Edith Wharton - Novel 15 (39 page)

 
          
A
great dignity and decency prevailed in her little circle. It was not the
oppressive respectability which weighs on the reformed declassee, but the air
of ease imparted by a woman of distinction who has wearied of society and
closed her doors to all save her intimates. One always felt, at Lizzie
Hazeldean’s, that the next moment one’s grandmother and aunts might be
announced; and yet so pleasantly certain that they wouldn’t be.

 
          
What
is there in the atmosphere of such houses that makes them so enchanting to a
fastidious and imaginative youth? Why is it that “those women” (as the others
call them) alone know how to put the awkward at ease, check the familiar, smile
a little at the over-knowing, and yet encourage naturalness in all? The
difference of atmosphere is felt on the very threshold. The flowers grow
differently in their vases, the lamps and easy-chairs have found a cleverer way
of coming together, the books on the table are the very ones that one is
longing to get hold of. The most perilous coquetry may not be in a woman’s way
of arranging her dress but in her way of arranging her drawing-room; and in
this art Mrs. Hazeldean excelled.

 
          
I
have spoken of books; even then they were usually the first objects to attract
me in a room, whatever else of beauty it contained; and I remember, on the
evening of that first “jolly supper,” coming to an astonished pause before the
crowded shelves that took up one wall of the drawing room. What! The goddess
read, then? She could accompany one on those flights too? Lead one, no doubt?
My heart beat high…

 
          
But
I soon learned that Lizzie Hazeldean did not read. She turned but languidly
even the pages of the last Ouida novel: and I remember seeing Mallock’s ‘
New
Republic
’ uncut on her table for weeks. It took me
no long time to make the discovery: at my very next visit she caught my glance
of surprise in the direction of the rich shelves, smiled, coloured a little,
and met it with the confession: “No, I can’t read them. I’ve tried—I
have
tried—but print makes me sleepy.
Even novels do…” “They” were the accumulated treasures of English
poetry,
and a rich and varied selection of history,
criticism, letters, in English, French and Italian—she spoke these languages, I
knew—books evidently assembled by a sensitive and widely-ranging reader. We
were alone at the time, and Mrs. Hazeldean went on in a lower tone: “I kept
just the few he liked best—my husband, you know.” It was the first time that
Charles Hazeldean’s name had been spoken between us, and my surprise was so
great that my candid cheek must have reflected the blush on hers. I had fancied
that women in her situation avoided alluding to their husbands. But she
continued to look at me, wistfully, humbly almost, as if there were something
more that she wanted to say, and was inwardly entreating me to understand.

 
          
“He
was a great reader: a student. And he tried so hard to make me read too—he
wanted to share everything with me. And I
did
like poetry—some poetry—when he read it aloud to me. After his death I thought:
‘There’ll be his books. I can go back to them—I shall find him there.’ And I
tried—oh, so hard—but it’s no use. They’ve lost their meaning…as most things
have.” She stood up, lit a cigarette,
pushed
back a
log on the hearth. I felt that she was waiting for me to speak. If life had but
taught me how to answer her, what was there of her story I might not have
learned? But I was too inexperienced; I could not shake off my bewilderment.
What! This woman whom I had
been pitying
for
matrimonial miseries which seemed to justify her seeking solace elsewhere—this
woman could speak of her husband in such a tone! I had instantly perceived that
the tone was not feigned; and a confused sense of the complexity—or the
chaos—of human relations held me as tongue-tied as a schoolboy to whom a
problem beyond his grasp is suddenly propounded.

 
          
Before
the thought took shape she had read it, and with the smile which drew such sad
lines about her mouth, had continued gaily: “What are you up to this evening,
by the way? What do you say to going to the “Black Crook” with your cousin
Hubert and one or two others? I have a box.”

 
          
It
was inevitable that, not long after this candid confession, I should have
persuaded myself that a taste for reading was boring in a woman, and that one
of Mrs. Hazeldean’s chief charms lay in her freedom from literary pretensions.
The truth was, of course, that it lay in her sincerity; in her humble yet
fearless estimate of her own qualities and short-comings. I had never met its
like in a woman of any age, and coming to me in such early days, and clothed in
such looks and intonations, it saved me, in after years, from all peril of
meaner beauties.

 
          
But
before I had come to understand that, or to guess what falling in love with
Lizzie Hazeldean was to do for me, I had quite unwittingly and fatuously done
the falling. The affair turned out, in the perspective of the years, to be but
an incident of our long friendship; and if I touch on it here it is only to
illustrate another of my poor friend’s gifts. If she could not read books she
could read hearts; and she bent a playful yet compassionate gaze on mine while
it still floundered in unawareness.

 
          
I
remember it all as if it were yesterday. We were sitting alone in her
drawing-room, in the winter twilight, over the fire. We had reached—in her
company it was not difficult—the degree of fellowship when friendly talk lapses
naturally into a friendlier silence, and she had taken up the evening paper
while I glowered dumbly at the embers. One little foot, just emerging below her
dress, swung, I remember, between me and the fire, and seemed to hold her all
in the spring of its instep…

 
          
“Oh,”
she exclaimed, “poor Henry Prest—”. She dropped the paper. “His wife is
dead—poor fellow,” she said simply.

 
          
The
blood rushed to my forehead: my heart was in my throat. She had named him—named
him at last, the recreant lover, the man who had “dishonoured” her! My hands
were clenched: if he had entered the room they would have been at his throat…

 
          
And
then, after a quick interval, I had again the humiliating disheartening sense
of not understanding: of being too young, too inexperienced, to know. This
woman, who spoke of her deceived husband with tenderness, spoke compassionately
of her faithless lover! And she did the one as naturally as the other, not as
if this impartial charity were an attitude she had determined to assume, but as
if it were part of the lesson life had taught her.

 
          
“I
didn’t know he was married,” I growled between my teeth.

 
          
She
meditated absently. “Married? Oh, yes; when was it? The year after…” her voice
dropped again…“after my husband died. He married a quiet cousin, who had always
been in love with him, I believe. They had two boys.—
You
knew him?” she abruptly questioned.

 
          
I
nodded grimly.

 
          
“People
always thought he would never marry—he used to say so himself,” she went on,
still absently.

 
          
I
burst out: “The—hound!”

 
          
“
Oh
!” she exclaimed. I started up, our
eyes met, and hers filled with tears of reproach and understanding. We sat
looking at each other in silence. Two of the tears overflowed, hung on her
lashes, melted down her cheeks. I continued to stare at her shamefacedly; then
I got to my feet, drew out my handkerchief, and tremblingly, reverently, as if
I had touched a sacred image, I wiped them away.

 
          
My
love-making went no farther. In another moment she had contrived to put a safe
distance between us. She did not want to turn a boy’s head; long since (she
told me afterward) such amusements had ceased to excite her. But she did want
my sympathy, wanted it overwhelmingly: amid the various feelings she was aware
of arousing, she let me see that sympathy, in the sense of a moved
understanding, had always been lacking. “But then,” she added ingenuously,
“I’ve never really been sure, because I’ve never told anyone my story. Only I
take it for granted that, if I haven’t, it’s
their
fault rather than mine…” She smiled half-deprecatingly, and
my bosom swelled, acknowledging the distinction. “And now I want to tell
you
—” she began.

 
          
I
have said that my love for Mrs. Hazeldean was a brief episode in our long
relation. At my age, it was inevitable that it should be so. The “fresher face”
soon came, and in its light I saw my old friend as a middle-aged woman, turning
grey, with a mechanical smile and haunted eyes. But it was in the first glow of
my feeling that she had told me her story; and when the glow subsided, and in
the afternoon light of a long intimacy I judged and tested her statements, I
found that each detail fitted into the earlier picture.

 
          
My
opportunities were many; for once she had told the tale she always wanted to be
retelling it. A perpetual longing to relive the past, a perpetual need to
explain and justify herself—the satisfaction of these two cravings, once she
had permitted herself to indulge them, became the luxury of her empty life. She
had kept it empty—emotionally, sentimentally empty—from the day of her
husband’s death, as the guardian of an abandoned temple might go on forever
sweeping and tending what had once been the god’s abode. But this duty
performed, she had no other. She had done one great—or abominable—thing; rank
it as you please, it had been done heroically. But there was nothing in her to
keep her at that height. Her tastes, her interests, her conceivable
occupations, were all on the level of a middling domesticity; she did not know
how to create for herself any inner life in keeping with that one unprecedented
impulse.

 
          
Soon
after her husband’s death, one of her cousins, the Miss Cecilia Winter of
Washington Square
to whom my mother had referred, had died
also, and left Mrs. Hazeldean a handsome legacy. And a year or two later
Charles Hazeldean’s small estate had undergone the favourable change that
befell
New
York
realty in the ’eighties. The property he had bequeathed to his wife had
doubled, then tripled, in value; and she found herself, after a few years of
widowhood, in possession of an income large enough to supply her with all the
luxuries which her husband had struggled so hard to provide. It was the
peculiar irony of her lot to be secured from temptation when all danger of
temptation was over; for she would never, I am certain, have held out the tip
of her finger to any man to obtain such luxuries for her own enjoyment. But if
she did not value her money for itself, she owed to it—and the service was
perhaps greater than she was aware—the power of mitigating her solitude, and
filling it with the trivial distractions without which she was less and less
able to live.

 
          
She
had been put into the world, apparently, to amuse men and enchant them; yet,
her husband dead, her sacrifice accomplished, she would have preferred, I am
sure, to shut herself up in a lonely monumental attitude, with thoughts and
pursuits on a scale with her one great hour. But what was she to do? She had
known of no way of earning money except by her graces; and now she knew no way
of filling her days except with cards and chatter and theatre-going. Not one of
the men who approached her passed beyond the friendly barrier she had opposed
to me. Of that I was sure. She had not shut out Henry Prest in order to replace
him—her face grew white at the suggestion. But what else was there to do, she
asked me; what? The days had to be spent somehow; and she was incurably,
disconsolately sociable.

 
          
So
she lived, in a cold celibacy that passed for I don’t know what licence; so she
lived, withdrawn from us all, yet needing us so desperately, inwardly faithful
to her one high impulse, yet so incapable of attuning her daily behaviour to
it! And so, at the very moment when she ceased to deserve the blame of society,
she found herself cut off from it, and reduced to the status of the “fast”
widow noted for her jolly suppers.

 
          
I
bent bewildered over the depths of her plight. What else, at any stage of her
career, could she have done, I often wondered? Among the young women now
growing up about me I find none with enough imagination to picture the helpless
incapacity of the pretty girl of the ’seventies, the girl without money or
vocation, seemingly put into the world only to please, and unlearned in any way
of maintaining herself there by her own efforts. Marriage alone could save such
a girl from starvation, unless she happened to run across an old lady who
wanted her dogs exercised and her ‘Churchman’ read aloud to her. Even the day
of painting wild-roses on fans, of colouring photographs to “look like”
miniatures, of manufacturing lamp-shades and trimming hats for more fortunate
friends—even this precarious beginning of feminine independence had not dawned.
It was inconceivable to my mother’s generation that a portionless girl should
not be provided for by her relations until she found a husband; and that,
having found him, she should have to help him to earn a living, was more
inconceivable still. The self-sufficing little society of that vanished
New York
attached no great importance to wealth, but
regarded poverty as so distasteful that it simply took no account of it.