"Of course--why not?" Dallas's eye brows went up whimsically. Then,
getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father's with a
confidential pressure.
"I say, father: what was she like?"
Archer felt his colour rise under his son's unabashed gaze. "Come, own
up: you and she were great pals, weren't you? Wasn't she most awfully
lovely?"
"Lovely? I don't know. She was different."
"Ah--there you have it! That's what it always comes to, doesn't it?
When she comes, _she's different_--and one doesn't know why. It's exactly
what I feel about Fanny."
His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. "About Fanny? But, my
dear fellow--I should hope so! Only I don't see--"
"Dash it, Dad, don't be prehistoric! Wasn't she--once--your Fanny?"
Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the
first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible
to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. "What's the use of
making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose 'em out," he always
objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting his eyes, saw
the filial light under their banter.
"My Fanny?"
"Well, the woman you'd have chucked everything for: only you didn't,"
continued his surprising son.
"I didn't," echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.
"No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said--"
"Your mother?"
"Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone--you
remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be,
because once, when she asked you to, you'd given up the thing you most
wanted."
Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes
remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sunlit square below the
window. At length he said in a low voice: "She never asked me."
"No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you
never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other,
and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in
fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other's
private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own.--I
say, Dad," Dallas broke off, "you're not angry with me? If you are,
let's make it up and go and lunch at Henri's. I've got to rush out to
Versailles afterward."
Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend
the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at
once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate
lifetime.
After a little while he did not regret Dallas's indiscretion. It seemed
to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, some one
had guessed and pitied.... And that it should have been his wife moved
him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would
not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, the episode was only
a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it
really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs
Élysées and wondered, while the stream of life rolled by....
A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had
never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years
before, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothing
now to keep her and Archer apart--and that afternoon he was to see her.
He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries
gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went there,
and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he
could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour or more
he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon
light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten
splendour, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. After all,
his life had been too starved....
Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian, he found himself saying: "But I'm
only fifty-seven--" and then he turned away. For such summer dreams
it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of
comradeship, in the blessed hush of her nearness.
He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and
together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the
bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.
Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father's mind, was
talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles. He had had but one
previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried
to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go
with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure
criticism tripped each other up on his lips.
As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness
increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the
facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a
master but as an equal. "That's it: they feel equal to things--they
know their way about," he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman
of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and
with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.
Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father's arm. "Oh, by
Jove," he exclaimed.
They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the
Invalides. The dome of Mansart floated ethereally above the budding
trees and the long grey front of the building: drawing up into itself
all the rays of afternoon light, it hung there like the visible symbol
of the race's glory.
Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the
avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter
as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendour that
lit it up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden
light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived.
For nearly thirty years, her life--of which he knew so strangely
little--had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to
be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the
theatres she must have been to, the pictures she must have looked at,
the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people
she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities,
images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a
setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young
Frenchman who had once said to him: "Ah, good conversation--there is
nothing like it, is there?"
Archer had not seen M. Rivière, or heard of him, for nearly thirty
years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame
Olenska's existence. More than half a lifetime divided them, and
she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a
society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly
understand. During that time he had been living with his youthful
memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible
companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something
apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim
chapel, where there was not time to pray every day....
They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of
the thoroughfares flanking the building. It was a quiet quarter, after
all, in spite of its splendour and its history; and the fact gave one
an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this
were left to the few and the indifferent.
The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there
by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square
into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.
"It must be here," he said, slipping his arm through his father's with
a movement from which Archer's shyness did not shrink; and they stood
together looking up at the house.
It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but
many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-coloured
front. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded
tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still
lowered, as though the sun had just left it.
"I wonder which floor--?" Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
_porte-cochère_ he put his head into the porter's lodge, and came back to
say: "The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings."
Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end
of their pilgrimage had been attained.
"I say, you know, it's nearly six," his son at length reminded him.
The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.
"I believe I'll sit there a moment," he said.
"Why--aren't you well?" his son exclaimed.
"Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me."
Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. "But, I say, Dad: do you
mean you won't come up at all?"
"I don't know," said Archer slowly.
"If you don't she won't understand."
"Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you."
Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.
"But what on earth shall I say?"
"My dear fellow, don't you always know what to say?" his father
rejoined with a smile.
"Very well. I shall say you're old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the
five flights because you don't like lifts."