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Archer
tried to console himself with the thought that he was not quite such an ass
as Larry Lefferts, nor May such a simpleton as poor Gertrude; but the
difference was after all one of intelligence and not of standards. In
reality they all lived in a kind of hieroglyphic world, where the real thing
was never said or done or even thought, but only represented by a set of
arbitrary signs; as when Mrs. Welland, who knew exactly why Archer had
pressed her to announce her daughter's engagement at the Beaufort ball (and
had indeed expected him to do no less), yet felt obliged to simulate
reluctance, and the air of having had her hand forced, quite as, in the
books on Primitive Man that people of advanced culture were beginning to
read, the savage bride is dragged with shrieks from her parents' tent.
The
result, of course, was that the young girl who was the centre of this
elaborate system of mystification remained the more inscrutable for her very
frankness and assurance. She
was frank, poor darling, because she had nothing to conceal, assured because
she knew of nothing to be on her guard against; and with no better
preparation than this, she was to be plunged overnight into what people
evasively called "the facts of life."
The
young man was sincerely but placidly in love. He delighted in the radiant
good looks of his betrothed, in her health, her horsemanship, her grace and
quickness at games, and the shy interest in books and ideas that she was
beginning to develop under his guidance. (She had advanced far enough to
join him in ridiculing the Idyls of the King, but not to feel the beauty of
Ulysses and the Lotus Eaters.) She was straightforward, loyal and brave; she
had a sense of humour (chiefly proved by her laughing at HIS jokes); and he
suspected, in the depths of her innocently-gazing soul, a glow of feeling
that it would be a joy to waken. But
when he had gone the brief round of her he returned discouraged by the
thought that all this frankness and innocence were only an artificial
product. Untrained human nature
was not frank and innocent; it was full of the twists and defences of an
instinctive guile. And he felt
himself oppressed by this creation of factitious purity, so cunningly
manufactured by a conspiracy of mothers and aunts and grandmothers and
long-dead ancestresses, because it was supposed to be what he wanted, what
he had a right to, in order that he might exercise his lordly pleasure in
smashing it like an image made of snow.
There
was a certain triteness in these reflections: they were those habitual to
young men on the approach of their wedding day.
But they were generally accompanied by a sense of compunction and
self-abasement of which Newland Archer felt no trace. He could not deplore (as Thackeray's heroes so often
exasperated him by doing) that he had not a blank page to offer his bride in
exchange for the unblemished one she was to give to him.
He could not get away from the fact that if he had been brought up as
she had they would have been no more fit to find their way about than the
Babes in the Wood; nor could he, for all his anxious cogitations, see any
honest reason (any, that is, unconnected with his own momentary pleasure,
and the passion of masculine vanity) why his bride should not have been
allowed the same freedom of experience as himself.
Such
questions, at such an hour, were bound to drift through his mind; but he was
conscious that their uncomfortable persistence and precision were due to the
inopportune arrival of the Countess Olenska.
Here he was, at the very moment of his betrothal--a moment for pure
thoughts and cloudless hopes--pitchforked into a coil of scandal which
raised all the special problems he would have preferred to let lie.
"Hang Ellen Olenska!" he grumbled, as he covered his fire
and began to undress. He could
not really see why her fate should have the least bearing on his; yet he
dimly felt that he had only just begun to measure the risks of the
championship which his engagement had forced upon him.
A
few days later the bolt fell.
The
Lovell Mingotts had sent out cards for what was known as "a formal
dinner" (that is, three extra footmen, two dishes for each course, and
a Roman punch in the middle), and had headed their invitations with the
words "To meet the Countess Olenska," in accordance with the
hospitable American fashion, which treats strangers as if they were
royalties, or at least as their ambassadors.
The
guests had been selected with a boldness and discrimination in which the
initiated recognised the firm hand of Catherine the Great.
Associated with such immemorial standbys as the Selfridge Merrys, who
were asked everywhere because they always had been, the Beauforts, on whom
there was a claim of relationship, and Mr. Sillerton Jackson and his sister
Sophy (who went wherever her brother told her to), were some of the most
fashionable and yet most irreproachable of the dominant "young
married" set; the Lawrence Leffertses, Mrs. Lefferts Rushworth (the
lovely widow), the Harry Thorleys, the Reggie Chiverses and young Morris
Dagonet and his wife (who was a van der Luyden). The company indeed was perfectly assorted, since all the
members belonged to the little inner group of people who, during the long
New York season, disported themselves together daily and nightly with
apparently undiminished zest.
Forty-eight
hours later the unbelievable had happened; every one had refused the
Mingotts' invitation except the Beauforts and old Mr. Jackson and his
sister. The intended slight was emphasised by the fact that even the Reggie
Chiverses, who were of the Mingott clan, were among those inflicting it; and
by the uniform wording of the notes, in all of which the writers
"regretted that they were unable to accept," without the
mitigating plea of a "previous engagement" that ordinary courtesy
prescribed.
New
York society was, in those days, far too small, and too scant in its
resources, for every one in it (including livery-stable-keepers, butlers and
cooks) not to know exactly on which evenings people were free; and it was
thus possible for the recipients of Mrs. Lovell Mingott's invitations to
make cruelly clear their determination not to meet the Countess Olenska.
The
blow was unexpected; but the Mingotts, as their way was, met it gallantly.
Mrs. Lovell Mingott confided the case to Mrs. Welland, who confided
it to Newland Archer; who, aflame at the outrage, appealed passionately and
authoritatively to his mother; who, after a painful period of inward
resistance and outward temporising, succumbed to his instances (as she
always did), and immediately embracing his cause with an energy redoubled by
her previous hesitations, put on her grey velvet bonnet and said:
"I'll go and see Louisa van der Luyden."
The
New York of Newland Archer's day was a small and slippery pyramid, in which,
as yet, hardly a fissure had been made or a foothold gained.
At its base was a firm foundation of what Mrs. Archer called
"plain people"; an honourable but obscure majority of respectable
families who (as in the case of the Spicers or the Leffertses or the
Jacksons) had been raised above their level by marriage with one of the
ruling clans. People, Mrs. Archer always said, were not as particular as
they used to be; and with old Catherine Spicer ruling one end of Fifth
Avenue, and Julius Beaufort the other, you couldn't expect the old
traditions to last much longer.
Firmly
narrowing upward from this wealthy but inconspicuous substratum was the
compact and dominant group which the Mingotts, Newlands, Chiverses and
Mansons so actively represented. Most
people imagined them to be the very apex of the pyramid; but they themselves
(at least those of Mrs. Archer's generation) were aware that, in the eyes of
the professional genealogist, only a still smaller number of families could
lay claim to that eminence.
"Don't
tell me," Mrs. Archer would say to her children, "all this modern
newspaper rubbish about a New York aristocracy. If there is one, neither the Mingotts nor the Mansons belong
to it; no, nor the Newlands or the Chiverses either. Our grandfathers and great- grandfathers were just
respectable English or Dutch merchants, who came to the colonies to make
their fortune, and stayed here because they did so well.
One of your great-grandfathers signed the Declaration, and another
was a general on Washington's staff, and received General Burgoyne's sword
after the battle of Saratoga. These
are things to be proud of, but they have nothing to do with rank or class.
New York has always been a commercial community, and there are not
more than three families in it who can claim an aristocratic origin in the
real sense of the word."
Mrs.
Archer and her son and daughter, like every one else in New York, knew who
these privileged beings were: the Dagonets of Washington Square, who came of
an old English county family allied with the Pitts and Foxes; the Lannings,
who had intermarried with the descendants of Count de Grasse, and the van
der Luydens, direct descendants of the first Dutch governor of Manhattan,
and related by pre-revolutionary marriages to several members of the French
and British aristocracy.
The
Lannings survived only in the person of two very old but lively Miss
Lannings, who lived cheerfully and reminiscently among family portraits and
Chippendale; the Dagonets were a considerable clan, allied to the best names
in Baltimore and Philadelphia; but the van der Luydens, who stood above all
of them, had faded into a kind of super-terrestrial twilight, from which
only two figures impressively emerged; those of Mr. and Mrs. Henry van der
Luyden.
Mrs.
Henry van der Luyden had been Louisa Dagonet, and her mother had been the
granddaughter of Colonel du Lac, of an old Channel Island family, who had
fought under Cornwallis and had settled in Maryland, after the war, with his
bride, Lady Angelica Trevenna, fifth daughter of the Earl of St. Austrey.
The tie between the Dagonets, the du Lacs of Maryland, and their
aristocratic Cornish kinsfolk, the Trevennas, had always remained close and
cordial. Mr. and Mrs. van der
Luyden had more than once paid long visits to the present head of the house
of Trevenna, the Duke of St. Austrey, at his country-seat in Cornwall and at
St. Austrey in Gloucestershire; and his Grace had frequently announced his
intention of some day returning their visit (without the Duchess, who feared
the Atlantic).
Mr.
and Mrs. van der Luyden divided their time between Trevenna, their place in
Maryland, and Skuytercliff, the great estate on the Hudson which had been
one of the colonial grants of the Dutch government to the famous first
Governor, and of which Mr. van der Luyden was still "Patroon."
Their large solemn house in Madison Avenue was seldom opened, and
when they came to town they received in it only their most intimate friends.
"I
wish you would go with me, Newland," his mother said, suddenly pausing
at the door of the Brown coupe. "Louisa
is fond of you; and of course it's on account of dear May that I'm taking
this step--and also because, if we don't all stand together, there'll be no
such thing as Society left."
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