The Glimpses of the Moon

E >> Edith Wharton >> The Glimpses of the Moon

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19

Proofed by: Dean Gilley
Bellevue, Washington
deang@baker.cnw.com

THE GLIMPSES OF THE MOON
BY
EDITH WHARTON

PART I

I

IT rose for them--their honey-moon--over the waters of a lake so
famed as the scene of romantic raptures that they were rather
proud of not having been afraid to choose it as the setting of
their own.

"It required a total lack of humour, or as great a gift for it
as ours, to risk the experiment," Susy Lansing opined, as they
hung over the inevitable marble balustrade and watched their
tutelary orb roll its magic carpet across the waters to their
feet.

"Yes--or the loan of Strefford's villa," her husband emended,
glancing upward through the branches at a long low patch of
paleness to which the moonlight was beginning to give the form
of a white house-front.

"Oh, come when we'd five to choose from. At least if you count
the Chicago flat."

"So we had--you wonder!" He laid his hand on hers, and his
touch renewed the sense of marvelling exultation which the
deliberate survey of their adventure always roused in her ....
It was characteristic that she merely added, in her steady
laughing tone: "Or, not counting the flat--for I hate to brag-
just consider the others: Violet Melrose's place at Versailles,
your aunt's villa at Monte Carlo--and a moor!"

She was conscious of throwing in the moor tentatively, and yet
with a somewhat exaggerated emphasis, as if to make sure that he
shouldn't accuse her of slurring it over. But he seemed to have
no desire to do so. "Poor old Fred!" he merely remarked; and
she breathed out carelessly: "Oh, well--"

His hand still lay on hers, and for a long interval, while they
stood silent in the enveloping loveliness of the night, she was
aware only of the warm current running from palm to palm, as the
moonlight below them drew its line of magic from shore to shore.

Nick Lansing spoke at last. "Versailles in May would have been
impossible: all our Paris crowd would have run us down within
twenty-four hours. And Monte Carlo is ruled out because it's
exactly the kind of place everybody expected us to go. So--
with all respect to you--it wasn't much of a mental strain to
decide on Como."

His wife instantly challenged this belittling of her capacity.
"It took a good deal of argument to convince you that we could
face the ridicule of Como!"

"Well, I should have preferred something in a lower key; at
least I thought I should till we got here. Now I see that this
place is idiotic unless one is perfectly happy; and that then
it's-as good as any other."

She sighed out a blissful assent. "And I must say that Streffy
has done things to a turn. Even the cigars--who do you suppose
gave him those cigars?" She added thoughtfully: "You'll miss
them when we have to go."

"Oh, I say, don't let's talk to-night about going. Aren't we
outside of time and space ...? Smell that guinea-a-bottle stuff
over there: what is it? Stephanotis?"

"Y-yes .... I suppose so. Or gardenias .... Oh, the fire-
flies! Look ... there, against that splash of moonlight on the
water. Apples of silver in a net-work of gold ...." They
leaned together, one flesh from shoulder to finger-tips, their
eyes held by the snared glitter of the ripples.

"I could bear," Lansing remarked, "even a nightingale at this
moment ...."

A faint gurgle shook the magnolias behind them, and a long
liquid whisper answered it from the thicket of laurel above
their heads.

"It's a little late in the year for them: they're ending just
as we begin."

Susy laughed. "I hope when our turn comes we shall say good-bye
to each other as sweetly."

It was in her husband's mind to answer: "They're not saying
good-bye, but only settling down to family cares." But as this
did not happen to be in his plan, or in Susy's, he merely echoed
her laugh and pressed her closer.

The spring night drew them into its deepening embrace. The
ripples of the lake had gradually widened and faded into a
silken smoothness, and high above the mountains the moon was
turning from gold to white in a sky powdered with vanishing
stars. Across the lake the lights of a little town went out,
one after another, and the distant shore became a floating
blackness. A breeze that rose and sank brushed their faces with
the scents of the garden; once it blew out over the water a
great white moth like a drifting magnolia petal. The
nightingales had paused and the trickle of the fountain behind
the house grew suddenly insistent.

When Susy spoke it was in a voice languid with visions. "I have
been thinking," she said, "that we ought to be able to make it
last at least a year longer."

Her husband received the remark without any sign of surprise or
disapprobation; his answer showed that he not only understood
her, but had been inwardly following the same train of thought.

"You mean," he enquired after a pause, "without counting your
grandmother's pearls?"

"Yes--without the pearls."

He pondered a while, and then rejoined in a tender whisper:
"Tell me again just how."

"Let's sit down, then. No, I like the cushions best." He
stretched himself in a long willow chair, and she curled up on
a heap of boat-cushions and leaned her head against his knee.
Just above her, when she lifted her lids, she saw bits of
moonflooded sky incrusted like silver in a sharp black
patterning of plane-boughs. All about them breathed of peace
and beauty and stability, and her happiness was so acute that it
was almost a relief to remember the stormy background of bills
and borrowing against which its frail structure had been reared.
"People with a balance can't be as happy as all this," Susy
mused, letting the moonlight filter through her lazy lashes.

People with a balance had always been Susy Branch's bugbear;
they were still, and more dangerously, to be Susy Lansing's.
She detested them, detested them doubly, as the natural enemies
of mankind and as the people one always had to put one's self
out for. The greater part of her life having been passed among
them, she knew nearly all that there was to know about them, and
judged them with the contemptuous lucidity of nearly twenty
years of dependence. But at the present moment her animosity
was diminished not only by the softening effect of love but by
the fact that she had got out of those very people more--yes,
ever so much more--than she and Nick, in their hours of most
reckless planning, had ever dared to hope for.

"After all, we owe them this!" she mused.

Her husband, lost in the drowsy beatitude of the hour, had not
repeated his question; but she was still on the trail of the
thought he had started. A year--yes, she was sure now that
with a little management they could have a whole year of it!
"It" was their marriage, their being together, and away from
bores and bothers, in a comradeship of which both of them had
long ago guessed the immediate pleasure, but she at least had
never imagined the deeper harmony.

It was at one of their earliest meetings--at one of the
heterogeneous dinners that the Fred Gillows tried to think
"literary"--that the young man who chanced to sit next to her,
and of whom it was vaguely rumoured that he had "written," had
presented himself to her imagination as the sort of luxury to
which Susy Branch, heiress, might conceivably have treated
herself as a crowning folly. Susy Branch, pauper, was fond of
picturing how this fancied double would employ her millions: it
was one of her chief grievances against her rich friends that
they disposed of theirs so unimaginatively.

"I'd rather have a husband like that than a steam-yacht!" she
had thought at the end of her talk with the young man who had
written, and as to whom it had at once been clear to her that
nothing his pen had produced, or might hereafter set down, would
put him in a position to offer his wife anything more costly
than a row-boat.

"His wife! As if he could ever have one! For he's not the kind
to marry for a yacht either." In spite of her past, Susy had
preserved enough inner independence to detect the latent signs
of it in others, and also to ascribe it impulsively to those of
the opposite sex who happened to interest her. She had a
natural contempt for people who gloried in what they need only
have endured. She herself meant eventually to marry, because
one couldn't forever hang on to rich people; but she was going
to wait till she found some one who combined the maximum of
wealth with at least a minimum of companionableness.

She had at once perceived young Lansing's case to be exactly the
opposite: he was as poor as he could be, and as companionable
as it was possible to imagine. She therefore decided to see as
much of him as her hurried and entangled life permitted; and
this, thanks to a series of adroit adjustments, turned out to be
a good deal. They met frequently all the rest of that winter;
so frequently that Mrs. Fred Gillow one day abruptly and sharply
gave Susy to understand that she was "making herself
ridiculous."

"Ah--" said Susy with a long breath, looking her friend and
patroness straight in the painted eyes.

"Yes," cried Ursula Gillow in a sob, "before you interfered Nick
liked me awfully ... and, of course, I don't want to reproach
you ... but when I think ...."

Susy made no answer. How could she, when she thought? The
dress she had on had been given her by Ursula; Ursula's motor
had carried her to the feast from which they were both
returning. She counted on spending the following August with
the Gillows at Newport ... and the only alternative was to go to
California with the Bockheimers, whom she had hitherto refused
even to dine with.

"Of course, what you fancy is perfect nonsense, Ursula; and as
to my interfering--" Susy hesitated, and then murmured: "But if
it will make you any happier I'll arrange to see him less
often ...." She sounded the lowest depths of subservience in
returning Ursula's tearful kiss ....

Susy Branch had a masculine respect for her word; and the next
day she put on her most becoming hat and sought out young Mr.
Lansing in his lodgings. She was determined to keep her promise
to Ursula; but she meant to look her best when she did it.

She knew at what time the young man was likely to be found, for
he was doing a dreary job on a popular encyclopaedia (V to X),
and had told her what hours were dedicated to the hateful task.
"Oh, if only it were a novel!" she thought as she mounted his
dingy stairs; but immediately reflected that, if it were the
kind that she could bear to read, it probably wouldn't bring him
in much more than his encyclopaedia. Miss Branch had her
standards in literature ....

The apartment to which Mr. Lansing admitted her was a good deal
cleaner, but hardly less dingy, than his staircase. Susy,
knowing him to be addicted to Oriental archaeology, had pictured
him in a bare room adorned by a single Chinese bronze of
flawless shape, or by some precious fragment of Asiatic pottery.
But such redeeming features were conspicuously absent, and no
attempt had been made to disguise the decent indigence of the
bed-sitting-room.

Lansing welcomed his visitor with every sign of pleasure, and
with apparent indifference as to what she thought of his
furniture. He seemed to be conscious only of his luck in seeing
her on a day when they had not expected to meet. This made Susy
all the sorrier to execute her promise, and the gladder that she
had put on her prettiest hat; and for a moment or two she looked
at him in silence from under its conniving brim.

Warm as their mutual liking was, Lansing had never said a word
of love to her; but this was no deterrent to his visitor, whose
habit it was to speak her meaning clearly when there were no
reasons, worldly or pecuniary, for its concealment. After a
moment, therefore, she told him why she had come; it was a
nuisance, of course, but he would understand. Ursula Gillow was
jealous, and they would have to give up seeing each other.

The young man's burst of laughter was music to her; for, after
all, she had been rather afraid that being devoted to Ursula
might be as much in his day's work as doing the encyclopaedia.

"But I give you my word it's a raving-mad mistake! And I don't
believe she ever meant me, to begin with--" he protested; but
Susy, her common-sense returning with her reassurance, promptly
cut short his denial.

"You can trust Ursula to make herself clear on such occasions.
And it doesn't make any difference what you think. All that
matters is what she believes."

"Oh, come! I've got a word to say about that too, haven't I?"

Susy looked slowly and consideringly about the room. There was
nothing in it, absolutely nothing, to show that he had ever
possessed a spare dollar--or accepted a present.

"Not as far as I'm concerned," she finally pronounced.

"How do you mean? If I'm as free as air--?"

"I'm not."

He grew thoughtful. "Oh, then, of course--. It only seems a
little odd," he added drily, "that in that case, the protest
should have come from Mrs. Gillow."

"Instead of coming from my millionaire bridegroom, Oh, I haven't
any; in that respect I'm as free as you."

"Well, then--? Haven't we only got to stay free?"

Susy drew her brows together anxiously. It was going to be
rather more difficult than she had supposed.

"I said I was as free in that respect. I'm not going to
marry--and I don't suppose you are?"

"God, no!" he ejaculated fervently.

"But that doesn't always imply complete freedom ...."

He stood just above her, leaning his elbow against the hideous
black marble arch that framed his fireless grate. As she
glanced up she saw his face harden, and the colour flew to hers.

"Was that what you came to tell me?" he asked.

"Oh, you don't understand--and I don't see why you don't, since
we've knocked about so long among exactly the same kind of
people." She stood up impulsively and laid her hand on his arm.
"I do wish you'd help me--!"

He remained motionless, letting the hand lie untouched.

"Help you to tell me that poor Ursula was a pretext, but that
there IS someone who--for one reason or another--really has a
right to object to your seeing me too often?"

Susy laughed impatiently. "You talk like the hero of a novel--
the kind my governess used to read. In the first place I should
never recognize that kind of right, as you call it--never!"

"Then what kind do you?" he asked with a clearing brow.

"Why--the kind I suppose you recognize on the part of your
publisher." This evoked a hollow laugh from him. "A business
claim, call it," she pursued. "Ursula does a lot for me: I
live on her for half the year. This dress I've got on now is
one she gave me. Her motor is going to take me to a dinner
to-night. I'm going to spend next summer with her at
Newport .... If I don't, I've got to go to California with the
Bockheimers-so good-bye."

Suddenly in tears, she was out of the door and down his steep
three flights before he could stop her--though, in thinking it
over, she didn't even remember if he had tried to. She only
recalled having stood a long time on the corner of Fifth Avenue,
in the harsh winter radiance, waiting till a break in the
torrent of motors laden with fashionable women should let her
cross, and saying to herself: "After all, I might have promised
Ursula ... and kept on seeing him ...."

Instead of which, when Lansing wrote the next day entreating a
word with her, she had sent back a friendly but firm refusal;
and had managed soon afterward to get taken to Canada for a
fortnight's ski-ing, and then to Florida for six weeks in a
house-boat ....

As she reached this point in her retrospect the remembrance of
Florida called up a vision of moonlit waters, magnolia fragrance
and balmy airs; merging with the circumambient sweetness, it
laid a drowsy spell upon her lids. Yes, there had been a bad
moment: but it was over; and she was here, safe and blissful,
and with Nick; and this was his knee her head rested on, and
they had a year ahead of them ... a whole year .... "Not
counting the pearls," she murmured, shutting her eyes ....

II.

LANSING threw the end of Strefford's expensive cigar into the
lake, and bent over his wife. Poor child! She had fallen
asleep .... He leaned back and stared up again at the
silver-flooded sky. How queer--how inexpressibly queer--it was
to think that that light was shed by his honey-moon! A year
ago, if anyone had predicted his risking such an adventure, he
would have replied by asking to be locked up at the first
symptoms ....

There was still no doubt in his mind that the adventure was a
mad one. It was all very well for Susy to remind him twenty
times a day that they had pulled it off--and so why should he
worry? Even in the light of her far-seeing cleverness, and of
his own present bliss, he knew the future would not bear the
examination of sober thought. And as he sat there in the summer
moonlight, with her head on his knee, he tried to recapitulate
the successive steps that had landed them on Streffy's
lake-front.

On Lansing's side, no doubt, it dated back to his leaving
Harvard with the large resolve not to miss anything. There
stood the evergreen Tree of Life, the Four Rivers flowing from
its foot; and on every one of the four currents he meant to
launch his little skiff. On two of them he had not gone very
far, on the third he had nearly stuck in the mud; but the fourth
had carried him to the very heart of wonder. It was the stream
of his lively imagination, of his inexhaustible interest in
every form of beauty and strangeness and folly. On this stream,
sitting in the stout little craft of his poverty, his
insignificance and his independence, he had made some notable
voyages .... And so, when Susy Branch, whom he had sought out
through a New York season as the prettiest and most amusing girl
in sight, had surprised him with the contradictory revelation of
her modern sense of expediency and her old-fashioned standard of
good faith, he had felt an irresistible desire to put off on one
more cruise into the unknown.

It was of the essence of the adventure that, after her one brief
visit to his lodgings, he should have kept his promise and not
tried to see her again. Even if her straightforwardness had not
roused his emulation, his understanding of her difficulties
would have moved his pity. He knew on how frail a thread the
popularity of the penniless hangs, and how miserably a girl like
Susy was the sport of other people's moods and whims. It was a
part of his difficulty and of hers that to get what they liked
they so often had to do what they disliked. But the keeping of
his promise was a greater bore than he had expected. Susy
Branch had become a delightful habit in a life where most of the
fixed things were dull, and her disappearance had made it
suddenly clear to him that his resources were growing more and
more limited. Much that had once amused him hugely now amused
him less, or not at all: a good part of his world of wonder had
shrunk to a village peep-show. And the things which had kept
their stimulating power--distant journeys, the enjoyment of art,
the contact with new scenes and strange societies--were becoming
less and less attainable. Lansing had never had more than a
pittance; he had spent rather too much of it in his first plunge
into life, and the best he could look forward to was a middle-
age of poorly-paid hack-work, mitigated by brief and frugal
holidays. He knew that he was more intelligent than the
average, but he had long since concluded that his talents were
not marketable. Of the thin volume of sonnets which a friendly
publisher had launched for him, just seventy copies had been
sold; and though his essay on "Chinese Influences in Greek Art"
had created a passing stir, it had resulted in controversial
correspondence and dinner invitations rather than in more
substantial benefits. There seemed, in short, no prospect of
his ever earning money, and his restricted future made him
attach an increasing value to the kind of friendship that Susy
Branch had given him. Apart from the pleasure of looking at her
and listening to her--of enjoying in her what others less
discriminatingly but as liberally appreciated--he had the sense,
between himself and her, of a kind of free-masonry of precocious
tolerance and irony. They had both, in early youth, taken the
measure of the world they happened to live in: they knew just
what it was worth to them and for what reasons, and the
community of these reasons lent to their intimacy its last
exquisite touch. And now, because of some jealous whim of a
dissatisfied fool of a woman, as to whom he felt himself no more
to blame than any young man who has paid for good dinners by
good manners, he was to be deprived of the one complete
companionship he had ever known ....

His thoughts travelled on. He recalled the long dull spring in
New York after his break with Susy, the weary grind on his last
articles, his listless speculations as to the cheapest and least
boring way of disposing of the summer; and then the amazing luck
of going, reluctantly and at the last minute, to spend a Sunday
with the poor Nat Fulmers, in the wilds of New Hampshire, and of
finding Susy there--Susy, whom he had never even suspected of
knowing anybody in the Fulmers' set!

She had behaved perfectly--and so had he--but they were
obviously much too glad to see each other. And then it was
unsettling to be with her in such a house as the Fulmers', away
from the large setting of luxury they were both used to, in the
cramped cottage where their host had his studio in the verandah,
their hostess practiced her violin in the dining-room, and five
ubiquitous children sprawled and shouted and blew trumpets and
put tadpoles in the water-jugs, and the mid-day dinner was two
hours late-and proportionately bad--because the Italian cook
was posing for Fulmer.

Lansing's first thought had been that meeting Susy in such
circumstances would be the quickest way to cure them both of
their regrets. The case of the Fulmers was an awful object-
lesson in what happened to young people who lost their heads;
poor Nat, whose pictures nobody bought, had gone to seed so
terribly-and Grace, at twenty-nine, would never again be
anything but the woman of whom people say, "I can remember her
when she was lovely."

But the devil of it was that Nat had never been such good
company, or Grace so free from care and so full of music; and
that, in spite of their disorder and dishevelment, and the bad
food and general crazy discomfort, there was more amusement to
be got out of their society than out of the most opulently
staged house-party through which Susy and Lansing had ever
yawned their way.

It was almost a relief to tile young man when, on the second
afternoon, Miss Branch drew him into the narrow hall to say: "I
really can't stand the combination of Grace's violin and little
Nat's motor-horn any longer. Do let us slip out till the duet
is over."

"How do they stand it, I wonder?" he basely echoed, as he
followed her up the wooded path behind the house.

"It might be worth finding out," she rejoined with a musing
smile.

But he remained resolutely skeptical. "Oh, give them a year or
two more and they'll collapse--! His pictures will never sell,
you know. He'll never even get them into a show."

"I suppose not. And she'll never have time to do anything worth
while with her music."

They had reached a piny knoll high above the ledge on which the
house was perched. All about them stretched an empty landscape
of endless featureless wooded hills. "Think of sticking here
all the year round!" Lansing groaned.

"I know. But then think of wandering over the world with some
people!"

"Oh, Lord, yes. For instance, my trip to India with the
Mortimer Hickses. But it was my only chance and what the deuce
is one to do?"

"I wish I knew!" she sighed, thinking of the Bockheimers; and
he turned and looked at her.

"Knew what?"

"The answer to your question. What is one to do--when one sees
both sides of the problem? Or every possible side of it,
indeed?"

They had seated themselves on a commanding rock under the pines,
but Lansing could not see the view at their feet for the stir of
the brown lashes on her cheek.

"You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of
it?"

"How can I say, when I've told you I see all the sides? Of
course," Susy added hastily, " I couldn't live as they do for a
week. But it's wonderful how little it's dimmed them."

"Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up
even better." He reflected. "We do them good, I daresay."

"Yes--or they us. I wonder which?"

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time
silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst
against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly
followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn't
alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts
as they were, they wouldn't be utter fools not to take their
chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them, To
this challenge he did not recall Susy's making any definite
answer; but after another interval, in which all the world
seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself
in a brooding tone: "I don't suppose it's ever been tried
before; but we might--." And then and there she had laid before
him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

Pages:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19