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The
clanging and groaning of the train came nearer, and it staggered slowly into
the station like a prey- laden monster into its lair. Archer pushed forward, elbowing through the crowd, and
staring blindly into window after window of the high-hung carriages.
And then, suddenly, he saw Madame Olenska's pale and surprised face
close at hand, and had again the mortified sensation of having forgotten
what she looked like.
They
reached each other, their hands met, and he drew her arm through his.
"This way--I have the carriage," he said.
After
that it all happened as he had dreamed.
He helped her into the brougham with her bags, and had afterward the
vague recollection of having properly reassured her about her grandmother
and given her a summary of the Beaufort situation (he was struck by the
softness of her: "Poor
Regina!"). Meanwhile the
carriage had worked its way out of the coil about the station, and they were
crawling down the slippery incline to the wharf, menaced by swaying
coal-carts, bewildered horses, dishevelled express-wagons, and an empty
hearse--ah, that hearse! She shut her eyes as it passed, and clutched at Archer's
hand.
"If
only it doesn't mean--poor Granny!"
"Oh,
no, no--she's much better--she's all right, really. There--we've passed
it!" he exclaimed, as if that made all the difference.
Her hand remained in his, and as the carriage lurched across the
gang-plank onto the ferry he bent over, unbuttoned her tight brown glove,
and kissed her palm as if he had kissed a relic.
She disengaged herself with a faint smile, and he said: "You
didn't expect me today?"
"Oh,
no."
"I
meant to go to Washington to see you. I'd
made all my arrangements--I very nearly crossed you in the train."
"Oh--"
she exclaimed, as if terrified by the narrowness of their escape.
"Do
you know--I hardly remembered you?"
"Hardly
remembered me?"
"I
mean: how shall I explain? I--it's
always so. EACH TIME YOU HAPPEN
TO ME ALL OVER AGAIN."
"Oh,
yes: I know! I know!"
"Does
it--do I too: to you?" he insisted.
She
nodded, looking out of the window.
"Ellen--Ellen--Ellen!"
She
made no answer, and he sat in silence, watching her profile grow indistinct
against the snow-streaked dusk beyond the window. What had she been doing in all those four long months, he
wondered? How little they knew
of each other, after all! The
precious moments were slipping away, but he had forgotten everything that he
had meant to say to her and could only helplessly brood on the mystery of
their remoteness and their proximity, which seemed to be symbolised by the
fact of their sitting so close to each other, and yet being unable to see
each other's faces.
"What
a pretty carriage! Is it
May's?" she asked, suddenly turning her face from the window.
"Yes."
"It
was May who sent you to fetch me, then?
How kind of her!"
He
made no answer for a moment; then he said explosively: "Your husband's secretary came to see me the day after
we met in Boston."
In
his brief letter to her he had made no allusion to M. Riviere's visit, and
his intention had been to bury the incident in his bosom. But her reminder that they were in his wife's carriage
provoked him to an impulse of retaliation.
He would see if she liked his reference to Riviere any better than he
liked hers to May! As on
certain other occasions when he had expected to shake her out of her usual
composure, she betrayed no sign of surprise: and at once he concluded:
"He writes to her, then."
"M.
Riviere went to see you?"
"Yes:
didn't you know?"
"No,"
she answered simply.
"And
you're not surprised?"
She
hesitated. "Why should I
be? He told me in Boston that
he knew you; that he'd met you in England I think."
"Ellen--I
must ask you one thing."
"Yes."
"I
wanted to ask it after I saw him, but I couldn't put it in a letter.
It was Riviere who helped you to get away--when you left your
husband?"
His
heart was beating suffocatingly. Would
she meet this question with the same composure?
"Yes:
I owe him a great debt," she answered, without the least tremor in her
quiet voice.
Her
tone was so natural, so almost indifferent, that Archer's turmoil subsided.
Once more she had managed, by her sheer simplicity, to make him feel
stupidly conventional just when he thought he was flinging convention to the
winds.
"I
think you're the most honest woman I ever met!" he exclaimed.
"Oh,
no--but probably one of the least fussy," she answered, a smile in her
voice.
"Call
it what you like: you look at things as they are."
"Ah--I've
had to. I've had to look at the
Gorgon."
"Well--it
hasn't blinded you! You've seen
that she's just an old bogey like all the others."
"She
doesn't blind one; but she dries up one's tears."
The
answer checked the pleading on Archer's lips: it seemed to come from depths
of experience beyond his reach. The
slow advance of the ferry-boat had ceased, and her bows bumped against the
piles of the slip with a violence that made the brougham stagger, and flung
Archer and Madame Olenska against each other.
The young man, trembling, felt the pressure of her shoulder, and
passed his arm about her.
"If
you're not blind, then, you must see that this can't last."
"What
can't?"
"Our
being together--and not together."
"No.
You ought not to have come today," she said in an altered voice;
and suddenly she turned, flung her arms about him and pressed her lips to
his. At the same moment the
carriage began to move, and a gas-lamp at the head of the slip flashed its
light into the window. She drew away, and they sat silent and motionless
while the brougham struggled through the congestion of carriages about the
ferry-landing. As they gained
the street Archer began to speak hurriedly.
"Don't
be afraid of me: you needn't squeeze yourself back into your corner like
that. A stolen kiss isn't what
I want. Look: I'm not even
trying to touch the sleeve of your jacket.
Don't suppose that I don't understand your reasons for not wanting to
let this feeling between us dwindle into an ordinary hole-and-corner
love-affair. I couldn't have spoken like this yesterday, because when we've
been apart, and I'm looking forward to seeing you, every thought is burnt up
in a great flame. But then you
come; and you're so much more than I remembered, and what I want of you is
so much more than an hour or two every now and then, with wastes of thirsty
waiting between, that I can sit perfectly still beside you, like this, with
that other vision in my mind, just quietly trusting to it to come
true."
For
a moment she made no reply; then she asked, hardly above a whisper:
"What do you mean by trusting to it to come true?"
"Why--you
know it will, don't you?"
"Your
vision of you and me together?" She
burst into a sudden hard laugh. "You
choose your place well to put it to me!"
"Do
you mean because we're in my wife's brougham? Shall we get out and walk,
then? I don't suppose you mind
a little snow?"
She
laughed again, more gently. "No;
I shan't get out and walk, because my business is to get to Granny's as
quickly as I can. And you'll
sit beside me, and we'll look, not at visions, but at realities."
"I
don't know what you mean by realities.
The only reality to me is this."
She
met the words with a long silence, during which the carriage rolled down an
obscure side-street and then turned into the searching illumination of Fifth
Avenue.
"Is
it your idea, then, that I should live with you as your mistress--since I
can't be your wife?" she asked.
The
crudeness of the question startled him: the word was one that women of his
class fought shy of, even when their talk flitted closest about the topic.
He noticed that Madame Olenska pronounced it as if it had a
recognised place in her vocabulary, and he wondered if it had been used
familiarly in her presence in the horrible life she had fled from.
Her question pulled him up with a jerk, and he floundered.
"I
want--I want somehow to get away with you into a world where words like
that--categories like that-- won't exist.
Where we shall be simply two human beings who love each other, who
are the whole of life to each other; and nothing else on earth will
matter."
She
drew a deep sigh that ended in another laugh. "Oh, my dear--where is
that country? Have you ever
been there?" she asked; and as he remained sullenly dumb she went on:
"I know so many who've tried to find it; and, believe me, they
all got out by mistake at wayside stations: at places like Boulogne, or
Pisa, or Monte Carlo--and it wasn't at all different from the old world
they'd left, but only rather smaller and dingier and more promiscuous."
He
had never heard her speak in such a tone, and he remembered the phrase she
had used a little while before.
"Yes,
the Gorgon HAS dried your tears," he said.
"Well,
she opened my eyes too; it's a delusion to say that she blinds people.
What she does is just the contrary--she fastens their eyelids open,
so that they're never again in the blessed darkness.
Isn't there a Chinese torture like that?
There ought to be. Ah,
believe me, it's a miserable little country!"
The
carriage had crossed Forty-second Street: May's sturdy brougham-horse was
carrying them northward as if he had been a Kentucky trotter.
Archer choked with the sense of wasted minutes and vain words.
"Then
what, exactly, is your plan for us?" he asked.
"For
US? But there's no US in that
sense! We're near each other
only if we stay far from each other. Then
we can be ourselves. Otherwise
we're only Newland Archer, the husband of Ellen Olenska's cousin, and Ellen
Olenska, the cousin of Newland Archer's wife, trying to be happy behind the
backs of the people who trust them."
"Ah,
I'm beyond that," he groaned.
"No,
you're not! You've never been
beyond. And I have," she
said, in a strange voice, "and I know what it looks like there."
He
sat silent, dazed with inarticulate pain.
Then he groped in the darkness of the carriage for the little bell
that signalled orders to the coachman.
He remembered that May rang twice when she wished to stop.
He pressed the bell, and the carriage drew up beside the curbstone.
"Why
are we stopping? This is not
Granny's," Madame Olenska exclaimed.
"No:
I shall get out here," he stammered, opening the door and jumping to
the pavement. By the light of a
street-lamp he saw her startled face, and the instinctive motion she made to
detain him. He closed the door,
and leaned for a moment in the window.
"You're
right: I ought not to have come today," he said, lowering his voice so
that the coachman should not hear. She
bent forward, and seemed about to speak; but he had already called out the
order to drive on, and the carriage rolled away while he stood on the
corner. The snow was over, and a tingling wind had sprung up, that lashed
his face as he stood gazing. Suddenly
he felt something stiff and cold on his lashes, and perceived that he had
been crying, and that the wind had frozen his tears.
He
thrust his hands in his pockets, and walked at a sharp pace down Fifth
Avenue to his own house.
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