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

she ever be able to explain it to

herself? How was it that she, so fertile in strategy, so

practiced in feminine arts, had stood there before him,

helpless, inarticulate, like a school-girl a-choke with her

first love-longing? If he was gone, and gone never to return,

it was her own fault, and none but hers. What had she done to

move him, detain him, make his heart beat and his head swim as

hers were beating and swimming? She stood aghast at her own

inadequacy, her stony inexpressiveness ….

 

And suddenly she lifted her hands to her throbbing forehead and

cried out: “But this is love! This must be love!”

 

She had loved him before, she supposed; for what else was she to

call the impulse that had drawn her to him, taught her how to

overcome his scruples, and whirled him away with her on their

mad adventure? Well, if that was love, this was something so

much larger and deeper that the other feeling seemed the mere

dancing of her blood in tune with his ….

 

But, no! Real love, great love, the love that poets sang, and

privileged and tortured beings lived and died of, that love had

its own superior expressiveness, and the sure command of its

means. The petty arts of coquetry were no farther from it than

the numbness of the untaught girl. Great love was wise, strong,

powerful, like genius, like any other dominant form of human

power. It knew itself, and what it wanted, and how to attain

its ends.

 

Not great love, then … but just the common humble average of

human love was hers. And it had come to her so newly, so

overwhelmingly, with a face so grave, a touch so startling, that

she had stood there petrified, humbled at the first look of its

eyes, recognizing that what she had once taken for love was

merely pleasure and spring-time, and the flavour of youth.

 

“But how was I to know? And now it’s too late!” she wailed.

XXIX

THE inhabitants of the little house in Passy were of necessity

early risers; but when Susy jumped out of bed the next morning

no one else was astir, and it lacked nearly an hour of the call

of the bonne’s alarm-clock.

 

For a moment Susy leaned out of her dark room into the darker

night. A cold drizzle fell on her face, and she shivered and

drew back. Then, lighting a candle, and shading it, as her

habit was, from the sleeping child, she slipped on her dressing-gown and opened the door. On the threshold she paused to look

at her watch. Only half-past five! She thought with

compunction of the unkindness of breaking in on Junie Fulmer’s

slumbers; but such scruples did not weigh an ounce in the

balance of her purpose. Poor Junie would have to oversleep

herself on Sunday, that was all.

 

Susy stole into the passage, opened a door, and cast her light

on the girl’s face.

 

“Junie! Dearest Junie, you must wake up!”

 

Junie lay in the abandonment of youthful sleep; but at the sound

of her name she sat up with the promptness of a grown person on

whom domestic burdens have long weighed.

 

“Which one of them is it?” she asked, one foot already out of

bed.

 

“Oh, Junie dear, no … it’s nothing wrong with the children …

or with anybody,” Susy stammered, on her knees by the bed.

 

In the candlelight, she saw Junie’s anxious brow darken

reproachfully.

 

“Oh, Susy, then why—? I was just dreaming we were all driving

about Rome in a great big motor-car with father and mother!”

 

“I’m so sorry, dear. What a lovely dream! I’m a brute to have

interrupted it—”

 

She felt the little girl’s awakening scrutiny. “If there’s

nothing wrong with anybody, why are you crying, Susy? Is it you

there’s something wrong with? What has happened?”

 

“Am I crying?” Susy rose from her knees and sat down on the

counterpane. “Yes, it is me. And I had to disturb you.”

 

“Oh, Susy, darling, what is it?” Junie’s arms were about her in

a flash, and Susy grasped them in burning fingers.

 

“Junie, listen! I’ve got to go away at once— to leave you all

for the whole day. I may not be back till late this evening;

late to-night; I can’t tell. I promised your mother I’d never

leave you; but I’ve got to—I’ve got to.”

 

Junie considered her agitated face with fully awakened eyes.

“Oh, I won’t tell, you know, you old brick, ” she said with

simplicity.

 

Susy hugged her. “Junie, Junie, you darling! But that wasn’t

what I meant. Of course you may tell—you must tell. I shall

write to your mother myself. But what worries me is the idea of

having to go away— away from Paris—for the whole day, with

Geordie still coughing a little, and no one but that silly

Angele to stay with him while you’re out—and no one but you to

take yourself and the others to school. But Junie, Junie, I’ve

got to do it!” she sobbed out, clutching the child tighter.

 

Junie Fulmer, with her strangely mature perception of the case,

and seemingly of every case that fate might call on her to deal

with, sat for a moment motionless in Susy’s hold. Then she

freed her wrists with an adroit twist, and leaning back against

the pillows said judiciously: “You’ll never in the world bring

up a family of your own if you take on like this over other

people’s children.”

 

Through all her turmoil of spirit the observation drew a laugh

from Susy. “Oh, a family of my own—I don’t deserve one, the

way I’m behaving to your”

 

Junie still considered her. “My dear, a change will do you

good: you need it,” she pronounced.

 

Susy rose with a laughing sigh. “I’m not at all sure it will!

But I’ve got to have it, all the same. Only I do feel

anxious—and I can’t even leave you my address!”

 

Junie still seemed to examine the case.

 

“Can’t you even tell me where you’re going?” she ventured, as if

not quite sure of the delicacy of asking.

 

“Well—no, I don’t think I can; not till I get back. Besides,

even if I could it wouldn’t be much use, because I couldn’t give

you my address there. I don’t know what it will be.”

 

“But what does it matter, if you’re coming back to-night?”

 

“Of course I’m coming back! How could you possibly imagine I

should think of leaving you for more than a day?”

 

“Oh, I shouldn’t be afraid—not much, that is, with the poker,

and Nat’s water-pistol,” emended Junie, still judicious.

 

Susy again enfolded her vehemently, and then turned to more

practical matters. She explained that she wished if possible to

catch an eight-thirty train from the Gare de Lyon, and that

there was not a moment to lose if the children were to be

dressed and fed, and full instructions written out for Junie and

Angele, before she rushed for the underground.

 

While she bathed Geordie, and then hurried into her own clothes,

she could not help wondering at her own extreme solicitude for

her charges. She remembered, with a pang, how often she had

deserted Clarissa Vanderlyn for the whole day, and even for two

or three in succession—poor little Clarissa, whom she knew to

be so unprotected, so exposed to evil influences. She had been

too much absorbed in her own greedy bliss to be more than

intermittently aware of the child; but now, she felt, no sorrow

however ravaging, no happiness however absorbing, would ever

again isolate her from her kind.

 

And then these children were so different! The exquisite

Clarissa was already the predestined victim of her surroundings:

her budding soul was divided from Susy’s by the same barrier of

incomprehension that separated the latter from Mrs. Vanderlyn.

Clarissa had nothing to teach Susy but the horror of her own

hard little appetites; whereas the company of the noisy

argumentative Fulmers had been a school of wisdom and

abnegation.

 

As she applied the brush to Geordie’s shining head and the

handkerchief to his snuffling nose, the sense of what she owed

him was so borne in on Susy that she interrupted the process to

catch him to her bosom.

 

“I’ll have such a story to tell you when I get back to-night, if

you’ll promise me to be good all day,” she bargained with him;

and Geordie, always astute, bargained back: “Before I promise,

I’d like to know what story.”

 

At length all was in order. Junie had been enlightened, and

Angele stunned, by the minuteness of Susy’s instructions; and

the latter, waterproofed and stoutly shod, descended the

doorstep, and paused to wave at the pyramid of heads yearning to

her from an upper window.

 

It was hardly light, and still raining, when she turned into the

dismal street. As usual, it was empty; but at the corner she

perceived a hesitating taxi, with luggage piled beside the

driver. Perhaps it was some early traveller, just arriving, who

would release the carriage in time for her to catch it, and thus

avoid the walk to the metro, and the subsequent strap-hanging;

for it was the work-people’s hour. Susy raced toward the

vehicle, which, overcoming its hesitation, was beginning to move

in her direction. Observing this, she stopped to see where it

would discharge its load. Thereupon the taxi stopped also, and

the load discharged itself in front of her in the shape of Nick

Lansing.

 

The two stood staring at each other through the rain till Nick

broke out: “Where are you going? I came to get you.”

 

“To get me? To get me?” she repeated. Beside the driver she

had suddenly remarked the old suitcase from which her husband

had obliged her to extract Strefford’s cigars as they were

leaving Como; and everything that had happened since seemed to

fall away and vanish in the pang and rapture of that memory.

 

“To get you; yes. Of course.” He spoke the words peremptorily,

almost as if they were an order. “Where were you going?” he

repeated.

 

Without answering, she turned toward the house. He followed

her, and the laden taxi closed the procession.

 

“Why are you out in such weather without an umbrella?” he

continued, in the same severe tone, drawing her under the

shelter of his.

 

“Oh, because Junie’s umbrella is in tatters, and I had to leave

her mine, as I was going away for the whole day.” She spoke the

words like a person in a trance.

 

“For the whole day? At this hour? Where?”

 

They were on the doorstep, and she fumbled automatically for her

key, let herself in, and led the way to the sitting-room. It

had not been tidied up since the night before. The children’s

school books lay scattered on the table and sofa, and the empty

fireplace was grey with ashes. She turned to Nick in the pallid

light.

 

“I was going to see you,” she stammered, “I was going to follow

you to Fontainebleau, if necessary, to tell you … to prevent

you….”

 

He repeated in the same aggressive tone: “Tell me what?

Prevent what?”

 

“Tell you that there must be some other way … some decent

way … of our separating … without that horror. that horror

of your going off with a woman ….”

 

He stared, and then burst into a laugh. The blood rushed to her

face. She had caught a familiar ring in his laugh, and it

wounded her. What business had he, at such a time, to laugh in

the old