OLD NEW YORK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
By EDITH WHARTON
OLD NEW YORK
FALSE DAWN
THE OLD MAID
THE SPARK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
THE AGE OF INNOCENCE
SUMMER
THE REEF
THE MARNE
FRENCH WAYS AND THEIR MEANING
OLD NEW YORK
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
BY
EDITH WHARTON
AUTHOR OF “THE AGE OF INNOCENCE,” ETC.
DECORATIONS BY E. C. CASWELL
[Illustration: colophon]
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
NEW YORK :: LONDON :: MCMXXIV
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
_Copyright, 1923, by The Consolidated Magazines Corporation_
(_The Red Book Magazine_)
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
NEW YEAR’S DAY
(_The ’Seventies_)
I
“She was _bad_ ... always. They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel,”
said my mother, as if the scene of the offence added to the guilt of the
couple whose past she was revealing. Her spectacles slanted on her
knitting, she dropped the words in a hiss that might have singed the
snowy baby-blanket which engaged her indefatigable fingers. (It was
typical of my mother to be always employed in benevolent actions while
she uttered uncharitable words.)
“_They used to meet at the Fifth Avenue Hotel_”; how the precision of
the phrase characterized my old New York! A generation later, people
would have said, in reporting an affair such as Lizzie Hazeldean’s with
Henry Prest: “They met in hotels”--and today who but a few superannuated
spinsters, still feeding on the venom secreted in their youth, would
take any interest in the tracing of such topographies?
Life has become too telegraphic for curiosity to linger on any given
point in a sentimental relation; as old Sillerton Jackson, in response
to my mother, grumbled through his perfect “china set”: “Fifth Avenue
Hotel? They might meet in the middle of Fifth Avenue nowadays, for all
that anybody cares.”
But what a flood of light my mother’s tart phrase had suddenly focussed
on an unremarked incident of my boyhood!
The Fifth Avenue Hotel ... Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest ... the
conjunction of these names had arrested her darting talk on a single
point of my memory, as a search-light, suddenly checked in its
gyrations, is held motionless while one notes each of the unnaturally
sharp and lustrous images it picks out.
At the time I was a boy of twelve, at home from school for the holidays.
My mother’s mother, Grandmamma Parrett, still lived in the house in West
Twenty-third Street which Grandpapa had built in his pioneering youth,
in days when people shuddered at the perils of living north of Union
Square--days that Grandmamma and my parents looked back to with a joking
incredulity as the years passed and the new houses advanced steadily
Park-ward, outstripping the Thirtieth Streets, taking the Reservoir at a
bound, and leaving us in what, in my school-days, was already a dullish
back-water between Aristocracy to the south and Money to the north.
Even then fashion moved quickly in New York, and my infantile memory
barely reached back to the time when Grandmamma, in lace lappets and
creaking “_moiré_” used to receive on New Year’s day, supported by her
handsome married daughters. As for old Sillerton Jackson, who, once a
social custom had dropped into disuse, always affected never to have
observed it, he stoutly maintained that the New Year’s day ceremonial
had never been taken seriously except among families of Dutch descent,
and that that was why Mrs. Henry van der Luyden had clung to it, in a
reluctant half-apologetic way, long after her friends had closed their
doors on the first of January, and the date had been chosen for those
out-of-town parties which are so often used as a pretext for absence
when the unfashionable are celebrating their rites.
Grandmamma, of course, no longer received. But it would have seemed to
her an exceedingly odd thing to go out of town in winter, especially now
that the New York houses were luxuriously warmed by the new hot-air
furnaces, and searchingly illuminated by gas chandeliers. No, thank
you--no country winters for the chilblained generation of prunella
sandals and low-necked sarcenet, the generation brought up in unwarmed
and unlit houses, and shipped off to die in Italy when they proved
unequal to the struggle of living in New York! Therefore Grandmamma,
like most of her contemporaries, remained in town on the first of
January, and marked the day by a family reunion, a kind of supplementary
Christmas--though to us juniors the absence of presents and plum-pudding
made it but a pale and moonlike reflection of the Feast.
Still, the day was welcome as a lawful pretext for over-eating,
dawdling, and looking out of the window: a Dutch habit still extensively
practised in the best New York circles. On the day in question, however,
we had not yet placed ourselves behind the plate-glass whence it would
presently be so amusing to observe the funny gentlemen who trotted
about, their evening ties hardly concealed behind their overcoat
collars, darting in and out of chocolate-coloured house-fronts on their
sacramental round of calls. We were still engaged in placidly digesting
around the ravaged luncheon table when a servant dashed in to say that
the Fifth Avenue Hotel was on fire.
Oh, then the fun began--and what fun it was! For Grandmamma’s house was
just opposite the noble edifice of white marble which I associated with
such deep-piled carpets, and such a rich sultry smell of anthracite and
coffee, whenever I was bidden to “step across” for a messenger-boy, or
to buy the evening paper for my elders.
The hotel, for all its sober state, was no longer fashionable. No one,
in my memory, had ever known any one who went there; it was frequented
by “politicians” and “Westerners,” two classes of citizens whom my
mother’s intonation always seemed to deprive of their vote by ranking
them with illiterates and criminals.
But for that very reason there was all the more fun to be expected from
the calamity in question; for had we not, with infinite amusement,
watched the arrival, that morning, of monumental “floral pieces” and
towering frosted cakes for the New Year’s day reception across the way?
The event was a communal one. All the ladies who were the hotel’s
“guests” were to receive together in the densely lace-curtained and
heavily chandeliered public parlours, and gentlemen with long hair,
imperials and white gloves had been hastening since two o’clock to the
scene of revelry. And now, thanks to the opportune conflagration, we
were going to have the excitement not only of seeing the Fire Brigade in
action (supreme joy of the New York youngster), but of witnessing the
flight of the ladies and their visitors, staggering out through the
smoke in gala array. The idea that the fire might be dangerous did not
mar these pleasing expectations. The house was solidly built; New York’s
invincible Brigade was already at the door, in a glare of polished
brass, coruscating helmets and horses shining like table-silver; and my
tall cousin Hubert Wesson, dashing across at the first alarm, had
promptly returned to say that all risk was over, though the two lower
floors were so full of smoke and water that the lodgers, in some
confusion, were being transported to other hotels. How then could a
small boy see in the event anything but an unlimited lark?
Our elders, once reassured, were of the same mind. As they stood behind
us in the windows, looking over our heads, we heard chuckles of
amusement mingled with ironic comment.
“Oh, my dear, look--here they all come! The New Year ladies! Low neck
and short sleeves in broad daylight, every one of them! Oh, and the fat
one with the paper roses in her hair ... they _are_ paper, my dear ...
off the frosted cake, probably! Oh! Oh! Oh! _Oh!_”
Aunt Sabina Wesson was obliged to stuff her lace handkerchief between
her lips, while her firm poplin-cased figure rocked with delight.
“Well, my dear,” Grandmamma gently reminded her, “in my youth we wore
low-necked dresses all day long and all the year round.”
No one listened. My cousin Kate, who always imitated Aunt Sabina, was
pinching my arm in an agony of mirth. “Look at them scuttling! The
parlours must be full of smoke. Oh, but this one is still funnier; the
one with the tall feather in her hair! Granny, did you wear feathers in
your hair in the daytime? Oh, don’t ask me to believe it! And the one
with the diamond necklace! And all the gentlemen in white ties! Did
Grandpapa wear a white tie at two o’clock in the afternoon?” Nothing was
sacred to Kate, and she feigned not to notice Grandmamma’s mild frown of
reproval.
“Well, they do in Paris, to this day, at weddings--wear evening clothes
and white ties,” said Sillerton Jackson with authority. “When Minnie
Transome of Charleston was married at the Madeleine to the Duc de....”
But no one listened even to Sillerton Jackson. One of the party had
abruptly exclaimed: “Oh, there’s a lady running out of the hotel who’s
not in evening dress!”
The exclamation caused all our eyes to turn toward the person indicated,
who had just reached the threshold; and someone added, in an odd voice:
“Why, her figure looks like Lizzie Hazeldean’s--”
A dead silence followed. The lady who was not in evening dress paused.
Standing on the door-step with lifted veil, she faced our window. Her
dress was dark and plain--almost conspicuously plain--and in less time
than it takes to tell she had put her hand to her closely-patterned veil
and pulled it down over her face. But my young eyes were keen and
farsighted; and in that hardly perceptible interval I had seen a vision.
Was she beautiful--or was she only someone apart? I felt the shock of a
small pale oval, dark eyebrows curved with one sure stroke, lips made
for warmth, and now drawn up in a grimace of terror; and it seemed as if
the mysterious something, rich, secret and insistent, that broods and
murmurs behind a boy’s conscious thoughts, had suddenly peered out at
me.... As the dart reached me her veil dropped.
“But it _is_ Lizzie Hazeldean!” Aunt Sabina gasped. She had stopped
laughing, and her crumpled handkerchief fell to the carpet.
“Lizzie--_Lizzie_?” The name was echoed over my head with varying
intonations of reprobation, dismay and half-veiled malice.
Lizzie Hazeldean? Running out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel on New Year’s
day with all those dressed-up women? But what on earth could she have
been doing there? No; nonsense! It was impossible....
“There’s Henry Prest with her,” continued Aunt Sabina in a precipitate
whisper.
“With her?” someone gasped; and “_Oh_--” my mother cried with a
shudder.
The men of the family said nothing, but I saw Hubert Wesson’s face
crimson with surprise. Henry Prest! Hubert was forever boring us
youngsters with his Henry Prest! That was the kind of chap Hubert meant
to be at thirty: in his eyes Henry Prest embodied all the manly graces.
Married? No, thank you! That kind of man wasn’t made for the domestic
yoke. Too fond of ladies’ society, Hubert hinted with his undergraduate
smirk; and handsome, rich, independent--an all-round sportsman, good
horseman, good shot, crack yachtsman (had his pilot’s certificate, and
always sailed his own sloop, whose cabin was full of racing trophies);
gave the most delightful little dinners, never more than six, with
cigars that beat old Beaufort’s; was awfully decent to the younger men,
chaps of Hubert’s age included--and combined, in short, all the
qualities, mental and physical, which make up, in such eyes as Hubert’s,
that oracular and irresistible figure, the man of the world. “Just the
fellow,” Hubert always solemnly concluded, “that I should go straight to
if ever I got into any kind of row that I didn’t want the family to know
about”; and our blood ran pleasantly cold at the idea of our old
Hubert’s ever being in such an unthinkable predicament.
I felt sorry to have missed a glimpse of this legendary figure; but my
gaze had been enthralled by the lady, and now the couple had vanished in
the crowd.
The group in our window continued to keep an embarrassed silence. They
looked almost frightened; but what struck me even more deeply was that
not one of them looked surprised. Even to my boyish sense it was clear
that what they had just seen was only the confirmation of something they
had long been prepared for. At length one of my uncles emitted a
whistle, was checked by a severe glance from his wife, and muttered:
“I’ll be damned”; another uncle began an unheeded narrative of a fire at
which he had been present in his youth, and my mother said to me
severely: “You ought to be at home preparing your lessons--a big boy
like you!”--a remark so obviously unfair that it served only to give the
measure of her agitation.
“I don’t believe it,” said Grandmamma, in a low voice of warning,
protest and appeal. I saw Hubert steal a grateful look at her.
But nobody else listened: every eye still strained through the window.
Livery-stable “hacks,” of the old blue-curtained variety, were driving
up to carry off the fair fugitives; for the day was bitterly cold, and
lit by one of those harsh New York suns of which every ray seems an
icicle. Into these ancient vehicles the ladies, now regaining their
composure, were being piled with their removable possessions, while
their kid-gloved callers (“So like the White Rabbit!” Kate exulted)
appeared and reappeared in the doorway, gallantly staggering after them
under bags, reticules, bird-cages, pet dogs and heaped-up finery. But to
all this--as even I, a little boy, was aware--nobody in Grandmamma’s
window paid the slightest attention. The thoughts of one and all, with a
mute and guarded eagerness, were still following the movements of those
two who were so obviously unrelated to the rest. The whole
business--discovery, comment, silent visual pursuit--could hardly, all
told, have filled a minute, perhaps not as much; before the sixty
seconds were over, Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest had been lost in the
crowd, and, while the hotel continued to empty itself into the street,
had gone their joint or separate ways. But in my grandmother’s window
the silence continued unbroken.
“Well, it’s over: here are the firemen coming out again,” someone said
at length.
We youngsters were all alert at that; yet I felt that the grown-ups lent
but a half-hearted attention to the splendid sight which was New York’s
only pageant: the piling of scarlet ladders on scarlet carts, the
leaping up on the engine of the helmeted flame-fighters, and the
disciplined plunge forward of each pair of broadchested black steeds,
as one after another the chariots of fire rattled off.
Silently, almost morosely, we withdrew to the drawing-room hearth;
where, after an interval of languid monosyllables, my mother, rising
first, slipped her knitting into its bag, and turning on me with renewed
severity, said: “This racing after fire-engines is what makes you too
sleepy to prepare your lessons”--a comment so wide of the mark that once
again I perceived, without understanding, the extent of the havoc
wrought in her mind by the sight of Mrs. Hazeldean and Henry Prest
coming out of the Fifth Avenue Hotel together.
It was not until many years later that chance enabled me to relate this
fugitive impression to what had preceded and what came after it.
II
Mrs. Hazeldean paused at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Madison Square.
The crowd attracted by the fire still enveloped her; it was safe to halt
and take breath.
Her companion, she knew, had gone in the opposite direction. Their
movements, on such occasions, were as well-ordered and as promptly
executed as those of the New York Fire Brigade; and after their
precipitate descent to the hall, the discovery that the police had
barred their usual exit, and the quick: “You’re all right?” to which her
imperceptible nod had responded, she was sure he had turned down
Twenty-third Street toward Sixth Avenue.
“The Parretts’ windows were full of people,” was her first thought.
She dwelt on it a moment, and then reflected: “Yes, but in all that
crowd and excitement nobody would have been thinking of _me_!”
Instinctively she put her hand to her veil, as though recalling that her
features had been exposed when she ran out, and unable to remember
whether she had covered them in time or not.
“What a fool I am! It can’t have been off my face for more than a
second--” but immediately afterward another disquieting possibility
assailed her. “I’m almost sure I saw Sillerton Jackson’s head in one of
the windows, just behind Sabina Wesson’s. No one else has that
particularly silvery gray hair.” She shivered, for everyone in New York
knew that Sillerton Jackson saw everything, and could piece together
seemingly unrelated fragments of fact with the art of a skilled
china-mender.
Meanwhile, after sending through her veil the circular glance which she
always shot about her at that particular corner, she had begun to walk
up Broadway. She walked well--fast, but not too fast; easily, assuredly,
with the air of a woman who knows that she has a good figure, and
expects rather than fears to be identified by it. But under this
external appearance of ease she was covered with cold beads of sweat.
Broadway, as usual at that hour, and on a holiday, was nearly deserted;
the promenading public still slowly poured up and down Fifth Avenue.
“Luckily there was such a crowd when we came out of the hotel that no
one could possibly have noticed me,” she murmured over again, reassured
by the sense of having the long thoroughfare to herself. Composure and
presence of mind were so necessary to a woman in her situation that they
had become almost a second nature to her, and in a few minutes her thick
uneven heart-beats began to subside and to grow steadier. As if to test
their regularity, she paused before a florist’s window, and looked
appreciatively at the jars of roses and forced lilac, the compact
bunches of lilies-of-the-valley and violets, the first pots of
close-budded azaleas. Finally she opened the shop-door, and after
examining the Jacqueminots and Marshal Niels, selected with care two
perfect specimens of a new silvery-pink rose, waited for the florist to
wrap them in cotton-wool, and slipped their long stems into her muff
for more complete protection.
“It’s so simple, after all,” she said to herself as she walked on. “I’ll
tell him that as I was coming up Fifth Avenue from Cousin Cecilia’s I
heard the fire-engines turning into Twenty-third Street, and ran after
them. Just what _he_ would have done ... once ...” she ended on a sigh.
At Thirty-first Street she turned the corner with a quicker step. The
house she was approaching was low and narrow; but the Christmas holly
glistening between frilled curtains, the well-scrubbed steps, the
shining bell and door-knob, gave it a welcoming look. From garret to
basement it beamed like the abode of a happy couple.
As Lizzie Hazeldean reached the door a curious change came over her. She
was conscious of it at once--she had so often said to herself, when her
little house rose before her: “It makes me feel younger as soon as I
turn the corner.” And it was true even today. In spite of her agitation
she was aware that the lines between her eyebrows were smoothing
themselves out, and that a kind of inner lightness was replacing the
heavy tumult of her breast. The lightness revealed itself in her
movements, which grew as quick as a girl’s as she ran up the steps. She
rang twice--it was her signal--and turned an unclouded smile on her
elderly parlourmaid.
“Is Mr. Hazeldean in the library, Susan? I hope you’ve kept up the fire
for him.”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. But Mr. Hazeldean’s not in,” said Susan, returning the
smile respectfully.
“Not _in_? With his cold--and in this weather?”
“That’s what I told him, ma’am. But he just laughed--”
“Just laughed? What do you mean, Susan?” Lizzie Hazeldean felt herself
turning pale. She rested her hand quickly on the hall table.
“Well, ma’am, the minute he heard the fire-engine, off he rushed like a
boy. It seems the Fifth Avenue Hotel’s on fire: there’s where he’s
gone.”
The blood left Mrs. Hazeldean’s lips; she felt it shuddering back to her
heart. But a second later she spoke in a tone of natural and
good-humoured impatience.
“What madness! How long ago--can you remember?” Instantly, she felt the
possible imprudence of the question, and added: “The doctor said he
ought not to be out more than a quarter of an hour, and only at the
sunniest time of the day.”
“I know that, ma’am, and so I reminded him. But he’s been gone nearly an
hour, I should say.”
A sense of deep fatigue overwhelmed Mrs. Hazeldean. She felt as if she
had walked for miles against an icy gale: her breath came laboriously.
“How could you let him go?” she wailed; then, as the parlourmaid again
smiled respectfully, she added: “Oh, I know--sometimes one can’t stop
him. He gets so restless, being shut up with these long colds.”
“That’s what I _do_ feel, ma’am.”
Mistress and maid exchanged a glance of sympathy, and Susan felt herself
emboldened to suggest: “Perhaps the outing will do him good,” with the
tendency of her class to encourage favoured invalids in disobedience.
Mrs. Hazeldean’s look grew severe. “Susan! I’ve often warned you against
talking to him in that way--”
Susan reddened, and assumed a pained expression. “How can you think it,
ma’am?--me that never say anything to anybody, as all in the house will
bear witness.”
Her mistress made an impatient movement. “Oh, well, I daresay he won’t
be long. The fire’s over.”
“Ah--you knew of it too, then, ma’am?”
“Of the fire? Why, of course. I _saw_ it, even--” Mrs. Hazeldean smiled.
“I was walking home from Washington Square--from Miss Cecilia
Winter’s--and at the corner of Twenty-third Street there was a huge
crowd, and clouds of smoke.... It’s very odd that I shouldn’t have run
across Mr. Hazeldean.” She looked limpidly at the parlourmaid. “But,
then, of course, in all that crowd and confusion....”
Half-way up the stairs she turned to call back: “Make up a good fire in
the library, please, and bring the tea up. It’s too cold in the
drawing-room.”
The library was on the upper landing. She went in, drew the two roses
from her muff, tenderly unswathed them, and put them in a slim glass on
her husband’s writing-table. In the doorway she paused to smile at this
touch of summer in the firelit wintry room; but a moment later her frown
of anxiety reappeared. She stood listening intently for the sound of a
latch-key; then, hearing nothing, passed on to her bedroom.
It was a rosy room, hung with one of the new English chintzes, which
also covered the deep sofa, and the bed with its rose-lined
pillow-covers. The carpet was cherry red, the toilet-table ruffled and
looped like a ball-dress. Ah, how she and Susan had ripped and sewn and
hammered, and pieced together old scraps of lace and ribbon and muslin,
in the making of that airy monument! For weeks after she had done over
the room her husband never came into it without saying: “I can’t think
how you managed to squeeze all this loveliness out of that last cheque
of your stepmother’s.”
On the dressing-table Lizzie Hazeldean noticed a long florist’s box, one
end of which had been cut open to give space to the still longer stems
of a bunch of roses. She snipped the string, and extracted from the box
an envelope which she flung into the fire without so much as a glance at
its contents. Then she pushed the flowers aside, and after rearranging
her dark hair before the mirror, carefully dressed herself in a loose
garment of velvet and lace which lay awaiting her on the sofa, beside
her high-heeled slippers and stockings of open-work silk.
She had been one of the first women in New York to have tea every
afternoon at five, and to put off her walking-dress for a tea-gown.
III
She returned to the library, where the fire was beginning to send a
bright blaze through the twilight. It flashed on the bindings of
Hazeldean’s many books, and she smiled absently at the welcome it held
out. A latch-key rattled, and she heard her husband’s step, and the
sound of his cough below in the hall.
“What madness--what madness!” she murmured.
Slowly--how slowly for a young man!--he mounted the stairs, and still
coughing came into the library. She ran to him and took him in her
arms.
“Charlie! How could you? In this weather? It’s nearly dark!”
His long thin face lit up with a deprecating smile. “I suppose Susan’s
betrayed me, eh? Don’t be cross. You’ve missed such a show! The Fifth
Avenue Hotel’s been on fire.”
“Yes; I know.” She paused, just perceptibly. “I _didn’t_ miss it,
though--I rushed across Madison Square for a look at it myself.”
“You did? You were there too? What fun!” The idea appeared to fill him
with boyish amusement.
“Naturally I was! On my way home from Cousin Cecilia’s....”
“Ah, of course. I’d forgotten you were going there. But how odd, then,
that we didn’t meet!”
“If we _had_ I should have dragged you home long ago. I’ve been in at
least half an hour, and the fire was already over when I got there.
What a baby you are to have stayed out so long, staring at smoke and a
fire-engine!”
He smiled, still holding her, and passing his gaunt hand softly and
wistfully over her head. “Oh, don’t worry. I’ve been indoors, safely
sheltered, and drinking old Mrs. Parrett’s punch. The old lady saw me
from her window, and sent one of the Wesson boys across the street to
fetch me in. They had just finished a family luncheon. And Sillerton
Jackson, who was there, drove me home. So you see,--”
He released her, and moved toward the fire, and she stood motionless,
staring blindly ahead, while the thoughts spun through her mind like a
mill-race.
“Sillerton Jackson--” she echoed, without in the least knowing what she
said.
“Yes; he has the gout again--luckily for me!--and his sister’s brougham
came to the Parretts’ to fetch him.”
She collected herself. “You’re coughing more than you did yesterday,”
she accused him.
“Oh, well--the air’s sharpish. But I shall be all right presently....
Oh, those roses!” He paused in admiration before his writing-table.
Her face glowed with a reflected pleasure, though all the while the
names he had pronounced--“The Parretts, the Wessons, Sillerton
Jackson”--were clanging through her brain like a death-knell.
“They _are_ lovely, aren’t they?” she beamed.
“Much too lovely for me. You must take them down to the drawing-room.”
“No; we’re going to have tea up here.”
“That’s jolly--it means there’ll be no visitors, I hope?”
She nodded, smiling.
“Good! But the roses--no, they mustn’t be wasted on this desert air.
You’ll wear them in your dress this evening?”
She started perceptibly, and moved slowly back toward the hearth.
“This evening?... Oh, I’m not going to Mrs. Struthers’s,” she said,
remembering.
“Yes, you are. Dearest--I want you to!”
“But what shall you do alone all the evening? With that cough, you won’t
go to sleep till late.”
“Well, if I don’t, I’ve a lot of new books to keep me busy.”
“Oh, your books--!” She made a little gesture, half teasing, half
impatient, in the direction of the freshly cut volumes stacked up
beside his student lamp. It was an old joke between them that she had
never been able to believe anyone could really “care for reading.” Long
as she and her husband had lived together, this passion of his remained
for her as much of a mystery as on the day when she had first surprised
him, mute and absorbed, over what the people she had always lived with
would have called “a deep book.” It was her first encounter with a born
reader; or at least, the few she had known had been, like her
stepmother, the retired opera-singer, feverish devourers of circulating
library fiction: she had never before lived in a house with books in it.
Gradually she had learned to take a pride in Hazeldean’s reading, as if
it had been some rare accomplishment; she had perceived that it
reflected credit on him, and was even conscious of its adding to the
charm of his talk, a charm she had always felt without being able to
define it. But still, in her heart of hearts she regarded books as a
mere expedient, and felt sure that they were only an aid to patience,
like jackstraws or a game of patience, with the disadvantage of
requiring a greater mental effort.
“Shan’t you be too tired to read tonight?” she questioned wistfully.
“Too tired? Why, you goose, reading is the greatest rest in the
world!--I want you to go to Mrs. Struthers’s, dear; I want to see you
again in that black velvet dress,” he added with his coaxing smile.
The parlourmaid brought in the tray, and Mrs. Hazeldean busied herself
with the tea-caddy. Her husband had stretched himself out in the deep
armchair which was his habitual seat. He crossed his arms behind his
neck, leaning his head back wearily against them, so that, as she
glanced at him across the hearth, she saw the salient muscles in his
long neck, and the premature wrinkles about his ears and chin. The lower
part of his face was singularly ravaged; only the eyes, those quiet
ironic grey eyes, and the white forehead above them, reminded her of
what he had been seven years before. Only seven years!
She felt a rush of tears: no, there were times when fate was too cruel,
the future too horrible to contemplate, and the past--the past, oh, how
much worse! And there he sat, coughing, coughing--and thinking God knows
what, behind those quiet half-closed lids. At such times he grew so
mysteriously remote that she felt lonelier than when he was not in the
room.
“Charlie!”
He roused himself. “Yes?”
“Here’s your tea.”
He took it from her in silence, and she began, nervously, to wonder why
he was not talking. Was it because he was afraid it might make him cough
again, afraid she would be worried, and scold him? Or was it because he
was thinking--thinking of things he had heard at old Mrs. Parrett’s, or
on the drive home with Sillerton Jackson ... hints they might have
dropped ... insinuations ... she didn’t know what ... or of something he
had _seen_, perhaps, from old Mrs. Parrett’s window? She looked across
at his white forehead, so smooth and impenetrable in the lamplight, and
thought: “Oh, God, it’s like a locked door. I shall dash my brains out
against it some day!”
For, after all, it was not impossible that he had actually seen her,
seen her from Mrs. Parrett’s window, or even from the crowd around the
door of the hotel. For all she knew, he might have been near enough, in
that crowd, to put out his hand and touch her. And he might have held
back, benumbed, aghast, not believing his own eyes.... She couldn’t
tell. She had never yet made up her mind how he would look, how he would
behave, what he would say, if ever he _did_ see or hear anything....
No! That was the worst of it. They had lived together for nearly nine
years--and how closely!--and nothing that she knew of him, or had
observed in him, enabled her to forecast exactly what, in that
particular case, his state of mind and his attitude would be. In his
profession, she knew, he was celebrated for his shrewdness and insight;
in personal matters he often seemed, to her alert mind, oddly
absent-minded and indifferent. Yet that might be merely his instinctive
way of saving his strength for things he considered more important.
There were times when she was sure he was quite deliberate and
self-controlled enough to feel in one way and behave in another: perhaps
even to have thought out a course in advance--just as, at the first bad
symptoms of illness, he had calmly made his will, and planned everything
about her future, the house and the servants.... No, she couldn’t tell;
there always hung over her the thin glittering menace of a danger she
could neither define nor localize--like that avenging lightning which
groped for the lovers in the horrible poem he had once read aloud to her
(what a choice!) on a lazy afternoon of their wedding journey, as they
lay stretched under Italian stone-pines.
The maid came in to draw the curtains and light the lamps. The fire
glowed, the scent of the roses drifted on the warm air, and the clock
ticked out the minutes, and softly struck a half hour, while Mrs.
Hazeldean continued to ask herself, as she so often had before: “Now,
what would be the _natural_ thing for me to say?”
And suddenly the words escaped from her, she didn’t know how: “I wonder
you didn’t see me coming out of the hotel--for I actually squeezed my
way in.”
Her husband made no answer. Her heart jumped convulsively; then she
lifted her eyes and saw that he was asleep. How placid his face
looked--years younger than when he was awake! The immensity of her
relief rushed over her in a warm glow, the counterpart of the icy sweat
which had sent her chattering homeward from the fire. After all, if he
could fall asleep, fall into such a peaceful sleep as that--tired, no
doubt, by his imprudent walk, and the exposure to the cold--it meant,
beyond all doubt, beyond all conceivable dread, that he knew nothing,
had seen nothing, suspected nothing: that she was safe, safe, safe!
The violence of the reaction made her long to spring to her feet and
move about the room. She saw a crooked picture that she wanted to
straighten, she would have liked to give the roses another tilt in their
glass. But there he sat, quietly sleeping, and the long habit of
vigilance made her respect his rest, watching over it as patiently as if
it had been a sick child’s.
She drew a contented breath. Now she could afford to think of his outing
only as it might affect his health; and she knew that this sudden
drowsiness, even if it were a sign of extreme fatigue, was also the
natural restorative for that fatigue. She continued to sit behind the
tea-tray, her hands folded, her eyes on his face, while the peace of the
scene entered into her, and held her under brooding wings.
IV
At Mrs. Struthers’s, at eleven o’clock that evening, the long over-lit
drawing-rooms were already thronged with people.
Lizzie Hazeldean paused on the threshold and looked about her. The habit
of pausing to get her bearings, of sending a circular glance around any
assemblage of people, any drawing-room, concert-hall or theatre that she
entered, had become so instinctive that she would have been surprised
had anyone pointed out to her the unobservant expression and careless
movements of the young women of her acquaintance, who also looked about
them, it is true, but with the vague unseeing stare of youth, and of
beauty conscious only of itself.
Lizzie Hazeldean had long since come to regard most women of her age as
children in the art of life. Some savage instinct of self-defence,
fostered by experience, had always made her more alert and perceiving
than the charming creatures who passed from the nursery to marriage as
if lifted from one rose-lined cradle into another. “Rocked to
sleep--that’s what they’ve always been,” she used to think sometimes,
listening to their innocuous talk during the long after-dinners in hot
drawing-rooms, while their husbands, in the smoking-rooms below,
exchanged ideas which, if no more striking, were at least based on more
direct experiences.
But then, as all the old ladies said, Lizzie Hazeldean had always
preferred the society of men.
The man she now sought was not visible, and she gave a little sigh of
ease. “If only he has had the sense to stay away!” she thought.
She would have preferred to stay away herself; but it had been her
husband’s whim that she should come. “You know you always enjoy yourself
at Mrs. Struthers’s--everybody does. The old girl somehow manages to
have the most amusing house in New York. Who is it who’s going to sing
tonight?... If you don’t go, I shall know it’s because I’ve coughed two
or three times oftener than usual, and you’re worrying about me. My dear
girl, it will take more than the Fifth Avenue Hotel fire to kill
_me_.... My heart’s feeling unusually steady.... Put on your black
velvet, will you?--with these two roses....”
So she had gone. And here she was, in her black velvet, under the
glitter of Mrs. Struthers’s chandeliers, amid all the youth and good
looks and gaiety of New York; for, as Hazeldean said, Mrs. Struthers’s
house was more amusing than anybody else’s, and whenever she opened her
doors the world flocked through them.
As Mrs. Hazeldean reached the inner drawing-room the last notes of a
rich tenor were falling on the attentive silence. She saw Campanini’s
low-necked throat subside into silence above the piano, and the clapping
of many tightly-fitting gloves was succeeded by a general movement, and
the usual irrepressible outburst of talk.
In the breaking-up of groups she caught a glimpse of Sillerton Jackson’s
silvery crown. Their eyes met across bare shoulders, he bowed
profoundly, and she fancied that a dry smile lifted his moustache. “He
doesn’t usually bow to me as low as that,” she thought apprehensively.
But as she advanced into the room her self-possession returned. Among
all these stupid pretty women she had such a sense of power, of knowing
almost everything better than they did, from the way of doing her hair
to the art of keeping a secret! She felt a thrill of pride in the slope
of her white shoulders above the black velvet, in the one curl escaping
from her thick chignon, and the slant of the gold arrow tipped with
diamonds which she had thrust in to retain it. And she had done it all
without a maid, with no one cleverer than Susan to help her! Ah, as a
woman she knew her business....
* * * * *
Mrs. Struthers, plumed and ponderous, with diamond stars studding her
black wig like a pin-cushion, had worked her resolute way back to the
outer room. More people were coming in; and with her customary rough
skill she was receiving, distributing, introducing them. Suddenly her
smile deepened; she was evidently greeting an old friend. The group
about her scattered, and Mrs. Hazeldean saw that, in her cordial
absent-minded way, and while her wandering hostess-eye swept the rooms,
she was saying a confidential word to a tall man whose hand she
detained. They smiled at each other; then Mrs. Struthers’s glance turned
toward the inner room, and her smile seemed to say: “You’ll find her
there.”
The tall man nodded. He looked about him composedly, and began to move
toward the centre of the throng, speaking to everyone, appearing to have
no object beyond that of greeting the next person in his path, yet
quietly, steadily pursuing that path, which led straight to the inner
room.
Mrs. Hazeldean had found a seat near the piano. A good-looking youth,
seated beside her, was telling her at considerable length what he was
going to wear at the Beauforts’ fancy-ball. She listened, approved,
suggested; but her glance never left the advancing figure of the tall
man.
Handsome? Yes, she said to herself; she had to admit that he was
handsome. A trifle too broad and florid, perhaps; though his air and his
attitude so plainly denied it that, on second thoughts, one agreed that
a man of his height had, after all, to carry some ballast. Yes; his
assurance made him, as a rule, appear to people exactly as he chose to
appear; that is, as a man over forty, but carrying his years carelessly,
an active muscular man, whose blue eyes were still clear, whose fair
hair waved ever so little less thickly than it used to on a low sunburnt
forehead, over eyebrows almost silvery in their blondness, and blue eyes
the bluer for their thatch. Stupid-looking? By no means. His smile
denied that. Just self-sufficient enough to escape fatuity, yet so cool
that one felt the fundamental coldness, he steered his way through life
as easily and resolutely as he was now working his way through Mrs.
Struthers’s drawing-rooms.
Half-way, he was detained by a tap of Mrs. Wesson’s red fan. Mrs.
Wesson--surely, Mrs. Hazeldean reflected, Charles had spoken of Mrs.
Sabina Wesson’s being with her mother, old Mrs. Parrett, while they
watched the fire? Sabina Wesson was a redoubtable woman, one of the few
of her generation and her clan who had broken with tradition, and gone
to Mrs. Struthers’s almost as soon as the Shoe-Polish Queen had bought
her house in Fifth Avenue, and issued her first challenge to society.
Lizzie Hazeldean shut her eyes for an instant; then, rising from her
seat, she joined the group about the singer. From there she wandered on
to another knot of acquaintances.
“Look here: the fellow’s going to sing again. Let’s get into that corner
over there.”
She felt ever so slight a touch on her arm, and met Henry Prest’s
composed glance.
A red-lit and palm-shaded recess divided the drawing-rooms from the
dining-room, which ran across the width of the house at the back. Mrs.
Hazeldean hesitated; then she caught Mrs. Wesson’s watchful glance,
lifted her head with a smile and followed her companion.
They sat down on a small sofa under the palms, and a couple, who had
been in search of the same retreat, paused on the threshold, and with an
interchange of glances passed on. Mrs. Hazeldean smiled more vividly.
“Where are my roses? Didn’t you get them?” Prest asked. He had a way of
looking her over from beneath lowered lids, while he affected to be
examining a glove-button or contemplating the tip of his shining boot.
“Yes, I got them,” she answered.
“You’re not wearing them. I didn’t order those.”
“No.”
“Whose are they, then?”
She unfolded her mother-of-pearl fan, and bent above its complicated
traceries.
“Mine,” she pronounced.
“Yours? Well, obviously. But I suppose someone sent them to you?”
“_I_ did.” She hesitated a second. “I sent them to myself.”
He raised his eyebrows a little. “Well, they don’t suit you--that washy
pink! May I ask why you didn’t wear mine?”
“I’ve already told you.... I’ve often asked you never to send flowers
... on the day....”
“Nonsense. That’s the very day.... What’s the matter? Are you still
nervous?”
She was silent for a moment; then she lowered her voice to say: “You
ought not to have come here tonight.”
“My dear girl, how unlike you! You _are_ nervous.”
“Didn’t you see all those people in the Parretts’ window?”
“What, opposite? Lord, no; I just took to my heels! It was the deuce,
the back way being barred. But what of it? In all that crowd, do you
suppose for a moment--”
“My husband was in the window with them,” she said, still lower.
His confident face fell for a moment, and then almost at once regained
its look of easy arrogance.
“Well--?”
“Oh, nothing--as yet. Only I ask you ... to go away now.”
“Just as you asked me not to come! Yet _you_ came, because you had the
sense to see that if you didn’t ... and I came for the same reason. Look
here, my dear, for God’s sake don’t lose your head!”
The challenge seemed to rouse her. She lifted her chin, glanced about
the thronged room which they commanded from their corner, and nodded and
smiled invitingly at several acquaintances, with the hope that some one
of them might come up to her. But though they all returned her greetings
with a somewhat elaborate cordiality, not one advanced toward her
secluded seat.
She turned her head slightly toward her companion. “I ask you again to
go,” she repeated.
“Well, I will then, after the fellow’s sung. But I’m bound to say you’re
a good deal pleasanter--”
The first bars of “_Salve, Dimora_” silenced him, and they sat side by
side in the meditative rigidity of fashionable persons listening to
expensive music. She had thrown herself into a corner of the sofa, and
Henry Prest, about whom everything was discreet but his eyes, sat apart
from her, one leg crossed over the other, one hand holding his folded
opera-hat on his knee, while the other hand rested beside him on the
sofa. But an end of her tulle scarf lay in the space between them; and
without looking in his direction, without turning her glance from the
singer, she was conscious that Prest’s hand had reached and drawn the
scarf toward him. She shivered a little, made an involuntary motion as
though to gather it about her--and then desisted. As the song ended, he
bent toward her slightly, said: “Darling” so low that it seemed no more
than a breath on her cheek, and then, rising, bowed, and strolled into
the other room.
She sighed faintly, and, settling herself once more in her corner,
lifted her brilliant eyes to Sillerton Jackson, who was approaching. “It
_was_ good of you to bring Charlie home from the Parretts’ this
afternoon.” She held out her hand, making way for him at her side.
“Good of me?” he laughed. “Why, I was glad of the chance of getting him
safely home; it was rather naughty of _him_ to be where he was, I
suspect.” She fancied a slight pause, as if he waited to see the effect
of this, and her lashes beat her cheeks. But already he was going on:
“Do you encourage him, with that cough, to run about town after
fire-engines?”
She gave back the laugh.
“I don’t discourage him--ever--if I can help it. But it _was_ foolish of
him to go out today,” she agreed; and all the while she kept on asking
herself, as she had that afternoon, in her talk with her husband: “Now,
what would be the _natural_ thing for me to say?”
Should she speak of having been at the fire herself--or should she not?
The question dinned in her brain so loudly that she could hardly hear
what her companion was saying; yet she had, at the same time, a queer
feeling of his never having been so close to her, or rather so closely
intent on her, as now. In her strange state of nervous lucidity, her
eyes seemed to absorb with a new precision every facial detail of
whoever approached her; and old Sillerton Jackson’s narrow mask, his
withered pink cheeks, the veins in the hollow of his temples, under the
carefully-tended silvery hair, and the tiny blood-specks in the white of
his eyes as he turned their cautious blue gaze on her, appeared as if
presented under some powerful lens. With his eyeglasses dangling over
one white-gloved hand, the other supporting his opera-hat on his knee,
he suggested, behind that assumed carelessness of pose, the patient
fixity of a naturalist holding his breath near the crack from which some
tiny animal might suddenly issue--if one watched long enough, or gave
it, completely enough, the impression of not looking for it, or dreaming
it was anywhere near. The sense of that tireless attention made Mrs.
Hazeldean’s temples ache as if she sat under a glare of light even
brighter than that of the Struthers’ chandeliers--a glare in which each
quiver of a half-formed thought might be as visible behind her forehead
as the faint lines wrinkling its surface into an uncontrollable frown of
anxiety. Yes, Prest was right; she was losing her head--losing it for
the first time in the dangerous year during which she had had such
continual need to keep it steady.
“What is it? What has happened to me?” she wondered.
There had been alarms before--how could it be otherwise? But they had
only stimulated her, made her more alert and prompt; whereas tonight
she felt herself quivering away into she knew not what abyss of
weakness. What was different, then? Oh, she knew well enough! It was
Charles ... that haggard look in his eyes, and the lines of his throat
as he had leaned back sleeping. She had never before admitted to herself
how ill she thought him; and now, to have to admit it, and at the same
time not to have the complete certainty that the look in his eyes was
caused by illness only, made the strain unbearable.
She glanced about her with a sudden sense of despair. Of all the people
in those brilliant animated groups--of all the women who called her
Lizzie, and the men who were familiars at her house--she knew that not
one, at that moment, guessed, or could have understood, what she was
feeling.... Her eyes fell on Henry Prest, who had come to the surface a
little way off, bending over the chair of the handsome Mrs. Lyman. “And
_you_ least of all!” she thought. “Yet God knows,” she added with a
shiver, “they all have their theories about me!”
“My dear Mrs. Hazeldean, you look a little pale. Are you cold? Shall I
get you some champagne?” Sillerton Jackson was officiously suggesting.
“If you think the other women look blooming! My dear man, it’s this
hideous vulgar overhead lighting....” She rose impatiently. It had
occurred to her that the thing to do--the “natural” thing--would be to
stroll up to Jinny Lyman, over whom Prest was still attentively bending.
_Then_ people would see if she was nervous, or ill--or afraid!