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The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton Part Two




It was Una Van Sideren who, on this occasion, unconsciously
focussed upon herself Mrs. Westall's wandering resentment. In
the first place, the girl had no business to be there. It was
"horrid"--Mrs. Westall found herself slipping back into the old
feminine vocabulary--simply "horrid" to think of a young girl's
being allowed to listen to such talk. The fact that Una smoked
cigarettes and sipped an occasional cocktail did not in the least
tarnish a certain radiant innocency which made her appear the
victim, rather than the accomplice, of her parents' vulgarities.
Julia Westall felt in a hot helpless way that something ought to
be done--that some one ought to speak to the girl's mother. And
just then Una glided up.

"Oh, Mrs. Westall, how beautiful it was!" Una fixed her with
large limpid eyes. "You believe it all, I suppose?" she asked
with seraphic gravity.

"All--what, my dear child?"

The girl shone on her. "About the higher life--the freer
expansion of the individual--the law of fidelity to one's self,"
she glibly recited.

Mrs. Westall, to her own wonder, blushed a deep and burning
blush.

"My dear Una," she said, "you don't in the least understand what
it's all about!"

Miss Van Sideren stared, with a slowly answering blush. "Don't
YOU, then?" she murmured.

Mrs. Westall laughed. "Not always--or altogether! But I should
like some tea, please."

Una led her to the corner where innocent beverages were
dispensed. As Julia received her cup she scrutinized the girl
more carefully. It was not such a girlish face, after all--
definite lines were forming under the rosy haze of youth. She
reflected that Una must be six-and-twenty, and wondered why she
had not married. A nice stock of ideas she would have as her
dower! If THEY were to be a part of the modern girl's trousseau--

Mrs. Westall caught herself up with a start. It was as though
some one else had been speaking--a stranger who had borrowed her
own voice: she felt herself the dupe of some fantastic mental
ventriloquism. Concluding suddenly that the room was stifling
and Una's tea too sweet, she set down her cup, and looked about
for Westall: to meet his eyes had long been her refuge from every
uncertainty. She met them now, but only, as she felt, in
transit; they included her parenthetically in a larger flight.
She followed the flight, and it carried her to a corner to which
Una had withdrawn--one of the palmy nooks to which Mrs. Van
Sideren attributed the success of her Saturdays. Westall, a
moment later, had overtaken his look, and found a place at the
girl's side. She bent forward, speaking eagerly; he leaned back,
listening, with the depreciatory smile which acted as a filter to
flattery, enabling him to swallow the strongest doses without
apparent grossness of appetite. Julia winced at her own
definition of the smile.


On the way home, in the deserted winter dusk, Westall surprised
his wife by a sudden boyish pressure of her arm. "Did I open
their eyes a bit? Did I tell them what you wanted me to?" he
asked gaily.

Almost unconsciously, she let her arm slip from his. "What I
wanted--?"

"Why, haven't you--all this time?" She caught the honest wonder
of his tone. "I somehow fancied you'd rather blamed me for not
talking more openly--before-- You've made me feel, at times, that
I was sacrificing principles to expediency."

She paused a moment over her reply; then she asked quietly: "What
made you decide not to--any longer?"

She felt again the vibration of a faint surprise. "Why--the wish
to please you!" he answered, almost too simply.

"I wish you would not go on, then," she said abruptly.

He stopped in his quick walk, and she felt his stare through the
darkness.

"Not go on--?"

"Call a hansom, please. I'm tired," broke from her with a sudden
rush of physical weariness.

Instantly his solicitude enveloped her. The room had been
infernally hot--and then that confounded cigarette smoke--he had
noticed once or twice that she looked pale--she mustn't come to
another Saturday. She felt herself yielding, as she always did,
to the warm influence of his concern for her, the feminine in her
leaning on the man in him with a conscious intensity of
abandonment. He put her in the hansom, and her hand stole into
his in the darkness. A tear or two rose, and she let them fall.
It was so delicious to cry over imaginary troubles!

That evening, after dinner, he surprised her by reverting to the
subject of his talk. He combined a man's dislike of
uncomfortable questions with an almost feminine skill in eluding
them; and she knew that if he returned to the subject he must
have some special reason for doing so.

"You seem not to have cared for what I said this afternoon. Did
I put the case badly?"

"No--you put it very well."

"Then what did you mean by saying that you would rather not have
me go on with it?"

She glanced at him nervously, her ignorance of his intention
deepening her sense of helplessness.

"I don't think I care to hear such things discussed in public."

"I don't understand you," he exclaimed. Again the feeling that
his surprise was genuine gave an air of obliquity to her own
attitude. She was not sure that she understood herself.

"Won't you explain?" he said with a tinge of impatience.
Her eyes wandered about the familiar drawing-room which had been
the scene of so many of their evening confidences. The shaded
lamps, the quiet-colored walls hung with mezzotints, the pale
spring flowers scattered here and there in Venice glasses and
bowls of old Sevres, recalled, she hardly knew why, the apartment
in which the evenings of her first marriage had been passed--a
wilderness of rosewood and upholstery, with a picture of a Roman
peasant above the mantel-piece, and a Greek slave in "statuary
marble" between the folding-doors of the back drawing-room. It
was a room with which she had never been able to establish any
closer relation than that between a traveller and a railway
station; and now, as she looked about at the surroundings which
stood for her deepest affinities--the room for which she had left
that other room--she was startled by the same sense of
strangeness and unfamiliarity. The prints, the flowers, the
subdued tones of the old porcelains, seemed to typify a
superficial refinement that had no relation to the deeper
significances of life.

Suddenly she heard her husband repeating his question.

"I don't know that I can explain," she faltered.

He drew his arm-chair forward so that he faced her across the
hearth. The light of a reading-lamp fell on his finely drawn
face, which had a kind of surface-sensitiveness akin to the
surface-refinement of its setting.

"Is it that you no longer believe in our ideas?" he asked.

"In our ideas--?"

"The ideas I am trying to teach. The ideas you and I are
supposed to stand for." He paused a moment. "The ideas on which
our marriage was founded."

The blood rushed to her face. He had his reasons, then--she was
sure now that he had his reasons! In the ten years of their
marriage, how often had either of them stopped to consider the
ideas on which it was founded? How often does a man dig about
the basement of his house to examine its foundation? The
foundation is there, of course--the house rests on it--but one
lives abovestairs and not in the cellar. It was she, indeed, who
in the beginning had insisted on reviewing the situation now and
then, on recapitulating the reasons which justified her course,
on proclaiming, from time to time, her adherence to the religion
of personal independence; but she had long ceased to feel the
need of any such ideal standards, and had accepted her marriage
as frankly and naturally as though it had been based on the
primitive needs of the heart, and needed no special sanction to
explain or justify it.

"Of course I still believe in our ideas!" she exclaimed.

"Then I repeat that I don't understand. It was a part of your
theory that the greatest possible publicity should be given to
our view of marriage. Have you changed your mind in that
respect?"

She hesitated. "It depends on circumstances--on the public one
is addressing. The set of people that the Van Siderens get about
them don't care for the truth or falseness of a doctrine. They
are attracted simply by its novelty."

"And yet it was in just such a set of people that you and I met,
and learned the truth from each other."

"That was different."

"In what way?"

"I was not a young girl, to begin with. It is perfectly
unfitting that young girls should be present at--at such times--
should hear such things discussed--"

"I thought you considered it one of the deepest social wrongs
that such things never ARE discussed before young girls; but that
is beside the point, for I don't remember seeing any young girl
in my audience to-day--"

"Except Una Van Sideren!"

He turned slightly and pushed back the lamp at his elbow.

"Oh, Miss Van Sideren--naturally--"

"Why naturally?"

"The daughter of the house--would you have had her sent out with
her governess?"

"If I had a daughter I should not allow such things to go on in
my house!"

Westall, stroking his mustache, leaned back with a faint smile.
"I fancy Miss Van Sideren is quite capable of taking care of
herself."

"No girl knows how to take care of herself--till it's too late."

"And yet you would deliberately deny her the surest means of
self-defence?"

"What do you call the surest means of self-defence?"

"Some preliminary knowledge of human nature in its relation to
the marriage tie."

She made an impatient gesture. "How should you like to marry
that kind of a girl?"

"Immensely--if she were my kind of girl in other respects."

She took up the argument at another point.

"You are quite mistaken if you think such talk does not affect
young girls. Una was in a state of the most absurd exaltation--"
She broke off, wondering why she had spoken.

Westall reopened a magazine which he had laid aside at the
beginning of their discussion. "What you tell me is immensely
flattering to my oratorical talent--but I fear you overrate its
effect. I can assure you that Miss Van Sideren doesn't have to
have her thinking done for her. She's quite capable of doing it
herself."

"You seem very familiar with her mental processes!" flashed
unguardedly from his wife.

He looked up quietly from the pages he was cutting.

"I should like to be," he answered. "She interests me."



II


If there be a distinction in being misunderstood, it was one
denied to Julia Westall when she left her first husband. Every
one was ready to excuse and even to defend her. The world she
adorned agreed that John Arment was "impossible," and hostesses
gave a sigh of relief at the thought that it would no longer be
necessary to ask him to dine.

There had been no scandal connected with the divorce: neither
side had accused the other of the offence euphemistically
described as "statutory." The Arments had indeed been obliged to
transfer their allegiance to a State which recognized desertion
as a cause for divorce, and construed the term so liberally that
the seeds of desertion were shown to exist in every union. Even
Mrs. Arment's second marriage did not make traditional morality
stir in its sleep. It was known that she had not met her second
husband till after she had parted from the first, and she had,
moreover, replaced a rich man by a poor one. Though Clement
Westall was acknowledged to be a rising lawyer, it was generally
felt that his fortunes would not rise as rapidly as his
reputation. The Westalls would probably always have to live
quietly and go out to dinner in cabs. Could there be better
evidence of Mrs. Arment's complete disinterestedness?

If the reasoning by which her friends justified her course was
somewhat cruder and less complex than her own elucidation of the
matter, both explanations led to the same conclusion: John Arment
was impossible. The only difference was that, to his wife, his
impossibility was something deeper than a social
disqualification. She had once said, in ironical defence of her
marriage, that it had at least preserved her from the necessity
of sitting next to him at dinner; but she had not then realized
at what cost the immunity was purchased. John Arment was
impossible; but the sting of his impossibility lay in the fact
that he made it impossible for those about him to be other than
himself. By an unconscious process of elimination he had
excluded from the world everything of which he did not feel a
personal need: had become, as it were, a climate in which only
his own requirements survived. This might seem to imply a
deliberate selfishness; but there was nothing deliberate about
Arment. He was as instinctive as an animal or a child. It was
this childish element in his nature which sometimes for a moment
unsettled his wife's estimate of him. Was it possible that he
was simply undeveloped, that he had delayed, somewhat longer than
is usual, the laborious process of growing up? He had the kind
of sporadic shrewdness which causes it to be said of a dull man
that he is "no fool"; and it was this quality that his wife found
most trying. Even to the naturalist it is annoying to have his
deductions disturbed by some unforeseen aberrancy of form or
function; and how much more so to the wife whose estimate of
herself is inevitably bound up with her judgment of her husband!

Arment's shrewdness did not, indeed, imply any latent
intellectual power; it suggested, rather, potentialities of
feeling, of suffering, perhaps, in a blind rudimentary way, on
which Julia's sensibilities naturally declined to linger. She so
fully understood her own reasons for leaving him that she
disliked to think they were not as comprehensible to her husband.
She was haunted, in her analytic moments, by the look of
perplexity, too inarticulate for words, with which he had
acquiesced to her explanations.

These moments were rare with her, however. Her marriage had been
too concrete a misery to be surveyed philosophically. If she had
been unhappy for complex reasons, the unhappiness was as real as
though it had been uncomplicated. Soul is more bruisable than
flesh, and Julia was wounded in every fibre of her spirit. Her
husband's personality seemed to be closing gradually in on her,
obscuring the sky and cutting off the air, till she felt herself
shut up among the decaying bodies of her starved hopes. A sense
of having been decoyed by some world-old conspiracy into this
bondage of body and soul filled her with despair. If marriage
was the slow life-long acquittal of a debt contracted in
ignorance, then marriage was a crime against human nature. She,
for one, would have no share in maintaining the pretence of which
she had been a victim: the pretence that a man and a woman,
forced into the narrowest of personal relations, must remain
there till the end, though they may have outgrown the span of
each other's natures as the mature tree outgrows the iron brace
about the sapling.

It was in the first heat of her moral indignation that she had
met Clement Westall. She had seen at once that he was
"interested," and had fought off the discovery, dreading any
influence that should draw her back into the bondage of
conventional relations. To ward off the peril she had, with an
almost crude precipitancy, revealed her opinions to him. To her
surprise, she found that he shared them. She was attracted by
the frankness of a suitor who, while pressing his suit, admitted
that he did not believe in marriage. Her worst audacities did
not seem to surprise him: he had thought out all that she had
felt, and they had reached the same conclusion. People grew at
varying rates, and the yoke that was an easy fit for the one
might soon become galling to the other. That was what divorce
was for: the readjustment of personal relations. As soon as
their necessarily transitive nature was recognized they would
gain in dignity as well as in harmony. There would be no farther
need of the ignoble concessions and connivances, the perpetual
sacrifice of personal delicacy and moral pride, by means of which
imperfect marriages were now held together. Each partner to the
contract would be on his mettle, forced to live up to the highest
standard of self-development, on pain of losing the other's
respect and affection. The low nature could no longer drag the
higher down, but must struggle to rise, or remain alone on its
inferior level. The only necessary condition to a harmonious
marriage was a frank recognition of this truth, and a solemn
agreement between the contracting parties to keep faith with
themselves, and not to live together for a moment after complete
accord had ceased to exist between them. The new adultery was
unfaithfulness to self.

It was, as Westall had just reminded her, on this understanding
that they had married. The ceremony was an unimportant
concession to social prejudice: now that the door of divorce
stood open, no marriage need be an imprisonment, and the contract
therefore no longer involved any diminution of self-respect. The
nature of their attachment placed them so far beyond the reach of
such contingencies that it was easy to discuss them with an open
mind; and Julia's sense of security made her dwell with a tender
insistence on Westall's promise to claim his release when he
should cease to love her. The exchange of these vows seemed to
make them, in a sense, champions of the new law, pioneers in the
forbidden realm of individual freedom: they felt that they had
somehow achieved beatitude without martyrdom.

This, as Julia now reviewed the past, she perceived to have been
her theoretical attitude toward marriage. It was unconsciously,
insidiously, that her ten years of happiness with Westall had
developed another conception of the tie; a reversion, rather, to
the old instinct of passionate dependency and possessorship that
now made her blood revolt at the mere hint of change. Change?
Renewal? Was that what they had called it, in their foolish
jargon? Destruction, extermination rather--this rending of a
myriad fibres interwoven with another's being! Another? But he
was not other! He and she were one, one in the mystic sense
which alone gave marriage its significance. The new law was not
for them, but for the disunited creatures forced into a mockery
of union. The gospel she had felt called on to proclaim had no
bearing on her own case. . . . She sent for the doctor and told
him she was sure she needed a nerve tonic.

She took the nerve tonic diligently, but it failed to act as a
sedative to her fears. She did not know what she feared; but
that made her anxiety the more pervasive. Her husband had not
reverted to the subject of his Saturday talks. He was unusually
kind and considerate, with a softening of his quick manner, a
touch of shyness in his consideration, that sickened her with new
fears. She told herself that it was because she looked badly--
because he knew about the doctor and the nerve tonic--that he
showed this deference to her wishes, this eagerness to screen her
from moral draughts; but the explanation simply cleared the way
for fresh inferences.

The week passed slowly, vacantly, like a prolonged Sunday. On
Saturday the morning post brought a note from Mrs. Van Sideren.
Would dear Julia ask Mr. Westall to come half an hour earlier
than usual, as there was to be some music after his "talk"?
Westall was just leaving for his office when his wife read the
note. She opened the drawing-room door and called him back to
deliver the message.

He glanced at the note and tossed it aside. "What a bore! I
shall have to cut my game of racquets. Well, I suppose it can't
be helped. Will you write and say it's all right?"

Julia hesitated a moment, her hand stiffening on the chair-back
against which she leaned.

"You mean to go on with these talks?" she asked.

"I--why not?" he returned; and this time it struck her that his
surprise was not quite unfeigned. The discovery helped her to
find words.

"You said you had started them with the idea of pleasing me--"

"Well?"

"I told you last week that they didn't please me."

"Last week? Oh--" He seemed to make an effort of memory. "I
thought you were nervous then; you sent for the doctor the next
day."

"It was not the doctor I needed; it was your assurance--"

"My assurance?"

Suddenly she felt the floor fail under her. She sank into the
chair with a choking throat, her words, her reasons slipping away
from her like straws down a whirling flood.

"Clement," she cried, "isn't it enough for you to know that I
hate it?"

He turned to close the door behind them; then he walked toward
her and sat down. "What is it that you hate?" he asked gently.

She had made a desperate effort to rally her routed argument.

"I can't bear to have you speak as if--as if--our marriage--were
like the other kind--the wrong kind. When I heard you there, the
other afternoon, before all those inquisitive gossiping people,
proclaiming that husbands and wives had a right to leave each
other whenever they were tired--or had seen some one else--"

Westall sat motionless, his eyes fixed on a pattern of the
carpet.

"You HAVE ceased to take this view, then?" he said as she broke
off. "You no longer believe that husbands and wives ARE
justified in separating--under such conditions?"

"Under such conditions?" she stammered. "Yes--I still believe
that--but how can we judge for others? What can we know of the
circumstances--?"

He interrupted her. "I thought it was a fundamental article of
our creed that the special circumstances produced by marriage
were not to interfere with the full assertion of individual
liberty." He paused a moment. "I thought that was your reason
for leaving Arment."

She flushed to the forehead. It was not like him to give a
personal turn to the argument.

"It was my reason," she said simply.

"Well, then--why do you refuse to recognize its validity now?"

"I don't--I don't--I only say that one can't judge for others."

He made an impatient movement. "This is mere hair-splitting.
What you mean is that, the doctrine having served your purpose
when you needed it, you now repudiate it."

"Well," she exclaimed, flushing again, "what if I do? What does
it matter to us?"

Westall rose from his chair. He was excessively pale, and stood
before his wife with something of the formality of a stranger.

"It matters to me," he said in a low voice, "because I do NOT
repudiate it."

"Well--?"

"And because I had intended to invoke it as"--

He paused and drew his breath deeply. She sat silent, almost
deafened by her heart-beats.

--"as a complete justification of the course I am about to take."

Julia remained motionless. "What course is that?" she asked.

He cleared his throat. "I mean to claim the fulfilment of your
promise."

For an instant the room wavered and darkened; then she recovered
a torturing acuteness of vision. Every detail of her
surroundings pressed upon her: the tick of the clock, the slant
of sunlight on the wall, the hardness of the chair-arms that she
grasped, were a separate wound to each sense.

"My promise--" she faltered.

"Your part of our mutual agreement to set each other free if one
or the other should wish to be released."

She was silent again. He waited a moment, shifting his position
nervously; then he said, with a touch of irritability: "You
acknowledge the agreement?"

The question went through her like a shock. She lifted her head
to it proudly. "I acknowledge the agreement," she said.

"And--you don't mean to repudiate it?"

A log on the hearth fell forward, and mechanically he advanced
and pushed it back.

"No," she answered slowly, "I don't mean to repudiate it."

There was a pause. He remained near the hearth, his elbow
resting on the mantel-shelf. Close to his hand stood a little
cup of jade that he had given her on one of their wedding
anniversaries. She wondered vaguely if he noticed it.

"You intend to leave me, then?" she said at length.

His gesture seemed to deprecate the crudeness of the allusion.

"To marry some one else?"

Again his eye and hand protested. She rose and stood before him.

"Why should you be afraid to tell me? Is it Una Van Sideren?"

He was silent.

"I wish you good luck," she said.



III


She looked up, finding herself alone. She did not remember when
or how he had left the room, or how long afterward she had sat
there. The fire still smouldered on the hearth, but the slant of
sunlight had left the wall.

Her first conscious thought was that she had not broken her word,
that she had fulfilled the very letter of their bargain. There
had been no crying out, no vain appeal to the past, no attempt at
temporizing or evasion. She had marched straight up to the guns.

Now that it was over, she sickened to find herself alive. She
looked about her, trying to recover her hold on reality. Her
identity seemed to be slipping from her, as it disappears in a
physical swoon. "This is my room--this is my house," she heard
herself saying. Her room? Her house? She could almost hear the
walls laugh back at her.

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