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

which Susy and Lansing had ever

yawned their way.

 

It was almost a relief to tile young man when, on the second

afternoon, Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: “I

really can’t stand the combination of Grace’s violin and little

Nat’s motor-horn any longer. Do let us slip out till the duet

is over.”

 

“How do they stand it, I wonder?” he basely echoed, as he

followed her up the wooded path behind the house.

 

“It might be worth finding out,” she rejoined with a musing

smile.

 

But he remained resolutely skeptical. “Oh, give them a year or

two more and they’ll collapse—! His pictures will never sell,

you know. He’ll never even get them into a show.”

 

“I suppose not. And she’ll never have time to do anything worth

while with her music.”

 

They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the

house was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape

of endless featureless wooded hills. “Think of sticking here

all the year round!” Lansing groaned.

 

“I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some

people!”

 

“Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the

Mortimer Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce

is one to do?”

 

“I wish I knew!” she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and

he turned and looked at her.

 

“Knew what?”

 

“The answer to your question. What is one to do—when one sees

both sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it,

indeed?”

 

They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines,

but Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of

the brown lashes on her cheek.

 

“You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of

it?”

 

“How can I say, when I’ve told you I see all the sides? Of

course,” Susy added hastily, ” I couldn’t live as they do for a

week. But it’s wonderful how little it’s dimmed them.”

 

“Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up

even better.” He reflected. “We do them good, I daresay.”

 

“Yes—or they us. I wonder which?”

 

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time

silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst

against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly

followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn’t

alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts

as they were, they wouldn’t be utter fools not to take their

chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To

this challenge he did not recall Susy’s making any definite

answer; but after another interval, in which all the world

seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself

in a brooding tone: “I don’t suppose it’s ever been tried

before; but we might—.” And then and there she had laid before

him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

 

She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by

declaring; and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid

impartiality. In the first place, she should have to marry some

day, and when she made the bargain she meant it to be an honest

one; and secondly, in the matter of love, she would never give

herself to anyone she did not really care for, and if such

happiness ever came to her she did not want it shorn of half its

brightness by the need of fibbing and plotting and dodging.

 

“I’ve seen too much of that kind of thing. Half the women I

know who’ve had lovers have had them for the fun of sneaking and

lying about it; but the other half have been miserable. And I

should be miserable.”

 

It was at this point that she unfolded her plan. Why shouldn’t

they marry; belong to each other openly and honourably, if for

ever so short a time, and with the definite understanding that

whenever either of them got the chance to do better he or she

should be immediately released? The law of their country

facilitated such exchanges, and society was beginning to view

them as indulgently as the law. As Susy talked, she warmed to

her theme and began to develop its endless possibilities.

 

“We should really, in a way, help more than we should hamper

each other,” she ardently explained. “We both know the ropes so

well; what one of us didn’t see the other might—in the way of

opportunities, I mean. And then we should be a novelty as

married people. We’re both rather unusually popular—why not be

frank!—and it’s such a blessing for dinner-givers to be able to

count on a couple of whom neither one is a blank. Yes, I really

believe we should be more than twice the success we are now; at

least,” she added with a smile, “if there’s that amount of room

for improvement. I don’t know how you feel; a man’s popularity

is so much less precarious than a girl’s—but I know it would

furbish me up tremendously to reappear as a married woman.” She

glanced away from him down the long valley at their feet, and

added in a lower tone: “And I should like, just for a little

while, to feel I had something in life of my very own—something

that nobody had lent me, like a fancy-dress or a motor or an

opera cloak.”

 

The suggestion, at first, had seemed to Lansing as mad as it was

enchanting: it had thoroughly frightened him. But Susy’s

arguments were irrefutable, her ingenuities inexhaustible. Had

he ever thought it all out? She asked. No. Well, she had; and

would he kindly not interrupt? In the first place, there would

be all the wedding-presents. Jewels, and a motor, and a silver

dinner service, did she mean? Not a bit of it! She could see

he’d never given the question proper thought. Cheques, my dear,

nothing but cheques—she undertook to manage that on her side:

she really thought she could count on about fifty, and she

supposed he could rake up a few more? Well, all that would

simply represent pocket-money! For they would have plenty of

houses to live in: he’d see. People were always glad to lend

their house to a newly-married couple. It was such fun to pop

down and see them: it made one feel romantic and jolly. All

they need do was to accept the houses in turn: go on honeymooning for a year! What was he afraid of? Didn’t he think

they’d be happy enough to want to keep it up? And why not at

least try—get engaged, and then see what would happen? Even if

she was all wrong, and her plan failed, wouldn’t it have been

rather nice, just for a month or two, to fancy they were going

to be happy? “I’ve often fancied it all by myself,” she

concluded; “but fancying it with you would somehow be so awfully

different ….”

 

That was how it began: and this lakeside dream was what it had

led up to. Fantastically improbable as they had seemed, all her

previsions had come true. If there were certain links in the

chain that Lansing had never been able to put his hand on,

certain arrangements and contrivances that still needed further

elucidation, why, he was lazily resolved to clear them up with

her some day; and meanwhile it was worth all the past might have

cost, and every penalty the future might exact of him, just to

be sitting here in the silence and sweetness, her sleeping head

on his knee, clasped in his joy as the hushed world was clasped

in moonlight.

 

He stooped down and kissed her. “Wake up,” he whispered, “it’s

bedtime.”

 

III.

 

THEIR month of Como was within a few hours of ending. Till the

last moment they had hoped for a reprieve; but the accommodating

Streffy had been unable to put the villa at their disposal for a

longer time, since he had had the luck to let it for a thumping

price to some beastly bouncers who insisted on taking possession

at the date agreed on.

 

Lansing, leaving Susy’s side at dawn, had gone down to the lake

for a last plunge; and swimming homeward through the crystal

light he looked up at the garden brimming with flowers, the long

low house with the cypress wood above it, and the window behind

which his wife still slept. The month had been exquisite, and

their happiness as rare, as fantastically complete, as the scene

before him. He sank his chin into the sunlit ripples and sighed

for sheer content ….

 

It was a bore to be leaving the scene of such complete

well-being, but the next stage in their progress promised to be

hardly less delightful. Susy was a magician: everything she

predicted came true. Houses were being showered on them; on all

sides he seemed to see beneficent spirits winging toward them,

laden with everything from a piano nobile in Venice to a camp in

the Adirondacks. For the present, they had decided on the

former. Other considerations apart, they dared not risk the

expense of a journey across the Atlantic; so they were heading

instead for the Nelson Vanderlyns’ palace on the Giudecca. They

were agreed that, for reasons of expediency, it might be wise to

return to New York for the coming winter. It would keep them in

view, and probably lead to fresh opportunities; indeed, Susy

already had in mind the convenient flat that she was sure a

migratory cousin (if tactfully handled, and assured that they

would not overwork her cook) could certainly be induced to lend

them. Meanwhile the need of making plans was still remote; and

if there was one art in which young Lansing’s twenty-eight years

of existence had perfected him it was that of living completely

and unconcernedly in the present ….

 

If of late he had tried to look into the future more insistently

than was his habit, it was only because of Susy. He had meant,

when they married, to be as philosophic for her as for himself;

and he knew she would have resented above everything his

regarding their partnership as a reason for anxious thought.

But since they had been together she had given him glimpses of

her past that made him angrily long to shelter and defend her

future. It was intolerable that a spirit as fine as hers should

be ever so little dulled or diminished by the kind of

compromises out of which their wretched lives were made. For

himself, he didn’t care a hang: he had composed for his own

guidance a rough-and-ready code, a short set of “mays” and

“mustn’ts” which immensely simplified his course. There were

things a fellow put up with for the sake of certain definite and

otherwise unattainable advantages; there were other things he

wouldn’t traffic with at any price. But for a woman, he began

to see, it might be different. The temptations might be

greater, the cost considerably higher, the dividing line between

the “mays” and “mustn’ts” more fluctuating and less sharply

drawn. Susy, thrown on the world at seventeen, with only a weak

wastrel of a father to define that treacherous line for her, and

with every circumstance soliciting her to overstep it, seemed to

have been preserved chiefly by an innate scorn of most of the

objects of human folly. “Such trash as he went to pieces for,”

was her curt comment on her parent’s premature demise: as

though she accepted in advance the necessity of ruining one’s

self for something, but was resolved to discriminate firmly

between what