Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (15 page)

 
          
It
was a melancholy alternative. Poor woman—poor woman either way, I thought. And
by the time I had reached this conclusion, I was in the train which was
hurrying me to
Milan
. Whatever happened I must see her, and hear from her own lips what she
was flying from.

 
          
I
hadn’t much hope of running down the fugitives at Stresa or Baveno. It was not
likely that they would go to either of the places they had mentioned to the
concierges
; but I went to both the next
morning, and carried out a minute inspection of all the hotel lists. As I had
foreseen, the travellers were not to be found, and I was at a loss to know
where to turn next. I knew, however, that the luggage the ladies had sent to
Milan was not likely to arrive till the next day, and concluded that they would
probably wait for it in the neighbourhood; and suddenly I remembered that I had
once advised Mrs. Ingram—who was complaining that she was growing tired of
fashionable hotels—to try a little
pension
on the lake of Orta, where she would be miles away from “palaces”, and from the
kind of people who frequent them. It was not likely that she would have
remembered this place; but I had put a pencil stroke beside the name in her
guide-book, and that might recall it to her. Orta, at any rate, was not far
off; and I decided to hire a car at Stresa, and go there before carrying on my
journey.

 
          
  

 
          
I
don’t suppose I shall ever get out of my eyes the memory of the public
sitting-room in the
pension
at Orta.
It was there that I waited for Mrs. Ingram to come down, wondering if she
would, and what we should say to each other when she did.

 
          
There
were three windows in a row, with clean heavily starched
Nottingham
lace curtains carefully draped to exclude
the best part of the matchless view over lake and mountains. To make up for
this privation the opposite wall was adorned with a huge oil-painting of a
Swiss water-fall. In the middle of the room was a table of sham ebony, with
ivory inlays, most of which had long since worked out of their grooves, and on
the table the usual dusty collection of tourist magazines, fashion papers, and
tattered copies of
Zion’s Weekly
and
the
Christian Science Monitor.

 
          
What
is the human mind made of, that mine, at such a moment, should have minutely
and indelibly registered these depressing details? I even remember smiling at
the thought of the impression my favourite
pension
must have made on travellers who had just moved out of the most expensive suite
in the
Mont
Soleil
Palace
.

 
          
And
then Mrs. Ingram came in.

 
          
My
first impression was that something about her dress or the arrangement of her
hair had changed her. Then I saw that two dabs of rouge had been unskilfully
applied to her pale cheeks, and a cloud of powder dashed over the dark
semicircles under her eyes. She must have undergone some terrible moral strain
since our parting to feel the need of such a disguise.

 
          
“I
thought I should find you here,” I said.

 
          
She
let me take her two hands, but at first she could not speak. Then she said, in
an altered voice: “You must have wondered—”

 
          
“Yes;
I wondered.”

 
          
“It
was Cassie who suddenly decided—”

 
          
“I
supposed so.”

 
          
She
looked at me beseechingly. “But she was right, you know.”

 
          
“Right—about what?”

 
          
Her
rouged lips began to tremble, and she drew her hands out of mine.

 
          
“Before
you say anything else,” I interrupted, “there’s one thing you must let me say.
I want you to marry me.”

 
          
I
had not meant to bring it out so abruptly; but something in her pitiful attempt
to conceal her distress had drawn me closer to her, drawn me past all doubts
and distrusts, all thought of evasion or delay.

 
          
She
looked at me, still without speaking, and two tears ran over her lids, and
streaked the untidy powder on her cheeks.

 
          
“No—no—no!”
she exclaimed, lifting her thin hand and pressing it against my lips. I drew it
down and held it fast.

 
          
“Why not?
You knew I was going to ask you, the day before
yesterday, and when we were interrupted you promised to hear me the next
morning. You yourself said: ‘tomorrow morning’.”

 
          
“Yes;
but I didn’t know then—”

 
          
“You
didn’t know—?”

 
          
I
was still holding her, and my eyes were fixed on hers. She gave me back my
look, deeply and desperately. Then she freed herself.

 
          
“Let
me go. I’m Kate Spain,” she said.

 
          
We
stood facing each other without speaking. Then I gave a laugh, and answered, in
a voice that sounded to me as though I were shouting: “Well, I want to marry
you, Kate Spain.”

 
          
She
shrank back, her hands clasped across her breast. “You knew already? That man
told you?”

 
          
“Who—Jimmy Shreve?
What does it matter if he did? Was that
the reason you ran away from me?” She nodded.

 
          
“And
you thought I wouldn’t find you?”

 
          
“I
thought you wouldn’t try.”

 
          
“You
thought that, having told you one day that I loved you, I’d let you go out of
my life the next?”

 
          
She
gave me another long look. “You—you’re generous. I’m grateful. But you can’t
marry Kate Spain,” she said, with a little smile like the grimace on a dying
face.

 
          
I
had no doubt in my own mind that I could; the first sight of her had carried
that conviction home, and I answered: “Can’t I, though? That’s what we’ll see.”

 
          
“You
don’t know what my life is. How would you like, wherever you went, to have some
one suddenly whisper behind you: ‘Look. That’s Kate Spain’?”

 
          
I
looked at her, and for a moment found no answer. My first impulse of passionate
pity had swept me past the shock of her confession; as long as she was herself,
I seemed to feel, it mattered nothing to me that she was also Kate Spain. But
her last words called up a sudden vision of the life she must have led since
her acquittal; the life I was asking to share with her. I recalled my helpless
wrath when Shreve had told me who she was; and now I seemed to hear the ugly
whisper—”Kate Spain, Kate Spain”—following us from place to place, from house
to house; following my wife and me.

 
          
She
took my hesitation for an answer. “You hadn’t thought of that, had you? But I
think of nothing else, day and night. For three years now I’ve been running
away from the sound of my name. I tried
California
first; it was at the other end of the
country, and some of my mother’s relations lived there. They were kind to me,
everybody was kind; but wherever I went I heard my name: Kate Spain—Kate Spain!
I couldn’t go to church, or to the theatre, or into a shop to buy a spool of
thread, without hearing it. What was the use of calling myself Mrs. Ingram,
when, wherever I went, I heard Kate Spain? The very school-children knew who I
was, and rushed out to see me when I passed, I used to get letters from people
who collected autographs, and wanted my signature: ‘Kate Spain, you know.’ And
when I tried shutting myself up, people said: ‘What’s she afraid of? Has she
got something to hide, after all?’ and I saw that it made my cousins
uncomfortable, and shy with me, because I couldn’t lead a normal life like
theirs… After a year I couldn’t stand it, and so we came away, and went round
the world… But wherever we go it begins again: and I know now I can never get
away from it.” She broke down, and hid her face for a moment. Then she looked
up at me and said: “And so you must go away, you see.”

 
          
I
continued to look at her without speaking: I wanted the full strength of my
will to go out to her in my answer. “I see, on the contrary, that I must stay.”

 
          
She
gave me a startled glance. “No—no.”

 
          
“Yes,
yes. Because all you say is a nervous dream; natural enough, after what you’ve
been through, but quite unrelated to reality. You say you’ve thought of nothing
else, day and night; but why think of it at all—in that way? Your real name is
Kate Spain. Well—what of it? Why try to disguise it? You’ve never done anything
to disgrace it. You’ve suffered through it, but never been abased. If you want
to get rid of it there’s a much simpler way; and that is to take mine instead.
But meanwhile, if people ask you if you’re Kate Spain, try saying yes, you are,
instead of running away from them.”

 
          
She
listened with bent head and interlocked hands, and I saw a softness creep about
her lips. But after I had ceased she looked up at me sadly. “You’ve never been
tried for your life,” she said.

 
          
The
words struck to the roots of my optimism. I remembered in a flash that when I
had first seen her I had thought there was a look about her mouth and eyes
unlike that of any other woman I had known; as if she had had a different
experience from theirs. Now I knew what that experience was: the black shadow
of the criminal court, and the long lonely fight to save her neck. And I’d been
trying to talk reason to a woman who’d been through that!

 
          
“My poor girl—my poor child!”
I held out my arms, and she
fell into them and wept out her agony. There were no more words to be said; no
words could help her. Only the sense of human nearness, human pity, of a man’s
arms about her, and his heart against hers, could draw her out of her icy hell
into the common warmth of day.

 
          
Perhaps
it was the thought of that healing warmth which made me suddenly want to take
her away from the
Nottingham
lace curtains and the Swiss water-fall. For
a while we sat silent, and I held her close; then I said: “Come out for a walk
with me. There are beautiful walks close by, up through the beechwoods.”

 
          
She
looked at me with a timid smile. I knew now that she would do all I told her
to; but before we started out I must rid my mind of another load. “I want to
have you all to myself for the rest of the day. Where’s Miss Wilpert?” I asked.

 
          
Miss
Wilpert was away in
Milan
, she said, and would not be back till late. She had gone to see about
passport visas and passages on a cruising liner which was sailing from
Genoa
to the
Aegean
in a few days. The ladies thought of taking
the cruise. I made no answer, and we walked out through the
pension
garden, and mounted the path to
the beechwoods.

 
          
We
wandered on for a long time, saying hardly anything to each other; then we sat
down on the mossy steps of one of the little pilgrimage chapels among the trees.
It is a place full of sweet solitude, and gradually it laid its quieting touch
on the tormented creature at my side.

 
          
As
we sat there the day slipped down the sky, and we watched, through the great
branches, the lake turning golden and then fading, and the moon rising above
the mountains. I put my hand on hers. “And now let’s make some plans,” I said.