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

know where she was

living, but imagined her to be staying with Mrs. Melrose, or

some other rich friend, or else lodged, in prospective

affluence, at the Nouveau Luxe, or in a pretty flat of her own.

Trust Susy—ah, the pang of it—to “manage”!

 

His first visit was to his lawyer’s; and as he walked through

the familiar streets each approaching face, each distant figure

seemed hers. The obsession was intolerable. It would not last,

of course; but meanwhile he had the exposed sense of a fugitive

in a nightmare, who feels himself the only creature visible in a

ghostly and besetting multitude. The eye of the metropolis

seemed fixed on him in an immense unblinking stare.

 

At the lawyer’s he was told that, as a first step to freedom, he

must secure a domicile in Paris. He had of course known of this

necessity: he had seen too many friends through the Divorce

Court, in one country or another, not to be fairly familiar with

the procedure. But the fact presented a different aspect as

soon as he tried to relate it to himself and Susy: it was as

though Susy’s personality were a medium through which events

still took on a transfiguring colour. He found the “domicile”

that very day: a tawdrily furnished rez-de-chaussee, obviously

destined to far different uses. And as he sat there, after the

concierge had discreetly withdrawn with the first quarter’s

payment in her pocket, and stared about him at the vulgar plushy

place, he burst out laughing at what it was about to figure in

the eyes of the law: a Home, and a Home desecrated by his own

act! The Home in which he and Susy had reared their precarious

bliss, and seen it crumble at the brutal touch of his

unfaithfulness and his cruelty—for he had been told that he

must be cruel to her as well as unfaithful! He looked at the

walls hung with sentimental photogravures, at the shiny bronze

“nudes,” the moth-eaten animal-skins and the bedizened bed-and

once more the unreality, the impossibility, of all that was

happening to him entered like a drug into his veins.

 

To rouse himself he stood up, turned the key on the hideous

place, and returned to his lawyer’s. He knew that in the hard

dry atmosphere of the office the act of giving the address of

the flat would restore some kind of reality to the phantasmal

transaction. And with wonder he watched the lawyer, as a matter

of course, pencil the street and the number on one of the papers

enclosed in a folder on which his own name was elaborately

engrossed.

 

As he took leave it occurred to him to ask where Susy was

living. At least he imagined that it had just occurred to him,

and that he was making the enquiry merely as a measure of

precaution, in order to know what quarter of Paris to avoid; but

in reality the question had been on his lips since he had first

entered the office, and lurking in his mind since he had emerged

from the railway station that morning. The fact of not knowing

where she lived made the whole of Paris a meaningless

unintelligible place, as useless to him as the face of a huge

clock that has lost its hour hand.

 

The address in Passy surprised him: he had imagined that she

would be somewhere in the neighborhood of the Champs Elysees or

the Place de l’Etoile. But probably either Mrs. Melrose or

Ellie Vanderlyn had taken a house at Passy. Well—it was

something of a relief to know that she was so far off. No

business called him to that almost suburban region beyond the

Trocadero, and there was much less chance of meeting her than if

she had been in the centre of Paris.

 

All day he wandered, avoiding the fashionable quarters, the

streets in which private motors glittered five deep, and furred

and feathered silhouettes glided from them into tea-rooms,

picture-galleries and jewellers’ shops. In some such scenes

Susy was no doubt figuring: slenderer, finer, vivider, than the

other images of clay, but imitating their gestures, chattering

their jargon, winding her hand among the same pearls and sables.

He struck away across the Seine, along the quays to the Cite,

the network of old Paris, the great grey vaults of St.

Eustache, the swarming streets of the Marais. He gazed at

monuments dawdled before shop-windows, sat in squares and on

quays, watching people bargain, argue, philander, quarrel, work-girls stroll past in linked bands, beggars whine on the bridges,

derelicts doze in the pale winter sun, mothers in mourning

hasten by taking children to school, and street-walkers beat

their weary rounds before the cafes.

 

The day drifted on. Toward evening he began to grow afraid of

his solitude, and to think of dining at the Nouveau Luxe, or

some other fashionable restaurant where he would be fairly sure

to meet acquaintances, and be carried off to a theatre, a boite

or a dancing-hall. Anything, anything now, to get away from the

maddening round of his thoughts. He felt the same blank fear of

solitude as months ago in Genoa …. Even if he were to run

across Susy and Altringham, what of it? Better get the job

over. People had long since ceased to take on tragedy airs

about divorce: dividing couples dined together to the last, and

met afterward in each other’s houses, happy in the consciousness

that their respective remarriages had provided two new centres

of entertainment. Yet most of the couples who took their rematings so philosophically had doubtless had their hour of

enchantment, of belief in the immortality of loving; whereas he

and Susy had simply and frankly entered into a business contract

for their mutual advantage. The fact gave the last touch of

incongruity to his agonies and exaltations, and made him appear

to himself as grotesque and superannuated as the hero of a

romantic novel.

 

He stood up from a bench on which he had been lounging in the

Luxembourg gardens, and hailed a taxi. Dusk had fallen, and he

meant to go back to his hotel, take a rest, and then go out to

dine. But instead, he threw Susy’s address to the driver, and

settled down in the cab, resting both hands on the knob of his

umbrella and staring straight ahead of him as if he were

accomplishing some tiresome duty that had to be got through with

before he could turn his mind to more important things.

 

“It’s the easiest way,” he heard himself say.

 

At the street-corner—her street-corner—he stopped the cab, and

stood motionless while it rattled away. It was a short vague

street, much farther off than he had expected, and fading away

at the farther end in a dusky blur of hoardings overhung by

trees. A thin rain was beginning to fall, and it was already

night in this inadequately lit suburban quarter. Lansing walked

down the empty street. The houses stood a few yards apart, with

bare-twigged shrubs between, and gates and railings dividing

them from the pavement. He could not, at first, distinguish

their numbers; but presently, coming abreast of a street-lamp,

he discovered that the small shabby facade it illuminated was

precisely the one he sought. The discovery surprised him. He

had imagined that, as frequently happened in the outlying

quarters of Passy and La Muette, the mean street would lead to a

stately private hotel, built upon some bowery fragment of an old

country-place. It was the latest whim of the wealthy to

establish themselves on these outskirts of Paris, where there

was still space for verdure; and he had pictured Susy behind

some pillared house-front, with lights pouring across glossy

turf to sculptured gateposts. Instead, he saw a six-windowed

house, huddled among neighbours of its kind, with the family

wash fluttering between meagre bushes. The arc-light beat

ironically on its front, which had the worn look of a tired

work-woman’s face; and Lansing, as he leaned against the

opposite railing, vainly tried to fit his vision of Susy into so

humble a setting.

 

The probable explanation was that his lawyer had given him the

wrong address; not only the wrong number but the wrong street.

He pulled out the slip of paper, and was crossing over to

decipher it under the lamp, when an errand-boy appeared out of

the obscurity, and approached the house. Nick drew back, and

the boy, unlatching the gate, ran up the steps and gave the bell

a pull.

 

Almost immediately the door opened; and there stood Susy, the

light full upon her, and upon a red-checked child against her

shoulder. The space behind them was dark, or so dimly lit that

it formed a black background to her vivid figure. She looked at

the errand-boy without surprise, took his parcel, and after he

had turned away, lingered a moment in the door, glancing down

the empty street.

 

That moment, to her watcher, seemed quicker than a flash yet as

long as a life-time. There she was, a stone’s throw away, but

utterly unconscious of his presence: his Susy, the old Susy,

and yet a new Susy, curiously transformed, transfigured almost,

by the new attitude in which he beheld her.

 

In the first shock of the vision he forgot his surprise at her

being in such a place, forgot to wonder whose house she was in,

or whose was the sleepy child in her arms. For an instant she

stood out from the blackness behind her, and through the veil of

the winter night, a thing apart, an unconditioned vision, the

eternal image of the woman and the child; and in that instant

everything within him was changed and renewed. His eyes were

still absorbing her, finding again the familiar curves of her

light body, noting the thinness of the lifted arm that upheld

the little boy, the droop of the shoulder he weighed on, the

brooding way in which her cheek leaned to his even while she

looked away; then she drew back, the door closed, and the

street-lamp again shone on blankness.

 

“But she’s mine!” Nick cried, in a fierce triumph of

recovery …

 

His eyes were so full of her that he shut them to hold in the

crowding vision.

 

It remained with him, at first, as a complete picture; then

gradually it broke up into its component parts, the child

vanished, the strange house vanished, and Susy alone stood

before him, his own Susy, only his Susy, yet changed, worn,

tempered—older, even—with sharper shadows under the cheek-bones, the brows drawn, the joint of the slim wrist more

prominent. It was not thus that his memory had evoked her, and

he recalled, with a remorseful pang, the fact that something in

her look, her dress, her tired and drooping attitude, suggested

poverty, dependence, seemed to make her after all a part of the

shabby house in which, at first sight, her presence had seemed

so incongruous.

 

“But she looks poor!” he thought, his heart tightening. And

instantly it occurred to him that these must be the Fulmer

children whom she was living with while their parents travelled

in Italy. Rumours of Nat Fulmer’s sudden ascension had reached

him, and he had heard that the couple had lately been seen in

Naples and Palermo. No one had mentioned Susy’s name in

connection with them, and he could hardly tell why he had

arrived at this conclusion, except perhaps because it seemed

natural that, if Susy were in trouble, she should turn to her

old friend Grace.

 

But why in trouble? What trouble? What could have happened to

check her triumphant career?

 

“That’s what I mean to find out!” he exclaimed.

 

His heart was beating with a tumult of new hopes and old

memories. The sight of his wife,