Edith Wharton - SSC 09 (25 page)

 
          
“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!

 
          
  

 
          
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.”

 
          
  

 
          
This
magnificent gift of life, which the Viennese doctor had restored to him 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?

 
          
Conscious
that his wife was waiting for his answer, he said: “Oh, this fellow here may be
all wrong. Anyhow, he wants me to take a cure somewhere first—I’ve got the name
written down.