The Greatest Works of Edith Wharton - 31 Books in One Edition. Edith Wharton

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СКАЧАТЬ and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to the wharf.

      Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their release and their isolation.

      As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return. But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper nearness that a touch may sunder.

      As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to take their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their possibility.

      In the bare diningroom of the inn, which he had hoped they would have to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young men and women—school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told them—and Archer’s heart sank at the idea of having to talk through their noise.

      “This is hopeless—I’ll ask for a private room,” he said; and Madame Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search of it. The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming in at the windows. It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a blueberry pie under a cage. No more guileless-looking cabinet particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him. A woman who had run away from her husband— and reputedly with another man—was likely to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other… .

      XXIV.

      They lunched slowly and meditatively, with mute intervals between rushes of talk; for, the spell once broken, they had much to say, and yet moments when saying became the mere accompaniment to long duologues of silence. Archer kept the talk from his own affairs, not with conscious intention but because he did not want to miss a word of her history; and leaning on the table, her chin resting on her clasped hands, she talked to him of the year and a half since they had met.

      She had grown tired of what people called “society”; New York was kind, it was almost oppressively hospitable; she should never forget the way in which it had welcomed her back; but after the first flush of novelty she had found herself, as she phrased it, too “different” to care for the things it cared about—and so she had decided to try Washington, where one was supposed to meet more varieties of people and of opinion. And on the whole she should probably settle down in Washington, and make a home there for poor Medora, who had worn out the patience of all her other relations just at the time when she most needed looking after and protecting from matrimonial perils.

      “But Dr. Carver—aren’t you afraid of Dr. Carver? I hear he’s been staying with you at the Blenkers’.”

      She smiled. “Oh, the Carver danger is over. Dr. Carver is a very clever man. He wants a rich wife to finance his plans, and Medora is simply a good advertisement as a convert.”

      “A convert to what?”

      “To all sorts of new and crazy social schemes. But, do you know, they interest me more than the blind conformity to tradition—somebody else’s tradition—that I see among our own friends. It seems stupid to have discovered America only to make it into a copy of another country.” She smiled across the table. “Do you suppose Christopher Columbus would have taken all that trouble just to go to the Opera with the Selfridge Merrys?”

      Archer changed colour. “And Beaufort—do you say these things to Beaufort?” he asked abruptly.

      “I haven’t seen him for a long time. But I used to; and he understands.”

      “Ah, it’s what I’ve always told you; you don’t like us. And you like Beaufort because he’s so unlike us.” He looked about the bare room and out at the bare beach and the row of stark white village houses strung along the shore. “We’re damnably dull. We’ve no character, no colour, no variety.—I wonder,” he broke out, “why you don’t go back?”

      Her eyes darkened, and he expected an indignant rejoinder. But she sat silent, as if thinking over what he had said, and he grew frightened lest she should answer that she wondered too.

      At length she said: “I believe it’s because of you.”

      It was impossible to make the confession more dispassionately, or in a tone less encouraging to the vanity of the person addressed. Archer reddened to the temples, but dared not move or speak: it was as if her words had been some rare butterfly that the least motion might drive off on startled wings, but that might gather a flock about it if it were left undisturbed.

      “At least,” she continued, “it was you who made me understand that under the dullness there are things so fine and sensitive and delicate that even those I most cared for in my other life look cheap in comparison. I don’t know how to explain myself”—she drew together her troubled brows— “but it seems as if I’d never before understood with how much that is hard and shabby and base the most exquisite pleasures may be paid.”

      “Exquisite pleasures—it’s something to have had them!” he felt like retorting; but the appeal in her eyes kept him silent.

      “I want,” she went on, “to be perfectly honest with you—and with myself. For a long time I’ve hoped this chance would come: that I might tell you how you’ve helped me, what you’ve made of me—”

      Archer sat staring beneath frowning brows. He interrupted her with a laugh. “And what do you make out that you’ve made of me?”

      She paled a little. “Of you?”

      “Yes: for I’m of your making much more than you ever were of mine. I’m the man who married one woman because another one told him to.”

      Her paleness turned to a fugitive flush. “I thought— you promised—you were not to say such things today.”

      “Ah—how like a woman! None of you will ever see a bad business through!”

      She lowered her voice. “IS it a bad business—for May?”

      He СКАЧАТЬ