The Age of Innocence, Chapter 31

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
“But aren’t you as free as air as it is?”
he returned.
“Who can touch you?
Mr. Letterblair tells me
the financial question has been settled—”

“Oh, yes,” she said indifferently.

“Well, then:
is it worth while to risk what may be infinitely disagreeable and painful?
Think of the newspapers—their vileness!
It’s all stupid and narrow and unjust—
but one can’t make over society.”

“No,” she acquiesced;
and her tone was so faint and desolate
that he felt a sudden remorse for his own hard thoughts.

“The individual, in such cases, is nearly always
sacrificed to what is supposed to be the collective interest:
people cling to any convention that keeps the family together—
protects the children, if there are any,”
he rambled on,
pouring out all the stock phrases that rose to his lips
in his intense desire to cover over the ugly reality which her silence seemed to have laid bare.
Since she would not or could not
say the one word that would have cleared the air,
his wish was not to let her feel
that he was trying to probe into her secret.
Better keep on the surface, in the prudent old New York way,
than risk uncovering a wound he could not heal.

“It’s my business, you know,” he went on, “to help you
to see these things as the people who are fondest of you see them.
The Mingotts, the Wellands, the van der Luydens,
all your friends and relations:
if I didn’t show you honestly
how they judge such questions,
it wouldn’t be fair of me, would it?”
He spoke insistently, almost pleading with her in his eagerness to cover up that yawning silence.

She said slowly:
“No; it wouldn’t be fair.”

The fire had crumbled down to greyness,
and one of the lamps made a gurgling appeal for attention.
Madame Olenska rose,
wound it up
and returned to the fire,
but without resuming her seat.

Her remaining on her feet
seemed to signify that there was nothing more for either of them to say,
and Archer stood up also.

“Very well;
I will do what you wish,”
she said abruptly.
The blood rushed to his forehead;
and, taken aback by the suddenness of her surrender,
he caught her two hands awkwardly in his.

“I—I do want to help you,”
he said.

“You do help me.
Good night, my cousin.”

He bent and laid his lips on her hands,
which were cold and lifeless.
She drew them away,
and he turned to the door,
found his coat and hat under the faint gas-light of the hall,
and plunged out into the winter night
bursting with the belated eloquence of the inarticulate.

End of Chapter 12

The AGE of INNOCENCE

BY EDITH WHARTON

BOOK I

Chapter 13

It was a crowded night at Wallack’s theatre.

The play was “The Shaughraun,”
with Dion Boucicault in the title rôle
and Harry Montague and Ada Dyas as the lovers.
The popularity of the admirable English company
was at its height,
and the Shaughraun always packed the house.
In the galleries the enthusiasm was unreserved;
in the stalls and boxes,
people smiled a little at the hackneyed sentiments and clap-trap situations,
and enjoyed the play as much as the galleries did.

There was one episode,
in particular, that held the house from floor to ceiling.
It was that in which Harry Montague, after a sad, almost monosyllabic scene of parting with Miss Dyas,
bade her good-bye,
and turned to go.
The actress, who was standing near the mantelpiece and looking down into the fire,
wore a gray cashmere dress
without fashionable loopings or trimmings,
moulded to her tall figure
and flowing in long lines about her feet.
Around her neck was a narrow black velvet ribbon
with the ends falling down her back.

When her wooer turned from her
she rested her arms against the mantel-shelf
and bowed her face in her hands.
On the threshold he paused to look at her;
then he stole back,
lifted one of the ends of velvet ribbon,
kissed it,
and left the room
without her hearing him
or changing her attitude.
And on this silent parting the curtain fell.

It was always for the sake of that particular scene
that Newland Archer went to see “The Shaughraun.”
He thought the adieux of Montague and Ada Dyas as fine
as anything he had ever seen Croisette and Bressant do in Paris,
or Madge Robertson and Kendall in London;
in its reticence,
its dumb sorrow,
it moved him more than the most famous histrionic outpourings.

On the evening
in question the little scene acquired an added poignancy by reminding him—
he could not have said why—
of his leave-taking from Madame Olenska
after their confidential talk a week or ten days earlier.

It would have been as difficult to discover any resemblance between the two situations
as between the appearance of the persons concerned.
Newland Archer could not pretend
to anything approaching the young English actor’s romantic good looks,
and Miss Dyas was a tall red-haired woman
of monumental build whose pale and pleasantly ugly face
was utterly unlike Ellen Olenska’s vivid countenance.
Nor were Archer and Madame Olenska
two lovers parting in heart-broken silence;
they were client and lawyer
separating after a talk
which had given the lawyer the worst possible impression of the client’s case.
Wherein, then, lay the resemblance
that made the young man’s heart beat with a kind of retrospective excitement?
It seemed to be in Madame Olenska’s mysterious faculty
of suggesting tragic and moving possibilities outside the daily run of experience.
She had hardly ever said a word to him to produce this impression,
but it was a part of her,
either a projection of her mysterious and outlandish background
or of something inherently dramatic, passionate and unusual in herself.
Archer had always been inclined to think
that chance and circumstance played a small part in shaping people’s lots
compared with their innate tendency to have things happen to them.
This tendency he had felt from the first in Madame Olenska.
The quiet, almost passive young woman
struck him as exactly
the kind of person to whom things were bound to happen,
no matter how much she shrank from them
and went out of her way to avoid them.
The exciting fact was
her having lived in an atmosphere so thick with drama
that her own tendency to provoke it
had apparently passed unperceived.
It was precisely the odd absence of surprise in her
that gave him the sense
of her having been plucked out of a very maelstrom:
the things she took for granted
gave the measure of those she had rebelled against.
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