The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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Edith Wharton >> The Touchstone, by Edith Wharton
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"Where have you been?" Glennard asked, moving forward so that he
obstructed her vision of the books.
"I walked over to the Dreshams for tea."
"I can't think what you see in those people," he said with a
shrug; adding, uncontrollably--"I suppose Flamel was there?"
"No; he left on the yacht this morning."
An answer so obstructing to the natural escape of his irritation
left Glennard with no momentary resource but that of strolling
impatiently to the window. As her eyes followed him they lit on
the books.
"Ah, you've brought them! I'm so glad," she exclaimed.
He answered over his shoulder, "For a woman who never reads you
make the most astounding exceptions!"
Her smile was an exasperating concession to the probability that
it had been hot in town or that something had bothered him.
"Do you mean it's not nice to want to read the book?" she asked.
"It was not nice to publish it, certainly; but after all, I'm not
responsible for that, am I?" She paused, and, as he made no
answer, went on, still smiling, "I do read sometimes, you know;
and I'm very fond of Margaret Aubyn's books. I was reading
'Pomegranate Seed' when we first met. Don't you remember? It was
then you told me all about her."
Glennard had turned back into the room and stood staring at his
wife. "All about her?" he repeated, and with the words
remembrance came to him. He had found Miss Trent one afternoon
with the novel in her hand, and moved by the lover's fatuous
impulse to associate himself in some way with whatever fills the
mind of the beloved, had broken through his habitual silence about
the past. Rewarded by the consciousness of figuring impressively
in Miss Trent's imagination he had gone on from one anecdote to
another, reviving dormant details of his old Hillbridge life, and
pasturing his vanity on the eagerness with which she received his
reminiscences of a being already clothed in the impersonality of
greatness.
The incident had left no trace in his mind; but it sprang up now
like an old enemy, the more dangerous for having been forgotten.
The instinct of self-preservation--sometimes the most perilous
that man can exercise--made him awkwardly declare--"Oh, I used to
see her at people's houses, that was all;" and her silence as
usual leaving room for a multiplication of blunders, he added,
with increased indifference, "I simply can't see what you can find
to interest you in such a book."
She seemed to consider this intently. "You've read it, then?"
"I glanced at it--I never read such things."
"Is it true that she didn't wish the letters to be published?"
Glennard felt the sudden dizziness of the mountaineer on a narrow
ledge, and with it the sense that he was lost if he looked more
than a step ahead.
"I'm sure I don't know," he said; then, summoning a smile, he
passed his hand through her arm. "I didn't have tea at the
Dreshams, you know; won't you give me some now?" he suggested.
That evening Glennard, under pretext of work to be done, shut
himself into the small study opening off the drawing-room. As he
gathered up his papers he said to his wife: "You're not going to
sit indoors on such a night as this? I'll join you presently
outside."
But she had drawn her armchair to the lamp. "I want to look at my
book," she said, taking up the first volume of the "Letters."
Glennard, with a shrug, withdrew into the study. "I'm going to
shut the door; I want to be quiet," he explained from the
threshold; and she nodded without lifting her eyes from the book.
He sank into a chair, staring aimlessly at the outspread papers.
How was he to work, while on the other side of the door she sat
with that volume in her hand? The door did not shut her out--he
saw her distinctly, felt her close to him in a contact as painful
as the pressure on a bruise.
The sensation was part of the general strangeness that made him
feel like a man waking from a long sleep to find himself in an
unknown country among people of alien tongue. We live in our own
souls as in an unmapped region, a few acres of which we have
cleared for our habitation; while of the nature of those nearest
us we know but the boundaries that march with ours. Of the points
in his wife's character not in direct contact with his own,
Glennard now discerned his ignorance; and the baffling sense of
her remoteness was intensified by the discovery that, in one way,
she was closer to him than ever before. As one may live for years
in happy unconsciousness of the possession of a sensitive nerve,
he had lived beside his wife unaware that her individuality had
become a part of the texture of his life, ineradicable as some
growth on a vital organ; and he now felt himself at once incapable
of forecasting her judgment and powerless to evade its effects.
To escape, the next morning, the confidences of the breakfast-
table, he went to town earlier than usual. His wife, who read
slowly, was given to talking over what she read, and at present
his first object in life was to postpone the inevitable discussion
of the letters. This instinct of protection in the afternoon, on
his way uptown, guided him to the club in search of a man who
might be persuaded to come out to the country to dine. The only
man in the club was Flamel.
Glennard, as he heard himself almost involuntarily pressing Flamel
to come and dine, felt the full irony of the situation. To use
Flamel as a shield against his wife's scrutiny was only a shade
less humiliating than to reckon on his wife as a defence against
Flamel.
He felt a contradictory movement of annoyance at the latter's
ready acceptance, and the two men drove in silence to the station.
As they passed the bookstall in the waiting-room Flamel lingered a
moment and the eyes of both fell on Margaret Aubyn's name,
conspicuously displayed above a counter stacked with the familiar
volumes.
"We shall be late, you know," Glennard remonstrated, pulling out
his watch.
"Go ahead," said Flamel, imperturbably. "I want to get something--"
Glennard turned on his heel and walked down the platform. Flamel
rejoined him with an innocent-looking magazine in his hand; but
Glennard dared not even glance at the cover, lest it should show
the syllables he feared.
The train was full of people they knew, and they were kept apart
till it dropped them at the little suburban station. As they
strolled up the shaded hill, Glennard talked volubly, pointing out
the improvements in the neighborhood, deploring the threatened
approach of an electric railway, and screening himself by a series
of reflex adjustments from the imminent risk of any allusion to
the "Letters." Flamel suffered his discourse with the bland
inattention that we accord to the affairs of someone else's
suburb, and they reached the shelter of Alexa's tea-table without
a perceptible turn toward the dreaded topic.
The dinner passed off safely. Flamel, always at his best in
Alexa's presence, gave her the kind of attention which is like a
beaconing light thrown on the speaker's words: his answers seemed
to bring out a latent significance in her phrases, as the sculptor
draws his statue from the block. Glennard, under his wife's
composure, detected a sensibility to this manoeuvre, and the
discovery was like the lightning-flash across a nocturnal
landscape. Thus far these momentary illuminations had served only
to reveal the strangeness of the intervening country: each fresh
observation seemed to increase the sum-total of his ignorance.
Her simplicity of outline was more puzzling than a complex
surface. One may conceivably work one's way through a labyrinth;
but Alexa's candor was like a snow-covered plain where, the road
once lost, there are no landmarks to travel by.
Dinner over, they returned to the veranda, where a moon, rising
behind the old elm, was combining with that complaisant tree a
romantic enlargement of their borders. Glennard had forgotten the
cigars. He went to his study to fetch them, and in passing
through the drawing-room he saw the second volume of the "Letters"
lying open on his wife's table. He picked up the book and looked
at the date of the letter she had been reading. It was one of the
last . . . he knew the few lines by heart. He dropped the book
and leaned against the wall. Why had he included that one among
the others? Or was it possible that now they would all seem like
that . . .?
Alexa's voice came suddenly out of the dusk. "May Touchett was
right--it IS like listening at a key-hole. I wish I hadn't read
it!"
Flamel returned, in the leisurely tone of the man whose phrases
are punctuated by a cigarette, "It seems so to us, perhaps; but to
another generation the book will be a classic."
"Then it ought not to have been published till it had become a
classic. It's horrible, it's degrading almost, to read the
secrets of a woman one might have known." She added, in a lower
tone, "Stephen DID know her--"
"Did he?" came from Flamel.
"He knew her very well, at Hillbridge, years ago. The book has
made him feel dreadfully . . . he wouldn't read it . . . he didn't
want me to read it. I didn't understand at first, but now I can
see how horribly disloyal it must seem to him. It's so much worse
to surprise a friend's secrets than a stranger's."
"Oh, Glennard's such a sensitive chap," Flamel said, easily; and
Alexa almost rebukingly rejoined, "If you'd known her I'm sure
you'd feel as he does. . . ."
Glennard stood motionless, overcome by the singular infelicity
with which he had contrived to put Flamel in possession of the two
points most damaging to his case: the fact that he had been a
friend of Margaret Aubyn's, and that he had concealed from Alexa
his share in the publication of the letters. To a man of less
than Flamel's astuteness it must now be clear to whom the letters
were addressed; and the possibility once suggested, nothing could
be easier than to confirm it by discreet research. An impulse of
self-accusal drove Glennard to the window. Why not anticipate
betrayal by telling his wife the truth in Flamel's presence? If
the man had a drop of decent feeling in him, such a course would
be the surest means of securing his silence; and above all, it
would rid Glennard of the necessity of defending himself against
the perpetual criticism of his wife's belief in him. . . .
The impulse was strong enough to carry him to the window; but
there a reaction of defiance set in. What had he done, after all,
to need defence and explanation? Both Dresham and Flamel had, in
his hearing, declared the publication of the letters to be not
only justifiable but obligatory; and if the disinterestedness of
Flamel's verdict might be questioned, Dresham's at least
represented the impartial view of the man of letters. As to
Alexa's words, they were simply the conventional utterance of the
"nice" woman on a question already decided for her by other "nice"
women. She had said the proper thing as mechanically as she would
have put on the appropriate gown or written the correct form of
dinner-invitation. Glennard had small faith in the abstract
judgments of the other sex; he knew that half the women who were
horrified by the publication of Mrs. Aubyn's letters would have
betrayed her secrets without a scruple.
The sudden lowering of his emotional pitch brought a proportionate
relief. He told himself that now the worst was over and things
would fall into perspective again. His wife and Flamel had turned
to other topics, and coming out on the veranda, he handed the
cigars to Flamel, saying, cheerfully--and yet he could have sworn
they were the last words he meant to utter!--"Look here, old man,
before you go down to Newport you must come out and spend a few
days with us--mustn't he, Alexa?"
VIII
Glennard had, perhaps unconsciously, counted on the continuance of
this easier mood. He had always taken pride in a certain
robustness of fibre that enabled him to harden himself against the
inevitable, to convert his failures into the building materials of
success. Though it did not even now occur to him that what he
called the inevitable had hitherto been the alternative he
happened to prefer, he was yet obscurely aware that his present
difficulty was one not to be conjured by any affectation of
indifference. Some griefs build the soul a spacious house--but in
this misery of Glennard's he could not stand upright. It pressed
against him at every turn. He told himself that this was because
there was no escape from the visible evidences of his act. The
"Letters" confronted him everywhere. People who had never opened
a book discussed them with critical reservations; to have read
them had become a social obligation in circles to which literature
never penetrates except in a personal guise.
Glennard did himself injustice. it was from the unexpected
discovery of his own pettiness that he chiefly suffered. Our
self-esteem is apt to be based on the hypothetical great act we
have never had occasion to perform; and even the most self-
scrutinizing modesty credits itself negatively with a high
standard of conduct. Glennard had never thought himself a hero;
but he had been certain that he was incapable of baseness. We all
like our wrong-doings to have a becoming cut, to be made to order,
as it were; and Glennard found himself suddenly thrust into a garb
of dishonor surely meant for a meaner figure.
The immediate result of his first weeks of wretchedness was the
resolve to go to town for the winter. He knew that such a course
was just beyond the limit of prudence; but it was easy to allay
the fears of Alexa who, scrupulously vigilant in the management of
the household, preserved the American wife's usual aloofness from
her husband's business cares. Glennard felt that he could not
trust himself to a winter's solitude with her. He had an
unspeakable dread of her learning the truth about the letters, yet
could not be sure of steeling himself against the suicidal impulse
of avowal. His very soul was parched for sympathy; he thirsted
for a voice of pity and comprehension. But would his wife pity?
Would she understand? Again he found himself brought up abruptly
against his incredible ignorance of her nature. The fact that he
knew well enough how she would behave in the ordinary emergencies
of life, that he could count, in such contingencies, on the kind
of high courage and directness he had always divined in her, made
him the more hopeless of her entering into the torturous
psychology of an act that he himself could no longer explain or
understand. It would have been easier had she been more complex,
more feminine--if he could have counted on her imaginative
sympathy or her moral obtuseness--but he was sure of neither. He
was sure of nothing but that, for a time, he must avoid her.
Glennard could not rid himself of the delusion that by and by his
action would cease to make its consequences felt. He would not
have cared to own to himself that he counted on the dulling of his
sensibilities: he preferred to indulge the vague hypothesis that
extraneous circumstances would somehow efface the blot upon his
conscience. In his worst moments of self-abasement he tried to
find solace in the thought that Flamel had sanctioned his course.
Flamel, at the outset, must have guessed to whom the letters were
addressed; yet neither then nor afterward had he hesitated to
advise their publication. This thought drew Glennard to him in
fitful impulses of friendliness, from each of which there was a
sharper reaction of distrust and aversion. When Flamel was not at
the house, he missed the support of his tacit connivance; when he
was there, his presence seemed the assertion of an intolerable
claim.
Early in the winter the Glennards took possession of the little
house that was to cost them almost nothing. The change brought
Glennard the immediate relief of seeing less of his wife, and of
being protected, in her presence, by the multiplied preoccupations
of town life. Alexa, who could never appear hurried, showed the
smiling abstraction of a pretty woman to whom the social side of
married life has not lost its novelty. Glennard, with the
recklessness of a man fresh from his first financial imprudence,
encouraged her in such little extravagances as her good sense at
first resisted. Since they had come to town, he argued, they
might as well enjoy themselves. He took a sympathetic view of the
necessity of new gowns, he gave her a set of furs at Christmas,
and before the New Year they had agreed on the obligation of
adding a parlour-maid to their small establishment.
Providence the very next day hastened to justify this measure by
placing on Glennard's breakfast-plate an envelope bearing the name
of the publishers to whom he had sold Mrs. Aubyn's letters. It
happened to be the only letter the early post had brought, and he
glanced across the table at his wife, who had come down before him
and had probably laid the envelope on his plate. She was not the
woman to ask awkward questions, but he felt the conjecture of her
glance, and he was debating whether to affect surprise at the
receipt of the letter, or to pass it off as a business
communication that had strayed to his house, when a check fell
from the envelope. It was the royalty on the first edition of the
letters. His first feeling was one of simple satisfaction. The
money had come with such infernal opportuneness that he could not
help welcoming it. Before long, too, there would be more; he knew
the book was still selling far beyond the publisher's previsions.
He put the check in his pocket and left the room without looking
at his wife.
On the way to his office the habitual reaction set in. The money
he had received was the first tangible reminder that he was living
on the sale of his self-esteem. The thought of material benefit
had been overshadowed by his sense of the intrinsic baseness of
making the letters known; now he saw what an element of sordidness
it added to the situation and how the fact that he needed the
money, and must use it, pledged him more irrevocably than ever to
the consequences of his act. It seemed to him, in that first hour
of misery, that he had betrayed his friend anew.
When, that afternoon, he reached home earlier than usual, Alexa's
drawing-room was full of a gayety that overflowed to the stairs.
Flamel, for a wonder, was not there; but Dresham and young Hartly,
grouped about the tea-table, were receiving with resonant mirth a
narrative delivered in the fluttered staccato that made Mrs.
Armiger's conversation like the ejaculations of a startled aviary.
She paused as Glennard entered, and he had time to notice that his
wife, who was busied about the tea-tray, had not joined in the
laughter of the men.
"Oh, go on, go on," young Hartly rapturously groaned; and Mrs.
Armiger met Glennard's inquiry with the deprecating cry that
really she didn't see what there was to laugh at. "I'm sure I
feel more like crying. I don't know what I should have done if
Alexa hadn't been home to give me a cup of tea. My nerves are in
shreds--yes, another, dear, please--" and as Glennard looked his
perplexity, she went on, after pondering on the selection of a
second lump of sugar, "Why, I've just come from the reading, you
know--the reading at the Waldorf."
"I haven't been in town long enough to know anything," said
Glennard, taking the cup his wife handed him. "Who has been
reading what?"
"That lovely girl from the South--Georgie--Georgie what's her
name--Mrs. Dresham's protegee--unless she's YOURS, Mr. Dresham!
Why, the big ball-room was PACKED, and all the women were crying
like idiots--it was the most harrowing thing I ever heard--"
"What DID you hear?" Glennard asked; and his wife interposed:
"Won't you have another bit of cake, Julia? Or, Stephen, ring for
some hot toast, please." Her tone betrayed a polite satiety of
the topic under discussion. Glennard turned to the bell, but Mrs.
Armiger pursued him with her lovely amazement.
"Why, the "Aubyn Letters"--didn't you know about it? The girl
read them so beautifully that it was quite horrible--I should have
fainted if there'd been a man near enough to carry me out."
Hartly's glee redoubled, and Dresham said, jovially, "How like you
women to raise a shriek over the book and then do all you can to
encourage the blatant publicity of the readings!"
Mrs. Armiger met him more than half-way on a torrent of self-
accusal. "It WAS horrid; it was disgraceful. I told your wife we
ought all to be ashamed of ourselves for going, and I think Alexa
was quite right to refuse to take any tickets--even if it was for
a charity."
"Oh," her hostess murmured, indifferently, "with me charity begins
at home. I can't afford emotional luxuries."
"A charity? A charity?" Hartly exulted. "I hadn't seized the
full beauty of it. Reading poor Margaret Aubyn's love-letters at
the Waldorf before five hundred people for a charity! WHAT
charity, dear Mrs. Armiger?"
"Why, the Home for Friendless Women--"
"It was well chosen," Dresham commented; and Hartly buried his
mirth in the sofa-cushions.
When they were alone Glennard, still holding his untouched cup of
tea, turned to his wife, who sat silently behind the kettle. "Who
asked you to take a ticket for that reading?"
"I don't know, really--Kate Dresham, I fancy. It was she who got
it up."
"It's just the sort of damnable vulgarity she's capable of! It's
loathsome--it's monstrous--"
His wife, without looking up, answered gravely, "I thought so too.
It was for that reason I didn't go. But you must remember that
very few people feel about Mrs. Aubyn as you do--"
Glennard managed to set down his cup with a steady hand, but the
room swung round with him and he dropped into the nearest chair.
"As I do?" he repeated.
"I mean that very few people knew her when she lived in New York.
To most of the women who went to the reading she was a mere name,
too remote to have any personality. With me, of course, it was
different--"
Glennard gave her a startled look. "Different? Why different?"
"Since you were her friend--"
"Her friend!" He stood up impatiently. "You speak as if she had
had only one--the most famous woman of her day!" He moved vaguely
about the room, bending down to look at some books on the table.
"I hope," he added, "you didn't give that as a reason, by the
way?"
"A reason?"
"For not going. A woman who gives reasons for getting out of
social obligations is sure to make herself unpopular or
ridiculous.
The words were uncalculated; but in an instant he saw that they
had strangely bridged the distance between his wife and himself.
He felt her close on him, like a panting foe; and her answer was a
flash that showed the hand on the trigger.
"I seem," she said from the threshold, "to have done both in
giving my reason to you."
The fact that they were dining out that evening made it easy for
him to avoid Alexa till she came downstairs in her opera-cloak.
Mrs. Touchett, who was going to the same dinner, had offered to
call for her, and Glennard, refusing a precarious seat between the
ladies' draperies, followed on foot. The evening was
interminable. The reading at the Waldorf, at which all the women
had been present, had revived the discussion of the "Aubyn
Letters" and Glennard, hearing his wife questioned as to her
absence, felt himself miserably wishing that she had gone, rather
than that her staying away should have been remarked. He was
rapidly losing all sense of proportion where the "Letters" were
concerned. He could no longer hear them mentioned without
suspecting a purpose in the allusion; he even yielded himself for
a moment to the extravagance of imagining that Mrs. Dresham, whom
he disliked, had organized the reading in the hope of making him
betray himself--for he was already sure that Dresham had divined
his share in the transaction.
The attempt to keep a smooth surface on this inner tumult was as
endless and unavailing as efforts made in a nightmare. He lost
all sense of what he was saying to his neighbors and once when he
looked up his wife's glance struck him cold.
She sat nearly opposite him, at Flamel's side, and it appeared to
Glennard that they had built about themselves one of those airy
barriers of talk behind which two people can say what they please.
While the reading was discussed they were silent. Their silence
seemed to Glennard almost cynical--it stripped the last disguise
from their complicity. A throb of anger rose in him, but suddenly
it fell, and he felt, with a curious sense of relief, that at
bottom he no longer cared whether Flamel had told his wife or not.
The assumption that Flamel knew about the letters had become a
fact to Glennard; and it now seemed to him better that Alexa
should know too.
He was frightened at first by the discovery of his own
indifference. The last barriers of his will seemed to be breaking
down before a flood of moral lassitude. How could he continue to
play his part, to keep his front to the enemy, with this poison of
indifference stealing through his veins? He tried to brace
himself with the remembrance of his wife's scorn. He had not
forgotten the note on which their conversation had closed. If he
had ever wondered how she would receive the truth he wondered no
longer--she would despise him. But this lent a new insidiousness
to his temptation, since her contempt would be a refuge from his
own. He said to himself that, since he no longer cared for the
consequences, he could at least acquit himself of speaking in
self-defence. What he wanted now was not immunity but
castigation: his wife's indignation might still reconcile him to
himself. Therein lay his one hope of regeneration; her scorn was
the moral antiseptic that he needed, her comprehension the one
balm that could heal him. . . .
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