Age of Innocence (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) (47 page)

Newland Archer, looking out of his hotel window at the stately gaiety of the Paris streets, felt his heart beating with the confusion and eagerness of youth.

It was long since it had thus plunged and reared under his widening waistcoat, leaving him, the next minute, with an empty breast and hot temples. He wondered if it was thus that his son’s conducted itself in the presence of Miss Fanny Beaufort—and decided that it was not. “It functions as actively, no doubt, but the rhythm is different,” he reflected, recalling the cool composure with which the young man had announced his engagement, and taken for granted that his family would approve.

“The difference is that these young people take it for granted that they’re going to get whatever they want, and that we almost always took it for granted that we shouldn’t. Only, I wonder—the thing one’s so certain of in advance: can it ever make one’s heart beat as wildly?”

It was the day after their arrival in Paris, and the spring sunshine held Archer in his open window above the wide silvery prospect of the Place Vendôme. One of the things he had stipulated—almost the only one—when he had agreed to come abroad with Dallas, was that, in Paris, he shouldn’t be made to go to one of the new- fangled “palaces.”

“Oh, all right—of course,” Dallas good-naturedly agreed. “I’ll take you to some jolly old-fashioned place—the Bristol say—” leaving his father speechless at hearing that the century-long home of kings and emperors was now spoken of as an old-fashioned inn, where one went for its quaint inconveniences and lingering local color.

Archer had pictured often enough, in the first impatient years, the scene of his return to Paris; then the personal vision had faded, and he had simply tried to see the city as the setting of Madame Olenska’s life. Sitting alone at night in his library, after the household had gone to bed, he had evoked the radiant outbreak of spring down the avenues of horse-chestnuts, the flowers and statues in the public gardens, the whiff of lilacs from the flower-carts, the majestic roll of the river under the great bridges, and the life of art and study and pleasure that filled each mighty artery to bursting. Now the spectacle was before him in its glory, and as he looked out on it he felt shy, old-fashioned, inadequate: a mere gray speck of a man compared with the ruthless magnificent fellow he had dreamed of being ...

Dallas’s hand came down cheerily on his shoulder. “Hullo, Father: this is something like, isn’t it?” They stood for a while looking out in silence, and then the young man continued: “By the way, I’ve got a message for you: the Countess Olenska expects us both at half-past five.”

He said it lightly, carelessly, as he might have imparted any casual item of information, such as the hour at which their train was to leave for Florence the next evening. Archer looked at him, and thought he saw in his gay young eyes a gleam of his great-grandmother Mingott’s malice.

“Oh, didn’t I tell you?” Dallas pursued. “Fanny made me swear to do three things while I was in Paris: get her the score of the last Debussy
^av
songs, go to the Grand-Guignol and see Madame Olenska. You know she was awfully good to Fanny when Mr. Beaufort sent her over from Buenos Aires to the Assumption.
^aw
Fanny hadn’t any friends in Paris, and Madame Olenska used to be kind to her and trot her about on holidays. I believe she was a great friend of the first Mrs. Beaufort’s. And she’s our cousin, of course. So I rang her up this morning, before I went out, and told her you and I were here for two days and wanted to see her.”

Archer continued to stare at him. “You told her I was here?”

“Of course—why not?” Dallas’s eyebrows went up whimsically. Then, getting no answer, he slipped his arm through his father’s with a confidential pressure.

“I say, Father: what was she like?”

Archer felt his color rise under his son’s unabashed gaze. “Come, own up: you and she were great pals, weren’t you? Wasn’t she most awfully lovely?”

“Lovely? I don’t know. She was different.”

“Ah—there you have it! That’s what it always comes to, doesn’t it? When she comes, she’s different—and one doesn’t know why. It’s exactly what I feel about Fanny.”

His father drew back a step, releasing his arm. “About Fanny? But, my dear fellow—I should hope so! Only I don’t see—”

“Dash it, Dad, don’t be prehistoric! Wasn’t she—once—your Fanny?”

Dallas belonged body and soul to the new generation. He was the first-born of Newland and May Archer, yet it had never been possible to inculcate in him even the rudiments of reserve. “What’s the use of making mysteries? It only makes people want to nose ‘em out,” he always objected when enjoined to discretion. But Archer, meeting his eyes, saw the filial light under their banter.

“My Fanny—?”

“Well, the woman you’d have chucked everything for: only you didn‘t,” continued his surprising son.

“I didn‘t,” echoed Archer with a kind of solemnity.

“No: you date, you see, dear old boy. But mother said—”

“Your mother?”

“Yes: the day before she died. It was when she sent for me alone—you remember? She said she knew we were safe with you, and always would be, because once, when she asked you to, you’d given up the thing you most wanted.”

Archer received this strange communication in silence. His eyes remained unseeingly fixed on the thronged sun-lit square below the window. At length he said in a low voice: “She never asked me.”

“No. I forgot. You never did ask each other anything, did you? And you never told each other anything. You just sat and watched each other, and guessed at what was going on underneath. A deaf-and-dumb asylum, in fact! Well, I back your generation for knowing more about each other’s private thoughts than we ever have time to find out about our own. I say, Dad,” Dallas broke off, “you’re not angry with me? If you are, let’s make it up and go and lunch at Henri’s. I’ve got to rush out to Versailles afterward.”

Archer did not accompany his son to Versailles. He preferred to spend the afternoon in solitary roamings through Paris. He had to deal all at once with the packed regrets and stifled memories of an inarticulate lifetime.

After a little while he did not regret Dallas’s indiscretion. It seemed to take an iron band from his heart to know that, after all, someone had guessed and pitied ... And that it should have been his wife moved him indescribably. Dallas, for all his affectionate insight, would not have understood that. To the boy, no doubt, the episode was only a pathetic instance of vain frustration, of wasted forces. But was it really no more? For a long time Archer sat on a bench in the Champs Élysées and wondered, while the stream of life rolled by ...

A few streets away, a few hours away, Ellen Olenska waited. She had never gone back to her husband, and when he had died, some years before, she had made no change in her way of living. There was nothing now to keep her and Archer apart—and that afternoon he was to see her.

He got up and walked across the Place de la Concorde and the Tuileries gardens to the Louvre. She had once told him that she often went there, and he had a fancy to spend the intervening time in a place where he could think of her as perhaps having lately been. For an hour or more he wandered from gallery to gallery through the dazzle of afternoon light, and one by one the pictures burst on him in their half-forgotten splendor, filling his soul with the long echoes of beauty. After all, his life had been too starved ...

Suddenly, before an effulgent Titian,
^ax
he found himself saying: “But I’m only fifty-seven—” and then he turned away. For such summer dreams it was too late; but surely not for a quiet harvest of friendship, of comradeship in the blessed hush of her nearness.

He went back to the hotel, where he and Dallas were to meet; and together they walked again across the Place de la Concorde and over the bridge that leads to the Chamber of Deputies.

Dallas, unconscious of what was going on in his father’s mind, was talking excitedly and abundantly of Versailles. He had had but one previous glimpse of it, during a holiday trip in which he had tried to pack all the sights he had been deprived of when he had had to go with the family to Switzerland; and tumultuous enthusiasm and cock-sure criticism tripped each other up on his lips.

As Archer listened, his sense of inadequacy and inexpressiveness increased. The boy was not insensitive, he knew; but he had the facility and self-confidence that came of looking at fate not as a master but as an equal. “That’s it: they feel equal to things—they know their way about,” he mused, thinking of his son as the spokesman of the new generation which had swept away all the old landmarks, and with them the sign-posts and the danger-signal.

Suddenly Dallas stopped short, grasping his father’s arm. “Oh, by Jove!” he exclaimed.

They had come out into the great tree-planted space before the Invalides. The dome of Mansart
^ay
floated ethereally above the budding trees and the long gray front of the building: drawing up into itself all the rays of afternoon light, that hung there like a visible symbol of the race’s glory.

Archer knew that Madame Olenska lived in a square near one of the avenues radiating from the Invalides; and he had pictured the quarter as quiet and almost obscure, forgetting the central splendor that lit it up. Now, by some queer process of association, that golden light became for him the pervading illumination in which she lived. For nearly thirty years, her life—of which he knew so strangely little—had been spent in this rich atmosphere that he already felt to be too dense and yet too stimulating for his lungs. He thought of the theaters she must have been to, the pic tures she must have looked at, the sober and splendid old houses she must have frequented, the people she must have talked with, the incessant stir of ideas, curiosities, images and associations thrown out by an intensely social race in a setting of immemorial manners; and suddenly he remembered the young Frenchman who had once said to him: “Ah, good conversation—there is nothing like it, is there?”

Archer had not seen M. Rivière, or heard of him, for nearly thirty years; and that fact gave the measure of his ignorance of Madame Olenska’s existence. More than half a lifetime divided them, and she had spent the long interval among people he did not know, in a society he but faintly guessed at, in conditions he would never wholly understand. During that time he had been living with his youthful memory of her; but she had doubtless had other and more tangible companionship. Perhaps she too had kept her memory of him as something apart; but if she had, it must have been like a relic in a small dim chapel, where there was not time to pray every day ...

They had crossed the Place des Invalides, and were walking down one of the thoroughfares flanking the building. It was a quiet quarter, after all, in spite of its splendor and its history; and the fact gave one an idea of the riches Paris had to draw on, since such scenes as this were left to the few and the indifferent.

The day was fading into a soft sun-shot haze, pricked here and there by a yellow electric light, and passers were rare in the little square into which they had turned. Dallas stopped again, and looked up.

“It must be here,” he said, slipping his arm through his father’s with a movement from which Archer’s shyness did not shrink; and they stood together looking up at the house.

It was a modern building, without distinctive character, but many-windowed, and pleasantly balconied up its wide cream-colored front. On one of the upper balconies, which hung well above the rounded tops of the horse-chestnuts in the square, the awnings were still lowered, as though the sun had just left it.

“I wonder which floor—?” Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the
porte-cochère
he put his head into the porter’s lodge, and came back to say: “The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings.”

Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained.

“I say, you know, it’s nearly six,” his son at length reminded him.

The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.

“I believe I’ll sit there a moment,” he said.

“Why—aren’t you well?” his son exclaimed.

“Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me.”

Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”

“I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.

“If you don’t she won’t understand.”

“Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”

Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.

“But what on earth shall I say?”

“My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to say?” his father rejoined with a smile.

“Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like lifts.”

His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.”