Newland Archer sat at the writing-table in his library in East
Thirty-ninth Street.
He had just got back from a big official reception for the inauguration
of the new galleries at the Metropolitan Museum, and the spectacle
of those great spaces crowded with the spoils of the ages, where
the throng of fashion circulated through a series of scientifically
catalogued treasures, had suddenly pressed on a rusted spring of memory.
"Why, this used to be one of the old Cesnola rooms," he heard some one
say; and instantly everything about him vanished, and he was sitting
alone on a hard leather divan against a radiator, while a slight figure
in a long sealskin cloak moved away down the meagrely-fitted vista of
the old Museum.
The vision had roused a host of other associations, and he sat looking
with new eyes at the library which, for over thirty years, had been the
scene of his solitary musings and of all the family confabulations.
It was the room in which most of the real things of his life had
happened. There his wife, nearly twenty-six years ago, had broken to
him, with a blushing circumlocution that would have caused the young
women of the new generation to smile, the news that she was to have a
child; and there their eldest boy, Dallas, too delicate to be taken
to church in midwinter, had been christened by their old friend the
Bishop of New York, the ample magnificent irreplaceable Bishop, so
long the pride and ornament of his diocese. There Dallas had first
staggered across the floor shouting "Dad," while May and the nurse
laughed behind the door; there their second child, Mary (who was so
like her mother), had announced her engagement to the dullest and most
reliable of Reggie Chivers's many sons; and there Archer had kissed her
through her wedding veil before they went down to the motor which was
to carry them to Grace Church--for in a world where all else had reeled
on its foundations the "Grace Church wedding" remained an unchanged
institution.
It was in the library that he and May had always discussed the future
of the children: the studies of Dallas and his young brother Bill,
Mary's incurable indifference to "accomplishments," and passion for
sport and philanthropy, and the vague leanings toward "art" which had
finally landed the restless and curious Dallas in the office of a
rising New York architect.
The young men nowadays were emancipating themselves from the law and
business and taking up all sorts of new things. If they were not
absorbed in state politics or municipal reform, the chances were that
they were going in for Central American archæology, for architecture
or landscape-engineering; taking a keen and learned interest in
the prerevolutionary buildings of their own country, studying and
adapting Georgian types, and protesting at the meaningless use of the
word "Colonial." Nobody nowadays had "Colonial" houses except the
millionaire grocers of the suburbs.
But above all--sometimes Archer put it above all--it was in that
library that the Governor of New York, coming down from Albany one
evening to dine and spend the night, had turned to his host, and said,
banging his clenched fist on the table and gnashing his eye-glasses:
"Hang the professional politician! You're the kind of man the country
wants, Archer. If the stable's ever to be cleaned out, men like you
have got to lend a hand in the cleaning."
"Men like you--" how Archer had glowed at the phrase! How eagerly he
had risen up at the call! It was an echo of Ned Winsett's old appeal
to roll his sleeves up and get down into the muck; but spoken by a man
who set the example of the gesture, and whose summons to follow him was
irresistible.
Archer, as he looked back, was not sure that men like himself _were_ what
his country needed, at least in the active service to which Theodore
Roosevelt had pointed; in fact, there was reason to think it did not,
for after a year in the State Assembly he had not been re-elected, and
had dropped back thankfully into obscure if useful municipal work, and
from that again to the writing of occasional articles in one of the
reforming weeklies that were trying to shake the country out of its
apathy. It was little enough to look back on; but when he remembered
to what the young men of his generation and his set had looked
forward--the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society to which
their vision had been limited--even his small contribution to the new
state of things seemed to count, as each brick counts in a well-built
wall. He had done little in public life; he would always be by nature
a contemplative and a dilettante; but he had had high things to
contemplate, great things to delight in; and one great man's friendship
to be his strength and pride.
He had been, in short, what people were beginning to call "a good
citizen." In New York, for many years past, every new movement,
philanthropic, municipal or artistic, had taken account of his
opinion and wanted his name. People said: "Ask Archer" when there
was a question of starting the first school for crippled children,
reorganising the Museum of Art, founding the Grolier Club, inaugurating
the new Library, or getting up a new society of chamber music. His days
were full, and they were filled decently. He supposed it was all a man
ought to ask.
Something he knew he had missed: the flower of life. But he thought
of it now as a thing so unattainable and improbable that to have
repined would have been like despairing because one had not drawn
the first prize in a lottery. There were a hundred million tickets
in _his_ lottery, and there was only one prize; the chances had been
too decidedly against him. When he thought of Ellen Olenska it was
abstractly, serenely, as one might think of some imaginary beloved in
a book or a picture: she had become the composite vision of all that
he had missed. That vision, faint and tenuous as it was, had kept him
from thinking of other women. He had been what was called a faithful
husband; and when May had suddenly died--carried off by the infectious
pneumonia through which she had nursed their youngest child--he had
honestly mourned her. Their long years together had shown him that
it did not so much matter if marriage was a dull duty, as long as it
kept the dignity of a duty: lapsing from that, it became a mere battle
of ugly appetites. Looking about him, he honoured his own past, and
mourned for it. After all, there was good in the old ways.
His eyes, making the round of the room--done over by Dallas with
English mezzotints, Chippendale cabinets, bits of chosen blue-and-white
and pleasantly shaded electric lamps--came back to the old Eastlake
writing-table that he had never been willing to banish, and to his
first photograph of May, which still kept its place beside his inkstand.
There she was, tall, round-bosomed and willowy, in her starched muslin
and flapping Leghorn, as he had seen her under the orange-trees in the
Mission garden. And as he had seen her that day, so she had remained;
never quite at the same height, yet never far below it: generous,
faithful, unwearied; but so lacking in imagination, so incapable of
growth, that the world of her youth had fallen into pieces and rebuilt
itself without her ever being conscious of the change. This hard bright
blindness had kept her immediate horizon apparently unaltered. Her
incapacity to recognise change made her children conceal their views
from her as Archer concealed his; there had been, from the first, a
joint pretence of sameness, a kind of innocent family hypocrisy, in
which father and children had unconsciously collaborated. And she had
died thinking the world a good place, full of loving and harmonious
households like her own, and resigned to leave it because she was
convinced that, whatever happened, Newland would continue to inculcate
in Dallas the same principles and prejudices which had shaped his
parents' lives, and that Dallas in turn (when Newland followed her)
would transmit the sacred trust to little Bill. And of Mary she was
sure as of her own self. So, having snatched little Bill from the
grave, and given her life in the effort, she went contentedly to her
place in the Archer vault in St. Mark's, where Mrs. Archer already lay
safe from the terrifying "trend" which her daughter-in-law had never
even become aware of.
Opposite May's portrait stood one of her daughter. Mary Chivers was
as tall and fair as her mother, but large-waisted, flat-chested and
slightly slouching, as the altered fashion required. Mary Chivers's
mighty feats of athleticism could not have been performed with the
twenty-inch waist that May Archer's azure sash so easily spanned. And
the difference seemed symbolic; the mother's life had been as closely
girt as her figure. Mary, who was no less conventional, and no more
intelligent, yet led a larger life and held more tolerant views. There
was good in the new order too.
The telephone clicked, and Archer, turning from the photographs,
unhooked the transmitter at his elbow. How far they were from the days
when the legs of the brass-buttoned messenger boy had been New York's
only means of quick communication!
"Chicago wants you."
Ah--it must be a long-distance from Dallas, who had been sent to
Chicago by his firm to talk over the plan of the Lakeside palace they
were to build for a young millionaire with ideas. The firm always sent
Dallas on such errands.
"Hallo, Dad--Yes: Dallas. I say--how do you feel about sailing on
Wednesday? Mauretania: Yes, next Wednesday as ever is. Our client wants
me to look at some Italian gardens before we settle anything, and has
asked me to nip over on the next boat. I've got to be back on the first
of June--" the voice broke into a joyful conscious laugh--"so we must
look alive. I say, Dad, I want your help: do come."
Dallas seemed to be speaking in the room: the voice was as near by
and natural as if he had been lounging in his favourite arm-chair by
the fire. The fact would not ordinarily have surprised Archer, for
long-distance telephoning had become as much a matter of course as
electric lighting and five-day Atlantic voyages. But the laugh did
startle him; it still seemed wonderful that across all those miles and
miles of country--forest, river, mountain, prairie, roaring cities and
busy indifferent millions--Dallas's laugh should be able to say: "Of
course, whatever happens, I must get back on the first, because Fanny
Beaufort and I are to be married on the fifth."
The voice began again: "Think it over? No, sir: not a minute. You've
got to say yes now. Why not, I'd like to know? If you can allege a
single reason--No; I knew it. Then it's a go, eh? Because I count on
you to ring up the Cunard office first thing tomorrow; and you'd better
book a return on a boat from Marseilles. I say, Dad; it'll be our last
time together, in this kind of way--. Oh, good! I knew you would."
Chicago rang off, and Archer rose and began to pace up and down the
room.
It would be their last time together in this kind of way: the boy
was right. They would have lots of other "times" after Dallas's
marriage, his father was sure; for the two were born comrades, and
Fanny Beaufort, whatever one might think of her, did not seem likely
to interfere with their intimacy. On the contrary, from what he had
seen of her, he thought she would be naturally included in it. Still,
change was change, and differences were differences, and much as he
felt himself drawn toward his future daughter-in-law, it was tempting
to seize this last chance of being alone with his boy.
There was no reason why he should not seize it, except the profound
one that he had lost the habit of travel. May had disliked to move
except for valid reasons, such as taking the children to the sea
or in the mountains: she could imagine no other motive for leaving
the house in Thirty-ninth Street or their comfortable quarters at
the Wellands' in Newport. After Dallas had taken his degree she had
thought it her duty to travel for six months; and the whole family
had made the old-fashioned tour through England, Switzerland and
Italy. Their time being limited (no one knew why) they had omitted
France. Archer remembered Dallas's wrath at being asked to contemplate
Mont Blanc instead of Rheims and Chartres. But Mary and Bill wanted
mountain-climbing, and had already yawned their way in Dallas's wake
through the English cathedrals; and May, always fair to her children,
had insisted on holding the balance evenly between their athletic and
artistic proclivities. She had indeed proposed that her husband should
go to Paris for a fortnight, and join them on the Italian lakes after
they had "done" Switzerland; but Archer had declined. "We'll stick
together," he said; and May's face had brightened at his setting such a
good example to Dallas.
Since her death, nearly two years before, there had been no reason
for his continuing in the same routine. His children had urged him to
travel: Mary Chivers had felt sure it would do him good to go abroad
and "see the galleries." The very mysteriousness of such a cure made
her the more confident of its efficacy. But Archer had found himself
held fast by habit, by memories, by a sudden startled shrinking from
new things.
Now, as he reviewed his past, he saw into what a deep rut he had sunk.
The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for
doing anything else. At least that was the view that the men of his
generation had taken. The trenchant divisions between right and wrong,
honest and dishonest, respectable and the reverse, had left so little
scope for the unforeseen. There are moments when a man's imagination,
so easily subdued to what it lives in, suddenly rises above its daily
level, and surveys the long windings of destiny. Archer hung there and
wondered....
What was left of the little world he had grown up in, and whose
standards had bent and bound him? He remembered a sneering prophecy
of poor Lawrence Lefferts's, uttered years ago in that very room: "If
things go on at this rate, our children will be marrying Beaufort's
bastards."
It was just what Archer's eldest son, the pride of his life, was doing;
and nobody wondered or reproved. Even the boy's Aunt Janey, who still
looked so exactly as she used to in her elderly youth, had taken her
mother's emeralds and seed-pearls out of their pink cotton-wool, and
carried them with her own twitching hands to the future bride; and
Fanny Beaufort, instead of looking disappointed at not receiving a
"set" from a Paris jeweller, had exclaimed at their old-fashioned
beauty, and declared that when she wore them she should feel like an
Isabey miniature.
Fanny Beaufort, who had appeared in New York at eighteen, after the
death of her parents, had won its heart much as Madame Olenska had won
it thirty years earlier; only instead of being distrustful and afraid
of her, society took her joyfully for granted. She was pretty, amusing
and accomplished: what more did any one want? Nobody was narrow-minded
enough to rake up against her the half-forgotten facts of her father's
past and her own origin. Only the older people remembered so obscure
an incident in the business life of New York as Beaufort's failure, or
the fact that after his wife's death he had been quietly married to
the notorious Fanny Ring, and had left the country with his new wife,
and a little girl who inherited her beauty. He was subsequently heard
of in Constantinople, then in Russia; and a dozen years later American
travellers were handsomely entertained by him in Buenos Ayres, where he
represented a large insurance agency. He and his wife died there in the
odour of prosperity; and one day their orphaned daughter had appeared
in New York in charge of May Archer's sister-in-law, Mrs. Jack Welland,
whose husband had been appointed the girl's guardian. The fact threw
her into almost cousinly relationship with Newland Archer's children,
and nobody was surprised when Dallas's engagement was announced.
Nothing could more clearly give the measure of the distance that the
world had travelled. People nowadays were too busy--busy with reforms
and "movements," with fads and fetishes and frivolities--to bother much
about their neighbours. And of what account was anybody's past, in the
huge kaleidoscope where all the social atoms spun around on the same
plane?
Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety
of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and
eagerness of youth.
It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening
waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot
temples. He wondered if it was thus that his son's conducted itself
in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort--and decided that it was not.
"It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different," he
reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had
announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would
approve.
"The difference is that these young people take it for granted that
they're going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took
it for granted that we shouldn't. Only, I wonder--the thing one's so
certain of in advance: can it ever make one's heart beat as wildly?"
It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine
held Archer in his open window, above the wide silvery prospect of the
Place Vendôme. One of the things he had stipulated--almost the only
one--when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris,
he shouldn't be made to go to one of the newfangled "palaces."
"Oh, all right--of course," Dallas good-naturedly agreed. "I'll take
you to some jolly old-fashioned place--the Bristol say--" leaving his
father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and
emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for
its quaint inconveniences and lingering local colour.
Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the
scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and
he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska's
life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had
gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the
avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public
gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll
of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and
pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle
was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy,
old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere grey speck of a man compared with the
ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being....
Dallas's hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. "Hullo, father:
this is something like, isn't it?" They stood for a while looking out
in silence, and then the young man continued: "By the way, I've got
a message for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past
five."
He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual
item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave
for Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw
in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott's malice.
"Oh, didn't I tell you?" Dallas pursued. "Fanny made me swear to do
three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last
Debussy songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know
she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from
Buenos Ayres to the Assomption. Fanny hadn't any friends in Paris, and
Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I
believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort's. And she's
our cousin, of course. So I rang her up this morning, before I went
out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see
her."