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

after her abrupt

flight he had made no sign; and though she longed to write and

ask his forgiveness she could not find the words. Finally it

was he who wrote: a short note, from Altringham, typical of all

that was best in the old Strefford. He had gone down to

Altringham, he told her, to think quietly over their last talk,

and try to understand what she had been driving at. He had to

own that he couldn’t; but that, he supposed, was the very head

and front of his offending. Whatever he had done to displease

her, he was sorry for; but he asked, in view of his invincible

ignorance, to be allowed not to regard his offence as a cause

for a final break. The possibility of that, he found, would

make him even more unhappy than he had foreseen; as she knew,

his own happiness had always been his first object in life, and

he therefore begged her to suspend her decision a little longer.

He expected to be in Paris within another two months, and before

arriving he would write again, and ask her to see him.

 

The letter moved her but did not make her waver. She simply

wrote that she was touched by his kindness, and would willingly

see him if he came to Paris later; though she was bound to tell

him that she had not yet changed her mind, and did not believe

it would promote his happiness to have her try to do so.

 

He did not reply to this, and there was nothing further to keep

her thoughts from revolving endlessly about her inmost hopes and

fears.

 

On the rainy afternoon in question, tramping home from the

“cours” (to which she was to return at six), she had said to

herself that it was two months that very day since Nick had

known she was ready to release him—and that after such a delay

he was not likely to take any further steps. The thought filled

her with a vague ecstasy. She had had to fix an arbitrary date

as the term of her anguish, and she had fixed that one; and

behold she was justified. For what could his silence mean but

that he too ….

 

On the hall-table lay a typed envelope with the Paris postage-mark. She opened it carelessly, and saw that the letter-head

bore Mr. Spearman’s office address. The words beneath spun

round before her eyes …. “Has notified us that he is at your

disposal … carry out your wishes … arriving in Paris … fix

an appointment with his lawyers ….”

 

Nick—it was Nick the words were talking of! It was the fact of

Nick’s return to Paris that was being described in those

preposterous terms! She sank down on the bench beside the

dripping umbrella-stand and stared vacantly before her. It had

fallen at last—this blow in which she now saw that she had

never really believed! And yet she had imagined she was

prepared for it, had expected it, was already planning her

future life in view of it—an effaced impersonal life in the

service of somebody else’s children—when, in reality, under

that thin surface of abnegation and acceptance, all the old

hopes had been smouldering red-hot in their ashes! What was the

use of any self-discipline, any philosophy, any experience, if

the lawless self underneath could in an instant consume them

like tinder?

 

She tried to collect herself—to understand what had happened.

Nick was coming to Paris—coming not to see her but to consult

his lawyer! It meant, of course, that he had definitely

resolved to claim his freedom; and that, if he had made up his

mind to this final step, after more than six months of inaction

and seeming indifference, it could be only because something

unforeseen and decisive had happened to him. Feverishly, she

put together again the stray scraps of gossip and the newspaper

paragraphs that had reached her in the last months. It was

evident that Miss Hicks’s projected marriage with the Prince of

Teutoburg-Waldhain had been broken off at the last moment; and

broken off because she intended to marry Nick. The announcement

of his arrival in Paris and the publication of Mr. and Mrs.

Hicks’s formal denial of their daughter’s betrothal coincided

too closely to admit of any other inference. Susy tried to

grasp the reality of these assembled facts, to picture to

herself their actual tangible results. She thought of Coral

Hicks bearing the name of Mrs. Nick Lansing—her name, Susy’s

own!—and entering drawing-rooms with Nick in her wake, gaily

welcomed by the very people who, a few months before, had

welcomed Susy with the same warmth. In spite of Nick’s growing

dislike of society, and Coral’s attitude of intellectual

superiority, their wealth would fatally draw them back into the

world to which Nick was attached by all his habits and

associations. And no doubt it would amuse him to re-enter that

world as a dispenser of hospitality, to play the part of host

where he had so long been a guest; just as Susy had once fancied

it would amuse her to re-enter it as Lady Altringham …. But,

try as she would, now that the reality was so close on her, she

could not visualize it or relate it to herself. The mere

juxtaposition of the two names—Coral, Nick—which in old times

she had so often laughingly coupled, now produced a blur in her

brain.

 

She continued to sit helplessly beside the hall-table, the tears

running down her cheeks. The appearance of the bonne aroused

her. Her youngest charge, Geordie, had been feverish for a day

or two; he was better, but still confined to the nursery, and he

had heard Susy unlock the house-door, and could not imagine why

she had not come straight up to him. He now began to manifest

his indignation in a series of racking howls, and Susy, shaken

out of her trance, dropped her cloak and umbrella and hurried

up.

 

“Oh, that child!” she groaned.

 

Under the Fulmer roof there was little time or space for the

indulgence of private sorrows. From morning till night there

was always some immediate practical demand on one’s attention;

and Susy was beginning to see how, in contracted households,

children may play a part less romantic but not less useful than

that assigned to them in fiction, through the mere fact of

giving their parents no leisure to dwell on irremediable

grievances. Though her own apprenticeship to family life had

been so short, she had already acquired the knack of rapid

mental readjustment, and as she hurried up to the nursery her

private cares were dispelled by a dozen problems of temperature,

diet and medicine.

 

Such readjustment was of course only momentary; yet each time it

happened it seemed to give her more firmness and flexibility of

temper. “What a child I was myself six months ago!” she

thought, wondering that Nick’s influence, and the tragedy of

their parting, should have done less to mature and steady her

than these few weeks in a house full of children.

 

Pacifying Geordie was not easy, for he had long since learned to

use his grievances as a pretext for keeping the offender at his

beck with a continuous supply of stories, songs and games.

“You’d better be careful never to put yourself in the wrong with

Geordie,” the astute Junie had warned Susy at the outset,

“because he’s got such a memory, and he won’t make it up with

you till you’ve told him every fairy-tale he’s ever heard

before.”

 

But on this occasion, as soon as he saw her, Geordie’s

indignation melted. She was still in the doorway, compunctious,

abject and racking her dazed brain for his favourite stories,

when she saw, by the smoothing out of his mouth and the sudden

serenity of his eyes, that he was going to give her the

delicious but not wholly reassuring shock of being a good boy.

 

Thoughtfully he examined her face as she knelt down beside the

cot; then he poked out a finger and pressed it on her tearful

cheek.

 

“Poor Susy got a pain too,” he said, putting his arms about her;

and as she hugged him close, he added philosophically: “Tell

Geordie a new story, darling, and you’ll forget all about it.”

XXVI

NICK Lansing arrived in Paris two days after his lawyer had

announced his coming to Mr. Spearman.

 

He had left Rome with the definite purpose of freeing himself

and Susy; and though he was not pledged to Coral Hicks he had

not concealed from her the object of his journey. In vain had

he tried to rouse in himself any sense of interest in his own

future. Beyond the need of reaching a definite point in his

relation to Susy his imagination could not travel. But he had

been moved by Coral’s confession, and his reason told him that

he and she would probably be happy together, with the temperate

happiness based on a community of tastes and an enlargement of

opportunities. He meant, on his return to Rome, to ask her to

marry him; and he knew that she knew it. Indeed, if he had not

spoken before leaving it was with no idea of evading his fate,

or keeping her longer in suspense, but simply because of the

strange apathy that had fallen on him since he had received

Susy’s letter. In his incessant self-communings he dressed up

this apathy as a discretion which forbade his engaging Coral’s

future till his own was assured. But in truth he knew that

Coral’s future was already engaged, and his with it: in Rome

the fact had seemed natural and even inevitable.

 

In Paris, it instantly became the thinnest of unrealities. Not

because Paris was not Rome, nor because it was Paris; but

because hidden away somewhere in that vast unheeding labyrinth

was the half-forgotten part of himself that was Susy …. For

weeks, for months past, his mind had been saturated with Susy:

she had never seemed more insistently near him than as their

separation lengthened, and the chance of reunion became less

probable. It was as if a sickness long smouldering in him had

broken out and become acute, enveloping him in the Nessus-shirt

of his memories. There were moments when, to his memory, their

actual embraces seemed perfunctory, accidental, compared with

this deep deliberate imprint of her soul on his.

 

Yet now it had become suddenly different. Now that he was in

the same place with her, and might at any moment run across her,

meet her eyes, hear her voice, avoid her hand—now that

penetrating ghost of her with which he had been living was

sucked back into the shadows, and he seemed, for the first time

since their parting, to be again in her actual presence. He

woke to the fact on the morning of his arrival, staring down

from his hotel window on a street she would perhaps walk through

that very day, and over a limitless huddle of roofs, one of

which covered her at that hour. The abruptness of the

transition startled him; he had not known that her mere

geographical nearness would take him by the throat in that way.

What would it be, then, if she were to walk into the room?

 

Thank heaven that need never happen! He was sufficiently

informed as to French divorce proceedings to know that they

would not necessitate a confrontation with his wife; and with

ordinary luck, and some precautions, he might escape even a

distant glimpse of her. He did not mean to remain in Paris more

than a few days; and during that time it would be easy—knowing,

as he did, her tastes and Altringham’s—to avoid the places

where she was likely to be met. He did not