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The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton CHAPTER XXXIII.
It was, as Mrs. Archer smilingly said to Mrs. Welland, a great event for a young
couple to give their first big dinner.
The Newland Archers, since they had set up their household, had received a good deal
of company in an informal way.
Archer was fond of having three or four friends to dine, and May welcomed them with
the beaming readiness of which her mother had set her the example in conjugal
affairs.
Her husband questioned whether, if left to herself, she would ever have asked any one
to the house; but he had long given up trying to disengage her real self from the
shape into which tradition and training had moulded her.
It was expected that well-off young couples in New York should do a good deal of
informal entertaining, and a Welland married to an Archer was doubly pledged to
the tradition.
But a big dinner, with a hired chef and two borrowed footmen, with Roman punch, roses
from Henderson's, and menus on gilt-edged cards, was a different affair, and not to
be lightly undertaken.
As Mrs. Archer remarked, the Roman punch made all the difference; not in itself but
by its manifold implications--since it signified either canvas-backs or terrapin,
two soups, a hot and a cold sweet, full
decolletage with short sleeves, and guests of a proportionate importance.
It was always an interesting occasion when a young pair launched their first
invitations in the third person, and their summons was seldom refused even by the
seasoned and sought-after.
Still, it was admittedly a triumph that the van der Luydens, at May's request, should
have stayed over in order to be present at her farewell dinner for the Countess
Olenska.
The two mothers-in-law sat in May's drawing-room on the afternoon of the great
day, Mrs. Archer writing out the menus on Tiffany's thickest gilt-edged bristol,
while Mrs. Welland superintended the placing of the palms and standard lamps.
Archer, arriving late from his office, found them still there.
Mrs. Archer had turned her attention to the name-cards for the table, and Mrs. Welland
was considering the effect of bringing forward the large gilt sofa, so that
another "corner" might be created between the piano and the window.
May, they told him, was in the dining-room inspecting the mound of Jacqueminot roses
and maidenhair in the centre of the long table, and the placing of the Maillard
bonbons in openwork silver baskets between the candelabra.
On the piano stood a large basket of orchids which Mr. van der Luyden had had
sent from Skuytercliff.
Everything was, in short, as it should be on the approach of so considerable an
event.
Mrs. Archer ran thoughtfully over the list, checking off each name with her sharp gold
pen.
"Henry van der Luyden--Louisa--the Lovell Mingotts--the Reggie Chiverses--Lawrence
Lefferts and Gertrude--(yes, I suppose May was right to have them)--the Selfridge
Merrys, Sillerton Jackson, Van Newland and his wife.
(How time passes!
It seems only yesterday that he was your best man, Newland)--and Countess Olenska--
yes, I think that's all...." Mrs. Welland surveyed her son-in-law
affectionately.
"No one can say, Newland, that you and May are not giving Ellen a handsome send-off."
"Ah, well," said Mrs. Archer, "I understand May's wanting her cousin to tell people
abroad that we're not quite barbarians."
"I'm sure Ellen will appreciate it. She was to arrive this morning, I believe.
It will make a most charming last impression.
The evening before sailing is usually so dreary," Mrs. Welland cheerfully continued.
Archer turned toward the door, and his mother-in-law called to him: "Do go in and
have a peep at the table.
And don't let May tire herself too much." But he affected not to hear, and sprang up
the stairs to his library.
The room looked at him like an alien countenance composed into a polite grimace;
and he perceived that it had been ruthlessly "tidied," and prepared, by a
judicious distribution of ash-trays and
cedar-wood boxes, for the gentlemen to smoke in.
"Ah, well," he thought, "it's not for long- -" and he went on to his dressing-room.
Ten days had passed since Madame Olenska's departure from New York.
During those ten days Archer had had no sign from her but that conveyed by the
return of a key wrapped in tissue paper, and sent to his office in a sealed envelope
addressed in her hand.
This retort to his last appeal might have been interpreted as a classic move in a
familiar game; but the young man chose to give it a different meaning.
She was still fighting against her fate; but she was going to Europe, and she was
not returning to her husband.
Nothing, therefore, was to prevent his following her; and once he had taken the
irrevocable step, and had proved to her that it was irrevocable, he believed she
would not send him away.
This confidence in the future had steadied him to play his part in the present.
It had kept him from writing to her, or betraying, by any sign or act, his misery
and mortification.
It seemed to him that in the deadly silent game between them the trumps were still in
his hands; and he waited.
There had been, nevertheless, moments sufficiently difficult to pass; as when Mr.
Letterblair, the day after Madame Olenska's departure, had sent for him to go over the
details of the trust which Mrs. Manson
Mingott wished to create for her granddaughter.
For a couple of hours Archer had examined the terms of the deed with his senior, all
the while obscurely feeling that if he had been consulted it was for some reason other
than the obvious one of his cousinship; and
that the close of the conference would reveal it.
"Well, the lady can't deny that it's a handsome arrangement," Mr. Letterblair had
summed up, after mumbling over a summary of the settlement.
"In fact I'm bound to say she's been treated pretty handsomely all round."
"All round?" Archer echoed with a touch of derision.
"Do you refer to her husband's proposal to give her back her own money?"
Mr. Letterblair's bushy eyebrows went up a fraction of an inch.
"My dear sir, the law's the law; and your wife's cousin was married under the French
law. It's to be presumed she knew what that
meant."
"Even if she did, what happened subsequently--."
But Archer paused.
Mr. Letterblair had laid his pen-handle against his big corrugated nose, and was
looking down it with the expression assumed by virtuous elderly gentlemen when they
wish their youngers to understand that virtue is not synonymous with ignorance.
"My dear sir, I've no wish to extenuate the Count's transgressions; but--but on the
other side...
I wouldn't put my hand in the fire...well, that there hadn't been *** for tat...with
the young champion...." Mr. Letterblair unlocked a drawer and
pushed a folded paper toward Archer.
"This report, the result of discreet enquiries..."
And then, as Archer made no effort to glance at the paper or to repudiate the
suggestion, the lawyer somewhat flatly continued: "I don't say it's conclusive,
you observe; far from it.
But straws show...and on the whole it's eminently satisfactory for all parties that
this dignified solution has been reached." "Oh, eminently," Archer assented, pushing
back the paper.
A day or two later, on responding to a summons from Mrs. Manson Mingott, his soul
had been more deeply tried. He had found the old lady depressed and
querulous.
"You know she's deserted me?" she began at once; and without waiting for his reply:
"Oh, don't ask me why! She gave so many reasons that I've
forgotten them all.
My private belief is that she couldn't face the boredom.
At any rate that's what Augusta and my daughters-in-law think.
And I don't know that I altogether blame her.
Olenski's a finished scoundrel; but life with him must have been a good deal gayer
than it is in Fifth Avenue.
Not that the family would admit that: they think Fifth Avenue is Heaven with the rue
de la Paix thrown in. And poor Ellen, of course, has no idea of
going back to her husband.
She held out as firmly as ever against that.
So she's to settle down in Paris with that fool Medora....
Well, Paris is Paris; and you can keep a carriage there on next to nothing.
But she was as gay as a bird, and I shall miss her."
Two tears, the parched tears of the old, rolled down her puffy cheeks and vanished
in the abysses of her ***. "All I ask is," she concluded, "that they
shouldn't bother me any more.
I must really be allowed to digest my gruel...."
And she twinkled a little wistfully at Archer.
It was that evening, on his return home, that May announced her intention of giving
a farewell dinner to her cousin.
Madame Olenska's name had not been pronounced between them since the night of
her flight to Washington; and Archer looked at his wife with surprise.
"A dinner--why?" he interrogated.
Her colour rose. "But you like Ellen--I thought you'd be
pleased." "It's awfully nice--your putting it in that
way.
But I really don't see--" "I mean to do it, Newland," she said,
quietly rising and going to her desk. "Here are the invitations all written.
Mother helped me--she agrees that we ought to."
She paused, embarrassed and yet smiling, and Archer suddenly saw before him the
embodied image of the Family.
"Oh, all right," he said, staring with unseeing eyes at the list of guests that
she had put in his hand.
When he entered the drawing-room before dinner May was stooping over the fire and
trying to coax the logs to burn in their unaccustomed setting of immaculate tiles.
The tall lamps were all lit, and Mr. van der Luyden's orchids had been conspicuously
disposed in various receptacles of modern porcelain and knobby silver.
Mrs. Newland Archer's drawing-room was generally thought a great success.
A gilt bamboo jardiniere, in which the primulas and cinerarias were punctually
renewed, blocked the access to the bay window (where the old-fashioned would have
preferred a bronze reduction of the Venus
of Milo); the sofas and arm-chairs of pale brocade were cleverly grouped about little
plush tables densely covered with silver toys, porcelain animals and efflorescent
photograph frames; and tall rosy-shaded
lamps shot up like tropical flowers among the palms.
"I don't think Ellen has ever seen this room lighted up," said May, rising flushed
from her struggle, and sending about her a glance of pardonable pride.
The brass tongs which she had propped against the side of the chimney fell with a
crash that drowned her husband's answer; and before he could restore them Mr. and
Mrs. van der Luyden were announced.
The other guests quickly followed, for it was known that the van der Luydens liked to
dine punctually.
The room was nearly full, and Archer was engaged in showing to Mrs. Selfridge Merry
a small highly-varnished Verbeckhoven "Study of Sheep," which Mr. Welland had
given May for Christmas, when he found Madame Olenska at his side.
She was excessively pale, and her pallor made her dark hair seem denser and heavier
than ever.
Perhaps that, or the fact that she had wound several rows of amber beads about her
neck, reminded him suddenly of the little Ellen Mingott he had danced with at
children's parties, when Medora Manson had first brought her to New York.
The amber beads were trying to her complexion, or her dress was perhaps
unbecoming: her face looked lustreless and almost ugly, and he had never loved it as
he did at that minute.
Their hands met, and he thought he heard her say: "Yes, we're sailing tomorrow in
the Russia--"; then there was an unmeaning noise of opening doors, and after an
interval May's voice: "Newland!
Dinner's been announced. Won't you please take Ellen in?"
Madame Olenska put her hand on his arm, and he noticed that the hand was ungloved, and
remembered how he had kept his eyes fixed on it the evening that he had sat with her
in the little Twenty-third Street drawing- room.
All the beauty that had forsaken her face seemed to have taken refuge in the long
pale fingers and faintly dimpled knuckles on his sleeve, and he said to himself: "If
it were only to see her hand again I should have to follow her--."
It was only at an entertainment ostensibly offered to a "foreign visitor" that Mrs.
van der Luyden could suffer the diminution of being placed on her host's left.
The fact of Madame Olenska's "foreignness" could hardly have been more adroitly
emphasised than by this farewell tribute; and Mrs. van der Luyden accepted her
displacement with an affability which left no doubt as to her approval.
There were certain things that had to be done, and if done at all, done handsomely
and thoroughly; and one of these, in the old New York code, was the tribal rally
around a kinswoman about to be eliminated from the tribe.
There was nothing on earth that the Wellands and Mingotts would not have done
to proclaim their unalterable affection for the Countess Olenska now that her passage
for Europe was engaged; and Archer, at the
head of his table, sat marvelling at the silent untiring activity with which her
popularity had been retrieved, grievances against her silenced, her past
countenanced, and her present irradiated by the family approval.
Mrs. van der Luyden shone on her with the dim benevolence which was her nearest
approach to cordiality, and Mr. van der Luyden, from his seat at May's right, cast
down the table glances plainly intended to
justify all the carnations he had sent from Skuytercliff.
Archer, who seemed to be assisting at the scene in a state of odd imponderability, as
if he floated somewhere between chandelier and ceiling, wondered at nothing so much as
his own share in the proceedings.
As his glance travelled from one placid well-fed face to another he saw all the
harmless-looking people engaged upon May's canvas-backs as a band of dumb
conspirators, and himself and the pale
woman on his right as the centre of their conspiracy.
And then it came over him, in a vast flash made up of many broken gleams, that to all
of them he and Madame Olenska were lovers, lovers in the extreme sense peculiar to
"foreign" vocabularies.
He guessed himself to have been, for months, the centre of countless silently
observing eyes and patiently listening ears; he understood that, by means as yet
unknown to him, the separation between
himself and the partner of his guilt had been achieved, and that now the whole tribe
had rallied about his wife on the tacit assumption that nobody knew anything, or
had ever imagined anything, and that the
occasion of the entertainment was simply May Archer's natural desire to take an
affectionate leave of her friend and cousin.
It was the old New York way of taking life "without effusion of blood": the way of
people who dreaded scandal more than disease, who placed decency above courage,
and who considered that nothing was more
ill-bred than "scenes," except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.
As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind Archer felt like a prisoner in the
centre of an armed camp.
He looked about the table, and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors from the
tone in which, over the asparagus from Florida, they were dealing with Beaufort
and his wife.
"It's to show me," he thought, "what would happen to ME--" and a deathly sense of the
superiority of implication and analogy over direct action, and of silence over rash
words, closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.
He laughed, and met Mrs. van der Luyden's startled eyes.
"You think it laughable?" she said with a pinched smile.
"Of course poor Regina's idea of remaining in New York has its ridiculous side, I
suppose;" and Archer muttered: "Of course."
At this point, he became conscious that Madame Olenska's other neighbour had been
engaged for some time with the lady on his right.
At the same moment he saw that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der
Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry, had cast a quick glance down the table.
It was evident that the host and the lady on his right could not sit through the
whole meal in silence. He turned to Madame Olenska, and her pale
smile met him.
"Oh, do let's see it through," it seemed to say.
"Did you find the journey tiring?" he asked in a voice that surprised him by its
naturalness; and she answered that, on the contrary, she had seldom travelled with
fewer discomforts.
"Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train," she added; and he remarked that she
would not suffer from that particular hardship in the country she was going to.
"I never," he declared with intensity, "was more nearly frozen than once, in April, in
the train between Calais and Paris."
She said she did not wonder, but remarked that, after all, one could always carry an
extra rug, and that every form of travel had its hardships; to which he abruptly
returned that he thought them all of no
account compared with the blessedness of getting away.
She changed colour, and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch: "I mean to do a
lot of travelling myself before long."
A tremor crossed her face, and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out: "I say,
Reggie, what do you say to a trip round the world: now, next month, I mean?
I'm game if you are--" at which Mrs. Reggie piped up that she could not think of
letting Reggie go till after the Martha Washington Ball she was getting up for the
Blind Asylum in Easter week; and her
husband placidly observed that by that time he would have to be practising for the
International Polo match.
But Mr. Selfridge Merry had caught the phrase "round the world," and having once
circled the globe in his steam-yacht, he seized the opportunity to send down the
table several striking items concerning the shallowness of the Mediterranean ports.
Though, after all, he added, it didn't matter; for when you'd seen Athens and
Smyrna and Constantinople, what else was there?
And Mrs. Merry said she could never be too grateful to Dr. Bencomb for having made
them promise not to go to Naples on account of the fever.
"But you must have three weeks to do India properly," her husband conceded, anxious to
have it understood that he was no frivolous globe-trotter.
And at this point the ladies went up to the drawing-room.
In the library, in spite of weightier presences, Lawrence Lefferts predominated.
The talk, as usual, had veered around to the Beauforts, and even Mr. van der Luyden
and Mr. Selfridge Merry, installed in the honorary arm-chairs tacitly reserved for
them, paused to listen to the younger man's philippic.
Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments that adorn Christian manhood and
exalt the sanctity of the home.
Indignation lent him a scathing eloquence, and it was clear that if others had
followed his example, and acted as he talked, society would never have been weak
enough to receive a foreign upstart like
Beaufort--no, sir, not even if he'd married a van der Luyden or a Lanning instead of a
Dallas.
And what chance would there have been, Lefferts wrathfully questioned, of his
marrying into such a family as the Dallases, if he had not already wormed his
way into certain houses, as people like
Mrs. Lemuel Struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake?
If society chose to open its doors to vulgar women the harm was not great, though
the gain was doubtful; but once it got in the way of tolerating men of obscure origin
and tainted wealth the end was total disintegration--and at no distant date.
"If things go on at this pace," Lefferts thundered, looking like a young prophet
dressed by Poole, and who had not yet been ***, "we shall see our children fighting
for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying Beaufort's ***."
"Oh, I say--draw it mild!"
Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested, while Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely
alarmed, and an expression of pain and disgust settled on Mr. van der Luyden's
sensitive face.
"Has he got any?" cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson, pricking up his ears; and while
Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh, the old gentleman twittered into
Archer's ear: "***, those fellows who are always wanting to set things right.
The people who have the worst cooks are always telling you they're poisoned when
they dine out.
But I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence's diatribe:--typewriter
this time, I understand...."
The talk swept past Archer like some senseless river running and running because
it did not know enough to stop. He saw, on the faces about him, expressions
of interest, amusement and even mirth.
He listened to the younger men's laughter, and to the praise of the Archer Madeira,
which Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully celebrating.
Through it all he was dimly aware of a general attitude of friendliness toward
himself, as if the guard of the prisoner he felt himself to be were trying to soften
his captivity; and the perception increased his passionate determination to be free.
In the drawing-room, where they presently joined the ladies, he met May's triumphant
eyes, and read in them the conviction that everything had "gone off" beautifully.
She rose from Madame Olenska's side, and immediately Mrs. van der Luyden beckoned
the latter to a seat on the gilt sofa where she throned.
Mrs. Selfridge Merry bore across the room to join them, and it became clear to Archer
that here also a conspiracy of rehabilitation and obliteration was going
on.
The silent organisation which held his little world together was determined to put
itself on record as never for a moment having questioned the propriety of Madame
Olenska's conduct, or the completeness of Archer's domestic felicity.
All these amiable and inexorable persons were resolutely engaged in pretending to
each other that they had never heard of, suspected, or even conceived possible, the
least hint to the contrary; and from this
tissue of elaborate mutual dissimulation Archer once more disengaged the fact that
New York believed him to be Madame Olenska's lover.
He caught the glitter of victory in his wife's eyes, and for the first time
understood that she shared the belief.
The discovery roused a laughter of inner devils that reverberated through all his
efforts to discuss the Martha Washington ball with Mrs. Reggie Chivers and little
Mrs. Newland; and so the evening swept on,
running and running like a senseless river that did not know how to stop.
At length he saw that Madame Olenska had risen and was saying good-bye.
He understood that in a moment she would be gone, and tried to remember what he had
said to her at dinner; but he could not recall a single word they had exchanged.
She went up to May, the rest of the company making a circle about her as she advanced.
The two young women clasped hands; then May bent forward and kissed her cousin.
"Certainly our hostess is much the handsomer of the two," Archer heard Reggie
Chivers say in an undertone to young Mrs. Newland; and he remembered Beaufort's
coarse sneer at May's ineffectual beauty.
A moment later he was in the hall, putting Madame Olenska's cloak about her shoulders.
Through all his confusion of mind he had held fast to the resolve to say nothing
that might startle or disturb her.
Convinced that no power could now turn him from his purpose he had found strength to
let events shape themselves as they would.
But as he followed Madame Olenska into the hall he thought with a sudden hunger of
being for a moment alone with her at the door of her carriage.
"Is your carriage here?" he asked; and at that moment Mrs. van der Luyden, who was
being majestically inserted into her sables, said gently: "We are driving dear
Ellen home."
Archer's heart gave a jerk, and Madame Olenska, clasping her cloak and fan with
one hand, held out the other to him. "Good-bye," she said.
"Good-bye--but I shall see you soon in Paris," he answered aloud--it seemed to him
that he had shouted it. "Oh," she murmured, "if you and May could
come--!"
Mr. van der Luyden advanced to give her his arm, and Archer turned to Mrs. van der
Luyden.
For a moment, in the billowy darkness inside the big landau, he caught the dim
oval of a face, eyes shining steadily--and she was gone.
As he went up the steps he crossed Lawrence Lefferts coming down with his wife.
Lefferts caught his host by the sleeve, drawing back to let Gertrude pass.
"I say, old chap: do you mind just letting it be understood that I'm dining with you
at the club tomorrow night? Thanks so much, you old brick!
Good-night."
"It DID go off beautifully, didn't it?" May questioned from the threshold of the
library. Archer roused himself with a start.
As soon as the last carriage had driven away, he had come up to the library and
shut himself in, with the hope that his wife, who still lingered below, would go
straight to her room.
But there she stood, pale and drawn, yet radiating the factitious energy of one who
has passed beyond fatigue. "May I come and talk it over?" she asked.
"Of course, if you like.
But you must be awfully sleepy--" "No, I'm not sleepy.
I should like to sit with you a little." "Very well," he said, pushing her chair
near the fire.
She sat down and he resumed his seat; but neither spoke for a long time.
At length Archer began abruptly: "Since you're not tired, and want to talk, there's
something I must tell you.
I tried to the other night--." She looked at him quickly.
"Yes, dear. Something about yourself?"
"About myself.
You say you're not tired: well, I am. Horribly tired..."
In an instant she was all tender anxiety. "Oh, I've seen it coming on, Newland!
You've been so wickedly overworked--"
"Perhaps it's that. Anyhow, I want to make a break--"
"A break? To give up the law?"
"To go away, at any rate--at once.
On a long trip, ever so far off--away from everything--"
He paused, conscious that he had failed in his attempt to speak with the indifference
of a man who longs for a change, and is yet too weary to welcome it.
Do what he would, the chord of eagerness vibrated.
"Away from everything--" he repeated. "Ever so far?
Where, for instance?" she asked.
"Oh, I don't know. India--or Japan."
She stood up, and as he sat with bent head, his chin propped on his hands, he felt her
warmly and fragrantly hovering over him.
"As far as that? But I'm afraid you can't, dear..." she said
in an unsteady voice. "Not unless you'll take me with you."
And then, as he was silent, she went on, in tones so clear and evenly-pitched that each
separate syllable tapped like a little hammer on his brain: "That is, if the
doctors will let me go...but I'm afraid they won't.
For you see, Newland, I've been sure since this morning of something I've been so
longing and hoping for--"
He looked up at her with a sick stare, and she sank down, all dew and roses, and hid
her face against his knee. "Oh, my dear," he said, holding her to him
while his cold hand stroked her hair.
There was a long pause, which the inner devils filled with strident laughter; then
May freed herself from his arms and stood up.
"You didn't guess--?"
"Yes--I; no. That is, of course I hoped--"
They looked at each other for an instant and again fell silent; then, turning his
eyes from hers, he asked abruptly: "Have you told any one else?"
"Only Mamma and your mother."
She paused, and then added hurriedly, the blood flushing up to her forehead: "That
is--and Ellen. You know I told you we'd had a long talk
one afternoon--and how dear she was to me."
"Ah--" said Archer, his heart stopping. He felt that his wife was watching him
intently. "Did you MIND my telling her first,
Newland?"
"Mind? Why should I?"
He made a last effort to collect himself. "But that was a fortnight ago, wasn't it?
I thought you said you weren't sure till today."
Her colour burned deeper, but she held his gaze.
"No; I wasn't sure then--but I told her I was.
And you see I was right!" she exclaimed, her blue eyes wet with victory.