The Age of Innocence, Chapter 87

歌手： Edith Wharton • 专辑：The Age of Innocence (unabridged) • 发布时间：2017-01-27 
作词 : Edith Wharton
It was the old New York way of taking life “without effusion of blood”:
the way of people who dreaded scandal more than disease,
who placed decency above courage,
and who considered that nothing was more ill-bred than “scenes,”
except the behaviour of those who gave rise to them.

As these thoughts succeeded each other in his mind
Archer felt like a prisoner
in the centre of an armed camp.
He looked about the table,
and guessed at the inexorableness of his captors
from the tone in which,
over the asparagus from Florida,
they were dealing with Beaufort and his wife.
“It’s to show me,” he thought,
“what would happen to me—”
and a deathly sense of the superiority
of implication and analogy over direct action,
and of silence over rash words,
closed in on him like the doors of the family vault.

He laughed,
and met Mrs. van der Luyden’s startled eyes.

“You think it laughable?”
she said with a pinched smile.
“Of course poor Regina’s idea of remaining in New York
has its ridiculous side, I suppose;”
and Archer muttered: “Of course.”

At this point,
he became conscious
that Madame Olenska’s other neighbour
had been engaged for some time with the lady on his right.
At the same moment he saw
that May, serenely enthroned between Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Selfridge Merry,
had cast a quick glance down the table.
It was evident
that the host and the lady on his right
could not sit through the whole meal in silence.
He turned to Madame Olenska,
and her pale smile met him.
“Oh, do let’s see it through,” it seemed to say.

“Did you find the journey tiring?”
he asked in a voice that surprised him by its naturalness;
and she answered that,
on the contrary,
she had seldom travelled with fewer discomforts.

“Except, you know, the dreadful heat in the train,”
she added;
and he remarked
that she would not suffer from that particular hardship
in the country she was going to.

“I never,” he declared with intensity,
“was more nearly frozen than once, in April,
in the train between Calais and Paris.”

She said she did not wonder,
but remarked that, after all,
one could always carry an extra rug,
and that every form of travel had its hardships;
to which he abruptly returned
that he thought them all of no account
compared with the blessedness of getting away.
She changed colour,
and he added, his voice suddenly rising in pitch:
“I mean to do a lot of travelling myself before long.”
A tremor crossed her face,
and leaning over to Reggie Chivers, he cried out:
“I say, Reggie,
what do you say to a trip round the world:
now, next month, I mean?
I’m game if you are—”
at which Mrs. Reggie piped up
that she could not think of letting Reggie go
till after the Martha Washington Ball
she was getting up for the Blind Asylum in Easter week;
and her husband placidly observed
that by that time
he would have to be practising for the International Polo match.

But Mr. Selfridge Merry
had caught the phrase “round the world,”
and having once circled the globe in his steam-yacht,
he seized the opportunity
to send down the table
several striking items concerning the shallowness of the Mediterranean ports.
Though, after all, he added,
it didn’t matter;
for when you’d seen Athens and Smyrna
and Constantinople,
what else was there?
And Mrs. Merry said
she could never be too grateful to Dr. Bencomb
for having made them promise not to go to Naples
on account of the fever.

“But you must have three weeks to do India properly,”
her husband conceded,
anxious to have it understood
that he was no frivolous globe-trotter.

And at this point
the ladies went up to the drawing-room.


In the library,
in spite of weightier presences,
Lawrence Lefferts predominated.

The talk, as usual,
had veered around to the Beauforts,
and even Mr. van der Luyden
and Mr. Selfridge Merry,
installed in the honorary arm-chairs tacitly reserved for them,
paused to listen to the younger man’s philippic.

Never had Lefferts so abounded in the sentiments
that adorn Christian manhood
and exalt the sanctity of the home.
Indignation lent him a scathing eloquence,
and it was clear
that if others had followed his example,
and acted as he talked,
society would never have been weak enough
to receive a foreign upstart like Beaufort—
no, sir,
not even if he’d married a van der Luyden or a Lanning
instead of a Dallas.
And what chance would there have been, Lefferts wrathfully questioned,
of his marrying into such a family as the Dallases, if he had not already wormed his way into certain houses,
as people like Mrs. Lemuel Struthers had managed to worm theirs in his wake?
If society chose to open its doors to vulgar women
the harm was not great,
though the gain was doubtful;
but once it got in the way
of tolerating men of obscure origin and tainted wealth
the end was total disintegration—
and at no distant date.

“If things go on at this pace,”
Lefferts thundered,
looking like a young prophet dressed by Poole,
and who had not yet been stoned,
“we shall see our children
fighting for invitations to swindlers’ houses,
and marrying Beaufort’s bastards.”

“Oh, I say—draw it mild!”
Reggie Chivers and young Newland protested,
while Mr. Selfridge Merry looked genuinely alarmed,
and an expression of pain and disgust
settled on Mr. van der Luyden’s sensitive face.

“Has he got any?”
cried Mr. Sillerton Jackson,
pricking up his ears;
and while Lefferts tried to turn the question with a laugh,
the old gentleman twittered into Archer’s ear:
“Queer, those fellows who are always wanting to set things right.
The people who have the worst cooks
are always telling you they’re poisoned when they dine out.
But I hear there are pressing reasons for our friend Lawrence’s diatribe:—
type-writer this time, I understand. . . .”

The talk swept past Archer
like some senseless river running and running
because it did not know enough to stop.
He saw, on the faces about him,
expressions of interest, amusement and even mirth.
He listened to the younger men’s laughter,
and to the praise of the Archer Madeira, which Mr. van der Luyden and Mr. Merry were thoughtfully celebrating.
Through it all
he was dimly aware of a general attitude of friendliness toward himself,
as if the guard of the prisoner he felt himself
to be were trying to soften his captivity;
and the perception increased
his passionate determination to be free.
📥 下载LRC歌词 📄 下载TXT歌词

支持卡拉OK同步显示，可用记事本编辑