The House of Mirth (52 page)

Selden roused himself to detain her. “But why are you going? She would have wished—”

Gerty shook her head with a smile. “No, this is what she would have wished—” And as she spoke, a light broke through Selden's stony misery, and he saw deep into the hidden things of love.

The door closed on Gerty, and he stood alone with the motionless sleeper on the bed. His impulse was to return to her side, to fall on his knees, and rest his throbbing head against the peaceful cheek on the pillow. They had never been at peace together, they two; and now he felt himself drawn downward into the strange, mysterious depths of her tranquillity.

But he remembered Gerty's warning words; he knew that though time had ceased in this room, its feet were hastening relentlessly toward the door. Gerty had given him this supreme half-hour, and he must use it as she willed.

He turned and looked about him, sternly compelling himself to regain his consciousness of outward things. There was very little furniture in the room. The shabby chest of drawers was spread with a lace cover and set out with a few gold-topped boxes and bottles, a rose-coloured pincushion, a glass tray strewn with tortoise-shell hairpins—he shrank from the poignant intimacy of these trifles and from the blank surface of the toilet-mirror above them.

These were the only traces of luxury, of that clinging to the minute observance of personal seemliness, which showed what her other renunciations must have cost. There was no other token of her personality about the room, unless it showed itself in the scrupulous neatness of the scant articles of furniture: a washing-stand, two chairs, a small writing-desk, and the little table near the bed. On this table stood the empty bottle and glass, and from these also he averted his eyes.

The desk was closed, but on its slanting lid lay two letters which he took up. One bore the address of a bank, and as it was stamped and sealed, Selden, after a moment's hesitation, laid it aside. On the other letter he read Gus Trenor's name, and the flap of the envelope was still ungummed.

Temptation leapt on him like the stab of a knife. He staggered under it, steadying himself against the desk. Why had she been writing to Trenor, writing, presumably, just after their parting of the previous evening?

The thought unhallowed the memory of that last hour, made a mock of the word he had come to speak, and defiled even the reconciling silence upon which it fell. He felt himself flung back on all the ugly uncertainties from which he thought he had cast loose forever. After all, what did he know of her life? Only as much as she had chosen to show him, and measured by the world's estimate, how little that was! By what right—the letter in his hand seemed to ask—by what right was it he who now passed into her confidence through the gate which death had left unbarred? His heart cried out that it was by right of their last hour together, the hour when she herself had placed the key in his hand. Yes, but what if the letter to Trenor had been written afterward?

He put it from him with sudden loathing, and setting his lips, addressed himself resolutely to what remained of his task. After all, that task would be easier to perform now that his personal stake in it was annulled.

He raised the lid of the desk and saw within it a cheque-book and a few packets of bills and letters, arranged with the orderly precision which characterized all her personal habits. He looked through the letters first because it was the most difficult part of the work. They proved to be few and unimportant, but among them he found, with a strange commotion of the heart, the note he had written her the day after the Brys' entertainment.

“When may I come to you?”—his words overwhelmed him with a realization of the cowardice which had driven him from her at the very moment of attainment. Yes, he had always feared his fate, and he was too honest to disown his cowardice now; for had not all his old doubts started to life again at the mere sight of Trenor's name?

He laid the note in his card-case, folding it away carefully as something made precious by the fact that she had held it so; then, growing once more aware of the lapse of time, he continued his examination of the papers.

To his surprise, he found that all the bills were receipted; there was not an unpaid account among them. He opened the cheque-book, and saw that, the very night before, a cheque of ten thousand dollars from Mrs. Peniston's executors had been entered in it. The legacy, then, had been paid sooner than Gerty had led him to expect. But turning another page or two, he discovered with astonishment that in spite of this recent accession of funds, the balance had already declined to a few dollars. A rapid glance at the stubs of the last cheques, all of which bore the date of the previous day, showed that between four or five hundred dollars of the legacy had been spent in the settlement of bills, while the remaining thousands were comprehended in one cheque, made out, at the same time, to Charles Augustus Trenor.

Selden laid the book aside and sank into the chair beside the desk. He leaned his elbows on it and hid his face in his hands. The bitter waters of life surged high about him; their sterile taste was on his lips. Did the cheque to Trenor explain the mystery or deepen it? At first his mind refused to act; he felt only the taint of such a transaction between a man like Trenor and a girl like Lily Bart. Then, gradually, his troubled vision cleared, old hints and rumours came back to him, and out of the very insinuations he had feared to probe he constructed an explanation of the mystery. It was true, then, that she had taken money from Trenor; but true also, as the contents of the little desk declared, that the obligation had been intolerable to her and that at the first opportunity she had freed herself from it, though the act left her face to face with bare, unmitigated poverty.

That was all he knew, all he could hope to unravel of the story. The mute lips on the pillow refused him more than this, unless indeed they had told him the rest in the kiss they had left upon his forehead. Yes, he could now read into that farewell all that his heart craved to find there; he could even draw from it courage not to accuse himself for having failed to reach the height of his opportunity.

He saw that all the conditions of life had conspired to keep them apart, since his very detachment from the external influences which swayed her had increased his spiritual fastidiousness and made it more difficult for him to live and love uncritically. But at least he
had
loved her, had been willing to stake his future on his faith in her, and if the moment had been fated to pass from them before they could seize it, he saw now that, for both, it had been saved whole out of the ruin of their lives.

It was this moment of love, this fleeting victory over themselves, which had kept them from atrophy and extinction, which, in her, had reached out to him in every struggle against the influence of her surroundings, and in him, had kept alive the faith that now drew him penitent and reconciled to her side.

He knelt by the bed and bent over her, draining their last moment to its lees; and in the silence there passed between them the word which made all clear.

Edith Wharton was forty-three in 1905, when
The House of Mirth
was published, and had little fiction to her credit relative to the bulk that she was thereafter to produce. She had made a leisurely but promising start with some volumes of short stories and a long historical tapestry of a tale called
The Valley of Decision,
which she herself described as more of a “romantic chronicle” than a novel, but nothing yet pointed to a major literary reputation. For this she needed only a major subject, but she had in mind the perfect one—fashionable New York.

“There it was before me,” she wrote in
A Backward Glance,
“in all its flatness and futility, asking to be dealt with as the theme most available to my hand, since I had been steeped in it from infancy.”

Her only doubt was whether she could extract from a study of irresponsible pleasure-seekers any significance deeper that what they sought, but her doubt was resolved in the conception of her heroine. Society's power of “debasing people and ideals,” and hence Lily Bart and hers, would provide
The House of Mirth
with the dramatic significance that it needed.

Lily Bart is by far the most vivid of Mrs. Wharton's heroines. By definition she had to be weak, for a strong person would not be debased or even attracted by the gilded world that engrosses her; but by definition also she must have charm, and this she has in abundance. It is inherent in her honesty, in her quick intuitions, in her skillful handling of people (when she chooses), in the light touch of her exquisite manners, and in the perfect taste that seems to encompass both a hat and a moral principle so that she feels, finely and immediately, what is attractive and what is good. Lily lives in every way beyond her means, but she accepts the consequences. In the end it is a kind of moral extravagance that destroys her. She cannot afford the fastidiousness that makes her spurn the weapon of Bertha Dorset's love letters. One can see at once why she is so indispensable to hostesses and why she is so easily dispensed with. She is a rose in an unweeded garden that only dully senses what a rose is.

The New York society that sat for Mrs. Wharton's brush was wearing its most opulent dress. There were immigrants in plenty to staff the great houses of Fifth Avenue, and the steam yacht and motorcar had removed geographical limits to pleasure-seeking. Time had closed the chasm between the old Knickerbocker families and the railroad fortunes; the Vanderbilts had married all over the lot, and even the Goulds were almost respectable. In
The House of Mirth
the Van Osburghs, who are not only the richest family but also the best, suggest the Astors, who in Mrs. Wharton's day were descended from the Schermerhorns and Livingstons. Everywhere there is fusion between tradition (such as it is) and the new wealth, but the novel makes us feel that the patina has taken on the crisp freshness of a recently issued greenback.

What Mrs. Wharton saw clearly—albeit with some resentment—was that the old and new, having at heart the same philosophy, were easily reconciled. The gap between Mrs. Peniston and Sim Rosedale is not unbridgeable. For those who knock at the door of
The House of Mirth
the rules are simple: an opera box, a season in New York, maybe one on Long Island, and then, under the well-paid auspices of a Trojan horse like Carry Fisher or Jack Stepney, the ultimate test of Newport. No matter how vulgar and pushing the husband, no matter how “red and stertorous” the wife, they will ultimately succeed. Carry Fisher feels badly used when her campaign for the Wellington Brys is even temporarily stalled. “It is all very well to say that everybody with money can get into society,” she complains, “but it would be truer to say that
nearly
everybody can.” Yet in the end we learn that even the Brys have been accepted in Newport.

The number of novels written about the fashionable world bears little relation to the number of writers who comprehend it. Authors who would not dare describe a coal mine without having worked in one will not hesitate to have a crack at Fifth Avenue. It may be the same bland assumption that makes historical novelists so chummy with royalty and the girl in the high-school play who portrays the dowager the most self-confident (and inept) of the cast. But Mrs. Wharton had lived in her subject for forty years, and
The House of Mirth
is uniquely authentic among American novels of manners. Assuming that Lily Bart is correct when she finds each descending rung of the social ladder a mere flamboyant copy of the one above, her story, dealing with the topmost rung, should be of material aid in interpreting the American dream.

The structure of the novel might suggest a relation to the determinist fiction of Flaubert and Zola, where, given the particular weakness of the principal character and his exact place in the national pyramid, his downfall must follow in logical steps. It is also suggested by the atmosphere of doom and by references to the
Eumenides,
a translation of which Lily has happened to skim in a country house. But the relation fades before the number of coincidences in the plot, the reversal of any one of which could alter Lily's downward course to an upward one. Mrs. Peniston, for example, might not have disinherited her—in fact, it seems less likely that she should—and with her aunt's money Lily would have been restored to popularity and contentment. Or Selden might have pushed his suit an ounce more forcefully, or Selden might not have seen her leaving the Trenors' after dark, or Selden might have made up his mind to marry her a few hours earlier—indeed, from a determinist point of view, poor Lily simple has a run of bad luck.

If she is not, then, inexorably doomed, does she doom herself? Is it a novel of moral struggle? Mrs. Wharton certainly believed in the power of the will, and she has a great deal to say about Lily's choices between right and wrong. In the end Lily welcomes the idea of death as an escape from the danger of weakening in what she regards as her essential moral position. But to me there is something unconvincing about this position, which may simply be that I view it a half century later. Gaillard Lapsley, Mrs. Wharton's literary executor, once told me that a popular edition (such as the instant one) of
The House of Mirth
could never succeed because readers today would not comprehend or take any interest in society's condemnation of Lily on such slender evidence of immorality. I disagreed. Injustice is always interesting. What may bore us about the past are its ideals.

Why, for example, should Lily Bart not accept a loan from Rosedale to start a dress shop? Why, for that matter, should she be in quite such a desperate hurry to repay to the rich Gus Trenor the money that he has given her in what she sincerely believed to be a business transaction? True, a person of any delicacy of feeling would want to refund the sum, but at the cost of near starvation? And why should Lily not thrust the Selden letters under Bertha Dorset's nose, not to blackmail her, but in simple self-defense? Aren't all of these things more matters of taste than morals? Do they do anything but prove that Lily is a lady, the only lady in the book, the only lady, one begins to think, in all society?