The Age of Innocence, Chapter 34

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
作词 : Edith Wharton
On the subject of “Hearth-fires” (as the paper was called)
he was inexhaustibly entertaining;
but beneath his fun lurked
the sterile bitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up.
His conversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life,
and feel how little it contained;
but Winsett’s, after all, contained still less,
and though their common fund of intellectual interests and curiosities
made their talks exhilarating,
their exchange of views usually
remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

“The fact is,
life isn’t much a fit for either of us,”
Winsett had once said.
“I’m down and out;
nothing to be done about it.
I’ve got only one ware to produce,
and there’s no market for it here,
and won’t be in my time.
But you’re free and you’re well-off.
Why don’t you get into touch?
There’s only one way to do it:
to go into politics.”

Archer threw his head back and laughed.
There one saw at a flash
the unbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and the others—Archer’s kind.
Every one in polite circles knew that,
in America,
“a gentleman couldn’t go into politics.”
But,
since he could hardly put it in that way to Winsett,
he answered evasively:
“Look at the career of the honest man in American politics!
They don’t want us.”

“Who’s ‘they’?
Why don’t you all get together
and be ‘they’ yourselves?”

Archer’s laugh lingered on his lips
in a slightly condescending smile.
It was useless to prolong the discussion:
everybody knew the melancholy fate of the few gentlemen
who had risked their clean linen in municipal or state politics in New York.
The day was past
when that sort of thing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and the emigrant,
and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

“Culture!
Yes—if we had it!
But there are just a few little local patches,
dying out here and there for lack of—well, hoeing and cross-fertilising:
the last remnants of the old European tradition that your forebears brought with them.
But you’re in a pitiful little minority:
you’ve got no centre, no competition, no audience.
You’re like the pictures on the walls of a deserted house:
‘The Portrait of a Gentleman.’
You’ll never amount to anything,
any of you,
till you roll up your sleeves
and get right down into the muck.
That, or emigrate . . .
God! If I could emigrate . . .”

Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders
and turned the conversation back to books,
where Winsett, if uncertain,
was always interesting.
Emigrate!
As if a gentleman could abandon his own country!
One could no more do that
than one could roll up one’s sleeves
and go down into the muck.
A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained.
But you couldn’t make a man like Winsett see that;
and that was why the New York of literary clubs and exotic restaurants,
though a first shake
made it seem more a kaleidoscope,
turned out, in the end, to be a smaller box,
with a more monotonous pattern, than assembled atoms of Fifth Avenue.


The next morning Archer scoured the town
in vain for more yellow roses.
In consequence of this search
he arrived late at the office,
perceived that his doing so
made no difference whatever to any one,
and was filled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.
Why should he not be, at that moment,
on the sands of St. Augustine with May Welland?
No one was deceived by his pretense of professional activity.
In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr. Letterblair was the head,
and which were mainly engaged in the management of large estates
and “conservative” investments,
there were always two or three young men,
fairly well-off,
and without professional ambition,
who, for a certain number of hours of each day,
sat at their desk accomplishing trivial tasks,
or simply reading the newspapers.
Though it was supposed
to be proper for them to have an occupation,
the crude fact of money-making
was still regarded as derogatory,
and the law, being a profession,
was accounted a more gentlemanly pursuit than business.
But none of these young men
had much hope of really advancing in his profession,
or any earnest desire to do so;
and over many of them
the green mould of the perfunctory
was already perceptibly spreading.

It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.
He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests;
he spent his vacations in European travel,
cultivated the “clever people” May spoke of,
and generally tried to “keep up,”
as he had somewhat wistfully put it to Madame Olenska.
But once he was married,
what would become of this narrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived?
He had seen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream,
though perhaps less ardently,
and who had gradually sunk into the placid and luxurious routine of their elders.

From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska,
asking if he might call that afternoon,
and begging her to let him find a reply at his club;
but at the club he found nothing,
nor did he receive any letter the following day.
This unexpected silence mortified him beyond reason,
and though the next morning
he saw a glorious cluster of yellow roses behind a florist’s window-pane,
he left it there.
It was only on the third morning
that he received a line by post from the Countess Olenska.
To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,
whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting the Duke on board his steamer.

“I ran away,” the writer began abruptly (without the usual preliminaries), “the day after I saw you at the play,
and these kind friends have taken me in.
I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.
You were right in telling me how kind they were;
I feel myself so safe here.
I wish that you were with us.”
She ended with a conventional “Yours sincerely,”
and without any allusion to the date of her return.

The tone of the note surprised the young man.
What was Madame Olenska running away from,
and why did she feel the need to be safe?
His first thought was of some dark menace from abroad;
then he reflected
that he did not know her epistolary style,
and that it might run to picturesque exaggeration.
Women always exaggerated;
and moreover
she was not wholly at her ease in English,
which she often spoke as if she were translating from the French.
“Je me suis évadée—” put in that way,
the opening sentence immediately suggested
that she might merely have wanted
to escape from a boring round of engagements;
which was very likely true,
for he judged her to be capricious,
and easily wearied of the pleasure of the moment.

It amused him to think of the van der Luydens’ having carried her off to Skuytercliff on a second visit,
and this time for an indefinite period.
The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened to visitors,
and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the few thus privileged.
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