

only possible alternatives had not come to seem so much less

bearable, and if Junie, called in for advice, and standing

there, small, plain and competent, had not said in her quiet

grown-up voice: “Oh, yes, I’m sure Mrs. Lansing and I can

manage while you’re away—especially if she reads aloud well.”

 

Reads aloud well! The stipulation had enchanted Susy. She had

never before known children who cared to be read aloud to; she

remembered with a shiver her attempts to interest Clarissa in

anything but gossip and the fashions, and the tone in which the

child had said, showing Strefford’s trinket to her father:

“Because I said I’d rather have it than a book.”

 

And here were children who consented to be left for three months

by their parents, but on condition that a good reader was

provided for them!

 

“Very well—I will! But what shall I be expected to read to

you?” she had gaily questioned; and Junie had answered, after

one of her sober pauses of reflection: “The little ones like

nearly everything; but Nat and I want poetry particularly,

because if we read it to ourselves we so often pronounce the

puzzling words wrong, and then it sounds so horrid.”

 

“Oh, I hope I shall pronounce them right,” Susy murmured,

stricken with self-distrust and humility.

 

Apparently she did; for her reading was a success, and even the

twins and Geordie, once they had grown used to her, seemed to

prefer a ringing page of Henry V, or the fairy scenes from the

Midsummer Night’s Dream, to their own more specialized

literature, though that had also at times to be provided.

 

There were, in fact, no lulls in her life with the Fulmers; but

its commotions seemed to Susy less meaningless, and therefore

less fatiguing, than those that punctuated the existence of

people like Altringham, Ursula Gillow, Ellie Vanderlyn and their

train; and the noisy uncomfortable little house at Passy was

beginning to greet her with the eyes of home when she returned

there after her tramps to and from the children’s classes. At

any rate she had the sense of doing something useful and even

necessary, and of earning her own keep, though on so modest a

scale; and when the children were in their quiet mood, and

demanded books or music (or, even, on one occasion, at the

surprising Junie’s instigation, a collective visit to the

Louvre, where they recognized the most unlikely pictures, and

the two elders emitted startling technical judgments, and called

their companion’s attention to details she had not observed); on

these occasions, Susy had a surprised sense of being drawn back

into her brief life with Nick, or even still farther and deeper,

into those visions of Nick’s own childhood on which the trivial

later years had heaped their dust.

 

It was curious to think that if he and she had remained

together, and she had had a child—the vision used to come to

her, in her sleepless hours, when she looked at little Geordie,

in his cot by her bed—their life together might have been very

much like the life she was now leading, a small obscure business

to the outer world, but to themselves how wide and deep and

crowded!

 

She could not bear, at that moment, the thought of giving up

this mystic relation to the life she had missed. In spite of

the hurry and fatigue of her days, the shabbiness and discomfort

of everything, and the hours when the children were as “horrid”

as any other children, and turned a conspiracy of hostile faces

to all her appeals; in spite of all this she did not want to

give them up, and had decided, when their parents returned, to

ask to go back to America with them. Perhaps, if Nat’s success

continued, and Grace was able to work at her music, they would

need a kind of governess-companion. At any rate, she could

picture no future less distasteful.

 

She had not sent to Mr. Spearman Nick’s answer to her letter.

In the interval between writing to him and receiving his reply

she had broken with Strefford; she had therefore no object in

seeking her freedom. If Nick wanted his, he knew he had only to

ask for it; and his silence, as the weeks passed, woke a faint

hope in her. The hope flamed high when she read one day in the

newspapers a vague but evidently “inspired” allusion to the

possibility of an alliance between his Serene Highness the

reigning Prince of Teutoburg-Waldhain and Miss Coral Hicks of

Apex City; it sank to ashes when, a few days later, her eye lit

on a paragraph wherein Mr. and Mrs. Mortimer Hicks “requested to

state” that there was no truth in the report.

 

On the foundation of these two statements Susy raised one watch-tower of hope after another, feverish edifices demolished or

rebuilt by every chance hint from the outer world wherein Nick’s

name figured with the Hickses’. And still, as the days passed

and she heard nothing, either from him or from her lawyer, her

flag continued to fly from the quaking structures.

 

Apart from the custody of the children there was indeed little

to distract her mind from these persistent broodings. She

winced sometimes at the thought of the ease with which her

fashionable friends had let her drop out of sight. In the

perpetual purposeless rush of their days, the feverish making of

winter plans, hurrying off to the Riviera or St. Moritz, Egypt

or New York, there was no time to hunt up the vanished or to

wait for the laggard. Had they learned that she had broken her

“engagement” (how she hated the word!) to Strefford, and had the

fact gone about that she was once more only a poor hanger-on, to

be taken up when it was convenient, and ignored in the

intervals? She did not know; though she fancied Strefford’s

newly-developed pride would prevent his revealing to any one

what had passed between them. For several days