Edith Wharton - SSC 09 Page 16

  Ah, well—no use in retrospection. What was done was done: what undone must remain so to all eternity. Eternity—what did the word mean? How could the least fringe of its meaning be grasped by ephemeral creatures groping blindly through a few short years to the grave? Ah, the pity of it—pity, pity! That was the feeling that rose to the surface of his thoughts. Pity for all the millions of blind gropers like himself, the millions and millions who thought themselves alive, as he had, and suddenly found themselves dead: as he had! Poor mortals all, with that seed of annihilation that made them brothers—how he longed to help them, how he winced at the thought that he must so often have hurt them, brushing by in his fatuous vitality! How many other lives had he used up in his short span of living? Not consciously, of course—that was the worst of it! The old nurse who had slaved for him when he was a child, and then vanished from his life, to be found again, years after, poor, neglected, dying—well, for her he had done what he could. And that thin young man in his office, with the irritating cough, who might perhaps have been saved if he had been got away sooner? Stuck on to the end because there was a family to support—of course! And the old bookkeeper whom Dorrance had inherited from his father, who was deaf and half blind, and wouldn’t go either till he had to be gently told—? All that had been, as it were, the stuff out of which he, Paul Dorrance, had built up his easy, affluent, successful life. But, no, what nonsense! He had been fair enough, kind enough, whenever he found out what was wrong; only he hadn’t really pitied them, had considered his debt discharged when he had drawn a check or rung up a Home for Incurables. Whereas pity, he now saw—oh, curse it, he was talking like a Russian novel! Nonsense… nonsense… everybody’s turn came sooner or later. The only way to reform the world was to reform Death out of it. And instead of that, Death was always there, was there now, at the door, in the room, at his elbow… his Death, his own private and particular end-of-everything. Now! He snatched his hands away from his face. They were wet.

  A bell rang hesitatingly and the door opened behind him. He heard the servant say: “Mrs. Welwood.” He stood up, blinking at the harsh impact of light and life. “Mrs. Welwood.” Everything was going on again, going on again… people were behaving exactly as if he were not doomed… the door shut.

  “Eleanor!”

  She came up to him quickly. How close, alive, oppressive everyone seemed! She seldom came to his flat—he wondered dully why she had come today.

  She stammered: “What has happened? You promised to telephone at ten. I’ve been ringing and ringing. They said nobody answered—”

  Ah, yes; he remembered now. He looked at the receiver. It lay on the desk, where he had dropped it when his eye had lit on that paper. All that had happened in his other life—before—Well, here she was. How pale she looked, her eyelids a little swollen. And yet how strong, how healthy—how obviously undiseased. Queer! She’d been crying too! Instinctively he turned, and put himself between her and the light.

  “What’s all the fuss about, dear?” he began jauntily.

  She colored a little, hesitating as if he had caught her at fault. “Why, it’s nearly one o’clock; and you told me the consultation was to be at nine. And you promised—”

  Oh, yes; of course. He had promised—With the hard morning light on her pale face and thin lips, she looked twenty years older. Older than what? After all, she was well over forty, and had never been beautiful. Had he ever thought her beautiful? Poor Eleanor—oh, poor Eleanor!

  “Well, yes; it’s my fault,” he conceded. “I suppose I telephoned to somebody” (this fib to gain time) “and forgot to hang up the receiver. There it lies; I’m convicted!” He took both her hands—how they trembled!—and drew her to him.

  This was Eleanor Welwood, for fifteen years past the heaviest burden on his conscience. As he stood there, holding her hands, he tried to recover a glimpse of the beginnings, and of his own state of mind at the time. He had been captivated; but never to the point of wishing she were free to marry him. Her husband was a pleasant enough fellow; they all belonged to the same little social group; it was a delightful relation, just as it was. And Dorrance had the pretext of his old mother, alone and infirm, who lived with him and whom he could not leave. It was tacitly understood that old Mrs. Dorrance’s habits must not be disturbed by any change in the household. So love, on his part, imperceptibly cooled (or should he say ripened?) into friendship; and when his mother’s death left him free, there still remained the convenient obstacle of Horace Welwood. Horace Welwood did not die; but one day, as the phrase is, he “allowed” his wife to divorce him. The news had cost Dorrance a sleepless night or two. The divorce was obtained by Mrs. Welwood, discreetly, in a distant and accommodating state; but it was really Welwood who had repudiated his wife, and because of Paul Dorrance. Dorrance knew this, and was aware that Mrs. Welwood knew he knew it. But he had kept his head, she had silenced her heart; and life went on as before, except that since the divorce it was easier to see her, and he could telephone to her house whenever he chose. And they continued to be the dearest of friends.

  He had often gone over all this in his mind, with an increasing satisfaction in his own shrewdness. He had kept his freedom, kept his old love’s devotion—or as much of it as he wanted—and proved to himself that life was not half bad if you knew how to manage it. That was what he used to think—and then, suddenly, two or three hours ago, he had begun to think differently about everything, and what had seemed shrewdness now unmasked itself as a pitiless egotism.

  He continued to look at Mrs. Welwood, as if searching her face for something it was essential he should find there. He saw her lips begin to tremble, the tears still on her lashes, her features gradually dissolving in a blur of apprehension and incredulity. “Ah—this is beyond her! She won’t be ‘brave’ now,” he thought with an uncontrollable satisfaction. It seemed necessary, at the moment, that someone should feel the shock of his doom as he was feeling it—should die with him, at least morally, since he had to die. And the strange insight which had come to him—this queer “behind-the-veil” penetration he was suddenly conscious of—had already told him that most of the people he knew, however sorry they might think they were, would really not be in the least affected by his fate, would remain as inwardly unmoved as he had been when, in the plenitude of his vigor, someone had said before him: “Ah, poor so-and-so—didn’t you know? The doctors say it’s all up with him.”

  With Eleanor it was different. As he held her there under his eyes he could almost trace the course of his own agony in her paling dissolving face, could almost see her as she might one day look if she were his widow—his widow! Poor thing. At least if she were that she could proclaim her love and her anguish, could abandon herself to open mourning on his grave. Perhaps that was the only comfort it was still in his power to give her… or in hers to give him. For the grave might be less cold if watered by her warm tears. The thought made his own well up, and he pressed her closer. At that moment his first wish was to see how she would look if she were really happy. His friend—his only friend! How he would make up to her now for his past callousness!

  “Eleanor—”

  “Oh, won’t you tell me?” she entreated.

  “Yes. Of course. Only I want you to promise me something first—”

  “Yes….”

  “To do what I want you to—whatever I want you to.”

  She could not still the trembling of her hands, though he pressed them so close. She could scarcely articulate: “Haven’t I, always—?

  Slowly he pronounced:” I want you to marry me.”

  Her trembling grew more violent, and then subsided. The shadow of her terrible fear seemed to fall from her, as the shadow of living falls from the face of the newly dead. Her face looked young and transparent; he watched the blood rise to her lips and cheeks.

  “Oh, Paul, Paul—then the news is good?”

  He felt a slight shrinking at her obtuseness. After all, she was alive (it wasn’t her fault),
she was merely alive, like all the rest—

  Magnanimously he rejoined: “Never mind about the news now.” But to himself he muttered: “Sancta Simplicitas!”

  She had thought he had asked her to marry him because the news was good!

  

  II.

  They were married almost immediately, and with as little circumstance as possible. Dorrance’s ill-health, already vaguely known of in his immediate group of friends, was a sufficient pretext for hastening and simplifying the ceremony; and the next day the couple sailed for France.

  Dorrance had not seen again the two doctors who had pronounced his doom. He had forbidden Mrs. Welwood to speak of the diagnosis, to him or to anyone else. “For God’s sake, don’t let’s dramatize the thing,” he commanded her; and she acquiesced.

  He had shown her the paper as soon as she had promised to marry him; and had hastened, as she read it, to inform her that of course he had no intention of holding her to her promise. “I only wanted to hear you say ‘yes,’” he explained, on a note of emotion so genuine that it deceived himself as completely as it did her. He was sure she would not accept his offer to release her; if he had not been sure he might not have dared to make it. For he understood now that he must marry her; he simply could not live out these last months alone. For a moment his thoughts had played sentimentally with the idea that he was marrying her to acquit an old debt, to make her happy before it was too late; but that delusion had been swept away like a straw on the torrent of his secret fears. A new form of egotism, fiercer and more impatient than the other, was dictating his words and gestures—and he knew it. He was marrying simply to put a sentinel between himself and the presence lurking on his threshold—with the same blind instinct of self-preservation which had made men, in old days, propitiate death by the lavish sacrifice of life. And, confident as he was, he had felt an obscure dread of her failing him till his ring was actually on her finger; and a great ecstasy of reassurance and gratitude as he walked out into the street with that captive hand on his arm. Could it be that together they would be able to cheat death after all?

  They landed at Genoa, and traveled by slow stages toward the Austrian Alps. The journey seemed to do Dorrance good; he was bearing the fatigue better than he had expected; and he was conscious that his attentive companion noted the improvement, though she forbore to emphasize it. “Above all, don’t be too cheerful,” he had warned her, half smilingly, on the day when he had told her of his doom. “Marry me if you think you can stand it; but don’t try to make me think I’m going to get well.”

  She had obeyed him to the letter, watching over his comfort, sparing him all needless fatigue and agitation, carefully serving up to him, on the bright surface of her vigilance, the flowers of travel stripped of their thorns. The very qualities which had made her a perfect mistress—self-effacement, opportuneness, the art of being present and visible only when he required her to be—made her (he had to own it) a perfect wife for a man cut off from everything but the contemplation of his own end.

  They were bound for Vienna, where a celebrated specialist was said to have found new ways of relieving the suffering caused by such cases as Dorrance’s—sometimes even (though Dorrance and his wife took care not to mention this to each other) of checking the disease, even holding it for years in abeyance. “I owe it to the poor child to give the thing a trial,” the invalid speciously argued, disguising his own passionate impatience to put himself in the great man’s hands. “If she wants to drag out her life with a half-dead man, why should I prevent her?” he thought, trying to sum up all the hopeful possibilities on which the new diagnostician might base his verdict—”Certainly,” Dorrance thought, “I have had less pain lately….”

  It had been agreed that he should go to the specialist’s alone; his wife was to wait for him at their hotel. “But you’ll come straight back afterward? You’ll take a taxi—you won’t walk?” she had pleaded, for the first time betraying her impatience. “She knows the hours are numbered, and she can’t bear to lose one,” he thought, a choking in his throat; and as he bent to kiss her he had a vision of what it would have been, after the interview that lay ahead of him, the verdict he had already discounted, to walk back to an hotel in which no one awaited him, climb to an empty room and sit down alone with his doom. “Bless you, child, of course I’ll take a taxi—”

  Now the consultation was over, and he had descended from the specialist’s door, and stood alone in the summer twilight, watching the trees darken against the illumination of the street lamps. What a divine thing a summer evening was, even in a crowded city street! He wondered that he had never before felt its peculiar loveliness. Through the trees the sky was deepening from pearl gray to blue as the stars came out. He stood there, unconscious of the hour, gazing at the people hurrying to and fro on the pavement, the traffic flowing by in an unbroken stream, all the ceaseless tides of the city’s life which had seemed to him, half an hour ago, forever suspended—

  “No, it’s too lovely; I’ll walk,” he said, rousing himself, and took a direction opposite to that in which his hotel lay. “After all,” he thought, “there’s no hurry…. What a charming town Vienna is—I think I should like to live here,” he mused as he wandered on under the trees—

  When at last he reached his hotel he stopped short on the threshold and asked himself: “How am I going to tell her?” He realized that during his two hours’ perambulations since he had left the doctor’s office he had thought out nothing, planned nothing, not even let his imagination glance at the future, but simply allowed himself to be absorbed into the softly palpitating life about him, like a tired traveler sinking, at his journey’s end, into a warm bath. Only now, at the foot of the stairs, did he see the future facing him, and understand that he knew no more how to prepare for the return to life than he had for the leaving it—”If only she takes it quietly—without too much fuss,” he thought, shrinking in advance from any disturbance of those still waters into which it was so beatific to subside.

  “That New York diagnosis was a mistake—an utter mistake,” he began vehemently, and then paused, arrested, silenced, by something in his wife’s face which seemed to oppose an invisible resistance to what he was in the act of saying. He had hoped she would not be too emotional—and now: what was it? Did he really resent the mask of composure she had no doubt struggled to adjust during her long hours of waiting? He stood and stared at her. “I suppose you don’t believe it?” he broke off, with an aimless irritated laugh.

  She came to him eagerly. “But of course I do, of course!” She seemed to hesitate for a second. “What I never did believe,” she said abruptly, “was the other—the New York diagnosis.”

  He continued to stare, vaguely resentful of this new attitude, and of the hint of secret criticism it conveyed. He felt himself suddenly diminished in her eyes, as though she were retrospectively stripping him of some prerogative. If she had not believed in the New York diagnosis, what must her secret view of him have been all the while? “Oh, you never believed in it? And may I ask why?” He heard the edge of sarcasm in his voice.

  She gave a little laugh that sounded almost as aimless as his. “I-—I don’t know. I suppose I couldn’t bear to, simply; I couldn’t believe fate could be so cruel.”

  Still with a tinge of sarcasm he rejoined: “I’m glad you had your incredulity to sustain you.” Inwardly he was saying: “Not a tear… not an outbreak of emotion…” and his heart, dilated by the immense inrush of returning life, now contracted as if an invisible plug had been removed from it, and its fullness were slowly ebbing. “It’s a queer business, anyhow,” he mumbled.

  “What is, dear?”

  “This being alive again. I’m not sure I know yet what it consists in.”

  She came up and put her arms about him, almost shyly. “We’ll try to find out, love—together.”

  

  III.

  This magnificent gift of life, which the Viennese doctor had restored to hi
m as lightly as his New York colleagues had withdrawn it, lay before Paul Dorrance like something external, outside of himself, an honor, an official rank, unexpectedly thrust on him: he did not discover till then how completely he had dissociated himself from the whole business of living. It was as if life were a growth which the surgeon’s knife had already extirpated, leaving him, disembodied, on the pale verge of nonentity. All the while that he had kept saying to himself: “In a few weeks more I shall be dead,” had he not really known that he was dead already?

  “But what are we to do, then, dearest?” he heard his wife asking. “What do you want? Would you like to go home at once? Do you want me to cable to have the flat got ready?”

  He looked at her in astonishment, wounded by such unperceivingness. Go home—to New York? To his old life there? Did she really think of it as something possible, even simple and natural? Why, the small space he had occupied there had closed up already; he felt himself as completely excluded from that other life as if his absence had lasted for years. And what did she mean by “going home”? The old Paul Dorrance who had made his will, wound up his affairs, resigned from his clubs and directorships, pensioned off his old servants and married his old mistress—that Dorrance was as dead as if he had taken that final step for which all those others were but the hasty preparation. He was dead; this new man, to whom the doctor had said: “Cancer? Nothing of the sort—not a trace of it. Go home and tell your wife that in a few months you’ll be as sound as any man of fifty I ever met—” This new Dorrance, with his new health, his new leisure and his new wife, was an intruder for whom a whole new existence would have to be planned out. And how could anything be decided until one got to know the new Paul Dorrance a little better?