The Age of Innocence, Chapter 60

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
作词 : Edith Wharton
He frowned and hesitated.
“You don’t know, I suppose—
I shall be in Boston tomorrow.
If I could manage to see her—”

He felt that Miss Blenker was losing interest in him, though her smile persisted.
“Oh, of course;
how lovely of you!
She’s staying at the Parker House;
it must be horrible there in this weather.”

After that
Archer was but intermittently aware
of the remarks they exchanged.
He could only remember stoutly resisting her entreaty
that he should await the returning family
and have high tea with them before he drove home.
At length,
with his hostess still at his side,
he passed out of range of the wooden Cupid,
unfastened his horses and drove off.
At the turn of the lane
he saw Miss Blenker standing at the gate
and waving the pink parasol.

End of Chapter 22

The AGE of INNOCENCE

BY EDITH WHARTON

BOOK II

Chapter 23

The next morning,
when Archer got out of the Fall River train,
he emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston.
The streets near the station
were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit
and a shirt-sleeved populace moved through them
with the intimate abandon of boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab
and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast.
Even the fashionable quarters
had the air of untidy domesticity
to which no excess of heat ever degrades the European cities.
Care-takers in calico
lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy,
and the Common looked like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic.
If Archer had tried to imagine
Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes
he could not have called up any
into which it was more difficult to fit her than this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method,
beginning with a slice of melon,
and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and scrambled eggs.
A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had business in Boston,
and should take the Fall River boat that night and go on to New York the following evening.
It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week,
and when he got back from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate had conspicuously
placed on a corner of the hall table,
sufficed to justify his sudden change of plan.
He was even ashamed of the ease with which the whole thing had been done:
it reminded him,
for an uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts’s masterly contrivances for securing his freedom.
But this did not long trouble him,
for he was not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette
and glanced over the Commercial Advertiser.
While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came in,
and the usual greetings were exchanged:
it was the same world after all,
though he had such a queer sense
of having slipped through the meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch,
and finding that it was half-past nine
got up and went into the writing-room.
There he wrote a few lines,
and ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House
and wait for the answer.
He then sat down behind another newspaper
and tried to calculate
how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.

“The lady was out, sir,”
he suddenly heard a waiter’s voice at his elbow;
and he stammered:
“Out?—”
as if it were a word in a strange language.

He got up and went into the hall.
It must be a mistake:
she could not be out at that hour.
He flushed with anger at his own stupidity:
why had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?

He found his hat and stick
and went forth into the street.
The city had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty
as if he were a traveller from distant lands.
For a moment he stood on the door-step hesitating;
then he decided to go to the Parker House.
What if the messenger had been misinformed,
and she were still there?

He started to walk across the Common;
and on the first bench, under a tree, he saw her sitting.
She had a grey silk sunshade over her head—
how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one?
As he approached
he was struck by her listless attitude:
she sat there
as if she had nothing else to do.
He saw her drooping profile,
and the knot of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat,
and the long wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade.
He came a step or two nearer,
and she turned and looked at him.

“Oh”—she said;
and for the first time he noticed a startled look on her face;
but in another moment
it gave way to a slow smile of wonder and contentment.

“Oh”—
she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down at her;
and without rising
she made a place for him on the bench.

“I’m here on business—
just got here,”
Archer explained;
and, without knowing why,
he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
“But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?”
He had really no idea what he was saying:
he felt as if he were shouting at her across endless distances,
and she might vanish again before he could overtake her.

“I? Oh, I’m here on business too,”
she answered,
turning her head toward him so that they were face to face.
The words hardly reached him:
he was aware only of her voice,
and of the startling fact
that not an echo of it had remained in his memory.
He had not even remembered that it was low-pitched,
with a faint roughness on the consonants.

“You do your hair differently,”
he said,
his heart beating
as if he had uttered something irrevocable.

“Differently? No—
it’s only that I do it as best I can when I’m without Nastasia.”

“Nastasia; but isn’t she with you?”

“No; I’m alone.
For two days
it was not worth while to bring her.”

“You’re alone—at the Parker House?”

She looked at him with a flash of her old malice.
“Does it strike you as dangerous?”

“No; not dangerous—”

“But unconventional?
I see; I suppose it is.”
She considered a moment.
“I hadn’t thought of it,
because I’ve just done something so much more unconventional.”
The faint tinge of irony lingered in her eyes.
“I’ve just refused to take back a sum of money—
that belonged to me.”
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