“That it’s all right. Come along. She’s the jolliest woman I know. We’ll
go back afterward and have supper with her--jolliest house I know.”
Hubert twirled a self-conscious moustache.
We were dining at the Knickerbocker, to which I had just been elected,
and the bottle of Pommery we were finishing disposed me to think that
nothing could be more fitting for two men of the world than to end their
evening in the box of the jolliest woman Hubert knew. I groped for my
own moustache, gave a twirl in the void, and followed him, after
meticulously sliding my overcoat sleeve around my silk hat as I had seen
him do.
But once in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box I was only an overgrown boy again,
bathed in such blushes as used, at the same age, to visit Hubert,
forgetting that I had a moustache to twirl, and knocking my hat from the
peg on which I had just hung it, in my zeal to pick up a programme she
had not dropped.
For she was really too lovely--too formidably lovely. I was used by now
to mere unadjectived loveliness, the kind that youth and spirits hang
like a rosy veil over commonplace features, an average outline and a
pointless merriment. But this was something calculated, accomplished,
finished--and just a little worn. It frightened me with my first glimpse
of the infinity of beauty and the multiplicity of her pit-falls. What!
There were women who need not fear crow’s-feet, were more beautiful for
being pale, could let a silver hair or two show among the dark, and
their eyes brood inwardly while they smiled and, chatted? But then no
young man was safe for a moment! But then the world I had hitherto known
had been only a warm pink nursery, while this new one was a place of
darkness, perils and enchantments....
It was the next day that one of my sisters asked me where I had been the
evening before, and that I puffed out my chest to answer: “With Mrs.
Hazeldean--at the opera.” My mother looked up, but did not speak till
the governess had swept the girls off; then she said with pinched lips:
“Hubert Wesson took you to Mrs. Hazeldean’s box?”
“Yes.”
“Well, a young man may go where he pleases. I hear Hubert is still
infatuated; it serves Sabina right for not letting him marry the
youngest Lyman girl. But don’t mention Mrs. Hazeldean again before your
sisters.... They say her husband never knew--I suppose if he _had_ she
would never have got old Miss Cecilia Winter’s money.” And it was then
that my mother pronounced the name of Henry Prest, and added that
phrase about the Fifth Avenue Hotel which suddenly woke my boyish
memories....
In a flash I saw again, under its quickly-lowered veil, the face with
the exposed eyes and the frozen smile, and felt through my grown-up
waistcoat the stab to my boy’s heart and the loosened murmur of my soul;
felt all this, and at the same moment tried to relate that former face,
so fresh and clear despite its anguish, to the smiling guarded
countenance of Hubert’s “jolliest woman I know.”
I was familiar with Hubert’s indiscriminate use of his one adjective,
and had not expected to find Mrs. Hazeldean “jolly” in the literal
sense: in the case of the lady he happened to be in love with the
epithet simply meant that she justified his choice. Nevertheless, as I
compared Mrs. Hazeldean’s earlier face to this one, I had my first
sense of what may befall in the long years between youth and maturity,
and of how short a distance I had travelled on that mysterious journey.
If only she would take me by the hand!
I was not wholly unprepared for my mother’s comment. There was no other
lady in Mrs. Hazeldean’s box when we entered; none joined her during the
evening, and our hostess offered no apology for her isolation. In the
New York of my youth every one knew what to think of a woman who was
seen “alone at the opera”; if Mrs. Hazeldean was not openly classed with
Fanny Ring, our one conspicuous “professional,” it was because, out of
respect for her social origin, New York preferred to avoid such
juxtapositions. Young as I was, I knew this social law, and had guessed,
before the evening was over, that Mrs. Hazeldean was not a lady on whom
other ladies called, though she was not, on the other hand, a lady whom
it was forbidden to mention to other ladies. So I did mention her, with
bravado.
No ladies showed themselves at the opera with Mrs. Hazeldean; but one or
two dropped in to the jolly supper announced by Hubert, an entertainment
whose jollity consisted in a good deal of harmless banter over broiled
canvas-backs and celery, with the best of champagne. These same ladies I
sometimes met at her house afterward. They were mostly younger than
their hostess, and still, though precariously, within the social pale:
pretty trivial creatures, bored with a monotonous prosperity, and
yearning for such unlawful joys as cigarettes, plain speaking, and a
drive home in the small hours with the young man of the moment. But
such daring spirits were few in old New York, their appearances
infrequent and somewhat furtive. Mrs. Hazeldean’s society consisted
mainly of men, men of all ages, from her bald or grey-headed
contemporaries to youths of Hubert’s accomplished years and raw novices
of mine.
A great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not
the oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed _déclassée_,
but the air of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied
of society and closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always
felt, at Lizzie Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and
aunts might be announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they
wouldn’t be.
What is there in the atmosphere of such houses that makes them so
enchanting to a fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that “those
women” (as the others call them) alone know how to put the awkward at
ease, check the familiar, smile a little at the over-knowing, and yet
encourage naturalness in all? The difference of atmosphere is felt on
the very threshold. The flowers grow differently in their vases, the
lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way of coming together, the
books on the table are the very ones that one is longing to get hold of.
The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way of arranging her
dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in this art Mrs.
Hazeldean excelled.
I have spoken of books; even then they were usually the first objects to
attract me in a room, whatever else of beauty it contained; and I
remember, on the evening of that first “jolly supper,” coming to an
astonished pause before the crowded shelves that took up one wall of the
drawing-room. What! The goddess read, then? She could accompany one on
those flights too? Lead one, no doubt? My heart beat high....
But I soon learned that Lizzie Hazeldean did not read. She turned but
languidly even the pages of the last Ouida novel; and I remember seeing
Mallock’s _New Republic_ uncut on her table for weeks. It took me no
long time to make the discovery: at my very next visit she caught my
glance of surprise in the direction of the rich shelves, smiled,
coloured a little, and met it with the confession: “No, I can’t read
them. I’ve tried--I _have_ tried--but print makes me sleepy. Even novels
do....” “They” were the accumulated treasures of English poetry, and a
rich and varied selection of history, criticism, letters, in English,
French and Italian--she spoke these languages, I knew--books evidently
assembled by a sensitive and widely-ranging reader. We were alone at the
time, and Mrs. Hazeldean went on in a lower tone: “I kept just the few
he liked best--my husband, you know.” It was the first time that Charles
Hazeldean’s name had been spoken between us, and my surprise was so
great that my candid cheek must have reflected the blush on hers. I had
fancied that women in her situation avoided alluding to their husbands.
But she continued to look at me, wistfully, humbly almost, as if there
were something more that she wanted to say, and was inwardly entreating
me to understand.
“He was a great reader: a student. And he tried so hard to make me read
too--he wanted to share everything with me. And I _did_ like
poetry--some poetry--when he read it aloud to me. After his death I
thought: ‘There’ll be his books. I can go back to them--I shall find him
there.’ And I tried--oh, so hard--but it’s no use. They’ve lost their
meaning ... as most things have.” She stood up, lit a cigarette, pushed
back a log on the hearth. I felt that she was waiting for me to speak.
If life had but taught me how to answer her, what was there of her story
I might not have learned? But I was too inexperienced; I could not shake
off my bewilderment. What! This woman whom I had been pitying for
matrimonial miseries which seemed to justify her seeking solace
elsewhere--this woman could speak of her husband in such a tone! I had
instantly perceived that the tone was not feigned; and a confused sense
of the complexity--or the chaos--of human relations held me as
tongue-tied as a schoolboy to whom a problem beyond his grasp is
suddenly propounded.
Before the thought took shape she had read it, and with the smile which
drew such sad lines about her mouth, had continued gaily: “What are you
up to this evening, by the way? What do you say to going to the “Black
Crook” with your cousin Hubert and one or two others? I have a box.”
It was inevitable that, not long after this candid confession, I should
have persuaded myself that a taste for reading was boring in a woman,
and that one of Mrs. Hazeldean’s chief charms lay in her freedom from
literary pretensions. The truth was, of course, that it lay in her
sincerity; in her humble yet fearless estimate of her own qualities and
short-comings. I had never met its like in a woman of any age, and
coming to me in such early days, and clothed in such looks and
intonations, it saved me, in after years, from all peril of meaner
beauties.
But before I had come to understand that, or to guess what falling in
love with Lizzie Hazeldean was to do for me, I had quite unwittingly and
fatuously done the falling. The affair turned out, in the perspective of
the years, to be but an incident of our long friendship; and if I touch
on it here it is only to illustrate another of my poor friend’s gifts.
If she could not read books she could read hearts; and she bent a
playful yet compassionate gaze on mine while it still floundered in
unawareness.
I remember it all as if it were yesterday. We were sitting alone in her
drawing-room, in the winter twilight, over the fire. We had reached--in
her company it was not difficult--the degree of fellowship when friendly
talk lapses naturally into a friendlier silence, and she had taken up
the evening paper while I glowered dumbly at the embers. One little
foot, just emerging below her dress, swung, I remember, between me and
the fire, and seemed to hold her all in the spring of its instep....
“Oh,” she exclaimed, “poor Henry Prest--“. She dropped the paper. “His
wife is dead--poor fellow,” she said simply.
The blood rushed to my forehead: my heart was in my throat. She had
named him--named him at last, the recreant lover, the man who had
“dishonoured” her! My hands were clenched: if he had entered the room
they would have been at his throat....
And then, after a quick interval, I had again the humiliating
disheartening sense of not understanding: of being too young, too
inexperienced, to know. This woman, who spoke of her deceived husband
with tenderness, spoke compassionately of her faithless lover! And she
did the one as naturally as the other, not as if this impartial charity
were an attitude she had determined to assume, but as if it were part of
the lesson life had taught her.
“I didn’t know he was married,” I growled between my teeth.
She meditated absently. “Married? Oh, yes; when was it? The year after
...” her voice dropped again ... “after my husband died. He married a
quiet cousin, who had always been in love with him, I believe. They had
two boys.--You knew him?” she abruptly questioned.
I nodded grimly.
“People always thought he would never marry--he used to say so himself,”
she went on, still absently.
I burst out: “The--hound!”
“_Oh!_” she exclaimed. I started up, our eyes met, and hers filled with
tears of reproach and understanding. We sat looking at each other in
silence. Two of the tears overflowed, hung on her lashes, melted down
her cheeks. I continued to stare at her shamefacedly; then I got to my
feet, drew out my handkerchief, and tremblingly, reverently, as if I had
touched a sacred image, I wiped them away.
My love-making went no farther. In another moment she had contrived to
put a safe distance between us. She did not want to turn a boy’s head;
long since (she told me afterward) such amusements had ceased to excite
her. But she did want my sympathy, wanted it overwhelmingly: amid the
various feelings she was aware of arousing, she let me see that
sympathy, in the sense of a moved understanding, had always been
lacking. “But then,” she added ingenuously, “I’ve never really been
sure, because I’ve never told anyone my story. Only I take it for
granted that, if I haven’t, it’s _their_ fault rather than mine....” She
smiled half-deprecatingly, and my bosom swelled, acknowledging the
distinction. “And now I want to tell _you_--” she began.
I have said that my love for Mrs. Hazeldean was a brief episode in our
long relation. At my age, it was inevitable that it should be so. The
“fresher face” soon came, and in its light I saw my old friend as a
middle-aged woman, turning grey, with a mechanical smile and haunted
eyes. But it was in the first glow of my feeling that she had told me
her story; and when the glow subsided, and in the afternoon light of a
long intimacy I judged and tested her statements, I found that each
detail fitted into the earlier picture.
My opportunities were many; for once she had told the tale she always
wanted to be retelling it. A perpetual longing to relive the past, a
perpetual need to explain and justify herself--the satisfaction of these
two cravings, once she had permitted herself to indulge them, became the
luxury of her empty life. She had kept it empty--emotionally,
sentimentally empty--from the day of her husband’s death, as the
guardian of an abandoned temple might go on forever sweeping and tending
what had once been the god’s abode. But this duty performed, she had no
other. She had done one great--or abominable--thing; rank it as you
please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to
keep her at that height. Her tastes, her interests, her conceivable
occupations, were all on the level of a middling domesticity; she did
not know how to create for herself any inner life in keeping with that
one unprecedented impulse.
Soon after her husband’s death, one of her cousins, the Miss Cecilia
Winter of Washington Square to whom my mother had referred, had died
also, and left Mrs. Hazeldean a handsome legacy. And a year or two later
Charles Hazeldean’s small estate had undergone the favourable change
that befell New York realty in the ’eighties. The property he had
bequeathed to his wife had doubled, then tripled, in value; and she
found herself, after a few years of widowhood, in possession of an
income large enough to supply her with all the luxuries which her
husband had struggled so hard to provide. It was the peculiar irony of
her lot to be secured from temptation when all danger of temptation was
over; for she would never, I am certain, have held out the tip of her
finger to any man to obtain such luxuries for her own enjoyment. But if
she did not value her money for itself, she owed to it--and the service
was perhaps greater than she was aware--the power of mitigating her
solitude, and filling it with the trivial distractions without which she
was less and less able to live.
She had been put into the world, apparently, to amuse men and enchant
them; yet, her husband dead, her sacrifice accomplished, she would have
preferred, I am sure, to shut herself up in a lonely monumental
attitude, with thoughts and pursuits on a scale with her one great hour.
But what was she to do? She had known of no way of earning money except
by her graces; and now she knew no way of filling her days except with
cards and chatter and theatre-going. Not one of the men who approached
her passed beyond the friendly barrier she had opposed to me. Of that I
was sure. She had not shut out Henry Prest in order to replace him--her
face grew white at the suggestion. But what else was there to do, she
asked me; what? The days had to be spent somehow; and she was incurably,
disconsolately sociable.
So she lived, in a cold celibacy that passed for I don’t know what
licence; so she lived, withdrawn from us all, yet needing us so
desperately, inwardly faithful to her one high impulse, yet so incapable
of attuning her daily behaviour to it! And so, at the very moment when
she ceased to deserve the blame of society, she found herself cut off
from it, and reduced to the status of the “fast” widow noted for her
jolly suppers.
I bent bewildered over the depths of her plight. What else, at any stage
of her career, could she have done, I often wondered? Among the young
women now growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to
picture the helpless incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies,
the girl without money or vocation, seemingly put into the world only to
please, and unlearned in any way of maintaining herself there by her own
efforts. Marriage alone could save such a girl from starvation, unless
she happened to run across an old lady who wanted her dogs exercised
and her _Churchman_ read aloud to her. Even the day of painting
wild-roses on fans, of colouring photographs to “look like” miniatures,
of manufacturing lamp-shades and trimming hats for more fortunate
friends--even this precarious beginning of feminine independence had not
dawned. It was inconceivable to my mother’s generation that a
portionless girl should not be provided for by her relations until she
found a husband; and that, having found him, she should have to help him
to earn a living, was more inconceivable still. The self-sufficing
little society of that vanished New York attached no great importance to
wealth, but regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no
account of it.
These things pleaded in favour of poor Lizzie Hazeldean, though to
superficial observers her daily life seemed to belie the plea. She had
known no way of smoothing her husband’s last years but by being false to
him; but once he was dead, she expiated her betrayal by a rigidity of
conduct for which she asked no reward but her own inner satisfaction. As
she grew older, and her friends scattered, married, or were kept away
from one cause or another, she filled her depleted circle with a less
fastidious hand. One met in her drawing-room dull men, common men, men
who too obviously came there because they were not invited elsewhere,
and hoped to use her as a social stepping-stone. She was aware of the
difference--her eyes said so whenever I found one of these newcomers
installed in my arm-chair--but never, by word or sign, did she admit it.
She said to me once: “You find it duller here than it used to be. It’s
my fault, perhaps; I think I knew better how to draw out my old
friends.” And another day: “Remember, the people you meet here now come
out of kindness. I’m an old woman, and I consider nothing else.” That
was all.
She went more assiduously than ever to the theatre and the opera; she
performed for her friends a hundred trivial services; in her eagerness
to be always busy she invented superfluous attentions, oppressed people
by offering assistance they did not need, verged at times--for all her
tact--on the officiousness of the desperately lonely. At her little
suppers she surprised us with exquisite flowers and novel delicacies.
The champagne and cigars grew better and better as the quality of the
guests declined; and sometimes, as the last of her dull company
dispersed, I used to see her, among the scattered ash-trays and liqueur
decanters, turn a stealthy glance at her reflection in the mirror, with
haggard eyes which seemed to ask: “Will even _these_ come back
tomorrow?”
I should be loth to leave the picture at this point; my last vision of
her is more satisfying. I had been away, travelling for a year at the
other end of the world; the day I came back I ran across Hubert Wesson
at my club. Hubert had grown pompous and heavy. He drew me into a
corner, and said, turning red, and glancing cautiously over his
shoulder: “Have you seen our old friend Mrs. Hazeldean? She’s very ill,
I hear.”
I was about to take up the “I hear”; then I remembered that in my
absence Hubert had married, and that his caution was probably a tribute
to his new state. I hurried at once to Mrs. Hazeldean’s; and on her
door-step, to my surprise, I ran against a Catholic priest, who looked
gravely at me, bowed and passed out.
I was unprepared for such an encounter, for my old friend had never
spoken to me of religious matters. The spectacle of her father’s career
had presumably shaken whatever incipient faith was in her; though in her
little-girlhood, as she often told me, she had been as deeply impressed
by Dr. Winter’s eloquence as any grown-up member of his flock. But now,
as soon as I laid eyes on her, I understood. She was very ill, she was
visibly dying; and in her extremity, fate, not always kind, had sent her
the solace which she needed. Had some obscure inheritance of religious
feeling awaked in her? Had she remembered that her poor father, after
his long life of mental and moral vagabondage, had finally found rest
in the ancient fold? I never knew the explanation--she probably never
knew it herself.
But she knew that she had found what she wanted. At last she could talk
of Charles, she could confess her sin, she could be absolved of it.
Since cards and suppers and chatter were over, what more blessed barrier
could she find against solitude? All her life, henceforth, was a long
preparation for that daily hour of expansion and consolation. And then
this merciful visitor, who understood her so well, could also tell her
things about Charles: knew where he was, how he felt, what exquisite
daily attentions could still be paid to him, and how, with all
unworthiness washed away, she might at last hope to reach him. Heaven
could never seem strange, so interpreted; each time that I saw her,
during the weeks of her slow fading, she was more and more like a
traveller with her face turned homeward, yet smilingly resigned to await
her summons. The house no longer seemed lonely, nor the hours tedious;
there had even been found for her, among the books she had so often
tried to read, those books which had long looked at her with such
hostile faces, two or three (they were always on her bed) containing
messages from the world where Charles was waiting.
Thus provided and led, one day she went to him.
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's New Year's Day, by Edith Wharton and E. C. Caswell