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

so remote in mien and manner

from the world in which he had imagined her to be reabsorbed,

changed in a flash his own relation to life, and flung a mist of

unreality over all that he had been trying to think most solid

and tangible. Nothing now was substantial to him but the stones

of the street in which he stood, the front of the house which

hid her, the bell-handle he already felt in his grasp. He

started forward, and was halfway to the threshold when a private

motor turned the corner, the twin glitter of its lamps carpeting

the wet street with gold to Susy’s door.

 

Lansing drew back into the shadow as the motor swept up to the

house. A man jumped out, and the light fell on Strefford’s

shambling figure, its lazy disjointed movements so unmistakably

the same under his fur coat, and in the new setting of

prosperity.

 

Lansing stood motionless, staring at the door. Strefford rang,

and waited. Would Susy appear again? Perhaps she had done so

before only because she had been on the watch ….

 

But no: after a slight delay a bonne appeared —the breathless

maid-of-all-work of a busy household—and at once effaced

herself, letting the visitor in. Lansing was sure that not a

word passed between the two, of enquiry on Lord Altringham’s

part, or of acquiescence on the servant’s. There could be no

doubt that he was expected.

 

The door closed on him, and a light appeared behind the blind of

the adjoining window. The maid had shown the visitor into the

sitting-room and lit the lamp. Upstairs, meanwhile, Susy was no

doubt running skilful fingers through her tumbled hair and

daubing her pale lips with red. Ah, how Lansing knew every

movement of that familiar rite, even to the pucker of the brow

and the pouting thrust-out of the lower lip! He was seized with

a sense of physical sickness as the succession of remembered

gestures pressed upon his eyes …. And the other man? The

other man, inside the house, was perhaps at that very instant

smiling over the remembrance of the same scene!

 

At the thought, Lansing plunged away into the night.

XXVII

SUSY and Lord Altringham sat in the little drawing-room, divided

from each other by a table carrying a smoky lamp and heaped with

tattered school-books.

 

In another half hour the bonne, despatched to fetch the children

from their classes, would be back with her flock; and at any

moment Geordie’s imperious cries might summon his slave up to

the nursery. In the scant time allotted them, the two sat, and

visibly wondered what to say.

 

Strefford, on entering, had glanced about the dreary room, with

its piano laden with tattered music, the children’s toys

littering the lame sofa, the bunches of dyed grass and impaled

butterflies flanking the cast-bronze clock. Then he had turned

to Susy and asked simply: “Why on earth are you here?”

 

She had not tried to explain; from the first, she had understood

the impossibility of doing so. And she would not betray her

secret longing to return to Nick, now that she knew that Nick

had taken definite steps for his release. In dread lest

Strefford should have heard of this, and should announce it to

her, coupling it with the news of Nick’s projected marriage, and

lest, hearing her fears thus substantiated, she should lose her

self-control, she had preferred to say, in a voice that she

tried to make indifferent: “The ‘proceedings,’ or whatever the

lawyers call them, have begun. While they’re going on I like to

stay quite by myself …. I don’t know why ….”

 

Strefford, at that, had looked at her keenly. “Ah,” he

murmured; and his lips were twisted into their old mocking

smile. “Speaking of proceedings,” he went on carelessly, “what

stage have Ellie’s reached, I wonder? I saw her and Vanderlyn

and Bockheimer all lunching cheerfully together to-day at

Larue’s.”

 

The blood rushed to Susy’s forehead. She remembered her tragic

evening with Nelson Vanderlyn, only two months earlier, and

thought to herself. “In time, then, I suppose, Nick and I ….

 

Aloud she said: “I can’t imagine how Nelson and Ellie can ever

want to see each other again. And in a restaurant, of all

places!”

 

Strefford continued to smile. “My dear, you’re incorrigibly

old-fashioned. Why should two people who’ve done each other the

best turn they could by getting out of each other’s way at the

right moment behave like sworn enemies ever afterward? It’s too

absurd; the humbug’s too flagrant. Whatever our generation has

failed to do, it’s got rid of humbug; and that’s enough to

immortalize it. I daresay Nelson and Ellie never liked each

other better than they do to-day. Twenty years ago, they’d have

been afraid to confess it; but why shouldn’t they now?”

 

Susy looked at Strefford, conscious that under his words was the

ache of the disappointment she had caused him; and yet conscious

also that that very ache was not the overwhelming penetrating

emotion he perhaps wished it to be, but a pang on a par with a

dozen others; and that even while he felt it he foresaw the day

when he should cease to feel it. And she thought to herself

that this certainty of oblivion must be bitterer than any

certainty of pain.

 

A silence had fallen between them. He broke it by rising from

his seat, and saying with a shrug: “You’ll end by driving me to

marry Joan Senechal.”

 

Susy smiled. “Well, why not? She’s lovely.”

 

“Yes; but she’ll bore me.”

 

“Poor Streff! So should I—”

 

“Perhaps. But nothing like as soon—” He grinned sardonically.

“There’d be more margin.” He appeared to wait for her to speak.

“And what else on earth are you going to do?” he concluded, as

she still remained silent.

 

“Oh, Streff, I couldn’t marry you for a reason like that!” she

murmured at length.

 

“Then marry me, and find your reason afterward.”

 

Her lips made a movement of denial, and still in silence she

held out her hand for good-bye. He clasped it, and then turned

away; but on the threshold he paused, his screwed-up eyes fixed

on her wistfully.

 

The look moved her, and she added hurriedly: “The only reason I

can find is one for not marrying you. It’s because I can’t yet

feel unmarried enough.”

 

“Unmarried enough? But I thought Nick was doing his best to

make you feel that.”

 

“Yes. But even when he has—sometimes I think even that won’t

make any difference.”

 

He still scrutinized her hesitatingly, with the gravest eyes she

had ever seen in his careless face.

 

“My dear, that’s rather the way I feel about you,” he said

simply as he turned to go.

 

That evening after the children had gone to bed Susy sat up late

in the cheerless sitting-room. She was not thinking of

Strefford but of Nick. He was coming to Paris—perhaps he had

already arrived. The idea that he might be in the same place

with her at that very moment, and without her knowing it, was so

strange and painful that she felt a violent revolt of all her

strong and joy-loving youth. Why should she go on suffering so

unbearably, so abjectly, so miserably? If only she could see

him, hear his voice, even hear him say again such cruel and

humiliating words as he had spoken on that dreadful day in

Venice when that would be better than this blankness, this utter

and final exclusion from his life! He had been cruel to her,

unimaginably cruel: hard, arrogant, unjust; and had been so,

perhaps, deliberately, because he already wanted to be free.

But she was ready to face even that possibility, to humble

herself still farther than he had humbled her—she was ready to

do anything, if only she might see him once again.

 

She leaned her aching head on her hands and pondered. Do

anything? But what could she do? Nothing that should hurt him,

interfere with his liberty, be false to the spirit of their

pact: on that she was more than ever resolved. She had made a

bargain, and she meant to stick to it, not for any abstract

reason, but simply because she happened to love him in that way.

Yes—but to see him again, only once!

 

Suddenly she remembered what Strefford had said about Nelson

Vanderlyn and his wife. “Why should two people who’ve just done

each other the best turn they could behave like sworn enemies

ever after?” If in offering Nick his freedom she had indeed

done him such a service as that, perhaps he no longer hated her,

would no longer be unwilling to see her …. At any rate, why

should she not write to him on that assumption, write in a

spirit of simple friendliness, suggesting that they should meet

and “settle things”? The business-like word “settle” (how she

hated it) would prove to him that she had no secret designs upon

his liberty; and besides he was too unprejudiced, too modern,

too free from what Strefford called humbug, not to understand

and accept such a suggestion. After all, perhaps Strefford was

right; it was something to have rid human relations of

hypocrisy, even if, in the process, so many exquisite things

seemed somehow to have been torn away with it ….

 

She ran up to her room, scribbled a note, and hurried with it

through the rain and darkness to the post-box at the corner. As

she returned through the empty street she had an odd feeling

that it was not empty—that perhaps Nick was already there,

somewhere near her in the night, about to follow her to the

door, enter the house, go up with her to her bedroom in the old

way. It was strange how close he had been brought by the mere

fact of her having written that little note to him!

 

In the bedroom, Geordie lay in his crib in ruddy slumber, and

she blew out the candle and undressed softly for fear of waking

him.

 

Nick Lansing, the next day, received Susy’s letter, transmitted

to his hotel from the lawyer’s office.

 

He read it carefully, two or three times over, weighing and

scrutinizing the guarded words. She proposed that they should

meet to “settle things.” What things? And why should he accede

to such a request? What secret purpose had prompted her? It

was horrible that nowadays, in thinking of Susy, he should

always suspect ulterior motives, be meanly on the watch for some

hidden tortuousness. What on earth was she trying to “manage”

now, he wondered.

 

A few hours ago, at the sight of her, all his hardness had

melted, and he had charged himself with cruelty, with injustice,

with every sin of pride against himself and her; but the

appearance of Strefford, arriving at that late hour, and so

evidently expected and welcomed, had driven back the rising tide

of tenderness.

 

Yet, after all, what was there to wonder at? Nothing was

changed in their respective situations. He had left his wife,

deliberately, and for reasons which no subsequent experience had

caused him to modify. She had apparently acquiesced in his

decision, and had utilized it, as she was justified in doing, to

assure her own future.

 

In all this, what was there to wail or knock the breast between

two people who prided themselves on looking facts in the face,

and making their grim best of them, without vain repinings? He

had been right in thinking their marriage an act of madness.

Her charms had overruled his judgment, and they had had their

year … their mad year … or at least all but two or three

months of