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Tales Of Men And Ghosts

E >> Edith Wharton >> Tales Of Men And Ghosts




"Yes, yes--of course--whatever you think right," he would always
assent, sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and
laying it carelessly on the table, or oftener saying, with his
charming smile: "Get what you please, and just put it onyour
account, you know."

But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or
even to hint, in crimson misery,--as once, poor soul! she had had to
do,--that Mr. Deering had overlooked her last little account had
probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier,
on a corner of his littered writing-table. That hour had been bad
enough, though he had done his best to make it easy to carry it off
gallantly and gaily; but this was infinitely worse. For she had come
to complain of her pupil; to say that, much as she loved little
Juliet, it was useless, unless Mr. Deering could "do something," to
go on with the lessons.

"It wouldn't be honest--I should be robbing you; I'm not sure that I
haven't already," she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she
put her case. Little Juliet would not work, would not obey. Her
poor, little, drifting existence floated aimlessly between the
kitchen and the _lingerie_, and all the groping tendrils ofher
curiosity were fastened about the doings of the backstairs.

It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her
drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and onthe
"society notes" of the morning paper; but since Juliet's horizon was
not yet wide enough to embrace these loftier objects, her interest
was centered in the anecdotes that Celeste and Suzanne brought back
from the market and the library. That these were not always of an
edifying nature the child's artless prattle too often betrayed; but
unhappily they occupied her fancy to the complete exclusion of such
nourishing items as dates and dynasties, and the sources of the
principal European rivers.

At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself
bound to resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering's intervention; and
for Juliet's sake she chose the harder alternative. It _was_ hard to
speak to him not onlybecause one hated still more to ascribe it to
such vulgar causes, but becauseone blushed to bring them to the
notice of a spirit engaged with higher things. Mr. Deering was very
busy at that moment: he had a new picture "on." And Lizzie entered
the studio with the flutterof one profanely intruding on some sacred
rite; she almost heard the rustle of retreating wings as she
approached.

And then--and then--how differently it had all turned out! Perhaps
it wouldn't have, if she hadn't been such a goose--she who so seldom
cried, so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering
cageful of "feelings." But if she had cried, it was because he had
looked at her so kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless
felt him so pained and shamed by what she said. The pain, of course,
lay for both in the implication behind her words--in the one word
they left unspoken. If little Juliet was as she was, it was because
of the mother up-stairs--the mother who had given her child her
futile impulses, and grudged her the care that might have guided
them. The wretched case so obviously revolved in its own vicious
circle that when Mr. Deering had murmured, "Of course if my wife
were not an invalid," they both turned with a simultaneous spring to
the flagrant "bad example" of Celeste and Suzanne, fastening on that
with a mutual insistence that ended inhis crying out, "All the more,
then, how can you leave her to them?"

"But if I do her no good?" Lizzie wailed; and it was then
that,--when he took her hand and assured her gently, "But you do, you
do!"--it was then that, in the traditional phrase, she "brokedown,"
and her conventional protest quivered off into tears.

"You do _me_ good, at any rate--you make the houseseem less like a
desert," she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself
drawn to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.

They kissed each other--there was the new fact. One does not, if one
is a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin's Pension Suisse at
Passy, and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out
trustfully to other eyes--one does not, under these common but
defenseless conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without
being now and then kissed,--waylaid once by a noisy student between
two doors, surprised once by one's gray-bearded professoras one bent
over the "theme" he was correcting,--but these episodes, if they
tarnish the surface, do not reach the heart: itis not the kiss
endured, but the kiss returned, that lives. And Lizzie West's first
kiss was for Vincent Deering.

As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her--something
deeper than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of
Mrs. Deering. A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and
started out blindly to seek the sun.

She might have felt differently, perhaps,--the shame and penitence
might have prevailed,--had she not known him so kind and tender, and
guessed him so baffled, poor, and disappointed. She knew the failure
of his married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his
artistic career. Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at
the same laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the
question of his pictures, which she judged to be extremely
brilliant, but suspected of having somehowfailed to affirm their
merit publicly. She understood that he had tasted an earlier moment
of success: a mention, a medal, something official and tangible;
then the tide of publicity had somehow setthe other way, and left
him stranded in a noble isolation. It was extraordinary and
unbelievable that any one so naturally eminent and exceptional
should have been subject to the same vulgar necessities that
governed her own life, should have known povertyand obscurity and
indifference. But she gathered that this had been the case, and felt
that it formed the miraculous link between them. For through what
medium less revealing than that of sharedmisfortune would he ever
have perceived so inconspicuous an object as herself? And she
recalled now how gently his eyes had rested on her from the
first--the gray eyes that might have seemed mocking if they had not
been so gentle.

She remembered how he had met her the first day, when Mrs. Deering's
inevitable headache had prevented her from receiving the new
teacher, and how his few questions had at once revealed his interest
in the little stranded, compatriot, doomed to earn a precarious
living so far from her native shore. Sweet as the moment of
unburdening had been, she wondered afterward what had determined it:
how she, so shy and sequestered, had found herselfletting slip her
whole poverty-stricken story, even to the avowalof the ineffectual
"artistic" tendencies that had drawn her to Paris, and had then left
her there to the dry task of tuition. She wondered at first, but she
understood now; she understood everything after he had kissed her.
It was simply because he wasas kind as he was great.

She thought of this now as she mounted the hill in the spring
sunshine, and she thought of all that had happened since. The
intervening months, as she looked back at them, were merged in a
vast golden haze, through which here and there rose the outline of a
shining island. The haze was the general enveloping sense of his
love, and the shining islands were the days they had spent together.
They had never kissed again under his own roof. Lizzie's
professional honor had a keen edge, but she had been spared the
vulgar necessity of making him feel it. It was of theessence of her
fatality that he always "understood" when his failing to do so might
have imperiled his hold on her.

But her Thursdays and Sundays were free, and it soon became a habit
to give them to him. She knew, for her peace of mind, onlytoo much
about pictures, and galleries and churches had been the one bright
outlet from the grayness of her personal atmosphere. For poetry,
too, and the other imaginative forms of literature, she had always
felt more than she had hitherto had occasion to betray; and now all
these folded sympathies shot out their tendrils to the light. Mr.
Deering knew how to express with unmatched clearness and competence
the thoughts that trembled in her mind: to talk with him was to soar
up into the azure on the outspread wings of his intelligence, and
look down dizzily yet distinctly, on all the wonders and glories of
the world. She was a little ashamed, sometimes, to find how few
definite impressions she brought back from these flights; but that
was doubtless because her heart beatso fast when he was near, and
his smile made his words like a long quiver of light. Afterward, in
quieter hours, fragments of theirtalk emerged in her memory with
wondrous precision, every syllable as minutely chiseled as some of
the delicate objects in crystal or ivory that he pointed out in the
museums they frequented. It wasalways a puzzle to Lizzie that some
of their hours should be so blurred and others so vivid.

On the morning in question she was reliving all these memories with
unusual distinctness, for it was a fortnight since she had seen her
friend. Mrs. Deering, some six weeks previously, had gone to visit a
relation at St.-Raphael; and, after she had been a month absent, her
husband and the little girl had joined her. Lizzie'sadieux to
Deering had been made on a rainy afternoon in the damp corridors of
the Aquarium at the Trocadero. She could not receive him at her own
_pension_. That a teacher should bevisited by the father of a pupil,
especially when that father wasstill, as Madame Clopin said, _si
bien_, was against that lady's austere Helvetian code. From
Deering's first tentative hint of another solution Lizzie had
recoiled in a wild unreasoned flurry of all her scruples, he took
her "No, no, _no!_" as he tookall her twists and turns of
conscience, with eyes half-tender and half-mocking, and an instant
acquiescence which was the finest homage to the "lady" she felt he
divined and honored in her.

So they continued to meet in museums and galleries, or to extend, on
fine days, their explorations to the suburbs, where now and then, in
the solitude of grove or garden, the kiss renewed itself, fleeting,
isolated, or prolonged in a shy, silent pressure of the hand. But on
the day of his leave-taking the rain kept them under cover; and as
they threaded the subterranean windings of the Aquarium, and Lizzie
looked unseeingly at the monstrous faces glaring at her through
walls of glass, she felt like a poor drowned wretch at the bottom of
the sea, with all her glancing, sunlit memories rolling over her
like the waves of its surface.

"You'll never see him again--never see him again," the wavesboomed
in her ears through his last words; and when she had said good-by to
him at the corner, and had scrambled, wet and shivering, into the
Passy omnibus, its great, grinding wheels took up the derisive
burden--"Never see him, never see him again."

All that was only two weeks ago, and here she was, as happy as a
lark, mounting the hill to his door in the spring sunshine. Soweak a
heart did not deserve such a radiant fate; and Lizzie saidto herself
that she would never again distrust her star.






II





THE cracked bell tinkled sweetly through her heart as she stood
listening for the scamper of Juliet's feet. Juliet, anticipatingthe
laggard Suzanne, almost always opened the door for her governess,
not from any unnatural zeal to hasten the hour of her studies, but
from the irrepressible desire to see what was going on in the
street. But on this occasion Lizzie listened vainly for astep, and
at length gave the bell another twitch. Doubtless someunusually
absorbing incident had detained the child below-stairs; thus only
could her absence be explained.

A third ring produced no response, and Lizzie, full of dawning
fears, drew back to look up at the shabby, blistered house. She saw
that the studio shutters stood wide, and then noticed, without
surprise, that Mrs. Deering's were still unopened. No doubt
Mrs. Deering was resting after the fatigue of the journey.
Instinctively Lizzie's eyes turned again to the studio; and as she
looked, she saw Deering at the window. He caught sight of her, and
an instant later came to the door. He looked paler than usual, and
she noticed that he wore a black coat.

"I rang and rang--where is Juliet?"

He looked at her gravely, almost solemnly; then, without answering,
he led her down the passage to the studio, and closed the door when
she had entered.

"My wife is dead--she died suddenly ten days ago. Didn't you see it
in the papers?"

Lizzie, with a little cry, sank down on the rickety divan. She
seldom saw a newspaper, since she could not afford one for her own
perusal, and those supplied to the Pension Clopin were usually in
the hands of its more privileged lodgers till long after the hour
when she set out on her morning round.

"No; I didn't see it," she stammered.

Deering was silent. He stood a little way off, twisting an unlit
cigarette in his hand, and looking down at her with a gaze that was
both hesitating and constrained.

She, too, felt the constraint of the situation, the impossibility of
finding words that, after what had passed between them, should seem
neither false nor heartless; and at last she exclaimed, standing up:
"Poor little Juliet! Can't I go to her?"

"Juliet is not here. I left her at St.-Raphael with the relations
with whom my wife was staying."

"Oh," Lizzie murmured, feeling vaguely that this added to the
difficulty of the moment. How differently she had pictured
theirmeeting!

"I'm so--so sorry for her!" she faltered out.

Deering made no reply, but, turning on his heel, walked the length
of the studio, and then halted vaguely before the picture on the
easel. It was the landscape he had begun the previous autumn, with
the intention of sending it to the Salon that spring. But it was
still unfinished--seemed, indeed, hardly moreadvanced than on the
fateful October day when Lizzie, standing before it for the first
time, had confessed her inability to dealwith Juliet. Perhaps the
same thought struck its creator, for hebroke into a dry laugh, and
turned from the easel with a shrug.

Under his protracted silence Lizzie roused herself to the fact that,
since her pupil was absent, there was no reason for her remaining
any longer; and as Deering again moved toward her she said with an
effort: "I'll go, then. You'll send for me when shecomes back?"

Deering still hesitated, tormenting the cigarette between his
fingers.

"She's not coming back--not at present."

Lizzie heard him with a drop of the heart. Was everything to be
changed in their lives? But of course; how could she have dreamed it
would be otherwise? She could only stupidly repeat: "Not coming
back? Not this spring?"

"Probably not, since are friends are so good as to keep her. The
fact is, I've got to go to America. My wife left a little property,
a few pennies, that I must go and see to--for the child."

Lizzie stood before him, a cold knife in her breast. "I see--I see,"
she reiterated, feeling all the while that she strained her eyes
into impenetrable blackness.

"It's a nuisance, having to pull up stakes," he went on, with a
fretful glance about the studio.

She lifted her eyes slowly to his face. "Shall you be gone long?"
she took courage to ask.

"There again--I can't tell. It's all so frightfully mixed up." He
met her look for an incredibly long, strange moment. "Ihate to go!"
he murmured as if to himself.

Lizzie felt a rush of moisture to her lashes, and the old, familiar
wave of weakness at her heart. She raised her hand to her face with
an instinctive gesture, and as she did so he held out his arms.

"Come here, Lizzie!" he said.

And she went--went with a sweet, wild throb of liberation, with the
sense that at last the house was his, that _she_ was his, if he
wanted her; that never again would that silent, rebuking presence in
the room above constrain and shame her rapture.

He pushed back her veil and covered her face with kisses. "Don't
cry, you little goose!" he said.






III





THAT they must see each other again before his departure, in
someplace less exposed than their usual haunts, was as clear to
Lizzie as it appeared to be to Deering. His expressing the wish
seemed, indeed, the sweetest testimony to the quality of his feeling,
since, in the first weeks of the most perfunctory widowerhood, a man
of his stamp is presumed to abstain from light adventures. If, then,
at such a moment, he wished so much to be quietly and gravely with
her, it could be only for reasons she did not call by name, but of
which she felt the sacred tremor in her heart; and it would have
seemed incredibly vain and vulgar to put forward, at such a crisis,
the conventional objections by means of which such littleexposed
existences defend the treasure of their freshness.

In such a mood as this one may descend from the Passy omnibus at the
corner of the Pont de la Concorde (she had not let him fetch her in
a cab) with a sense of dedication almost solemn, and may advance to
meet one's fate, in the shape of a gentleman of melancholy elegance,
with an auto-taxi at his call, as one has advanced to the
altar-steps in some girlish bridal vision.

Even the experienced waiter ushering them into an upper roomof the
quiet restaurant on the Seine could hardly have supposed their quest
for seclusion to be based on sentimental motives, so soberly did
Deering give his orders, while his companion sat small and grave at
his side. She did not, indeed, mean to let her private pang obscure
their hour together: she was already learning that Deering shrank
from sadness. He should see that she had courage and gaiety to face
their coming separation, and yet give herself meanwhile to this
completer nearness; but she waited, as always, for him to strike the
opening note.

Looking back at it later, she wondered at the mild suavity of the
hour. Her heart was unversed inhappiness, but he had found the tone
to lull her apprehensions, and make her trust her fate for any
golden wonder. Deepest of all, he gave her the sense of something
tacit and confirmed between them, as if his tenderness were a habit
of the heart hardly needing the support of outward proof.

Such proof as he offered came, therefore, as a kind of crowning
luxury, the flower of a profoundly rooted sentiment; andhere again
the instinctive reserves and defenses would have seemed to vulgarize
what his trust ennobled. But if all the tender casuistries of her
heart were at his service, he took no grave advantage of them. Even
when they sat alone after dinner, with the lights of the river
trembling through their one low window, and the vast rumor of Paris
inclosing them in a heart of silence, he seemed, as much as herself,
under the spell of hallowing influences. She felt it most of all as
she yielded to the arm hepresently put about her, to the long caress
he laid on her lips and eyes: not a word or gesture missed the note
of quiet union, or cast a doubt, in retrospect, on the pact they
sealed with their last look.

That pact, as she reviewed it through a sleepless night, seemed to
have consisted mainly, on his part, in pleadings for full and
frequent news of her, on hers in the assurance that it shouldbe
given as often as he asked it. She had felt an intense desirenot to
betray any undue eagerness, any crude desire to affirm anddefine her
hold on him. Her life had given her a certain acquaintance with the
arts of defense: girls in her situation were commonly supposed to
know them all, and to use them as occasion called. But Lizzie's very
need of them had intensified her disdain. Just because she was so
poor, and had always, materially, so to count her change and
calculate her margin, she would at least know the joy of emotional
prodigality, would give her heart as recklessly as the rich their
millions. She was sure now that Deering loved her, and if he had
seized the occasion of their farewell to give her some definitely
worded sign of his feeling--if, more plainly, he had asked her to
marry him,--his doing so would have seemed less like a proof of his
sincerity than of his suspecting in her the need of a verbal
warrant. That he had abstained seemed to show that he trusted her as
she trusted him, and that they were one most of all in this deep
security of understanding.

She had tried to make him divine all this in the chariness of her
promise to write. She would write; of course she would. Buthe would
be busy, preoccupied, on the move: it was for him to lether know
when he wished a word, to spare her the embarrassment ofill-timed
intrusions.

"Intrusions?" He had smiled the word away. "You can't wellintrude,
my darling, on a heart where you're already established, to the
complete exclusion of other lodgers." And then, taking her hands,
and looking up from them into her happy, dizzy eyes: "You don't know
much about being in love, do you, Lizzie?" he laughingly ended.

It seemed easy enough to reject this imputation in a kiss; but she
wondered afterward if she had not deserved it. Was she really cold
and conventional, and did other women give more richly and
recklessly? She found that it was possible to turn about every one
of her reserves and delicacies so that they looked like selfish
scruples and petty pruderies, and at this game she came in time to
exhaust all the resources of an over-abundant casuistry.

Meanwhile the first days after Deering's departure wore a soft,
refracted light like the radiance lingering after sunset. _He_, at
any rate, was taxable with no reserves, nocalculations, and his
letters of farewell, from train and steamer, filled her with long
murmurs and echoes of his presence. How he loved her, how he loved
her--and how he knew how to tell her so!

She was not sure of possessing the same aptitude. Unused tothe
expression of personal emotion, she fluctuated between the impulse
to pour out all she felt and the fear lest her extravagance should
amuse or even bore him. She never lost the sense that what was to
her the central crisis of experience must be a mere episode in a
life so predestined as his to romantic accidents. All that she felt
and said would be subjected to the test of comparison with what
others had already given him: from all quarters of the globeshe saw
passionate missives winging their way toward Deering, forwhom her
poor little swallow-flight ofdevotion could certainly not make a
summer. But such moments were succeeded by others in which she
raised her head and dared inwardly to affirm her conviction that no
woman had ever loved him just as she had, and that none, therefore,
had probably found just such things to say to him. And this
conviction strengthened the other less solidly based belief that
_he_ also, for the same reason, had found new accents to express his
tenderness, and that the three letters she wore all day in her
shabby blouse, and hid all night beneath her pillow, surpassed not
only in beauty, but in quality, all he had ever penned for other
eyes.

They gave her, at any rate, during the weeks that she wore them on
her heart, sensations even more complex and delicate than Deering's
actual presence had ever occasioned. To be with him was always like
breasting a bright, rough sea, that blinded while it buoyed her: but
his letters formed a still pool of contemplation, above which she
could bend, and see the reflection of the sky, and the myriad
movements of life that flitted and gleamed below the surface. The
wealth of his hidden life--that was what most surprised her! It was
incredible to her now that she had had no inkling of it, but had
kept on blindly along the narrow track of habit, like a traveler
climbing a road in a fog, who suddenly finds himself on a sunlit
crag between blue leagues of sky and dizzy depths of valley. And the
odd thing was that all the people about her--the whole world of the
Passy pension--were still plodding along the same dull path,
preoccupied with the pebbles underfoot, and unconscious of the glory
beyond the fog!

There were wild hours when she longed to cry out to them what one
saw from the summit--and hours of tremulous abasement when she asked
herself why _her_ happy feet had been guided there, while others, no
doubt as worthy, stumbled and blundered in obscurity. She felt, in
particular, a sudden urgent pity for the two or three other girls at
Mme. Clopin's--girls older, duller, less alive than she, and by that
very token more appealingly flung upon her sympathy. Would they ever
know? Had they ever known?--those were the questions that haunted
her as she crossed her companions on the stairs, faced them at the
dinner-table, and listened to their poor, pining talk in the dim-lit
slippery-seated _salon_. One ofthe girls was Swiss, the other
English; the third, Andora Macy, was ayoung lady from the Southern
States who was studying French with the ultimate object of imparting
it to the inmates of a girls' school at Macon, Georgia.

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