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The
young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and business
and taking up all sorts of new things.
If they were not absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the
chances were that they were going in for Central American archaeology, for
architecture or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in
the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and adapting
Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the word
"Colonial." Nobody
nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the millionaire grocers of
the suburbs.
But
above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that library that
the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one evening to dine and
spend the night, had turned to his host, and said, banging his clenched fist
on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician!
You're the kind of man the country wants, Archer.
If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you have got to lend
a hand in the cleaning."
"Men
like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly he had risen up at the call!
It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal to roll his sleeves up and
get down into the muck; but spoken by a man who set the example of the
gesture, and whose summons to follow him was irresistible.
Archer,
as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself WERE what his country
needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore Roosevelt had
pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not, for after a year in
the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and had dropped back
thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and from that again to the
writing of occasional articles in one of the reforming weeklies that were
trying to shake the country out of its apathy.
It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered to what
the young men of his generation and his set had looked forward--the narrow
groove of money-making, sport and society to which their vision had been
limited--even his small contribution to the new state of things seemed to
count, as each brick counts in a well-built wall.
He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature a
contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to contemplate,
great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship to be his
strength and pride.
He
had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good
citizen." In New York, for
many years past, every new movement, philanthropic, municipal or artistic,
had taken account of his opinion and wanted his name.
People said: "Ask
Archer" when there was a question of starting the first school for
crippled children, reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier
Club, inaugurating the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber
music. His days were full, and
they were filled decently. He
supposed it was all a man ought to ask.
Something
he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought of it now as a
thing so unattainable and improbable that to have repined would have been
like despairing because one had not drawn the first prize in a lottery.
There were a hundred million tickets in HIS lottery, and there was
only one prize; the chances had been too decidedly against him.
When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was abstractly, serenely, as one
might think of some imaginary beloved in a book or a picture: she had become
the composite vision of all that he had missed.
That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him from thinking
of other women. He had been
what was called a faithful husband; and when May had suddenly died--carried
off by the infectious pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest
child--he had honestly mourned her. Their
long years together had shown him that it did not so much matter if marriage
was a dull duty, as long as it kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from
that, it became a mere battle of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he
honoured his own past, and mourned for it.
After all, there was good in the old ways.
His
eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas with English
mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white and
pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlake writing-
table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his first photograph
of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.
There
she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin and
flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the Mission
garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained; never quite at
the same height, yet never far below it: generous, faithful, unwearied; but
so lacking in imagination, so incapable of growth, that the world of her
youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt itself without her ever being
conscious of the change. This
hard bright blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered. Her incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal
their views from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the
first, a joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in
which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she had died thinking the world a good place, full of
loving and harmonious households like her own, and resigned to leave it
because she was convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to
inculcate in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his
parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her) would
transmit the sacred trust to little Bill.
And of Mary she was sure as of her own self.
So, having snatched little Bill from the grave, and given her life in
the effort, she went contentedly to her place in the Archer vault in St.
Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already lay safe from the terrifying
"trend" which her daughter-in-law had never even become aware of.
Opposite
May's portrait stood one of her daughter. Mary Chivers was as tall and fair
as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and slightly slouching, as
the altered fashion required. Mary
Chivers's mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the
twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. And the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had
been as closely girt as her figure. Mary, who was no less conventional, and
no more intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views.
There was good in the new order too.
The
telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs, unhooked the
transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days when the legs of
the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's only means of quick
communication!
"Chicago
wants you."
Ah--it
must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent to Chicago by his
firm to talk over the plan of the Lakeside palace they were to build for a
young millionaire with ideas. The
firm always sent Dallas on such errands.
"Hallo,
Dad--Yes: Dallas. I say--how do
you feel about sailing on Wednesday? Mauretania:
Yes, next Wednesday as ever is. Our client wants me to look at some Italian gardens before we
settle anything, and has asked me to nip over on the next boat.
I've got to be back on the first of June--" the voice broke into
a joyful conscious laugh--"so we must look alive.
I say, Dad, I want your help: do come."
Dallas
seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by and natural as
if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by the fire.
The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for
long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as electric
lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the laugh did startle him; it still seemed wonderful that
across all those miles and miles of country--forest, river, mountain,
prairie, roaring cities and busy indifferent millions--Dallas's laugh should
be able to say: "Of course, whatever happens, I must get back on the
first, because Fanny Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth."
The
voice began again: "Think
it over? No, sir: not a minute.
You've got to say yes now. Why
not, I'd like to know? If you
can allege a single reason--No; I knew it. Then it's a go, eh?
Because I count on you to ring up the Cunard office first thing
tomorrow; and you'd better book a return on a boat from Marseilles. I say, Dad; it'll be our last time together, in this kind of
way--. Oh, good!
I knew you would."
Chicago
rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace up and down the room.
It
would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy was right.
They would have lots of other "times" after Dallas's
marriage, his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and Fanny
Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely to interfere
with their intimacy. On the contrary, from what he had seen of her, he thought she
would be naturally included in it. Still,
change was change, and differences were differences, and much as he felt
himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was tempting to seize
this last chance of being alone with his boy.
There
was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound one that he
had lost the habit of travel. May
had disliked to move except for valid reasons, such as taking the children
to the sea or in the mountains: she could imagine no other motive for
leaving the house in Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at
the Wellands' in Newport. After
Dallas had taken his degree she had thought it her duty to travel for six
months; and the whole family had made the old-fashioned tour through
England, Switzerland and Italy. Their
time being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted France.
Archer remembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate Mont
Blanc instead of Rheims and Chartres. But
Mary and Bill wanted mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in
Dallas's wake through the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her
children, had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic
and artistic proclivities. She
had indeed proposed that her husband should go to Paris for a fortnight, and
join them on the Italian lakes after they had "done" Switzerland;
but Archer had declined. "We'll
stick together," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting
such a good example to Dallas.
Since
her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason for his
continuing in the same routine. His children had urged him to travel: Mary
Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad and "see the
galleries." The very
mysteriousness of such a cure made her the more confident of its efficacy.
But Archer had found himself held fast by habit, by memories, by a
sudden startled shrinking from new things.
Now,
as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for
doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his generation had
taken. The trenchant divisions
between right and wrong, honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse,
had left so little scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's
imagination, so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its
daily level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and
wondered. . . .
What
was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose standards had
bent and bound him? He
remembered a sneering prophecy of poor Lawrence Lefferts's, uttered years
ago in that very room: "If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort's
bastards."
It
was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing; and
nobody wondered or reproved. Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who still looked so
exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her mother's emeralds
and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and carried them with her own
twitching hands to the future bride; and Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking
disappointed at not receiving a "set" from a Paris jeweller, had
exclaimed at their old-fashioned beauty, and declared that when she wore
them she should feel like an Isabey miniature.
Fanny
Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the death of her
parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won it thirty years
earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid of her, society took
her joyfully for granted. She
was pretty, amusing and accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-minded enough to rake up against her the
half-forgotten facts of her father's past and her own origin.
Only the older people remembered so obscure an incident in the
business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or the fact that after his
wife's death he had been quietly married to the notorious Fanny Ring, and
had left the country with his new wife, and a little girl who inherited her
beauty. He was subsequently
heard of in Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American
travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he
represented a large insurance agency. He
and his wife died there in the odour of prosperity; and one day their
orphaned daughter had appeared in New York in charge of May Archer's
sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland, whose husband had been appointed the
girl's guardian. The fact threw
her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's children, and
nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was announced.
Nothing
could more dearly give the measure of the distance that the world had
travelled. People nowadays were
too busy--busy with reforms and "movements," with fads and
fetishes and frivolities--to bother much about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in the huge
kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same plane?
Newland
Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the Paris
streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.
It
was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening waistcoat,
leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot temples.
He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself in the
presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not.
"It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is
different," he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the
young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his
family would approve.
"The
difference is that these young people take it for granted that they're going
to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted
that we shouldn't. Only, I
wonder--the thing one's so certain of in advance: can it ever make one's
heart beat as wildly?"
It
was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine held
Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the Place
Vendome. One of the things he
had stipulated--almost the only one-- when he had agreed to come abroad with
Dallas, was that, in Paris, he shouldn't be made to go to one of the
newfangled "palaces."
"Oh,
all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed.
"I'll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place-- the Bristol
say--" leaving his father speechless at hearing that the century-long
home of kings and emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where
one went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.
Archer
had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the scene of his
return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried
to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's life. Sitting alone at
night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the
radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers
and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the
flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and
the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to
bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked
out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man
compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being. . . .
Dallas's
hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "Hullo, father: this is
something like, isn't it?" They
stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the young man continued:
"By the way, I've got a message for you: the Countess Olenska
expects us both at half- past five."
He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual
item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave for
Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in his gay young
eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's malice.
"Oh,
didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued.
"Fanny made me swear to do three things while I was in Paris:
get her the score of the last Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see
Madame Olenska. You know she
was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from Buenos Ayres
to the Assomption. Fanny hadn't
any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her
about on holidays. I believe
she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's. And she's our cousin,
of course. So I rang her up
this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I were here for two
days and wanted to see her."
Archer
continued to stare at him. "You
told her I was here?"
"Of
course--why not?" Dallas's
eye brows went up whimsically. Then,
getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a
confidential pressure.
"I
say, father: what was she like?"
Archer
felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze. "Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren't you?
Wasn't she most awfully lovely?"
"Lovely?
I don't know. She was different."
"Ah--there
you have it! That's what it
always comes to, doesn't it? When
she comes, SHE'S DIFFERENT--and one doesn't know why.
It's exactly what I feel about Fanny."
His
father drew back a step, releasing his arm.
"About Fanny? But,
my dear fellow--I should hope so! Only
I don't see--"
"Dash
it, Dad, don't be prehistoric! Wasn't
she-- once--your Fanny?"
Dallas
belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the first-born of
Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him
even the rudiments of reserve. "What's
the use of making mysteries? It
only makes people want to nose 'em out," he always objected when
enjoined to discretion. But
Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.
"My
Fanny?"
"Well,
the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't,"
continued his surprising son.
"I
didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
"No:
you date, you see, dear old boy. But
mother said--"
"Your
mother?"
"Yes:
the day before she died. It was
when she sent for me alone--you remember?
She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because
once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most wanted."
Archer
received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly
fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"No.
I forgot. You never did
ask each other anything, did you? And
you never told each other anything. You
just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on
underneath. A deaf-and-dumb
asylum, in fact! Well, I back
your generation for knowing more about each other's private thoughts than we
ever have time to find out about our own.--I say, Dad," Dallas broke
off, "you're not angry with me? If you are, let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's.
I've got to rush out to Versailles afterward."
Archer
did not accompany his son to Versailles.
He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through
Paris. He had to deal all at
once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.
After
a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that,
after all, some one had guessed and pitied. . . .
And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably.
Dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would not have understood
that. To the boy, no doubt, the
episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces.
But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench in
the Champs Elysees and wondered, while the stream of life rolled by. . . .
A
few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and when he had died,
some years before, she had made no change in her way of living.
There was nothing now to keep her and Archer apart--and that
afternoon he was to see her.
He
got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens
to the Louvre. She had once
told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the
intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having
lately been. For an hour or
more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon
light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten
splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. After all, his
life had been too starved. . . .
Suddenly,
before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: "But I'm only fifty-seven--" and then he turned
away. For such summer dreams it
was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of
comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.
He
went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and together they
walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads
to the Chamber of Deputies.
Dallas,
unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was talking excitedly
and abundantly of Versailles. He
had had but one previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he
had tried to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to
go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure
criticism tripped each other up on his lips.
As
Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased.
The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and
self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an
equal. "That's it: they
feel equal to things--they know their way about," he mused, thinking of
his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the
old landmarks, and with them the sign- posts and the danger-signal.
Suddenly
Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm. "Oh, by Jove," he exclaimed.
They
had come out into the great tree-planted space before the Invalides.
The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding trees and
the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays of
afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol of the race's glory.
Archer
knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating
from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost
obscure, forgetting the central splendour that lit it up. Now, by some queer
process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading
illumination in which she lived. For
nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely little--had
been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and
yet too stimulating for his lungs. He
thought of the theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have
looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the
people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,
images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting
of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young Frenchman who
had once said to him: "Ah,
good conversation--there is nothing like it, is there?"
Archer
had not seen M. Riviere, or heard of him, for nearly thirty years; and that
fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame Olenska's existence.
More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long
interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed
at, in conditions he would never wholly understand.
During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her;
but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps she
too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must
have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to
pray every day. . . .
They
had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of the
thoroughfares flanking the building. It
was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its splendour and its history;
and the fact gave one an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such
scenes as this were left to the few and the indifferent.
The
day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow
electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they
had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.
"It
must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with a
movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood together
looking up at the house.
It
was a modern building, without distinctive character, but many-windowed, and
pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured front.
On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops
of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still lowered, as
though the sun had just left it.
"I
wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
porte-cochere he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to say:
"The fifth. It must
be the one with the awnings."
Archer
remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end of their
pilgrimage had been attained.
"I
say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.
The
father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.
"I
believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.
"Why--aren't
you well?" his son exclaimed.
"Oh,
perfectly. But I should like
you, please, to go up without me."
Dallas
paused before him, visibly bewildered.
"But, I say, Dad: do you mean you won't come up at all?"
"I
don't know," said Archer slowly.
"If
you don't she won't understand."
"Go,
my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."
Dallas
gave him a long look through the twilight.
"But
what on earth shall I say?"
"My
dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father rejoined
with a smile.
"Very
well. I shall say you're
old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don't like
lifts."
His
father smiled again. "Say
I'm old-fashioned: that's enough."
Dallas
looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture, passed out of
sight under the vaulted doorway.
Archer
sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony.
He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the
lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and
then ushered into the drawing-room. He
pictured Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step and his
delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his
boy "took after him."
Then
he tried to see the persons already in the room--for probably at that
sociable hour there would be more than one--and among them a dark lady, pale
and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin
hand with three rings on it. . . . He
thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas
banked behind her on a table.
"It's
more real to me here than if I went up," he suddenly heard himself say;
and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him
rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He
sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never
turning from the balcony. At
length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant
came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At
that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up
slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
The End
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