Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (21 page)

 
          
Yes;
she saw it now. That was the kind of thing that had dazzled her—the
light-years, and the buried lady, and that calm fatalistic vision: “You’ll die
of losing me—
Und mein Stamm
sind
jene Asra .
. .” and all the rest of it.

 
          
And then—the reality?
Well, it wasn’t that he seemed to love
her less. Perhaps it was, in
part, that
the violence,
the absoluteness of his love, was too much for her, was more than mortal
stature—hers at any rate—could carry. There were days when she simply staggered
under the load. And somehow he never seemed to try to share it with her—just
left her to bear this prodigious burden of being loved by him as he left her,
when they got out at a railway station, to stagger under the burden of their
joint bags and wraps, to dive after the umbrellas, capture a porter and hunt
for the hotel bus, while he solicitously nursed those sacred objects, his
“painting things,” and forgot about everything else, herself included.

 
          
Not that he wasn’t kind;
but how could he notice a poor
woman carrying too heavy a load when he was miles above the earth, floating
overhead in his native medium, in the stratosphere, as he called it? Why
wouldn’t she come up there with him?
he
was always
asking her. “Don’t say you couldn’t breathe up there, when your eyes are made
of two pieces of it.” She had thought that enchanting, she remembered….

 
          
But
then, one day, when her eyes reminded him of something else, and he was bending
over them, as he said, to fish for his lost soul—that day he had drawn back
suddenly, and exclaimed, in a voice strident with jealousy: “Who’s that other
man in your eyes?”

 
          
Genuinely
bewildered, she lifted them from the letter she had been reading.
“The other man?”
They filled with tears.
“Oh,
such a darling man!
My little boy.
This is from
his Nanny—”

 
          
“Your little boy?”
He seemed really not to know of whom she
was speaking.

 
          
“My son Christopher.
You haven’t forgotten, I suppose, that
I have a child at home, and must sometimes think of him?”

 
          
His
own eyes darkened with momentary pity. “Oh, you poor lost mother-bird! But
we’ll have another child,” he declared with sudden conviction, as if he were
saying: “Poor child yourself—you’ve broken your toy, but I’ll buy you another.
…”

 
          
And
then there had been the other day, less painful but more humiliating, when he
had to tell her that the London dealer had returned the picture sent on
approval, and that there wasn’t money enough left to pay the hotel bill in that
horrid place where the woman had been so insolent that they had already decided
to leave—the day when they had had to bear her rudeness, and invent things to
pacify her, and Jeff had offered to paint a head of her little girl in payment,
and the monster had looked at one of his canvases, and said:
“Est-ce que Monsieur se moque de moi?”
Ah, how Christine hated the memory of it, she who had always held her head so
high, and marked her passage by such liberalities! Devons, who wasn’t always
generous, gave big tips in travelling, perhaps because it was an easy way of
adding to his own consequence, and because he liked to be blessed by beggars,
and have servants rush to open doors for him. “It takes so little to make them
happy,” he always said, referring to the poor and the dependent; and Christine
sometimes wondered how he knew.

 
          
She
wasn’t sure any longer that it took so little to make anybody happy. In her
case it seemed to have taken the best of four or five people’s lives, and left
her so little happy that, with her steamer-trunk half unpacked, and the
luncheon gong booming, she could only throw herself down on her berth and weep.

 
          
  

 
          
“A
wireless, ma’am,” the steward said, coming up to her on the last day out.

 
          
Christine
took the message tremblingly; she had to wait a minute before breaking the
band. Supposing it should be from Jeff, re-opening the whole question, arguing,
pleading,
reproaching
her again? Or from Devons, to
say that after all he had presumed too much on his moral courage in saying she
might come back to him, with all Stokesburg maliciously agog for her return? Or
the boy?—Ah, if it should be to say that Christopher was ill, was dead—her
child whom she had abandoned so light-heartedly, and then, after a few weeks,
begun to fret and yearn for with an incessant torment of self-reproach? How
could she bear that, how could she bear it? The great tragic folds of her
destiny were more than she could ever fill, were cut on a scale too vast for
her. “Any answer, ma’am?” asked the hovering steward; and she stiffened herself
and opened the telegram.

 
          
“In
two days more there will be joy in the house. Devons and Christopher,” she
read, and the happy tears rushed to her eyes.

 
          
“Yes—there’s
an answer.” She found her pen, the steward produced a form, and she scribbled:
“And in my heart, you darlings.” Yes; it was swelling, ripening in her heart,
the joy of her return to these two people who were hers, who were waiting for
her, to whom, in spite of everything, she was still, sacredly and inalienably,
“my wife,” “my mother.” The steward hurried away, and she leaned back with
closed eyes and a meditative heart.

 
          
What
a relief to be drawn back into her own peaceful circle—to stop thinking about
Jeff and the last tormented months, and glide, through the door of that tender
welcome, into the safe haven of home! She kept her eyes shut, and tried to feel
that home again, to see and hear it….

 
          
A
house in
Crest Avenue
—how proud she had been of it when Devons had first brought her there!
Proud of the smooth circle of turf before the door, the two cut-leaved maples,
the carefully clipped privet hedge, the honeysuckle over the porch. It was in
the very best neighborhood, high up, dry, airy, healthy—and with the richest
people living close by. Old Mrs. Briscott, and the Barkly Troys, and the young
Palmers building their great new house on the ridge just above; Devons had the
right to be proud of taking his young wife to such a home. But what she thought
of now was not the Briscotts and the Troys and the Palmers—no, not even Mabel
Breck and her “last boat,” or the other social and topographical amenides of
Crest Avenue, but just the space enclosed in her own privet hedge: the garden
she and Devons had fussed over, ordered seeds and tools for, the house with its
wide friendly gables and the inevitable Colonial porch, the shining order
within doors, the sunny neatness of the nursery, the spring bulbs in Chinese
bowls on the south window-seat in the drawing-room, her books in their low
mahogany bookshelves, Devons’s own study, that was as tidy and glossy as a
model dairy, and Martha’s broad smile and fluted cap on the threshold. Even to
see Martha’s smile again would be a separate and individual joy! And at last
her clothes would be properly mended and pressed, and she would be able to
splash about at leisure in the warm bathroom….

 
          
She
was not in the least ashamed of lingering over these small sensual joys. She
had not made enough of them when they were hers, and dwelling on them now
helped to shut out something dark and looming on the threshold of her
thoughts—the confused sense that life is not a matter of water-tight
compartments, that no effort of the will can keep experiences from
interpenetrating and colouring each other, and that for all her memories and
yearnings she was really a new strange Christine entering upon a new strange
life….

 
          
As
the train reached Stokesburg, she leaned out, hungry for the sight of
Christopher. She saw a round pink face, an arm agitating a new straw hat, a
large pink hand gesticulating.

 
          
“No;
the boy’s waiting for you at home with his grandmother. I wanted to be alone to
greet my wife. Let me take your bag, my darling. So; be careful how you jump.”
He enveloped her with almost paternal vigilance, receiving her on his broad
chest as she stepped down on the platform. He smelt of eau de Cologne and bath
salts; something sanitary, crisp and blameless exhaled itself from his whole
person. If anything could ever corrupt him, it would not be moth and rust….

 
          
She
wanted to speak, to answer what he was saying; but her lips were dry.
“And Christopher?”
Her throat contracted as she tried to
ask.

 
          
“Bless
the boy! He’s growing out of all his clothes. Mother says—”

 
          
Oh,
the relief in her heart! “I suppose Susan’s had Mrs. Shetter in to help her
with the sewing?” How sweet it was to be saying the old usual things in the old
usual way!

 
          
“Well,
Susan—the fact is, Susan’s not here any more. She—”

 
          
Susan
not here!
Susan no longer with Christopher?
Christine’s heart contracted again, she felt herself suddenly plunged fall into
the unknown, the disquieting. What had happened, why had her boy been separated
from his nurse? But she hardly heard her husband’s answer—she was thinking in a
tumult: “After all, he was separated from his mother …”

 
          
“The
fact is
,
Susan was too hide-bound, too old-fashioned.
She was afraid of fresh air. She inflicted silly punishments. Mother and I felt
that a change was necessary. You’ll see what Miss Bilk has done already—”

 
          
“Miss
Bilk!” Ah, how she was prepared to hate Miss Bilk!
And her
mother-in-law also, for interfering and introducing new ideas and people behind
her back.
Christine had always felt, under Mrs. Robbit’s blandness and
acquiescence, a secret itch to meddle and
advise
. And
of course Devons had been wax in her hands….

 
          
And
here they were at the white gate, and across the newly clipped privet the house
smiled at them from all its glittering windows. On the shiny door-step stood
Mrs. Robbit, large and soft and beautifully dressed; and from her arms shot
forth a flying figure, shouting: “Daddy—Daddy!” as the car drew up.

 
          
Daddy—only
Daddy! Christine hung back, her dry eyes devouring the child, her lips
twitching. “My son, here’s your mother; here’s darling mummy, back from her
long journey. You know I always said she’d come,” Devons admonished him.

 
          
Christopher
stopped short, glanced at her, and twisted his hand nervously in his father’s.
She fell on her knees before him.
“Chris—my Chris!
You
haven’t forgotten me?”

 
          
“I
thought you were dead,” he said.

 
          
“Christopher,
I told you every day that your mother had only gone away on a journey,” his
father rebuked him.

 
          
“Yes;
but that’s what they always say when they’re dead,” the child rejoined, kicking
the gravel, and looking away from his mother. “You won’t lock up my wireless,
will you?” he asked suddenly. “Not because I thought you were dead?”

 
          
The
tension was relieved by tears and laughter, and with the boy on his father’s
shoulder, husband and wife walked up the carefully raked gravel to where Mrs.
Robbit smiled and rustled between newly painted tubs of blue hydrangeas. “I
wanted you to have your first moments alone with Chris and Devons—my daughter!”
Mrs. Robbit murmured, enfolding Christine in an embrace that breathed of
hygiene and Christian charity.

 
          
Miss
Bilk, discretion itself, hung in the background, hiding behind her spectacles.
When Christine saw how neutral-tinted she was, and how large the spectacles
were, her secret apprehension was relieved. Had she actually felt jealous of
Miss Bilk? Was it possible that Jeff had so altered her whole angle of vision,
taught her to regard all men and women as carnivora perpetually devouring each
other in hate or love? She put an appeased hand in the nursery-governess’s, and
walked across the threshold with a quiet heart.