Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (5 page)

 
          
“Why,
the studio. It was my last sitting.”

 
          
“People
don’t sit for their portraits in the dark.”

 
          
He
saw a faint surprise in her eyes as she bent to the samovar. “No; I was not sitting
all the time. Not for the last hour or more, I suppose.”

 
          
She
spoke as quietly as usual, yet he thought he caught a tremor of resentment in
her voice.
Against himself—or against the painter?
But
how he was letting his imagination run away with him! He sat down in his
accustomed armchair, took the cup of tea she held out. He was determined to
behave like a reasonable being, yet never had reason appeared to him so
unrelated to reality. “Ah, well—I suppose you two had a lot of things to talk
about. You rather fancy Svengaart, don’t you?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes; I like him very much. Do you know,” she asked earnestly, “how much he has
made during his visit to America? It was of course in confidence that he told
me.
Two hundred thousand dollars.
And he was rich before.”

 
          
She
spoke so solemnly that Targatt burst into a vague laugh. “Well, what of it? I
don’t know that it showed much taste to brag to you about the way he skins his
sitters. But it shows he didn’t make much of a sacrifice in painting you for
nothing,” he said irritably.

 
          
“No;
I said to him he might have done you too.”

 
          
“
Me?”
Targatt’s laugh redoubled. “Well,
what did he say to that?”

 
          
“Oh,
he laughed as you are now laughing,” Nadeja rejoined. “But he says he will
never marry—never.”

 
          
Targatt
put down his cup with a rattle. “
Never
marry?

 
          
What
the devil are you talking about? Who cares whether he marries, anyhow?” he
gasped with a dry throat.

 
          
“I
do,” said Nadeja.

 
          
There
was a silence. Nadeja was lifting her tea-cup to her lips, and something in the
calm tree movement reminded him of Svengaart’s outburst when he had seen her
lift the pile of music. For the first time in his life Targatt seemed to
himself to be looking at her; and he wondered if it would also be the last. He
cleared his throat and tried to speak, to say something immense, magnanimous.
“Well, if—”

 
          
“No;
it’s useless. He will hear nothing. I said to him: ‘You will never anywhere
find such a
plastik
as Mouna’s’ …”

 
          
“Mound’s?”

 
          
She
turned to him with a slight shrug. “Oh, my poor Jim, are you quite blind?
Haven’t you seen how we have all been trying to make him want to marry Mouna?
It will be almost my first failure, I think,” she concluded with a
half-apologetic sigh.

 
          
Targatt
rested his chin on his hands and looked up at her. She looked tired, certainly,
and older; too tired and old for any one still well under forty. And Mouna—why
in God’s name should she be persecuting this man to marry Mouna? It was
indecent, it was shocking,
it
was unbelievable… Yet
not for a moment did he doubt the truth of what she said.

 
          
“Mouna?”
he could only repeat stupidly.

 
          
“Well,
you see, darling, we’re all a little anxious about Mouna. And I was so glad
when Svengaart asked to paint me, because I thought: ‘Now’s my opportunity.’
But no, it was not to be.”

 
          
Targatt
drew a deep breath. He seemed to be inhaling some life-giving element, and it
was with the most superficial severity that he said: “I don’t fancy this idea
of your throwing your sister at men’s heads.”

 
          
“No,
it was no use,” Nadeja sighed, with her usual complete unawareness of any moral
rebuke in his comment.

 
          
Targatt
stood up uneasily. “He wouldn’t have her at any price?”

 
          
She
shook her head sadly.
“Foolish man!”

 
          
Targatt
went up to her and took her abruptly by the wrist.

 
          
“Look
at me, Nadeja—straight. Did he refuse her because he wanted vow?”

 
          
She
gave her light lift of the shoulders, and the rare colour flitted across her
pale cheeks. “Isn’t it always the way of men? What they can’t get—”

 
          
“Ah;
so he’s been making love to you all this time, has he?”

 
          
“But of course not, James.
What he wished was to marry me.
That is something quite different, is it not?”

 
          
“Yes.
I see.”

 
          
Targatt
had released her wrist and turned away. He walked once or twice up and down the
length of the room, no more knowing where he was than a man dropped blindfold
onto a new planet. He knew what he wanted to do and to say; the words he had
made up his mind to speak stood out in letters of fire against the choking
blackness. “You must feel yourself free—.” Five words, and so easy to speak!
“Perfectly free—perfectly free,” a voice kept crying within him. It was the
least he could do, if he were ever to hold up his head again; but when he
opened his mouth to speak not a sound came. At last he halted before Nadeja
again, his face working like a frightened child’s.

 
          
“
Nad—
what would you like best in the world to do? If you’ll
tell me I—I want you to do it!” he stammered. And with hands of ice he waited.

 
          
Nadeja
looked at him with a slowly growing surprise. She had turned very pale again.

 
          
“Even
if,” he continued, half choking, “you understand,
Nad
,
even if—”

 
          
She
continued to look at him in her grave maternal way. “Is this true, what you are
now saying?” she asked very low. Targatt nodded.

 
          
A
little smile wavered over her lips. “Well, darling, if only I could have got
Mouna safely married, I should have said: Don’t you think that now at last we
could afford to have a baby?”‘

 
          
(
Hearst’s International Cosmopolitan 96
,
February 1934)

 
          
  

 
          
Charlotte
Ashby paused on her doorstep. Dark had descended on the brilliancy of the March
afternoon, and the grinding rasping street life of the city was at its highest.
She turned her back on it, standing for a moment in the old-fashioned,
marble-flagged vestibule before she inserted her key in the lock. The sash
curtains drawn across the panes of the inner door softened the light within to
a warm blur through which no details showed. It was the hour when, in the first
months of her marriage to Kenneth Ashby, she had most liked to return to that
quiet house in a street long since deserted by business and fashion. The
contrast between the soulless roar of New York, its devouring blaze of lights,
the oppression of its congested traffic, congested houses, lives, minds and
this veiled sanctuary she called home, always stirred her profoundly. In the
very heart of the hurricane she had found her tiny islet—or thought she had.
And now, in the last months, everything was changed, and she always wavered on
the doorstep and had to force herself to enter.

 
          
While
she stood there she called up the scene within: the hall hung with old prints,
the ladderlike stairs, and on the left her husband’s long shabby library, full
of books and pipes and worn armchairs inviting to meditation. How she had loved
that room! Then, upstairs, her own drawing-room, in which, since the death of
Kenneth’s first wife, neither furniture nor hangings had been changed, because
there had never been money enough, but which Charlotte had made her own by
moving furniture about and adding more books, another lamp, a table for the new
reviews. Even on the occasion of her only visit to the first Mrs. Ashby—a
distant, self-centred woman, whom she had known very slightly—she had looked
about her with an innocent envy, feeling it to be exactly the drawing-room she
would have liked for herself; and now for more than a year it had been hers to
deal with as she chose—the room to which she hastened back at dusk on winter
days, where she sat reading by the fire, or answering notes at the pleasant
roomy desk, or going over her stepchildren’s copy books, till she heard her
husband’s step.

 
          
Sometimes
friends dropped in; sometimes—oftener—she was alone; and she liked that best,
since it was another way of being with Kenneth, thinking over what he had said
when they parted in the morning, imagining what he would say when he sprang up
the stairs, found her by herself and caught her to him.

 
          
Now,
instead of this, she thought of one thing only—the letter she might or might
not find on the hall table. Until she had made sure whether or not it was
there, her mind had no room for anything else. The letter was always the same—a
square grayish envelope with “Kenneth Ashby,
Esquire.,
”
written on it in bold but faint characters. From the first it had struck
Charlotte as peculiar that anyone who wrote such a firm hand should trace the
letters so lightly; the address was always written as though there were not
enough ink in the pen, or the writer’s wrist were too weak to bear upon it.
Another curious thing was that, in spite of its masculine curves, the writing
was so visibly feminine. Some hands are sexless, some masculine, at first
glance; the writing on the gray envelope, for all its strength and assurance,
was without doubt a woman’s. The envelope never bore anything but the
recipient’s name; no stamp, no address. The letter was presumably delivered by
hand—but by whose? No doubt it was slipped into the letter box, whence the
parlour maid, when she closed the shutters and lit the lights, probably
extracted it. At any rate, it was always in the evening, after dark, that
Charlotte saw it lying there. She thought of the letter in the singular, as
“it”, because, though there had been several since her marriage—seven, to be
exact—they were so alike in appearance that they had become merged in one
another in her mind, become one letter, become “it”.

 
          
The
first had come the day after their return from their honeymoon—a journey
prolonged to the West Indies, from which they had returned to New York after an
absence of more than two months. Re-entering the house with her husband, late
on that first evening—they had dined at his mother’s—she had seen, alone on the
hall table, the gray envelope. Her eye fell on it before Kenneth’s, and her
first thought was: “Why, I’ve seen that writing before;” but where she could
not recall. The memory was just definite enough for her to identify the script
whenever it looked up at her faintly from the same pale envelope; but on that
first day she would have thought no more of the letter if, when her husband’s
glance lit on it, she had not chanced to be looking at him. It all happened in
a flash—his seeing the letter, putting out his hand for it, raising it to his
short-sighted eyes to decipher the faint writing, and then abruptly withdrawing
the arm he had slipped through Charlotte’s, and moving away to the hanging
light, his back turned to her. She had waited—waited for a sound, an
exclamation; waited for him to open the letter; but he had slipped it into his
pocket without a word and followed her into the library. And there they had sat
down by the fire and lit their cigarettes, and he had remained silent, his head
thrown back broodingly against the armchair, his eyes fixed on the hearth, and
presently had passed his hand over his forehead and said: “Wasn’t it unusually
hot at my mother’s tonight? I’ve got a splitting head. Mind if I take myself
off to bed?”