The Age of Innocence

  XIV.

  As he came out into the lobby Archer ran across his friend Ned Winsett,the only one among what Janey called his "clever people" with whom hecared to probe into things a little deeper than the average level ofclub and chop-house banter.

  He had caught sight, across the house, of Winsett's shabbyround-shouldered back, and had once noticed his eyes turned toward theBeaufort box. The two men shook hands, and Winsett proposed a bock ata little German restaurant around the corner. Archer, who was not inthe mood for the kind of talk they were likely to get there, declinedon the plea that he had work to do at home; and Winsett said: "Oh,well so have I for that matter, and I'll be the Industrious Apprenticetoo."

  They strolled along together, and presently Winsett said: "Look here,what I'm really after is the name of the dark lady in that swell box ofyours--with the Beauforts, wasn't she? The one your friend Leffertsseems so smitten by."

  Archer, he could not have said why, was slightly annoyed. What thedevil did Ned Winsett want with Ellen Olenska's name? And above all,why did he couple it with Lefferts's? It was unlike Winsett tomanifest such curiosity; but after all, Archer remembered, he was ajournalist.

  "It's not for an interview, I hope?" he laughed.

  "Well--not for the press; just for myself," Winsett rejoined. "Thefact is she's a neighbour of mine--queer quarter for such a beauty tosettle in--and she's been awfully kind to my little boy, who fell downher area chasing his kitten, and gave himself a nasty cut. She rushedin bareheaded, carrying him in her arms, with his knee all beautifullybandaged, and was so sympathetic and beautiful that my wife was toodazzled to ask her name."

  A pleasant glow dilated Archer's heart. There was nothingextraordinary in the tale: any woman would have done as much for aneighbour's child. But it was just like Ellen, he felt, to have rushedin bareheaded, carrying the boy in her arms, and to have dazzled poorMrs. Winsett into forgetting to ask who she was.

  "That is the Countess Olenska--a granddaughter of old Mrs. Mingott's."

  "Whew--a Countess!" whistled Ned Winsett. "Well, I didn't knowCountesses were so neighbourly. Mingotts ain't."

  "They would be, if you'd let them."

  "Ah, well--" It was their old interminable argument as to theobstinate unwillingness of the "clever people" to frequent thefashionable, and both men knew that there was no use in prolonging it.

  "I wonder," Winsett broke off, "how a Countess happens to live in ourslum?"

  "Because she doesn't care a hang about where she lives--or about any ofour little social sign-posts," said Archer, with a secret pride in hisown picture of her.

  "H'm--been in bigger places, I suppose," the other commented. "Well,here's my corner."

  He slouched off across Broadway, and Archer stood looking after him andmusing on his last words.

  Ned Winsett had those flashes of penetration; they were the mostinteresting thing about him, and always made Archer wonder why they hadallowed him to accept failure so stolidly at an age when most men arestill struggling.

  Archer had known that Winsett had a wife and child, but he had neverseen them. The two men always met at the Century, or at some haunt ofjournalists and theatrical people, such as the restaurant where Winsetthad proposed to go for a bock. He had given Archer to understand thathis wife was an invalid; which might be true of the poor lady, or mightmerely mean that she was lacking in social gifts or in evening clothes,or in both. Winsett himself had a savage abhorrence of socialobservances: Archer, who dressed in the evening because he thought itcleaner and more comfortable to do so, and who had never stopped toconsider that cleanliness and comfort are two of the costliest items ina modest budget, regarded Winsett's attitude as part of the boring"Bohemian" pose that always made fashionable people, who changed theirclothes without talking about it, and were not forever harping on thenumber of servants one kept, seem so much simpler and lessself-conscious than the others. Nevertheless, he was always stimulatedby Winsett, and whenever he caught sight of the journalist's leanbearded face and melancholy eyes he would rout him out of his cornerand carry him off for a long talk.

  Winsett was not a journalist by choice. He was a pure man of letters,untimely born in a world that had no need of letters; but afterpublishing one volume of brief and exquisite literary appreciations, ofwhich one hundred and twenty copies were sold, thirty given away, andthe balance eventually destroyed by the publishers (as per contract) tomake room for more marketable material, he had abandoned his realcalling, and taken a sub-editorial job on a women's weekly, wherefashion-plates and paper patterns alternated with New Englandlove-stories and advertisements of temperance drinks.

  On the subject of "Hearth-fires" (as the paper was called) he wasinexhaustibly entertaining; but beneath his fun lurked the sterilebitterness of the still young man who has tried and given up. Hisconversation always made Archer take the measure of his own life, andfeel how little it contained; but Winsett's, after all, contained stillless, and though their common fund of intellectual interests andcuriosities made their talks exhilarating, their exchange of viewsusually remained within the limits of a pensive dilettantism.

  "The fact is, life isn't much a fit for either of us," Winsett had oncesaid. "I'm down and out; nothing to be done about it. I've got onlyone ware to produce, and there's no market for it here, and won't be inmy time. But you're free and you're well-off. Why don't you get intotouch? There's only one way to do it: to go into politics."

  Archer threw his head back and laughed. There one saw at a flash theunbridgeable difference between men like Winsett and theothers--Archer's kind. Every one in polite circles knew that, inAmerica, "a gentleman couldn't go into politics." But, since he couldhardly put it in that way to Winsett, he answered evasively: "Look atthe career of the honest man in American politics! They don't want us."

  "Who's 'they'? Why don't you all get together and be 'they'yourselves?"

  Archer's laugh lingered on his lips in a slightly condescending smile.It was useless to prolong the discussion: everybody knew the melancholyfate of the few gentlemen who had risked their clean linen in municipalor state politics in New York. The day was past when that sort ofthing was possible: the country was in possession of the bosses and theemigrant, and decent people had to fall back on sport or culture.

  "Culture! Yes--if we had it! But there are just a few little localpatches, dying out here and there for lack of--well, hoeing andcross-fertilising: the last remnants of the old European tradition thatyour forebears brought with them. But you're in a pitiful littleminority: you've got no centre, no competition, no audience. You'relike the pictures on the walls of a deserted house: 'The Portrait of aGentleman.' You'll never amount to anything, any of you, till you rollup your sleeves and get right down into the muck. That, or emigrate... God! If I could emigrate ..."

  Archer mentally shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation backto books, where Winsett, if uncertain, was always interesting.Emigrate! As if a gentleman could abandon his own country! One couldno more do that than one could roll up one's sleeves and go down intothe muck. A gentleman simply stayed at home and abstained. But youcouldn't make a man like Winsett see that; and that was why the NewYork of literary clubs and exotic restaurants, though a first shakemade it seem more of a kaleidoscope, turned out, in the end, to be asmaller box, with a more monotonous pattern, than the assembled atomsof Fifth Avenue.

  The next morning Archer scoured the town in vain for more yellow roses.In consequence of this search he arrived late at the office, perceivedthat his doing so made no difference whatever to any one, and wasfilled with sudden exasperation at the elaborate futility of his life.Why should he not be, at that moment, on the sands of St. Augustinewith May Welland? No one was deceived by his pretense of professionalactivity. In old-fashioned legal firms like that of which Mr.Letterblair was the head, and which were mainly engaged in themanagement of large estates and "conservative" investments, there werealways two or three young men, fairly we
ll-off, and withoutprofessional ambition, who, for a certain number of hours of each day,sat at their desks accomplishing trivial tasks, or simply reading thenewspapers. Though it was supposed to be proper for them to have anoccupation, the crude fact of money-making was still regarded asderogatory, and the law, being a profession, was accounted a moregentlemanly pursuit than business. But none of these young men hadmuch hope of really advancing in his profession, or any earnest desireto do so; and over many of them the green mould of the perfunctory wasalready perceptibly spreading.

  It made Archer shiver to think that it might be spreading over him too.He had, to be sure, other tastes and interests; he spent his vacationsin European travel, cultivated the "clever people" May spoke of, andgenerally tried to "keep up," as he had somewhat wistfully put it toMadame Olenska. But once he was married, what would become of thisnarrow margin of life in which his real experiences were lived? He hadseen enough of other young men who had dreamed his dream, thoughperhaps less ardently, and who had gradually sunk into the placid andluxurious routine of their elders.

  From the office he sent a note by messenger to Madame Olenska, askingif he might call that afternoon, and begging her to let him find areply at his club; but at the club he found nothing, nor did he receiveany letter the following day. This unexpected silence mortified himbeyond reason, and though the next morning he saw a glorious cluster ofyellow roses behind a florist's window-pane, he left it there. It wasonly on the third morning that he received a line by post from theCountess Olenska. To his surprise it was dated from Skuytercliff,whither the van der Luydens had promptly retreated after putting theDuke on board his steamer.

  "I ran away," the writer began abruptly (without the usualpreliminaries), "the day after I saw you at the play, and these kindfriends have taken me in. I wanted to be quiet, and think things over.You were right in telling me how kind they were; I feel myself so safehere. I wish that you were with us." She ended with a conventional"Yours sincerely," and without any allusion to the date of her return.

  The tone of the note surprised the young man. What was Madame Olenskarunning away from, and why did she feel the need to be safe? His firstthought was of some dark menace from abroad; then he reflected that hedid not know her epistolary style, and that it might run to picturesqueexaggeration. Women always exaggerated; and moreover she was notwholly at her ease in English, which she often spoke as if she weretranslating from the French. "Je me suis evadee--" put in that way,the opening sentence immediately suggested that she might merely havewanted to escape from a boring round of engagements; which was verylikely true, for he judged her to be capricious, and easily wearied ofthe pleasure of the moment.

  It amused him to think of the van der Luydens' having carried her offto Skuytercliff on a second visit, and this time for an indefiniteperiod. The doors of Skuytercliff were rarely and grudgingly opened tovisitors, and a chilly week-end was the most ever offered to the fewthus privileged. But Archer had seen, on his last visit to Paris, thedelicious play of Labiche, "Le Voyage de M. Perrichon," and heremembered M. Perrichon's dogged and undiscouraged attachment to theyoung man whom he had pulled out of the glacier. The van der Luydenshad rescued Madame Olenska from a doom almost as icy; and though therewere many other reasons for being attracted to her, Archer knew thatbeneath them all lay the gentle and obstinate determination to go onrescuing her.

  He felt a distinct disappointment on learning that she was away; andalmost immediately remembered that, only the day before, he had refusedan invitation to spend the following Sunday with the Reggie Chiversesat their house on the Hudson, a few miles below Skuytercliff.

  He had had his fill long ago of the noisy friendly parties at Highbank,with coasting, ice-boating, sleighing, long tramps in the snow, and ageneral flavour of mild flirting and milder practical jokes. He hadjust received a box of new books from his London book-seller, and hadpreferred the prospect of a quiet Sunday at home with his spoils. Buthe now went into the club writing-room, wrote a hurried telegram, andtold the servant to send it immediately. He knew that Mrs. Reggiedidn't object to her visitors' suddenly changing their minds, and thatthere was always a room to spare in her elastic house.