"I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you
had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has
never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always
been on ease and luxury--how she has hated what was shabby and
ugly and uncomfortable. She can't help it--she was brought up
with those ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of
them. But now all the things she cared for have been taken from
her, and the people who taught her to care for them have
abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some one could
reach out a hand and show her the other side--show her how much
is left in life and in herself---" Gerty broke off, abashed at
the sound of her own eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of
giving precise expression to her vague yearning for her friend's
retrieval. "I can't help her myself: she's passed out of my
reach," she continued. "I think she's afraid of being a burden to
me. When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed dreadfully
worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher was trying to
find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that
she had taken a position as private secretary, and that I was not
to be anxious, for everything was all right, and she
would come in and tell me about it when she had time; but she has
never come, and I don't like to go to her, because I am afraid of
forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once, when we were
children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and thrown
my arms about her, she said:'Please don't kiss me unless I ask
you to, Gerty'--and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since
then I've always waited to be asked."
Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which
his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it
against any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin
ended, he said with a slight smile: "Since you've learned the
wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me to rush in_ n but
the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take
leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you
responsible for my failure." Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had
not been as unintentional as he had allowed his cousin to think.
At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte
Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he had
anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by
lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened
that business had called him to the West, whence he came back
only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers.
The revelation of this suddenly-established intimacy effectually
chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment when her whole
life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully commit its
reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such
accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she
took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where,
once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and
the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been
surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was
much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct
than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so
disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the
recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense
of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.
But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how
little this view was really his, and how impossible it was for
him to live quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that
she was in need of help--even such vague help as he could
offer--was to be at once repossessed by that thought; and by the
time he reached the street he had sufficiently convinced himself
of the urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps directly
toward Lily's hotel.
There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart
had moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk
remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently
began to search through his books.
It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step
without letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden
waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was
sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn
to apprehension; but when at length a slip of paper was handed
him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium
Hotel," his apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and
this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper in
two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.
When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the
Emporium Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical
satisfaction. The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the
luxury of lying once more in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking
across a spacious sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly
near the fire. Analysis and introspection might come later; but
for the moment she was not even troubled by the excesses of the
upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture. The
sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some
dense mild medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled
the faintest note of criticism.
When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady
to whom Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of
entering a new world. Carry's vague presentment of Mrs. Norma
Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the
result of her latest divorce), left her under the implication of
coming "from the West," with the not unusual extenuation of
having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short,
rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily's hand. Mrs.
Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about"
through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the
Falstaff of a certain section of festive dub life. Socially, Mr.
Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the
Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now
found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively that
the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world could be described as dim:
in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric
light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences
on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she
rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the
fixity of something impaled and shown under glass. This did not
preclude the immediate discovery that she was some years younger
than her visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease,
the aggression of her dress and voice, there persisted that
ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so
curiously coexists with startling extremes of experience.
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her
as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the
fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated,
over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for
the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts
of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through
this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly
upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or
permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity
from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room,
from "art exhibit" to dress-maker's opening. High-stepping horses
or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into
vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more
wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the
stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in
the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past,
peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably
the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified
contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no
more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady,
though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of
developing an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively
seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of
large resounding presence, suggestive of convivial occasions and
of a chivalry finding expression in "first-night" boxes and
thousand dollar bonbonnieres, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch
from the scene of her first development to the higher stage of
hotel life in the metropolis. It was he who had selected the
horses with which she had taken the blue ribbon at the Show, had
introduced her to the photographer whose portraits of her formed
the recurring ornament of "Sunday Supplements," and had got
together the group which constituted her social world. It was a
small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended
in large unpeopled spaces; but Lily did not take long to learn
that its regulation was no longer in Mr. Stancy's hands. As often
happens, the pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch
was already aware of heights of elegance as well as depths of
luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This discovery at once
produced in her a craving for higher guidance, for the adroit
feminine hand which should give the right turn to her
correspondence, the right "look" to her hats, the right
succession to the items of her MENUS. It was, in short, as the
regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart's guidance
was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted
by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write
to.
The daily details of Mrs. Hatch's existence were as strange to
Lily as its general tenor. The lady's habits were marked by an
Oriental indolence and disorder peculiarly trying to her
companion. Mrs. Hatch and her friends seemed to float together
outside the bounds of time and space. No definite hours were
kept; no fixed obligations existed: night and day flowed into one
another in a blur of confused and retarded engagements, so that
one had the impression of lunching at the tea-hour, while dinner
was often merged in the noisy after-theatre supper which
prolonged Mrs. Hatch's vigil till daylight.
Through this jumble of futile activities came and went a strange
throng of hangers-on--manicures, beauty-doctors, hair-dressers,
teachers of bridge, of French, of "physical development": figures
sometimes indistinguishable, by their appearance, or by Mrs.
Hatch's relation to them, from the visitors constituting her
recognized society. But strangest of all to Lily was the
encounter, in this latter group, of several of her acquaintances.
She had supposed, and not without relief, that she was passing,
for the moment, completely out of her own circle; but she found
that Mr. Stancy, one side of whose sprawling existence overlapped
the edge of Mrs. Fisher's world, had drawn several of its
brightest ornaments into the circle of the Emporium. To find Ned
Silverton among the habitual frequenters of Mrs. Hatch's
drawing-room was one of Lily's first astonishments; but she soon
discovered that he was not Mr. Stancy's most important
recruit. It was on little Freddy Van Osburgh, the small slim heir
of the Van Osburgh millions, that the attention of Mrs. Hatch's
group was centred. Freddy, barely out of college, had risen above
the horizon since Lily's eclipse, and she now saw with surprise
what an effulgence he shed on the outer twilight of Mrs. Hatch's
existence. This, then, was one of the things that young men "went
in" for when released from the official social routine; this
was the kind of "previous engagement" that so frequently caused
them to disappoint the hopes of anxious hostesses. Lily had an
odd sense of being behind the social tapestry, on the side where
the threads were knotted and the loose ends hung. For a moment
she found a certain amusement in the show, and in her own share
of it: the situation had an ease and unconventionality distinctly
refreshing after her experience of the irony of conventions. But
these flashes of amusement were but brief reactions from the long
disgust of her days. Compared with the vast gilded void of Mrs.
Hatch's existence, the life of Lily's former friends seemed
packed with ordered activities. Even the most irresponsible
pretty woman of her acquaintance had her inherited obligations,
her conventional benevolences, her share in the working of the
great civic machine; and all hung together in the solidarity of
these traditional functions. The performance of specific duties
would have simplified Miss Bart's position; but the vague
attendance on Mrs. Hatch was not without its perplexities.
It was not her employer who created these perplexities. Mrs.
Hatch showed from the first an almost touching desire for Lily's
approval. Far from asserting the superiority of wealth, her
beautiful eyes seemed to urge the plea of inexperience: she
wanted to do what was "nice," to be taught how to be "lovely."
The difficulty was to find any point of contact between her
ideals and Lily's.
Mrs. Hatch swam in a haze of indeterminate enthusiasms, of
aspirations culled from the stage, the newspapers, the fashion
journals, and a gaudy world of sport still more completely beyond
her companion's ken. To separate from these confused conceptions
those most likely to advance the lady on her way, was Lily's
obvious duty; but its performance was hampered by
rapidly-growing doubts. Lily was in fact becoming more and more
aware of a certain ambiguity in her situation. It was not that
she had, in the conventional sense, any doubt of Mrs. Hatch's
irreproachableness. The lady's offences were always against taste
rather than conduct; her divorce record seemed due to
geographical rather than ethical conditions; and her worst
laxities were likely to proceed from a wandering and extravagant
good-nature. But if Lily did not mind her detaining her manicure
for luncheon, or offering the "Beauty-Doctor" a seat in Freddy
Van Osburgh's box at the play, she was not equally at ease in
regard to some less apparent lapses from convention. Ned
Silverton's relation to Stancy seemed, for instance, closer and
less clear than any natural affinities would warrant; and both
appeared united in the effort to cultivate Freddy Van Osburgh's
growing taste for Mrs. Hatch. There was as yet nothing definable
in the situation, which might well resolve itself into a huge
joke on the part of the other two; but Lily had a vague sense
that the subject of their experiment was too young, too rich and
too credulous. Her embarrassment was increased by the fact that
Freddy seemed to regard her as cooperating with himself in the
social development of Mrs. Hatch: a view that suggested, on his
part, a permanent interest in the lady's future. There were
moments when Lily found an ironic amusement in this aspect of the
case. The thought of launching such a missile as Mrs. Hatch at
the perfidious bosom of society was not without its charm: Miss
Bart had even beguiled her leisure with visions of the fair Norma
introduced for the first time to a family banquet at the Van
Osburghs'. But the thought of being personally connected with the
transaction was less agreeable; and her momentary flashes of
amusement were followed by increasing periods of doubt.
The sense of these doubts was uppermost when, late one afternoon,
she was surprised by a visit from Lawrence Selden. He found her
alone in the wilderness of pink damask, for in Mrs. Hatch's world
the tea-hour was not dedicated to social rites, and the lady was
in the hands of her masseuse.
Selden's entrance had caused Lily an inward start of
embarrassment; but his air of constraint had the effect of
restoring her self-possession, and she took at once the tone of
surprise and pleasure, wondering frankly that he should
have traced her to so unlikely a place, and asking what had
inspired him to make the search.
Selden met this with an unusual seriousness: she had never seen
him so little master of the situation, so plainly at the mercy of
any obstructions she might put in his way. "I wanted to see you,"
he said; and she could not resist observing in reply that he had
kept his wishes under remarkable control. She had in truth felt
his long absence as one of the chief bitternesses of the last
months: his desertion had wounded sensibilities far below the
surface of her pride.
Selden met the challenge with directness. "Why should I have
come, unless I thought I could be of use to you? It is my only
excuse for imagining you could want me."
This struck her as a clumsy evasion, and the thought gave a flash
of keenness to her answer. "Then you have come now because you
think you can be of use to me?"
He hesitated again. "Yes: in the modest capacity of a person to
talk things over with."
For a clever man it was certainly a stupid beginning; and the
idea that his awkwardness was due to the fear of her attaching a
personal significance to his visit, chilled her pleasure in
seeing him. Even under the most adverse conditions, that pleasure
always made itself felt: she might hate him, but she had never
been able to wish him out of the room. She was very near hating
him now; yet the sound of his voice, the way the light fell on
his thin dark hair, the way he sat and moved and wore his
clothes--she was conscious that even these trivial things were
inwoven with her deepest life. In his presence a sudden stillness
came upon her, and the turmoil of her spirit ceased; but an
impulse of resistance to this stealing influence now prompted her
to say: "It's very good of you to present yourself in that
capacity; but what makes you think I have anything particular to
talk about?"
Though she kept the even tone of light intercourse, the question
was framed in a way to remind him that his good offices were
unsought; and for a moment Selden was checked by it. The
situation between them was one which could have been cleared up
only by a sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training
and habit of mind were against the chances of such an
explosion. Selden's calmness seemed rather to harden into
resistance, and Miss Bart's into a surface of glittering irony,
as they faced each other from the opposite comers of one of Mrs.
Hatch's elephantine sofas. The sofa in question, and the
apartment peopled by its monstrous mates, served at length to
suggest the turn of Selden's reply.
"Gerty told me that you were acting as Mrs. Hatch's secretary;
and I knew she was anxious to hear how you were getting on."
Miss Bart received this explanation without perceptible
softening. "Why didn't she look me up herself, then?" she asked.
"Because, as you didn't send her your address, she was afraid of
being importunate." Selden continued with a smile: "You see no
such scruples restrained me; but then I haven't as much to risk
if I incur your displeasure."
Lily answered his smile. "You haven't incurred it as yet; but I
have an idea that you are going to."
"That rests with you, doesn't it? You see my initiative doesn't
go beyond putting myself at your disposal."
"But in what capacity? What am I to do with you?" she asked in
the same light tone.
Selden again glanced about Mrs. Hatch's drawing-room; then he
said, with a decision which he seemed to have gathered from this
final inspection: "You are to let me take you away from here."
Lily flushed at the suddenness of the attack; then she stiffened
under it and said coldly: "And may I ask where you mean me to
go?"
"Back to Gerty in the first place, if you will; the essential
thing is that it should be away from here."
