Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (20 page)

 
          
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The
moment the big liner began to move out of harbour Christine Ansley went down to
her small inside stateroom and addressed herself, attentively and
systematically, to unpacking and arranging her things. Only a week between
Havre and
New
York
;
but that was no reason why she should not be comfortably settled, have
everything within easy reach, “ship-shape,” in fact—she saw now the fitness of
the term.

 
          
She
sat down on the narrow berth with a sigh of mingled weariness and satisfaction.
The wrench had been dreadful—the last hours really desperate; she was shaken
with them still—but the very moment the steamer began to glide out into the
open the obsession fell from her, the tumult and the agony seemed to grow
unreal, remote, as if they had been part of a sensational film she had sat and
gazed at from the stalls. The real woman, her only real self, was here in this
cabin, homeward bound, was Mrs. Devons Ansley—ah, thank God, still Mrs. Devons
Ansley!—and not the bewildered shattered Christine who, a few hours earlier,
had stumbled out of the room in the hotel at Havre, repeating to the man who
sat, his face buried in his arms, and neither moved nor spoke any longer: “I
can’t … I mean I must. … I promised Devons I’d go back…. You
know
I promised!”

 
          
That
was barely three hours ago. But by this time no doubt Jeff Lithgow was in the
train again, on his way back to Paris; and she was here, on this blessed boat,
in this dear little cabin of her own, sitting on the narrow berth in which she
would sleep undisturbed through the long safe quiet night and on into the next
day, for as many hours on end as she chose. A whole week by herself, in which
to sleep, and to think things over, and gradually to become Christine Ansley
again—oh, yes, forever! The time seemed too short; she wished the steamer were
bound across the Pacific at its widest….

 
          
She
began to unpack, shaking out the garments she had flung into her steamer-trunk
that morning, she didn’t know how! What a welter of untidiness and confusion
she had come out of: things always being pitched into trunks or tumbled out, in
the perpetual rush and confusion of their unsettied lives. Poor Jeff! He would
never be anything but a roamer … With whom would he roam next, she wondered?
But that speculation did not detain her long. She wanted to turn her thoughts
away from Jeff, not to follow him through his subsequent divagations…. She
supposed all artists were like that; he said they were. Painters especially….
Not that she had ever thought him a great painter—not
really….
His portrait of her, for instance! Why, she must have sat
for it sixty times—no, sixty-two; she’d counted…. Hours and hours of stiff neck
and petrified joints…. He had a theory that a painter should always catch his
subjects unawares, but there wasn’t much unawareness about his practice! She
was thankful Devons had never seen that portrait…. Of course Devons didn’t know
much about painting; at least that particular kind of painting. In his own
line—as a militant moralist, and an amateur lecturer on the New Psychology—he
prided himself on being in the advance guard, an “ultra,” as he smilingly
boasted; but though he had a smattering of Academic culture, and had once
discoursed on Renaissance Painters to the Stokesburg Wednesday Evening Club,
his business as an active real-estate agent had prevented his having time to
deal with the moderns, and Christine recalled his genial guffaw when he had
first encountered a picture of Jeff’s at Mabel Breck’s: “My Lithgow,” Mabel
simperingly called it.

 
          
“That
a
Lithgow,
is it? Glad to know! I saw at once it
wasn’t a picture,” Dev had guffawed—how it had mortified Christine at the time!
Mabel had been obviously annoyed; Mabel liked to be in the “last boat,” but not
alone there; but Mabel’s husband and the others had enjoyed the joke, and been
put at their ease by it, for Devons passed for a wit in their set, and
Stokesburg, in spite of its thirst for modern culture, was not yet collecting
Lithgows….

 
          
Jeff
had a brilliant talent; Christine had been among the first to recognise it. At
least among the first at Stokesburg; for when she went to
New York
that spring she found that everybody (the
“everybody” she wanted to be one of) was talking of him, and wondering whether
one oughtn’t to get in ahead and buy his pictures. Yes, of course Jeff had
talent—but there was something unstable, unreliable in his talent, just as
there was in his character … whereas Devons …

 
          
She
put up her hands and hid her face in them for a moment…. Why this perpetual
pendulum swing: Jeff—Devons, Devons—Jeff, backward and forward in her brain?
The Jeff affair was over, wound up, wiped out of existence; she was Mrs. Devons
Ansley, going back to her husband after a six months’ absence. No; no six
months, even. Five months and sixteen days. That had been the understanding
when she and Devons had parted at the station (so like him to drive her to the
station, and see that she was properly settled in the
New York
train, and had the newspapers, and a box of
chocolates!). He had said then, slipping a letter into her hand with her
ticket: “Here, my dear; I’ve put it in writing so that there can be no mistake.
Any time within six months, if you want to come back, there’ll be joy in the
house. Joy in the house!” He had said it emphatically, deliberately, with a
drawn smile, and ended on a sort of nervous parody of his large hospitable
laugh. “
Within
six months! After
that, of course, I shall assume … I shall feel obliged to assume …” The train
was already moving, but his strained grin, his laborious laugh, had followed
her. It had been “poor Dev” then—till she saw Jeff’s dark eager head working a
way toward her through the crowd at the Grand Central station….

 
          
Well—she
had made a horrible mistake, and she had recognised it in time. Many women make
just such mistakes, but
to
few, even in communities
more advanced than Stokesburg, is given the opportunity of wiping out the past
and beginning over again. She owed that to Devons; to his really superhuman
generosity. It was something she would never forget; she would devote the rest
of her life to making up to him for it—to that, and to bringing up their boy to
appreciate and revere his father…. When she thought of the boy—her baby
Christopher—the sense of her iniquity, of her inhumanity, overcame her afresh.
She had walked out of the house and left husband and child to fend for
themselves, consoling
herself
with the idea that the
same thing happened to lots of children whose parents were “unsuited” to each
other, and that they never seemed much the worse for it. And then Christopher’s
Susan was a perfect nurse, and Mrs. Robbit, Devons’s mother (who had remarried,
but was again a widow) lived only five minutes away, and was devoted to her son
and to the boy, and would manage everything ever so much better than Christine
ever had. That had stilled her conscience as she pushed her way through the
crowd to join Jeff at the Grand Central … but now?

 
          
Now
she saw that, but for her husband’s magnanimity, his loyalty to his given word,
she would have been alone and adrift, husbandless and childless—for whatever
happened (even if Jeff had been able to persuade his wife to divorce him, which
had never been very sure, Madge Lithgow’s views being less “advance guard” and
more proprietary than Devons’s); whatever happened, Christine now knew, she
could never have married Jeffrey Lithgow…. Anything, anything but that!

 
          
“A
trial marriage,” Devons had called it, stiffening his lips into a benedictory
smile on the day when she had wrung his consent from him. “Let’s call it that,
shall we? A marriage, I’ll understand—not an elopement. For, of course, my
child, unless your object is marriage—and unless you have a definite
understanding—er … er … pledge—I couldn’t possibly let you expose yourself—.” A
man like Devons, of course, couldn’t dream that, to men like Jeff Lithgow,
marriage means nothing; that they don’t care whether they’re married or not,
because it makes no practical difference to them—no difference in their way of
thinking or living. After all, what’s the meaning of “self-realisation,” if
you’re to let your life be conditioned and contracted by somebody else’s? To
the abstract argument, of course, Devons would have agreed; it was exactly what
he was always preaching and proclaiming. “You wouldn’t think it a virtue to
limp about in a tight shoe, would you? Then, if the domestic shoe pinches—”
didn’t she know all the figures of speech and all the deductions? Jeff, on the
contrary, had never thought about such questions, or worried about his own
conduct or anybody else’s. Abstract reasoning sent him to sleep, and he was
unaware of institutions unless they got in his way and tripped him up. Every
faculty was concentrated on the pursuit of his two passions: painting and
loving. He said perhaps some time he’d take a day off—from painting, that
is—and find out about the rest of life….

 
          
With
Devons it was just the other way. He was forever taking out his convictions and
re-examining and re-formulating them. But he might lecture on “The New
Morality” to the end of time, and talk as loudly as he pleased about individual
liberty, and living one’s life:
his
life was one of bed-room slippers and the evening paper by a clean gas-fire,
with his wife stitching across the hearth, and telling him that the baby’s
first tooth was showing. Only, having proclaimed the doctrine of sentimental
liberty so long and loudly, when he was asked to apply his doctrine to his
wife’s case he had either to admit it was a
failure,
or to accept the consequences; and he had accepted them.

 
          
She
remembered the first day she had really listened to Jeff, consented to take his
entreaties seriously, his look of genuine surprise when she had questioned:
“Yes—but what about your wife?”

 
          
“Who—Madge?”
(As if he had had several, and wasn’t sure
which!) “Oh, Madge’s all right. She’s A-l.” That settled
it,
his easy smile seemed to say.

 
          
“But
if you feel like that about her—why do you want to leave her?”

 
          
He
took the end of one of his paint-brushes and ran it through the tawny-brown
ripples of Christine’s hair. “Because she smells of soap,” he said gravely.

 
          
“Oh, Jeff-—how monstrous!”
But how could she help laughing
with him when he laughed? “Madge understands—she
knows,”
he continued, reassuring her. “Doesn’t Ansley
know
?” he added, with sudden insight.
And she murmured: “I suppose people can’t help knowing when they’re out of
step….” “Well, what’s worrying you, then? Turn your head a fraction of a hair’s
breadth to the left, will you, darling? There—that’s it…. For how many aeons of
time do you suppose the Creator has been storing the light in your hair for me?
It may come from some star thirty million light-years away.
Especially
stored up for Jeff Lithgow!”

 
          
“But
then, if it comes from as far off as that, the star’s dead already; been dead
for aeons; the Christine star, you know.”

 
          
At
that he had drawn up his tormented eyebrows to meet the dusky-brown wrinkles of
his forehead.
“
Ton
dead?
Why, you’ve hardly begun to be alive! You’re a lovely buried lady
that I’ve stumbled on in a desert tomb, shrouded in your golden hair; and being
a sorcerer I’m breathing life into you. There! You’re actually getting rosier
with every word….”

 
          
“Yes,”
she laughed. “But those resuscitated ladies never stay alive long. What are you
going to do when I crumble on you?”

 
          
He
threw down his brushes. “Do? Kill myself. I’ve waited for you too long,” he
said with a sudden sombreness, and a shiver swept through her that checked her
laugh.

 
          
“Well—as
long as you don’t kill
me,”
she
bantered back with dry lips.

 
          
“Tow?
I won’t have to. You’ll die of losing me,” he
announced in his calm concentrated voice. “This isn’t any ordinary flurry, you
understand; it’s one of those damned predestined things…. Child! You’ve moved
again. Here—do try to look steadily at the left-hand upper corner of that picture-frame.
So …” He sank back into his absorption with a murmur of deep content.