He had known that the moment must come sooner or later,but he had somewhat imagined that by force of willing he might hold it at bay.
"Yes--I--no: yes, it was beautiful," he said, looking at her blindly, and wondering if,whenever he heard those two syllables, all his carefully built-up world would tumble about him like a house of cards.
"Aren't you tired?It will be good to have some tea when we arrive--I'm sure the aunts have got everything beautifully ready," he rattled on, taking her hand in his;and her mind rushed away instantly to the magnificent tea and coffee service of Baltimore silver which the Beauforts had sent,and which "went" so perfectly with uncle Lovell Mingott's trays and side-dishes.
In the spring twilight the train stopped at the Rhinebeck station,and they walked along the platform to the waiting carriage.
"Ah, how awfully kind of the van der Luydens--they've sent their man over from Skuytercliff to meet us," Archer exclaimed, as a sedate person out of livery approached them and relieved the maid of her bags.
"I'm extremely sorry, sir," said this emissary,"that a little accident has occurred at the Miss du Lacs': a leak in the water-tank.It happened yesterday, and Mr. van der Luyden, who heard of it this morning,sent a housemaid up by the early train to get the Patroon's house ready.It will be quite comfortable, I think you'll find, sir;and the Miss du Lacs have sent their cook over,so that it will be exactly the same as if you'd been at Rhinebeck."
Archer stared at the speaker so blankly that he repeated in still more apologetic accents:"It'll be exactly the same, sir, I do assure you--" and May's eager voice broke out,covering the embarrassed silence:"The same as Rhinebeck?The Patroon's house?But it will be a hundred thousand times better--won't it, Newland?It's too dear and kind of Mr. van der Luyden to have thought of it."
And as they drove off, with the maid beside the coachman,and their shining bridal bags on the seat before them, she went on excitedly:"Only fancy, I've never been inside it--have you?The van der Luydens show it to so few people. But they opened it for Ellen, it seems,and she told me what a darling little place it was:she says it's the only house she's seen in America that she could imagine being perfectly happy in. "
"Well--that's what we're going to be, isn't it?" cried her husband gaily; and she answered with her boyish smile: "Ah,it's just our luck beginning--the wonderful luck we're always going to have together!"
XX.
"Of course we must dine with Mrs. Carfry, dearest," Archer said;and his wife looked at him with an anxious frown across the monumental Britannia ware of their lodging house breakfast-table.
In all the rainy desert of autumnal London there were only two people whom the Newland Archers knew;and these two they had sedulously avoided,in conformity with the old New York tradition that it was not"dignified" to force one's self on the notice of one's acquaintances in foreign countries.
Mrs. Archer and Janey, in the course of their visits to Europe,had so unflinchingly lived up to this principle,and met the friendly advances of their fellow-travellers with an air of such impenetrable reserve,that they had almost achieved the record of never having exchanged a word with a "foreigner" other than those employed in hotels and railway-stations.Their own compatriots--save those previously known or properly accredited--they treated with an even more pronounced disdain;so that, unless they ran across a Chivers, a Dagonet or a Mingott,their months abroad were spent in an unbroken _tête-à-tête_.But the utmost precautions are sometimes unavailing;and one night at Botzen one of the two English ladies in the room across the passage (whose names,dress and social situation were already intimately known to Janey) had knocked on the door and asked if Mrs.Archer had a bottle of liniment. The other lady--the intruder's sister, Mrs.Carfry--had been seized with a sudden attack of bronchitis; and Mrs. Archer,who never travelled without a complete family pharmacy,was fortunately able to produce the required remedy.
Mrs. Carfry was very ill, and as she and her sister Miss Harle were travelling alone they were profoundly grateful to the Archer ladies,who supplied them with ingenious comforts and whose efficient maid helped to nurse the invalid back to health.
When the Archers left Botzen they had no idea of ever seeing Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle again.Nothing, to Mrs. Archer's mind, would have been more "undignified" than to force one's self on the notice of a"foreigner" to whom one had happened to render an accidental service. But Mrs. Carfry and her sister, to whom this point of view was unknown, and who would have found it utterly incomprehensible, felt themselves linked by an eternal gratitude to the "delightful Americans" who had been so kind at Botzen. With touching fidelity they seized every chance of meeting Mrs. Archer and Janey in the course of their continental travels, and displayed a supernatural acuteness in finding out when they were to pass through London on their way to or from the States. The intimacy became indissoluble, and Mrs. Archer and Janey, whenever they alighted at Brown's Hotel, found themselves awaited by two affectionate friends who, like themselves, cultivated ferns in Wardian cases, made macramé lace, read the memoirs of the Baroness Bunsen and had views about the occupants of the leading London pulpits. As Mrs. Archer said, it made "another thing of London" to know Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle; and by the time that Newland became engaged the tie between the families was so firmly established that it was thought "only right" to send a wedding invitation to the two English ladies, who sent, in return, a pretty bouquet of pressed Alpine flowers under glass. And on the dock, when Newland and his wife sailed for England, Mrs. Archer's last word had been: "You must take May to see Mrs. Carfry."
Newland and his wife had had no idea of obeying this injunction; but Mrs. Carfry,with her usual acuteness, had run them down and sent them an invitation to dine;and it was over this invitation that May Archer was wrinkling her brows across the tea and muffins.
"It's all very well for you, Newland; you _know_ them.But I shall feel so shy among a lot of people I've never met. And what shall I wear?"
Newland leaned back in his chair and smiled at her.She looked handsomer and more Diana-like than ever.The moist English air seemed to have deepened the bloom of her cheeks and softened the slight hardness of her virginal features;or else it was simply the inner glow of happiness, shining through like a light under ice.
"Wear, dearest?I thought a trunkful of things had come from Paris last week."
"Yes, of course. I meant to say that I shan't know _which_ to wear." She pouted a little."I've never dined out in London; and I don't want to be ridiculous."
He tried to enter into her perplexity. "But don't Englishwomen dress just like everybody else in the evening?"
"Newland!How can you ask such funny questions?When they go to the theatre in old ball-dresses and bare heads."
"Well, perhaps they wear new ball-dresses at home; but at any rate Mrs. Carfry and Miss Harle won't.They'll wear caps like my mother's--and shawls; very soft shawls."
"Yes; but how will the other women be dressed?"
"Not as well as you, dear," he rejoined,wondering what had suddenly developed in her Janey's morbid interest in clothes.
She pushed back her chair with a sigh. "That's dear of you, Newland; but it doesn't help me much."
He had an inspiration. "Why not wear your wedding-dress?That can't be wrong, can it?"
"Oh, dearest!If I only had it here!But it's gone to Paris to be made over for next winter, and Worth hasn't sent it back."
"Oh, well--" said Archer, getting up. "Look here--the fog's lifting.If we made a dash for the National Gallery we might manage to catch a glimpse of the pictures."
The Newland Archers were on their way home, after a three months' wedding-tour which May,in writing to her girl friends, vaguely summarised as "blissful."
They had not gone to the Italian Lakes: on reflection,Archer had not been able to picture his wife in that particular setting.Her own inclination (after a month with the Paris dressmakers) was for mountaineering in July and swimming in August.This plan they punctually fulfilled, spending July at Interlaken and Grindelwald,and August at a little place called Etretat, on the Normandy coast,which some one had recommended as quaint and quiet. Once or twice, in the mountains,Archer had pointed southward and said: "There's Italy"; and May, her feet in a gentian-bed,had smiled cheerfully, and replied: "It would be lovely to go there next winter,if only you didn't have to be in New York."
But in reality travelling interested her even less than he had expected.She regarded it (once her clothes were ordered) as merely an enlarged opportunity for walking,riding, swimming, and trying her hand at the fascinating new game of lawn tennis;and when they finally got back to London (where they were to spend a fortnight while he ordered _his_ clothes) she no longer concealed the eagerness with which she looked forward to sailing.
In London nothing interested her but the theatres and the shops;and she found the theatres less exciting than the Paris _cafés chantants_ where,under the blossoming horse-chestnuts of the Champs Élysées,she had had the novel experience of looking down from the restaurant terrace on an audience of "cocottes," and having her husband interpret to her as much of the songs as he thought suitable for bridal ears.
Archer had reverted to all his old inherited ideas about marriage.It was less trouble to conform with the tradition and treat May exactly as all his friends treated their wives than to try to put into practice the theories with which his untrammelled bachelorhood had dallied. There was no use in trying to emancipate a wife who had not the dimmest notion that she was not free; and he had long since discovered that May's only use of the liberty she supposed herself to possess would be to lay it on the altar of her wifely adoration. Her innate dignity would always keep her from making the gift abjectly; and a day might even come (as it once had) when she would find strength to take it altogether back if she thought she were doing it for his own good. But with a conception of marriage so uncomplicated and incurious as hers such a crisis could be brought about only by something visibly outrageous in his own conduct; and the fineness of her feeling for him made that unthinkable. Whatever happened, he knew, she would always be loyal, gallant and unresentful; and that pledged him to the practice of the same virtues.
All this tended to draw him back into his old habits of mind.If her simplicity had been the simplicity of pettiness he would have chafed and rebelled;but since the lines of her character, though so few, were on the same fine mould as her face,she became the tutelary divinity of all his old traditions and reverences.
Such qualities were scarcely of the kind to enliven foreign travel,though they made her so easy and pleasant a companion;but he saw at once how they would fall into place in their proper setting.He had no fear of being oppressed by them, for his artistic and intellectual life would go on,as it always had, outside the domestic circle;and within it there would be nothing small and stifling--coming back to his wife would never be like entering a stuffy room after a tramp in the open.And when they had children the vacant corners in both their lives would be filled.
All these things went through his mind during their long slow drive from Mayfair to South Kensington,where Mrs. Carfry and her sister lived.Archer too would have preferred to escape their friends' hospitality:in conformity with the family tradition he had always travelled as a sight-seer and looker-on,affecting a haughty unconsciousness of the presence of his fellow-beings. Once only,just after Harvard, he had spent a few gay weeks at Florence with a band of queer Europeanised Americans,dancing all night with titled ladies in palaces,and gambling half the day with the rakes and dandies of the fashionable club;but it had all seemed to him, though the greatest fun in the world, as unreal as a carnival.These queer cosmopolitan women, deep in complicated love-affairs which they appeared to feel the need of retailing to every one they met,and the magnificent young officers and elderly dyed wits who were the subjects or the recipients of their confidences,were too different from the people Archer had grown up among,too much like expensive and rather malodorous hot-house exotics, to detain his imagination long.To introduce his wife into such a society was out of the question;and in the course of his travels no other had shown any marked eagerness for his company.
Not long after their arrival in London he had run across the Duke of St. Austrey, and the Duke,instantly and cordially recognising him, had said: "Look me up, won't you?"--but no proper-spirited American would have considered that a suggestion to be acted on,and the meeting was without a sequel. They had even managed to avoid May's English aunt,the banker's wife, who was still in Yorkshire; in fact,they had purposely postponed going to London till the autumn in order that their arrival during the season might not appear pushing and snobbish to these unknown relatives.
"Probably there'll be nobody at Mrs. Carfry's--London's a desert at this season,and you've made yourself much too beautiful," Archer said to May,who sat at his side in the hansom so spotlessly splendid in her sky-blue cloak edged with swansdown that it seemed wicked to expose her to the London grime.
"I don't want them to think that we dress like savages," she replied,with a scorn that Pocahontas might have resented;and he was struck again by the religious reverence of even the most unworldly American women for the social advantages of dress.
"It's their armour," he thought, "their defence against the unknown, and their defiance of it." And he understood for the first time the earnestness with which May,who was incapable of tying a ribbon in her hair to charm him,had gone through the solemn rite of selecting and ordering her extensive wardrobe.
He had been right in expecting the party at Mrs. Carfry's to be a small one.Besides their hostess and her sister, they found, in the long chilly drawing-room,only another shawled lady, a genial Vicar who was her husband, a silent lad whom Mrs.Carfry named as her nephew, and a small dark gentleman with lively eyes whom she introduced as his tutor,pronouncing a French name as she did so.
Into this dimly-lit and dim-featured group May Archer floated like a swan with the sunset on her:she seemed larger, fairer, more voluminously rustling than her husband had ever seen her;and he perceived that the rosiness and rustlingness were the tokens of an extreme and infantile shyness.
"What on earth will they expect me to talk about?" her helpless eyes implored him, at the very moment that her dazzling apparition was calling forth the same anxiety in their own bosoms.But beauty, even when distrustful of itself, awakens confidence in the manly heart;and the Vicar and the French-named tutor were soon manifesting to May their desire to put her at her ease.
In spite of their best efforts, however, the dinner was a languishing affair.Archer noticed that his wife's way of showing herself at her ease with foreigners was to become more uncompromisingly local in her references,so that, though her loveliness was an encouragement to admiration,her conversation was a chill to repartee. The Vicar soon abandoned the struggle; but the tutor,who spoke the most fluent and accomplished English,gallantly continued to pour it out to her until the ladies,to the manifest relief of all concerned, went up to the drawing-room.
The Vicar, after a glass of port, was obliged to hurry away to a meeting, and the shy nephew,who appeared to be an invalid, was packed off to bed.But Archer and the tutor continued to sit over their wine,and suddenly Archer found himself talking as he had not done since his last symposium with Ned Winsett.The Carfry nephew, it turned out, had been threatened with consumption,and had had to leave Harrow for Switzerland,where he had spent two years in the milder air of Lake Leman. Being a bookish youth,he had been entrusted to M. Rivière, who had brought him back to England,and was to remain with him till he went up to Oxford the following spring; and M.Rivière added with simplicity that he should then have to look out for another job.
It seemed impossible, Archer thought, that he should be long without one,so varied were his interests and so many his gifts. He was a man of about thirty,with a thin ugly face (May would certainly have called him common-looking) to which the play of his ideas gave an intense expressiveness;but there was nothing frivolous or cheap in his animation.
His father, who had died young, had filled a small diplomatic post,and it had been intended that the son should follow the same career;but an insatiable taste for letters had thrown the young man into journalism,then into authorship (apparently unsuccessful),and at length--after other experiments and vicissitudes which he spared his listener--into tutoring English youths in Switzerland.Before that, however, he had lived much in Paris, frequented the Goncourt _grenier_,been advised by Maupassant not to attempt to write (even that seemed to Archer a dazzling honour!), and had often talked with Mérimée in his mother's house.He had obviously always been desperately poor and anxious (having a mother and an unmarried sister to provide for),and it was apparent that his literary ambitions had failed. His situation, in fact, seemed,materially speaking, no more brilliant than Ned Winsett's; but he had lived in a world in which,as he said, no one who loved ideas need hunger mentally.As it was precisely of that love that poor Winsett was starving to death,Archer looked with a sort of vicarious envy at this eager impecunious young man who had fared so richly in his poverty.
"You see, Monsieur, it's worth everything, isn't it, to keep one's intellectual liberty,not to enslave one's powers of appreciation, one's critical independence?It was because of that that I abandoned journalism, and took to so much duller work:tutoring and private secretaryship. There is a good deal of drudgery, of course;but one preserves one's moral freedom, what we call in French one's _quant à soi_.And when one hears good talk one can join in it without compromising any opinions but one's own;or one can listen, and answer it inwardly. Ah, good conversation--there's nothing like it, is there?The air of ideas is the only air worth breathing.And so I have never regretted giving up either diplomacy or journalism--two different forms of the same self-abdication." He fixed his vivid eyes on Archer as he lit another cigarette. "_Voyez-vous_, Monsieur,to be able to look life in the face: that's worth living in a garret for, isn't it?But, after all, one must earn enough to pay for the garret;and I confess that to grow old as a private tutor--or a 'private' anything--is almost as chilling to the imagination as a second secretaryship at Bucharest.Sometimes I feel I must make a plunge: an immense plunge. Do you suppose, for instance,there would be any opening for me in America--in New York?"
Archer looked at him with startled eyes. New York,for a young man who had frequented the Goncourts and Flaubert,and who thought the life of ideas the only one worth living!He continued to stare at M. Rivière perplexedly,wondering how to tell him that his very superiorities and advantages would be the surest hindrance to success.
"New York--New York--but must it be especially New York?" he stammered, utterly unable to imagine what lucrative opening his native city could offer to a young man to whom good conversation appeared to be the only necessity.
A sudden flush rose under M. Rivière's sallow skin. "I--I thought it your metropolis:is not the intellectual life more active there?" he rejoined; then, as if fearing to give his hearer the impression of having asked a favour,he went on hastily: "One throws out random suggestions--more to one's self than to others.In reality, I see no immediate prospect--" and rising from his seat he added,without a trace of constraint: "But Mrs. Carfry will think that I ought to be taking you upstairs."
During the homeward drive Archer pondered deeply on this episode. His hour with M.Rivière had put new air into his lungs,and his first impulse had been to invite him to dine the next day;but he was beginning to understand why married men did not always immediately yield to their first impulses.
"That young tutor is an interesting fellow:we had some awfully good talk after dinner about books and things," he threw out tentatively in the hansom.
May roused herself from one of the dreamy silences into which he had read so many meanings before six months of marriage had given him the key to them.
"The little Frenchman?Wasn't he dreadfully common?" she questioned coldly; and he guessed that she nursed a secret disappointment at having been invited out in London to meet a clergyman and a French tutor.The disappointment was not occasioned by the sentiment ordinarily defined as snobbishness,but by old New York's sense of what was due to it when it risked its dignity in foreign lands.If May's parents had entertained the Carfrys in Fifth Avenue they would have offered them something more substantial than a parson and a schoolmaster.
But Archer was on edge, and took her up.
"Common--common _where_?" he queried; and she returned with unusual readiness: "Why,I should say anywhere but in his school-room. Those people are always awkward in society. But then," she added disarmingly,"I suppose I shouldn't have known if he was clever."
Archer disliked her use of the word "clever" almost as much as her use of the word "common";but he was beginning to fear his tendency to dwell on the things he disliked in her. After all,her point of view had always been the same. It was that of all the people he had grown up among,and he had always regarded it as necessary but negligible.Until a few months ago he had never known a "nice" woman who looked at life differently;and if a man married it must necessarily be among the nice.
"Ah--then I won't ask him to dine!" he concluded with a laugh; and May echoed, bewildered: "Goodness--ask the Carfrys' tutor?"
"Well, not on the same day with the Carfrys, if you prefer I shouldn't.But I did rather want another talk with him. He's looking for a job in New York."
Her surprise increased with her indifference:he almost fancied that she suspected him of being tainted with "foreignness."
"A job in New York?What sort of a job?People don't have French tutors: what does he want to do?"
"Chiefly to enjoy good conversation, I understand," her husband retorted perversely;and she broke into an appreciative laugh. "Oh, Newland, how funny!Isn't that _French_?"
On the whole, he was glad to have the matter settled for him by her refusing to take seriously his wish to invite M.Rivière. Another after-dinner talk would have made it difficult to avoid the question of New York;and the more Archer considered it the less he was able to fit M.Rivière into any conceivable picture of New York as he knew it.
He perceived with a flash of chilling insight that in future many problems would be thus negatively solved for him;but as he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. "After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other's angles," he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep.
XXI.
The small bright lawn stretched away smoothly to the big bright sea.
The turf was hemmed with an edge of scarlet geranium and coleus,and cast-iron vases painted in chocolate colour,standing at intervals along the winding path that led to the sea,looped their garlands of petunia and ivy geranium above the neatly raked gravel.
Half way between the edge of the cliff and the square wooden house (which was also chocolate-coloured,but with the tin roof of the verandah striped in yellow and brown to represent an awning) two large targets had been placed against a background of shrubbery.On the other side of the lawn, facing the targets, was pitched a real tent,with benches and garden-seats about it.A number of ladies in summer dresses and gentlemen in grey frock-coats and tall hats stood on the lawn or sat upon the benches;and every now and then a slender girl in starched muslin would step from the tent, bow in hand,and speed her shaft at one of the targets,while the spectators interrupted their talk to watch the result.
Newland Archer, standing on the verandah of the house, looked curiously down upon this scene.On each side of the shiny painted steps was a large blue china flower-pot on a bright yellow china stand.A spiky green plant filled each pot, and below the verandah ran a wide border of blue hydrangeas edged with more red geraniums.Behind him, the French windows of the drawing-rooms through which he had passed gave glimpses,between swaying lace curtains, of glassy parquet floors islanded with chintz poufs,dwarf armchairs, and velvet tables covered with trifles in silver.
The Newport Archery Club always held its August meeting at the Beauforts'. The sport,which had hitherto known no rival but croquet,was beginning to be discarded in favour of lawn-tennis;but the latter game was still considered too rough and inelegant for social occasions,and as an opportunity to show off pretty dresses and graceful attitudes the bow and arrow held their own.
Archer looked down with wonder at the familiar spectacle.It surprised him that life should be going on in the old way when his own reactions to it had so completely changed.It was Newport that had first brought home to him the extent of the change. In New York,during the previous winter, after he and May had settled down in the new greenish-yellow house with the bow-window and the Pompeian vestibule,he had dropped back with relief into the old routine of the office,and the renewal of this daily activity had served as a link with his former self.Then there had been the pleasurable excitement of choosing a showy grey stepper for May's brougham (the Wellands had given the carriage),and the abiding occupation and interest of arranging his new library, which,in spite of family doubts and disapprovals, had been carried out as he had dreamed,with a dark embossed paper, Eastlake book-cases and"sincere" arm-chairs and tables.At the Century he had found Winsett again,and at the Knickerbocker the fashionable young men of his own set;and what with the hours dedicated to the law and those given to dining out or entertaining friends at home,with an occasional evening at the Opera or the play,the life he was living had still seemed a fairly real and inevitable sort of business.
But Newport represented the escape from duty into an atmosphere of unmitigated holiday-making.Archer had tried to persuade May to spend the summer on a remote island off the coast of Maine (called,appropriately enough, Mount Desert), where a few hardy Bostonians and Philadelphians were camping in "native" cottages,and whence came reports of enchanting scenery and a wild,almost trapper-like existence amid woods and waters.
But the Wellands always went to Newport, where they owned one of the square boxes on the cliffs,and their son-in-law could adduce no good reason why he and May should not join them there. As Mrs.Welland rather tartly pointed out, it was hardly worth while for May to have worn herself out trying on summer clothes in Paris if she was not to be allowed to wear them; and this argument was of a kind to which Archer had as yet found no answer.
May herself could not understand his obscure reluctance to fall in with so reasonable and pleasant a way of spending the summer.She reminded him that he had always liked Newport in his bachelor days,and as this was indisputable he could only profess that he was sure he was going to like it better than ever now that they were to be there together.But as he stood on the Beaufort verandah and looked out on the brightly peopled lawn it came home to him with a shiver that he was not going to like it at all.
It was not May's fault, poor dear. If, now and then, during their travels,they had fallen slightly out of step, harmony had been restored by their return to the conditions she was used to.He had always foreseen that she would not disappoint him; and he had been right.He had married (as most young men did) because he had met a perfectly charming girl at the moment when a series of rather aimless sentimental adventures were ending in premature disgust; and she had represented peace, stability, comradeship, and the steadying sense of an unescapable duty.