Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Read online

  “Say I was out—but why?” Christine stood looking at her shyly, kindly. There had been a day when the meeting with Jeff’s wife would have filled her with anguish and terror; but now that the Jeff episode was happily over—obliterated, wiped out, as Devons said—what could she be to Mrs. Lithgow but a messenger of peace? “Why shouldn’t I see you?” she repeated with a smile.

  Mrs. Lithgow stood in the middle of the hall. Suddenly she looked up and her eyes rested on the withered “Joy in the House” that confronted her. “Well—because of that,” she said with a sharp laugh.

  Christine coloured up. How indelicate—how like Jeff! she thought. The shock of the sneer made her feel how deeply she herself had already been reabsorbed into the pacifying atmosphere of Crest Avenue. “Do come in,” she said, ignoring the challenge.

  Mrs. Lithgow followed her into the drawing-room and Christine closed the door. Her visitor stood still, looking about her as she had looked about the hall. “Flowers everywhere, joy everywhere,” she said, with the same low rasping laugh.

  Christine flushed again, again felt herself more deeply committed to the Crest Avenue attitude. “Won’t you sit down?” she suggested courteously.

  The other did not seem to hear. “And not one petal on his grave!” she burst out with a sudden hysterical cry.

  Christine gave a start of alarm. Was the woman off her balance—or only unconsciously imitating Jeffs crazy ravings? After a moment Christine’s apprehension gave way to pity—she felt that she must quiet and reassure the poor creature. Perhaps Mrs. Lithgow, who was presumably not kept informed of the course of her husband’s amatory adventures, actually thought that Christine meant to rejoin him. Perhaps she had come to warn her rival that she would never under any circumstances consent to a divorce.

  “Mrs. Lithgow,” Christine began, “I know you must think badly of me. I don’t mean to defend myself. But perhaps you don’t know that I’ve fully realised the wrong I’ve done, and that I’ve parted definitely from Jeff …”

  Mrs. Lithgow, sitting rigid in the opposite chair, emitted one of her fierce little ejaculations. “Not know? Oh, yes: I know. Look at this.” She drew a telegram out of her bag, and handed it to Christine, who unfolded it and read: “I thought I could stand her leaving me but I can’t. Goodbye.”

  “You see he kept me informed of your slightest movements,” said Mrs. Lithgow with a kind of saturnine satisfaction.

  Christine sat staring in silence at the message. She felt faint and confused. Why was the poor woman showing her those pitiful words, so obviously meant for no other eyes? She was seized with an agony of pity and remorse. “But it’s all over, it’s all over,” she murmured penitently, propitiatingly.

  “All over—yes! I was starting for Havre when I got that cable three days ago. But the other message caught me on my way to the train.”

  “The other message?”

  “Well, the one that said it was all over. He was buried yesterday. The Consul was there. It was the Consul who cabled me not to come—it was just as well; for I’d have had to borrow the money, and there are the children to think of. He hardly ever sent me any money,” added Mrs. Lithgow dispassionately. Her hysterical excitement had subsided with the communication of what she had come to say, and she spoke in a low monotonous voice like an absent-minded child haltingly reciting a lesson.

  Christine stood before her, the telegram in her shaking hands. Mrs. Lithgow’s words were still remote and unreal to her: they sounded like the ticking out of a message on a keyboard—a message that would have to be decoded…. “Jeff—Jeff? You mean—you don’t mean he’s dead?” she gasped.

  Mrs. Lithgow looked at her in astonishment. “You didn’t know—you really didn’t know?”

  “Know? How could you suppose … how could I imagine .. .?”

  “How could you imagine you’d—killed him?”

  “Ah, no! No! Not that—don’t say that!”

  “As if you’d held the revolver,” said Mrs. Lithgow implacably.

  “Ah, no—no, no!”

  “He held out for two days … he tried to pull himself together. I thought you must have seen it in one of those papers they print on the steamer.”

  Christine shook her head. “I never looked at them.”

  “And you actually mean to say your husband didn’t tell you?” Again Christine made a shuddering gesture of negation.

  “Well,” said Mrs. Lithgow, with her little acrid laugh, “now you know why he hung up that ‘Joy In The House’ for your arrival.”

  “Oh, don’t say that—don’t be so inhuman!”

  “Well—don’t he read the papers either?”

  “He couldn’t have … seen this …”

  “He must have been blind, then. There’s been nothing else in the papers. My husband was famous,” said Mrs. Lithgow with a sudden bitter pride.

  Christine had dropped down sobbing into a chair. “Oh, spare me—spare me!” she cried out, hiding her face.

  “I don’t know why I should,” she heard Mrs. Lithgow say behind her. Christine struggled to her feet, and the two women stood looking at each other in silence.

  “There’s no joy in the house for me,” said Mrs. Lithgow drily.

  “Oh, don’t—don’t speak of that again! That silly thing …”

  “My husband’s epitaph.”

  “How can you speak to me in that way?” Christine struggled to control herself, to fight down the humiliation and the horror. “It wasn’t my fault—-I mean that he … I was not the only one…. He was always imagining …”

  “He was always looking for the woman? Yes; artists are like that, I believe. But he was sure he’d found her when he found you. He never hid it from me. He told you so, didn’t he? He told you he couldn’t live without you? Only I suppose you didn’t believe him….”

  Christine sank down again with covered face. Only Mrs. Lithgow’s last words had reached her. “You didn’t believe him….” But hadn’t she, in the inmost depths of herself, believed him? Hadn’t she felt, during those last agonizing hours in the hotel at Havre, that what he told her was the truth, hadn’t she known that his life was actually falling in ruins, hadn’t her only care been to escape before the ruins fell on her and destroyed her too? Her husband had said the night before that she had come back to the place where she belonged; but if human responsibility counted for anything, wasn’t her place rather in that sordid hotel room where a man sat with buried face because he could not bear to see the door close on her forever?

  “Oh, what can I do—what can I do?” broke from her in her desolate misery.

  Mrs. Lithgow took the outcry as addressed to herself. “Do? For me, do you mean? I forgot—it was what I came for. About his pictures … I have to think about that already. The lawyers say I must…. Do you know where they are, what he’d done with them? Had he given you any to bring home?” She hung her head, turning sallow under her duskiness. “They say his dying in this terrible way will … will help the sale. … I have to think of the children. I’m beyond minding anything for myself. …”

  Christine looked at her vacantly. She was thinking: “I tried to escape from the ruins, and here they are crashing about me.” At first she could not recall anything about the pictures; then her memory cleared, and gave her back the address of a painter in Paris with whom Jeff had told her that he had left some of his things, in the hope that the painter might sell them. He had been worried, she remembered, because there was no money to send home for the children; he had hoped his friend would contrive to raise a few hundred francs on the pictures. She faltered out the address, and Mrs. Lithgow noted it down carefully on the back of her husband’s farewell cable. She was beyond minding even that, Christine supposed. Mrs. Lithgow pushed the cable back into her shabby bag.

  “Well,” she said, “I suppose you and I haven’t got anything else to say to each other.”

  It was on Christine’s lips to break out: “Only that I know now how I loved him—” but she da
red not. She moved a few steps nearer to Mrs. Lithgow, and held out her hands beseechingly. But the widow did not seem to see them. “Goodbye,” she said, and walked rigidly across the hall and out of the door.

  Christine followed her half way and then, as the door closed, turned back and looked up at the “Joy in the House” that still dangled inanely from the stair-rail. She was sure now that her husband had known of Jeff Lithgow’s death. How could he not have known of it? Even if he had not been the most careful and conscientious of newspaper readers, the house must have been besieged by reporters. Everybody in Stokesburg knew that she and Lithgow had gone off together; though they had slipped on board the steamer unnoticed the papers had rung with their adventure for days afterward. And of course the man she had caught Devons amiably banishing that morning was a journalist who had come to see how she had taken the news of the suicide….

  Yes; they had all known, and had all concealed it from her; her husband, her mother-in-law, Miss Bilk; even Martha and the cook had known. It had been Devons’s order that there should not be a cloud on the horizon; and there had not been one. She sat down on a chair in the white shiny hall, with its spick-and-span Chinese rug, the brass umbrella-stand, the etchings in their neat ebony mouldings. She would always see Mrs. Lithgow now, a blot on the threshold, a black restless ghost in the pretty drawing-room. Yes; Devons had known, and it had made no difference to him. His serenity and his good-humour were not assumed. He would probably say: Why should Lithgow’s death affect him? It was the providential solving of a problem. He wished the poor fellow no ill; but it was certainly simpler to have him out of the way….

  Christine sprang up with a spurt of energy. She must get away, get away at once from this stifling atmosphere of tolerance and benevolence, of smoothing over and ignoring and dissembling. Anywhere out into the live world, where men and women struggled and loved and hated, and quarrelled and came together again with redoubled passion…. But the hand which had opened that world to her was dead, was stiff in the coffin already. “He was buried yesterday,” she muttered….

  Martha came out into the hall to carry a vase of fresh flowers into the drawing-room. Christine stood up with weary limbs. “You’d better take that down—the flowers are dead,” she said, pointing to the inscription dangling from the stairs. Martha looked surprised and a little grieved. “Oh, ma’am—do you think Mr. Ansley would like you to? He worked over it so hard himself, him and Miss Bilk and me. And Mr. Chris helped us too. …”

  “Take it down,” Christine commanded sternly. “But there’s the boy—” she thought; and walked slowly up the stairs to find her son.

  (Nash’s Pall Mall 90, December 1932)

  

  Diagnosis.

  I.

  Nothing to worry about—absolutely nothing. Of course not… just what they all say!” Paul Dorrance walked away from his writing-table to the window of his high-perched flat. The window looked south, over the crowded towering New York below Wall Street which was the visible center and symbol of his life’s work. He drew a great breath of relief—for under his surface incredulity a secret reassurance was slowly beginning to unfold. The two eminent physicians he had just seen had told him he would be all right again in a few months; that his dark fears were delusions; that all he needed was to get away from work till he had recovered his balance of body and brain. Dorrance had smiled acquiescence and muttered inwardly: “Infernal humbugs: as if I didn’t know how I felt!”; yet hardly a quarter of an hour later their words had woven magic passes about him, and with a timid avidity he had surrendered to the sense of returning life. “By George, I do feel better,” he muttered, and swung about to this desk, remembering he had not breakfasted. The first time in months that he had remembered that! He touched the bell at his elbow, and with a half-apologetic smile told his servant that… well, yes… the doctors said he ought to eat more—Perhaps he’d have an egg or two with his coffee… yes, with bacon—He chafed with impatience till the tray was brought.

  Breakfast over, he glanced through the papers with the leisurely eye of a man before whom the human comedy is likely to go on unrolling itself for many years. “Nothing to be in a hurry about, after all,” was his half-conscious thought. That line which had so haunted him lately, about “Times wingèd chariot,” relapsed into the region of pure aesthetics, now that in his case the wings were apparently to be refurled. “No reason whatever why you shouldn’t live to be an old man.” That was pleasant hearing, at forty-nine. What did they call an old man, nowadays? He had always imagined that he shouldn’t care to live to be an old man: now he began by asking himself what he understood by the term “old.” Nothing that applied to himself, certainly; even if he were to be mysteriously metamorphosed into an old man at some far distant day—what then? It was too far off to visualize, it did not affect his imagination. Why, old age no longer began short of seventy; almost every day the papers told of hearty old folk celebrating their hundredth birthdays—sometimes by remarriage. Dorrance lost himself in pleasant musings over the increased longevity of the race, evoking visions of contemporaries of his grandparents, infirm and toothless at an age which found their descendants still carnivorous and alert.

  The papers read, his mind drifted agreeably among the rich possibilities of travel. A busy man ordered to interrupt his work could not possibly stay in New York. Names suggestive of idleness and summer clothes floated before him: the West Indies, the Canaries, Morocco—why not Morocco, where he had never been? And from there he could work his way up through Spain. He rose to reach for a volume from the shelves where his travel books were ranged—but as he stood fluttering its pages, in a state of almost thoughtless beatitude, something twitched him out of his dream. “I suppose I ought to tell her—” he said aloud.

  Certainly he ought to tell her; but the mere thought let loose a landslide of complications, obligations, explanations… their suffocating descent made him gasp for breath. He leaned against the desk, closing his eyes.

  But of course she would understand. The doctors said he was going to be all right—that would be enough for her. She would see the necessity of his going away for some months; a year perhaps. She couldn’t go with him; that was certain! So what was there to make a fuss about? Gradually, insidiously, there stole into his mind the thought—at first a mere thread of a suggestion—that this might be the moment to let her see, oh, ever so gently, that things couldn’t go on forever—nothing did—and that, at his age, and with this new prospect of restored health, a man might reasonably be supposed to have his own views, his own plans; might think of marriage; marriage with a young girl; children; a place in the country… his mind wandered into that dream as it had into the dream of travel—

  Well, meanwhile he must let her know what the diagnosis was. She had been awfully worried about him, he knew, though all along she had kept up so bravely. (Should he, in the independence of his recovered health, confess under his breath that her celebrated “braveness” sometimes got a little on his nerves?) Yes, it had been hard for her; harder than for anyone; he owed it to her to tell her at once that everything was all right; all right as far as he was concerned. And in her beautiful unselfishness nothing else would matter to her—at first. Poor child! He could hear her happy voice! “Really—really and truly? They both said so? You’re sure? Oh, of course I’ve always known… haven’t I always told you?” Bless her, yes; but he’d known all along what she was thinking—He turned to the desk, and took up the telephone.

  As he did so, his glance lit on a sheet of paper on the rug at his feet. He had keen eyes: he saw at once that the letterhead bore the name of the eminent consultant whom his own physician had brought in that morning. Perhaps the paper was one of the three or four prescriptions they had left with him; a chance gust from door or window might have snatched it from the table where the others lay. He stooped and picked it up—

  That was the truth, then. That paper on the floor held his fate. The two doctors had written out their diagn
osis, and forgotten to pocket it when they left. There were their two signatures; and the date. There was no mistake—Paul Dorrance sat for a long time with the paper on the desk before him. He propped his chin on his locked hands, shut his eyes, and tried to grope his way through the illimitable darkness…

  Anything, anything but the sights and sounds of the world outside! If he had had the energy to move he would have jumped up, drawn the curtains shut, and cowered in his armchair in absolute blackness till he could come to some sort of terms with this new reality—for him henceforth the sole reality. For what did anything matter now except that he was doomed—was dying? That these two scoundrels had known it, and had lied to him? And that, having lied to him, in their callous professional haste, they had tossed his death sentence down before him, forgotten to carry it away, left it there staring up at him from the floor?

  Yes; it would be easier to bear in a pitch-black room, a room from which all sights and sounds, all suggestions of life, were excluded. But the effort of getting up to draw the curtains was too great. It was easier to go on sitting there, in the darkness created by pressing his fists against his lids. “Now, then, my good fellow—this is what it’ll be like in the grave—”

  Yes; but if he had known the grave was there, so close, so all-including, so infinitely more important and real than any of the trash one had tossed the years away for; if somebody had told him… he might have done a good many things differently, put matters in a truer perspective, discriminated, selected, weighed—Or, no! A thousand times no! Be beaten like that? Go slinking off to his grave before it was dug for him? His folly had been that he had not packed enough into life; that he had always been sorting, discriminating, trying for a perspective, choosing, weighing—God! When there was barely time to seize life before the cup that held it was cracked, and gulp it down while you had a throat that could swallow!