Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (23 page)

 
          
“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 dared 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)

 
          
  

 
          
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.