The sharp release from her fears restored Lily to immediate
lucidity. The collapse of Trenor's will left her in control, and
she heard herself, in a voice that was her own yet outside
herself, bidding him ring for the servant, bidding him give the
order for a hansom, directing him to put her in it when
it came. Whence the strength came to her she knew not; but an
insistent voice warned her that she must leave the house openly,
and nerved her, in the hall before the hovering care taker, to
exchange light words with Trenor, and charge him with the usual
messages for Judy, while all the while she shook with inward
loathing. On the doorstep, with the street before her, she felt a
mad throb of liberation, intoxicating as the prisoner's first
draught of free air; but the clearness of brain continued, and
she noted the mute aspect of Fifth Avenue, guessed at the
lateness of the hour, and even observed a man's figure--was there
something half-familiar in its outline?--which, as she entered
the hansom, turned from the opposite corner and vanished in the
obscurity of the side street.
But with the turn of the wheels reaction came, and shuddering
darkness closed on her. "I can't think--I can't think," she
moaned, and leaned her head against the rattling side of the cab.
She seemed a stranger to herself, or rather there were two selves
in her, the one she had always known, and a new abhorrent being
to which it found itself chained. She had once picked up, in a
house where she was staying, a translation of the EUMENIDES, and
her imagination had been seized by the high terror of the scene
where Orestes, in the cave of the oracle, finds his implacable
huntresses asleep, and snatches an hour's repose. Yes, the Furies
might sometimes sleep, but they were there, always there in the
dark corners, and now they were awake and the iron clang of their
wings was in her brain . . . She opened her eyes and saw the
streets passing--the familiar alien streets. All she looked on
was the same and yet changed. There was a great gulf fixed
between today and yesterday. Everything in the past seemed
simple, natural, full of daylight--and she was alone in a place
of darkness and pollution.--Alone! It was the loneliness that
frightened her. Her eyes fell on an illuminated clock at a street
corner, and she saw that the hands marked the half hour after
eleven. Only half-past eleven--there were hours and hours left of
the night! And she must spend them alone, shuddering sleepless on
her bed. Her soft nature recoiled from this ordeal, which had
none of the stimulus of conflict to goad her through it. Oh, the
slow cold drip of the minutes on her head! She had a
vision of herself lying on the black walnut bed--and the darkness
would frighten her, and if she left the light burning the dreary
details of the room would brand themselves forever on her brain.
She had always hated her room at Mrs. Peniston's--its ugliness,
its impersonality, the fact that nothing in it was really hers.
To a torn heart uncomforted by human nearness a room may open
almost human arms, and the being to whom no four walls mean more
than any others, is, at such hours, expatriate everywhere.
Lily had no heart to lean on. Her relation with her aunt was as
superficial as that of chance lodgers who pass on the stairs. But
even had the two been in closer contact, it was impossible to
think of Mrs. Peniston's mind as offering shelter or
comprehension to such misery as Lily's. As the pain that can be
told is but half a pain, so the pity that questions has little
healing in its touch. What Lily craved was the darkness made by
enfolding arms, the silence which is not solitude, but compassion
holding its breath.
She started up and looked forth on the passing streets.
Gerty!--they were nearing Gerty's corner. If only she could reach
there before this labouring anguish burst from her breast to her
lips--if only she could feel the hold of Gerty's arms while she
shook in the ague-fit of fear that was coming upon her! She
pushed up the door in the roof and called the address to the
driver. It was not so late--Gerty might still be waking. And even
if she were not, the sound of the bell would penetrate every
recess of her tiny apartment, and rouse her to answer her
friend's call.
Gerty Farish, the morning after the Wellington Brys'
entertainment, woke from dreams as happy as Lily's. If they were
less vivid in hue, more subdued to the half-tints of her
personality and her experience, they were for that very reason
better suited to her mental vision. Such flashes of joy as Lily
moved in would have blinded Miss Farish, who was accustomed, in
the way of happiness, to such scant light as shone through the
cracks of other people's lives.
Now she was the centre of a little illumination of her own: a
mild but unmistakable beam, compounded of Lawrence Selden's
growing kindness to herself and the discovery that he extended
his liking to Lily Bart. If these two factors seem incompatible
to the student of feminine psychology, it must be remembered that
Gerty had always been a parasite in the moral order, living on
the crumbs of other tables, and content to look through the
window at the banquet spread for her friends. Now that she was
enjoying a little private feast of her own, it would have seemed
incredibly selfish not to lay a plate for a friend; and there was
no one with whom she would rather have shared her enjoyment than
Miss Bart.
As to the nature of Selden's growing kindness, Gerty would no
more have dared to define it than she would have tried to learn a
butterfly's colours by knocking the dust from its wings. To seize
on the wonder would be to brush off its bloom, and perhaps see it
fade and stiffen in her hand: better the sense of beauty
palpitating out of reach, while she held her breath and watched
where it would alight. Yet Selden's manner at the Brys' had
brought the flutter of wings so close that they seemed to be
beating in her own heart. She had never seen him so alert, so
responsive, so attentive to what she had to say. His habitual
manner had an absent-minded kindliness which she accepted, and
was grateful for, as the liveliest sentiment her presence was
likely to inspire; but she was quick to feel in him a change
implying that for once she could give pleasure as well as receive
it.
And it was so delightful that this higher degree of sympathy
should be reached through their interest in Lily Bart!
Gerty's affection for her friend--a sentiment that had learned to
keep itself alive on the scantiest diet--had grown to active
adoration since Lily's restless curiosity had drawn her into the
circle of Miss Farish's work. Lily's taste of beneficence had
wakened in her a momentary appetite for well-doing. Her visit to
the Girls' Club had first brought her in contact with the
dramatic contrasts of life. She had always accepted with
philosophic calm the fact that such existences as hers were
pedestalled on foundations of obscure humanity. The dreary limbo
of dinginess lay all around and beneath that little illuminated
circle in which life reached its finest efflorescence, as the mud
and sleet of a winter night enclose a hot-house filled with
tropical flowers. All this was in the natural order of things,
and the orchid basking in its artificially created atmosphere
could round the delicate curves of its petals undisturbed by the
ice on the panes.
But it is one thing to live comfortably with the abstract
conception of poverty, another to be brought in contact with its
human embodiments. Lily had never conceived of these victims of
fate otherwise than in the mass. That the mass was composed of
individual lives, innumerable separate centres of sensation, with
her own eager reachings for pleasure, her own fierce revulsions
from pain--that some of these bundles of feeling were clothed in
shapes not so unlike her own, with eyes meant to look on
gladness, and young lips shaped for love--this discovery gave
Lily one of those sudden shocks of pity that sometimes
decentralize a life. Lily's nature was incapable of such renewal:
she could feel other demands only through her own, and no pain
was long vivid which did not press on an answering nerve. But for
the moment she was drawn out of herself by the interest of her
direct relation with a world so unlike her own. She had
supplemented her first gift by personal assistance to one or two
of Miss Farish's most appealing subjects, and the admiration and
interest her presence excited among the tired workers at the club
ministered in a new form to her insatiable desire to please.
Gerty Farish was not a close enough reader of character to
disentangle the mixed threads of which Lily's philanthropy was
woven. She supposed her beautiful friend to be actuated by the
same motive as herself--that sharpening of the moral
vision which makes all human suffering so near and insistent that
the other aspects of life fade into remoteness. Gerty lived by
such simple formulas that she did not hesitate to class her
friend's state with the emotional "change of heart" to which her
dealings with the poor had accustomed her; and she rejoiced in
the thought that she had been the humble instrument of this
renewal. Now she had an answer to all criticisms of Lily's
conduct: as she had said, she knew "the real Lily," and the
discovery that Selden shared her knowledge raised her placid
acceptance of life to a dazzled sense of its possibilities--a
sense farther enlarged, in the course of the afternoon, by the
receipt of a telegram from Selden asking if he might dine with
her that evening.
While Gerty was lost in the happy bustle which this announcement
produced in her small household, Selden was at one with her in
thinking with intensity of Lily Bart. The case which had called
him to Albany was not complicated enough to absorb all his
attention, and he had the professional faculty of keeping a part
of his mind free when its services were not needed. This
part--which at the moment seemed dangerously like the whole--was
filled to the brim with the sensations of the previous evening.
Selden understood the symptoms: he recognized the fact that he
was paying up, as there had always been a chance of his having to
pay up, for the voluntary exclusions of his past. He had meant to
keep free from permanent ties, not from any poverty of feeling,
but because, in a different way, he was, as much as Lily, the
victim of his environment. There had been a germ of truth in his
declaration to Gerty Farish that he had never wanted to marry a
"nice" girl: the adjective connoting, in his cousin's vocabulary,
certain utilitarian qualities which are apt to preclude the
luxury of charm. Now it had been Selden's fate to have a charming
mother: her graceful portrait, all smiles and Cashmere, still
emitted a faded scent of the undefinable quality. His father was
the kind of man who delights in a charming woman: who quotes her,
stimulates her, and keeps her perennially charming. Neither one
of the couple cared for money, but their disdain of it took the
form of always spending a little more than was prudent. If their
house was shabby, it was exquisitely kept; if there were good
books on the shelves there were also good dishes on the
table. Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an
understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of
restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew
how it was that the bills mounted up.
Though many of Selden's friends would have called his parents
poor, he had grown up in an atmosphere where restricted means
were felt only as a check on aimless profusion: where the few
possessions were so good that their rarity gave them a merited
relief, and abstinence was combined with elegance in a way
exemplified by Mrs. Selden's knack of wearing her old velvet as
if it were new. A man has the advantage of being delivered early
from the home point of view, and before Selden left college he
had learned that there are as many different ways of going
without money as of spending it. Unfortunately, he found no way
as agreeable as that practised at home; and his views of
womankind in especial were tinged by the remembrance of the one
woman who had given him his sense of "values." It was from her
that he inherited his detachment from the sumptuary side of life:
the stoic's carelessness of material things, combined with the
Epicurean's pleasure in them. Life shorn of either feeling
appeared to him a diminished thing; and nowhere was the blending
of the two ingredients so essential as in the character of a
pretty woman.
It had always seemed to Selden that experience offered a great
deal besides the sentimental adventure, yet he could vividly
conceive of a love which should broaden and deepen till it became
the central fact of life. What he could not accept, in his own
case, was the makeshift alternative of a relation that should be
less than this: that should leave some portions of his nature
unsatisfied, while it put an undue strain on others. He would
not, in other words, yield to the growth of an affection which
might appeal to pity yet leave the understanding untouched:
sympathy should no more delude him than a trick of the eyes, the
grace of helplessness than a curve of the cheek.
But now--that little BUT passed like a sponge over all his vows.
His reasoned-out resistances seemed for the moment so much less
important than the question as to when Lily would receive his
note! He yielded himself to the charm of trivial
preoccupations, wondering at what hour her reply would be sent,
with what words it would begin. As to its import he had no
doubt--he was as sure of her surrender as of his own. And so he
had leisure to muse on all its exquisite details, as a hard
worker, on a holiday morning, might lie still and watch the beam
of light travel gradually across his room. But if the new light
dazzled, it did not blind him. He could still discern the outline
of facts, though his own relation to them had changed. He was no
less conscious than before of what was said of Lily Bart, but he
could separate the woman he knew from the vulgar estimate of her.
His mind turned to Gerty Farish's words, and the wisdom of the
world seemed a groping thing beside the insight of innocence.
BLESSED ARE THE PURE IN HEART, FOR THEY SHALL SEE GOD--even the
hidden god in their neighbour's breast! Selden was in the state
of impassioned self-absorption that the first surrender to love
produces. His craving was for the companionship of one whose
point of view should justify his own, who should confirm, by
deliberate observation, the truth to which his intuitions had
leaped. He could not wait for the midday recess, but seized a
moment's leisure in court to scribble his telegram to Gerty
Farish.
Reaching town, he was driven direct to his club, where he hoped a
note from Miss Bart might await him. But his box contained only a
line of rapturous assent from Gerty, and he was turning away
disappointed when he was hailed by a voice from the smoking room.
"Hallo, Lawrence! Dining here? Take a bite with me-I've ordered a
canvas-back."
He discovered Trenor, in his day clothes, sitting, with a tall
glass at his elbow, behind the folds of a sporting journal.
Selden thanked him, but pleaded an engagement.
"Hang it, I believe every man in town has an engagement tonight.
I shall have the dub to myself. You know how I'm living this
winter, rattling round in that empty house. My wife meant to come
to town today, but she's put it off again, and how is a fellow to
dine alone in a room with the looking-glasses covered, and
nothing but a bottle of Harvey sauce on the side-board? I say,
Lawrence, chuck your engagement and take pity on me--it gives me
the blue devils to dine alone, and there's nobody but
that canting ass Wetherall in the club."
"Sorry, Gus--I can't do it."
As Selden turned away, he noticed the dark flush on Trenor's
face, the unpleasant moisture of his intensely white forehead,
the way his jewelled rings were wedged in the creases of his fat
red fingers. Certainly the beast was predominating--the beast at
the bottom of the glass. And he had heard this man's name coupled
with Lily's! Bah--the thought sickened him; all the way back to
his rooms he was haunted by the sight of Trenor's fat creased
hands---
On his table lay the note: Lily had sent it to his rooms. He knew
what was in it before he broke the seal--a grey seal with BEYOND!
beneath a flying ship. Ah, he would take her beyond--beyond the
ugliness, the pettiness, the attrition and corrosion of the
soul---
Gerty's little sitting-room sparkled with welcome when Selden
entered it. Its modest "effects," compact of enamel paint and
ingenuity, spoke to him in the language just then sweetest to his
ear. It is surprising how little narrow walls and a low ceiling
matter, when the roof of the soul has suddenly been raised. Gerty
sparkled too; or at least shone with a tempered radiance. He had
never before noticed that she had "points"--really, some good
fellow might do worse . . . Over the little dinner (and here,
again, the effects were wonderful) he told her she ought to
marry--he was in a mood to pair off the whole world. She had made
the caramel custard with her own hands? It was sinful to keep
such gifts to herself. He reflected with a throb of pride that
Lily could trim her own hats--she had told him so the day of
their walk at Bellomont.
He did not speak of Lily till after dinner. During the little
repast he kept the talk on his hostess, who, fluttered at being
the centre of observation, shone as rosy as the candle-shades she
had manufactured for the occasion. Selden evinced an
extraordinary interest in her household arrangements:
complimented her on the ingenuity with which she had utilized
every inch of her small quarters, asked how her servant managed
about afternoons out, learned that one may improvise
delicious dinners in a chafing-dish, and uttered thoughtful
generalizations on the burden of a large establishment.
When they were in the sitting-room again, where they fitted as
snugly as bits in a puzzle, and she had brewed the coffee, and
poured it into her grandmother's egg-shell cups, his eye, as he
leaned back, basking in the warm fragrance, lighted on a recent
photograph of Miss Bart, and the desired transition was effected
without an effort. The photograph was well enough--but to catch
her as she had looked last night! Gerty agreed with him--never
had she been so radiant. But could photography capture that
light? There had been a new look in her face--something
different; yes, Selden agreed there had been something different.
The coffee was so exquisite that he asked for a second cup: such
a contrast to the watery stuff at the club! Ah, your poor
bachelor with his impersonal club fare, alternating with the
equally impersonal CUISINE of the dinner-party! A man who lived
in lodgings missed the best part of life--he pictured the
flavourless solitude of Trenor's repast, and felt a moment's
compassion for the man . . . But to return to Lily--and again and
again he returned, questioning, conjecturing, leading Gerty on,
draining her inmost thoughts of their stored tenderness for her
friend.
At first she poured herself out unstintingly, happy in this
perfect communion of their sympathies. His understanding of Lily
helped to confirm her own belief in her friend. They dwelt
together on the fact that Lily had had no chance. Gerty instanced
her generous impulses--her restlessness and discontent. The fact
that her life had never satisfied her proved that she was made
for better things. She might have married more than once--the
conventional rich marriage which she had been taught to consider
the sole end of existence--but when the opportunity came she had
always shrunk from it. Percy Gryce, for instance, had been in
love with her--every one at Bellomont had supposed them to be
engaged, and her dismissal of him was thought inexplicable. This
view of the Gryce incident chimed too well with Selden's mood not
to be instantly adopted by him, with a flash of retrospective
contempt for what had once seemed the obvious solution. If
rejection there had been--and he wondered now that he had
ever doubted it!--then he held the key to the secret, and the
hillsides of Bellomont were lit up, not with sunset, but with
dawn. It was he who had wavered and disowned the face of
opportunity--and the joy now warming his breast might have been a
familiar inmate if he had captured it in its first flight.
It was at this point, perhaps, that a joy just trying its wings
in Gerty's heart dropped to earth and lay still. She sat facing
Selden, repeating mechanically: "No, she has never been
understood---" and all the while she herself seemed to be sitting
in the centre of a great glare of comprehension. The little
confidential room, where a moment ago their thoughts had touched
elbows like their chairs, grew to unfriendly vastness, separating
her from Selden by all the length of her new vision of the
future--and that future stretched out interminably, with her
lonely figure toiling down it, a mere speck on the solitude.
"She is herself with a few people only; and you are one of them,"
she heard Selden saying. And again: "Be good to her, Gerty, won't
you?" and: "She has it in her to become whatever she is believed
to be--you'll help her by believing the best of her?"
The words beat on Gerty's brain like the sound of a language
which has seemed familiar at a distance, but on approaching is
found to be unintelligible. He had come to talk to her of
Lily--that was all! There had been a third at the feast she had
spread for him, and that third had taken her own place. She tried
to follow what he was saying, to cling to her own part in the
talk--but it was all as meaningless as the boom of waves in a
drowning head, and she felt, as the drowning may feel, that to
sink would be nothing beside the pain of struggling to keep up.
Selden rose, and she drew a deep breath, feeling that soon she
could yield to the blessed waves.
"Mrs. Fisher's? You say she was dining there? There's music
afterward; I believe I had a card from her." He glanced at the
foolish pink-faced clock that was drumming out this hideous
hour. "A quarter past ten? I might look in there now; the Fisher
evenings are amusing. I haven't kept you up too late, Gerty? You
look tired--I've rambled on and bored you." And in the
unwonted overflow of his feelings, he left a cousinly kiss upon
her cheek.
