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

of training in

liking common people with big purses; in such cases her stock of

allowances and extenuations was inexhaustible. But they had to

be successful common people; and the trouble was that the

Hickses, judged by her standards, were failures. It was not

only that they were ridiculous; so, heaven knew, were many of

their rivals. But the Hickses were both ridiculous and

unsuccessful. They had consistently resisted the efforts of the

experienced advisers who had first descried them on the horizon

and tried to help them upward. They were always taking up the

wrong people, giving the wrong kind of party, and spending

millions on things that nobody who mattered cared about. They

all believed passionately in “movements” and “causes” and

“ideals,” and were always attended by the exponents of their

latest beliefs, always asking you to hear lectures by haggard

women in peplums, and having their portraits painted by wild

people who never turned out to be the fashion.

 

All this would formerly have increased Susy’s contempt; now she

found herself liking the Hickses most for their failings. She

was touched by their simple good faith, their isolation in the

midst of all their queer apostles and parasites, their way of

drifting about an alien and indifferent world in a compactly

clinging group of which Eldorada Tooker, the doctor and the two

secretaries formed the outer fringe, and by their view of

themselves as a kind of collective re-incarnation of some past

state of princely culture, symbolised for Mrs. Hicks in what she

called “the court of the Renaissance.” Eldorada, of course, was

their chief prophetess; but even the intensely “bright” and

modern young secretaries, Mr. Beck and Mr. Buttles, showed a

touching tendency to share her view, and spoke of Mr. Hicks as

“promoting art,” in the spirit of Pandolfino celebrating the

munificence of the Medicis.

 

“I’m getting really fond of the Hickses; I believe I should be

nice to them even if they were staying at Danieli’s,” Susy said

to Strefford.

 

“And even if you owned the yacht?” he answered; and for once his

banter struck her as beside the point.

 

The Ibis carried them, during the endless June days, far and

wide along the enchanted shores; they roamed among the

Euganeans, they saw Aquileia and Pomposa and Ravenna. Their

hosts would gladly have taken them farther, across the Adriatic

and on into the golden network of the Aegean; but Susy resisted

this infraction of Nick’s rules, and he himself preferred to

stick to his task. Only now he wrote in the early mornings, so

that on most days they could set out before noon and steam back

late to the low fringe of lights on the lagoon. His work

continued to progress, and as page was added to page Susy

obscurely but surely perceived that each one corresponded with a

hidden secretion of energy, the gradual forming within him of

something that might eventually alter both their lives. In what

sense she could not conjecture: she merely felt that the fact

of his having chosen a job and stuck to it, if only through a

few rosy summer weeks, had already given him a new way of saying

“Yes” and “No.”

 

VII.

 

OF some new ferment at work in him Nick Lansing himself was

equally aware. He was a better judge of the book he was trying

to write than either Susy or Strefford; he knew its weaknesses,

its treacheries, its tendency to slip through his fingers just

as he thought his grasp tightest; but he knew also that at the

very moment when it seemed to have failed him it would suddenly

be back, beating its loud wings in his face.

 

He had no delusions as to its commercial value, and had winced

more than he triumphed when Susy produced her allusion to

Marius. His book was to be called The Pageant of Alexander.

His imagination had been enchanted by the idea of picturing the

young conqueror’s advance through the fabulous landscapes of

Asia: he liked writing descriptions, and vaguely felt that

under the guise of fiction he could develop his theory of

Oriental influences in Western art at the expense of less

learning than if he had tried to put his ideas into an essay.

He knew enough of his subject to know that he did not know

enough to write about it; but he consoled himself by remembering

that Wilhelm Meister has survived many weighty volumes on

aesthetics; and between his moments of self-disgust he took

himself at Susy’s valuation, and found an unmixed joy in his

task.

 

Never—no, never!—had he been so boundlessly, so confidently

happy. His hack-work had given him the habit of application,

and now habit wore the glow of inspiration. His previous

literary ventures had been timid and tentative: if this one was

growing and strengthening on his hands, it must be because the

conditions were so different. He was at ease, he was secure, he

was satisfied; and he had also, for the first time since his

early youth, before his mother’s death, the sense of having some

one to look after, some one who was his own particular care, and

to whom he was answerable for himself and his actions, as he had

never felt himself answerable to the hurried and indifferent

people among whom he had chosen to live.

 

Susy had the same standards as these people: she spoke their

language, though she understood others, she required their

pleasures if she did not revere their gods. But from the moment

that she had become his property he had built up in himself a

conception of her answering to some deep-seated need of

veneration. She was his, he had chosen her, she had taken her

place in the long line of Lansing women who had been loved,

honoured, and probably deceived, by bygone Lansing men. He

didn’t pretend to understand the logic of it; but the fact that

she was his wife gave purpose and continuity to his scattered

impulses, and a mysterious glow of consecration to his task.

 

Once or twice, in the first days of his marriage, he had asked

himself with a slight shiver what would happen if Susy should

begin to bore him. The thing had happened to him with other

women as to whom his first emotions had not differed in

intensity from those she inspired. The part he had played in

his previous love-affairs might indeed have been summed up in

the memorable line: “I am the hunter and the prey,” for he had

invariably ceased to be the first only to regard himself as the

second. This experience had never ceased to cause him the

liveliest pain, since his sympathy for his pursuer was only less

keen than his commiseration for himself; but as he was always a

little sorrier for himself, he had always ended by distancing

the pursuer.

 

All these pre-natal experiences now seemed utterly inapplicable

to the new man he had become. He could not imagine being bored

by Susy—or trying to escape from her if he were. He could not

think of her as an enemy, or even as an accomplice, since

accomplices are potential enemies: she was some one with whom,

by some unheard-of miracle, joys above the joys of friendship

were to be tasted, but who, even through these fleeting

ecstasies, remained simply and securely his friend.

 

These new feelings did not affect his general attitude toward

life: they merely confirmed his faith in its ultimate

“jolliness.” Never had he more thoroughly enjoyed the things he

had always enjoyed. A good dinner had never been as good to

him, a beautiful sunset as beautiful; he still rejoiced in the

fact that he appreciated both with an equal acuity. He was as

proud as ever of Susy’s cleverness and freedom from prejudice:

she couldn’t be too “modern” for him now that she was his. He

shared to the full her passionate enjoyment of the present, and

all her feverish eagerness to make it last. He knew when she

was thinking of ways of extending their golden opportunity, and

he secretly thought with her, wondering what new means they

could devise. He was thankful that Ellie Vanderlyn was still

absent, and began to hope they might have the palace to

themselves for the remainder of the summer. If they did, he

would have time to finish his book, and Susy to lay up a little

interest on their wedding cheques; and thus their enchanted year

might conceivably be prolonged to two.

 

Late as the season was, their presence and Strefford’s in Venice

had already drawn thither several wandering members of their

set. It was characteristic of these indifferent but

agglutinative people that they could never remain long parted

from each other without a dim sense of uneasiness. Lansing was

familiar with the feeling. He had known slight twinges of it

himself, and had often ministered to its qualms in others. It

was hardly stronger than the faint gnawing which recalls the

tea-hour to one who has lunched well and is sure of dining as

abundantly; but it gave a purpose to the purposeless, and helped

many hesitating spirits over the annual difficulty of deciding

between Deauville and St. Moritz, Biarritz and Capri.

 

Nick was not surprised to learn that it was becoming the

fashion, that summer, to pop down to Venice and take a look at

the Lansings. Streffy had set the example, and Streffy’s

example was always followed. And then Susy’s marriage was still

a subject of sympathetic speculation. People knew the story of

the wedding cheques, and were interested in seeing how long they

could be made to last. It was going to be the thing, that year,

to help prolong the honeymoon by pressing houses on the

adventurous couple. Before June was over a band of friends were

basking with the Lansings on the Lido.

 

Nick found himself unexpectedly disturbed by their arrival. To

avoid comment and banter he put his book aside and forbade Susy

to speak of it, explaining to her that he needed an interval of

rest. His wife instantly and exaggeratedly adopted this view,

guarding him from the temptation to work as jealously as she had

discouraged him from idling; and he was careful not to let her

find out that the change in his habits coincided with his having

reached a difficult point in his book. But though he was not

sorry to stop writing he found himself unexpectedly oppressed by

the weight of his leisure. For the first time communal dawdling

had lost its charm for him; not because his fellow dawdlers were

less congenial than of old, but because in the interval he had

known something so immeasurably better. He had always felt

himself to be the superior of his habitual associates, but now

the advantage was too great: really, in a sense, it was hardly

fair to them.

 

He had flattered himself that Susy would share this feeling; but

he perceived with annoyance that the arrival of their friends

heightened her animation. It was as if the inward glow which

had given her a new beauty were now refracted upon her by the

presence of the very people they had come to Venice to avoid.

 

Lansing was vaguely irritated; and when he asked her how she

liked being with their old crowd again his irritation was

increased by her answering with a laugh that she only hoped the

poor dears didn’t see too plainly how they bored her. The

patent insincerity of the reply was a shock to Lansing. He knew

that Susy was not really bored, and he understood that she had

simply guessed his feelings and instinctively adopted them:

that henceforth she was always going to think as he thought. To

confirm this fear he said carelessly: “Oh, all the same, it’s

rather jolly