Edith Wharton - SSC 10 (19 page)

 
          
“Moonlight—moonlight!
What a part it still plays. Do you
suppose they’re as sentimental as we were?”

 
          
“I’ve
come to the conclusion that I don’t in the least know what they are,” said Mrs.
Ansley. “And perhaps we didn’t know much more about each other.”

 
          
“No,
perhaps we didn’t.”

 
          
Her
friend gave her a shy glance. “I never should have supposed you were
sentimental, Alida.”

 
          
“Well,
perhaps I wasn’t.” Mrs. Slade drew her lids together in retrospect; and for a
few moments the two ladies, who had been intimate since childhood, reflected
how little they knew each other. Each one, of course, had a label ready to
attach to the other’s name; Mrs. Delphin Slade, for instance, would have told
herself, or anyone who asked her, that Mrs. Horace Ansley, twenty-five years
ago, had been exquisitely lovely—no, you wouldn’t believe it, would you!
though
, of course, still charming, distinguished…. Well, as
a girl she had been exquisite; far more beautiful than her daughter, Barbara,
though certainly Babs, according to the new standards at any rate, was more
effective—had more edge, as they say.
Funny where she got it,
with those two nullities as parents.
Yes; Horace Ansley was—well, just
the duplicate of his wife.
Museum specimens of old
New York
.
Good-looking,
irreproachable, exemplary.
Mrs. Slade and Mrs. Ansley had lived opposite
each other—actually as well as figuratively—for years. When the drawing-room
curtains in
No. 20 East
Seventy-third
Street
were renewed, No. 23, across the way, was
always aware of it. And of all the movings, buyings, travels, anniversaries,
illnesses—the tame chronicle of an estimable pair. Little of it escaped Mrs.
Slade. But she had grown bored with it by the time her husband made his big
coup in Wall Street, and when they bought in upper
Park Avenue
had already begun to think: “I’d rather
live opposite a speakeasy for a change; at least one might see it raided.” The
idea of seeing Grace raided was so amusing that (before the move) she launched
it at a woman’s lunch. It made a hit, and went the rounds—she sometimes
wondered if it had crossed the street, and reached Mrs. Ansley. She hoped not,
but didn’t much mind. Those were the days when respectability was at a
discount, and it did the irreproachable no harm to laugh at them a little.

 
          
A
few years later, and not many months apart, both ladies lost their husbands.
There was an appropriate exchange of wreaths and condolences, and a brief
renewal of intimacy in the half shadow of their mourning; and now, after
another interval, they had run across each other in
Rome
, at the same hotel, each of them the modest
appendage of a salient daughter. The similarity of their lot had again drawn
them together, lending itself to mild jokes, and the mutual confession that, if
in old days it must have been tiring to “keep up” with daughters, it was now,
at times, a little dull not to.

 
          
No
doubt, Mrs. Slade reflected, she felt her unemployment more than poor Grace
ever would. It was a big drop from being the wife of Delphin Slade to being his
widow. She had always regarded herself (with a certain conjugal pride) as his
equal in social gifts, as contributing her full share to the making of the
exceptional couple they were: but the difference after his death was
irremediable. As the wife of the famous corporation lawyer, always with an
international case or two on hand, every day brought its exciting and
unexpected obligation: the impromptu entertaining of eminent colleagues from
abroad, the hurried dashes on legal business to London, Paris or Rome, where
the entertaining was so handsomely reciprocated; the amusement of hearing in
her wakes: “What, that handsome woman with the good clothes and the eyes is
Mrs. Slade—the Slade’s wife! Really! Generally the wives of celebrities are
such frumps.”

 
          
Yes;
being the Slade’s widow was a dullish business after that. In living up to such
a husband all her faculties had been engaged; now she had only her daughter to
live up to, for the son who seemed to have inherited his father’s gifts had
died suddenly in boyhood. She had fought through that agony because her husband
was there, to be
help
ed and to help; now, after the
father’s death, the thought of the boy had become unbearable. There was nothing
left but to mother her daughter; and dear Jenny was such a perfect daughter
that she needed no excessive mothering. “Now with Babs Ansley I don’t know that
I should be so quiet,” Mrs. Slade sometimes half-enviously reflected; but
Jenny, who was younger than her brilliant friend, was that rare accident, an
extremely pretty girl who somehow made youth and prettiness seem as safe as
their absence. It was all perplexing—and to Mrs. Slade a little boring. She
wished that Jenny would fall in love—with the wrong man, even; that she might
have to be watched, out-maneuvered,
rescued
. And
instead, it was Jenny who watched her mother, kept her out of drafts, made sure
that she had taken her tonic…

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley was much less articulate than her friend, and her mental portrait of
Mrs. Slade was slighter, and drawn with fainter touches. “Alida Slade’s awfully
brilliant; but not as brilliant as she thinks,” would have summed it up; though
she would have added, for the enlightenment of strangers, that Mrs. Slade had
been an extremely dashing girl; much more so than her daughrer, who was pretty,
of course, and clever in a way, but had none of her mother’s—well, “vividness,”
someone had once called it. Mrs. Ansley would take up current words like this,
and cite them in quotation marks, as unheard-of audacities. No; Jenny was not
like her mother. Sometimes Mrs. Ansley thought Alida Slade was disappointed; on
the whole she had had a sad life. Full of failures and mistakes; Mrs. Ansley
had always been rather sorry for her….

 
          
So
these two ladies visualized each other, each through the wrong end of her
little telescope.

 
          
  

 
          
For
a long time they continued to sit side by side without speaking. It seemed as
though, to both, there was a relief in laying down their somewhat futile
activities in the presence of the vast Memento Mori which faced them. Mrs.
Slade sat quite still, her eyes fixed on the golden slope of the Palace of the
Caesars, and after a while Mrs. Ansley ceased to fidget with her bag, and she
too sank into meditation. Like many intimate friends, the two ladies had never
before had occasion to be silent together, and Mrs. Ansley was slightly
embarrassed by what seemed, after so many years, a new stage in their intimacy,
and one with which she did not yet know how to deal.

 
          
Suddenly
the air was full of that deep clangor of bells which periodically covers
Rome
with a roof of silver. Mrs. Slade glanced
at her wristwatch. “
Five o’clock
already,” she said, as though surprised.

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley suggested interrogatively: “There’s bridge at the Embassy at five.” For
a long time Mrs. Slade did not answer. She appeared to be lost in
contemplation, and Mrs. Ansley thought the remark had escaped her. But after a
while she said, as if speaking out of a dream: “Bridge, did you say! Not unless
you want to…. But I don’t think I will, you know.”

 
          
“Oh,
no,” Mrs. Ansley hastened to assure her. “I don’t care to at all. It’s so
lovely here; and so full of old memories, as you say.” She settled herself in
her chair, and almost furtively drew forth her knitting. Mrs. Slade took
sideways note of this activity, but her own beautifully cared-for hands
remained motionless on her knee.

 
          
“I
was just thinking,”
she
said slowly, “what different
things
Rome
stands for to each generation of travelers.
To our grandmothers, Roman fever; to our mothers, sentimental
dangers—how we used to be guarded!—to our daughters, no more dangers than the
middle of
Main Street
.
They don’t know it—but how much they’re
missing!”

 
          
The
long golden light was beginning to pale, and Mrs. Ansley lifted her knitting a
little closer to her eyes. “Yes, how we were guarded”

 
          
“I
always used to think,” Mrs. Slade continued, “that our mothers had a much more
difficult job than our grandmothers. When Roman fever stalked the streets it
must have been comparatively easy to gather in the girls at the danger hour;
but when you and I were young, with such beauty calling us, and the spice of
disobedience thrown in, and no worse risk than catching cold during the cool
hour after sunset, the mothers used to be put to it to keep us in—didn’t they!”

 
          
She
turned again toward Mrs. Ansley, but the latter had reached a delicate point in
her knitting. “One, two, three—slip two; yes, they must have been,” she
assented, without looking up.

 
          
Mrs.
Slade’s eyes rested on her with a deepened attention. “She can knit—in the face
of this! How like her….”

 
          
Mrs.
Slade leaned back, brooding, her eyes ranging from the ruins which faced her to
the long green hollow of the Forum, the fading glow of the church fronts beyond
it, and the outlying immensity of the Colosseum. Suddenly she thought: “It’s all
very well to say that our girls have done away with sentiment and moonlight.
But if Babs Ansley isn’t out to catch that young aviator—the one who’s a
Marchese—then I don’t know anything. And Jenny has no chance beside her. I know
that too. I wonder if that’s why Grace Ansley likes the two girls to go
everywhere together!
My poor Jenny as a foil—!”
Mrs.
Slade gave a hardly audible laugh, and at the sound Mrs. Ansley dropped her
knitting.

 
          
“Yes—?”

 
          
“I—oh, nothing.
I was only thinking how your Babs
carries
everything before her. That Campolieri boy is one of
the best matches in
Rome
. Don’t look so innocent, my dear—you know he is. And I was wondering,
ever so respectfully, you understand… wondering how two such exemplary
characters as you and Horace had managed to produce anything quite so dynamic.”
Mrs. Slade laughed again, with a touch of asperity.

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley’s hands lay inert across her needles. She looked straight out at the
great accumulated wreckage of passion and splendor at her feet. But her small
profile was almost expressionless. At length she said, “I think you overrate
Babs, my dear.”

 
          
Mrs.
Slade’s tone grew easier. “No; I don’t. I appreciate her. And perhaps envy you.
Oh, my girl’s perfect; if I were a chronic invalid I’d—well, I think I’d rather
be in Jenny’s hands. There must be times… but there! I always wanted a
brilliant daughter… and never quite understood why I got an angel instead.”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley echoed her laugh in a faint murmur. “Babs is an angel too.”

 
          
“Of course—of course!
But she’s got rainbow wings. Well,
they’re wandering by the sea with their young men; and here we sit… and it all
brings back the past a little too acutely.”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley had resumed her knitting. One might almost have imagined (if one had
known her less well, Mrs. Slade reflected) that, for her also, too many
memories rose from the lengthening shadows of those august ruins. But no; she
was simply absorbed in her work. What was there for her to worry about! She
knew that Babs would almost certainly come back engaged to the extremely
eligible Campolieri. “And she’ll sell the
New York
house, and settle down near them in
Rome
, and never be in their way… she’s much too
tactful. But she’ll have an excellent
cook,
and just
the right people in for bridge and cocktails… and a perfectly peacefuI old age
among her grandchildren.”

 
          
Mrs.
Slade broke off this prophetic flight with
a recoil
of
self-disgust. There was no one of whom she had less right to think unkindly
than of Grace Ansley. Would she never cure herself of envying her! Perhaps she
had begun too long ago.

 
          
She
stood up and leaned against the parapet, filling her troubled eyes with the
tranquilizing magic of the hour. But instead of tranquilizing
her the
sight seemed to increase her exasperation. Her gaze
turned toward the Colosseum. Already its golden flank was drowned in purple
shadow, and above it the sky curved crystal clear, without light or color. It
was the moment when afternoon and evening hang balanced in midheaven.

 
          
Mrs.
Slade turned back and laid her hand on her friend’s arm. The gesture was so
abrupt that Mrs. Ansley looked up, startled.

 
          
“The
sun’s set. You’re not afraid, my dear?”

 
          
“Afraid—?”

 
          
“Of Roman fever or pneumonia!
I remember how ill you were
that winter. As a girl you had a very delicate throat, hadn’t you?”

 
          
“Oh,
we’re all right up here. Down below, in the Forum, it does get deathly cold,
all of a sudden… but not here.”

 
          
“Ah,
of course you know because you had to be so careful.” Mrs. Slade turned back to
the parapet. She thought: “I must make one more effort not to hate her.” Aloud
she said: “Whenever I look at the Forum from up here, I remember that story
about a great-aunt of yours, wasn’t she?
A dreadfully wicked
great-aunt?”

 
          
“Oh,
yes; Great-aunt Harriet.
The one who was supposed to have
sent her young sister out to the Forum after sunset to gather a nightblooming
flower for her album.
All our great-aunts and grandmothers used to have
albums of dried flowers.”

 
          
Mrs.
Slade nodded. “But she really sent her because they were in love with the same
man—”

 
          
“Well,
that was the family tradition. They said Aunt Harriet confessed it years
afterward. At any rate, the poor little sister caught the fever and died.
Mother used to frighten us with the story when we were children.”

 
          
“And
you frightened me with it, that winter when you and I were here as girls.
The winter I was engaged to Delphin.”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley gave a faint laugh. “Oh, did
I
! Really
frightened you? I don’t believe you’re easily frightened.”

 
          
“Not
often; but I was then. I was easily frightened because I was too happy. I
wonder if you know what that
means?
”

 
          
“I—yes…”
Mrs. Ansley faltered.

 
          
“Well,
I suppose that was why the story of your wicked aunt made such an impression on
me. And I thought: ‘There’s no more Roman fever, but the Forum is deathly cold
after sunset—especially after a hot day. And the Colosseum’s even colder and
damper.’“

 
          
“The Colosseum—?”

 
          
“Yes.
It wasn’t easy to get in, after the gates were locked for the night.
Far from easy.
Still, in those days it could be managed; it
was managed, often. Lovers met there who couldn’t meet elsewhere. You knew
that?”

 
          
“I—I
daresay. I don’t remember.”

 
          
“You
don’t remember? You don’t remember going to visit some ruins or other one
evening, just after dark, and catching a bad chill! You were supposed to have
gone to see the moonrise. People always said that expedition was what caused
your illness.”

 
          
There
was a moment’s silence; then Mrs. Ansley rejoined: “Did they? It was all so
long ago.”

 
          
“Yes.
And you got well again—so it didn’t matter. But I suppose it struck your
friends—the reason given for your illness. I mean—because everybody knew you
were so prudent on account of your throat, and your mother took such care of
you…. You had been out late sightseeing, hadn’t you, that
night
”

 
          
“Perhaps
I had. The most prudent girls aren’t always prudent. What made you think of it
now?”

 
          
Mrs.
Slade seemed to have no answer ready. But after a moment she broke out:
“Because I simply can’t bear it any longer—”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley lifted her head quickly. Her eyes were wide and very pale. “Can’t bear
what?”

 
          
“Why—
your
not knowing that I’ve always known why you went.”

 
          
“Why
I went—?”

 
          
“Yes.
You think I’m bluffing, don’t you? Well, you went to meet the man I was engaged
to—and I can repeat every word of the letter that took you there.”

 
          
While
Mrs. Slade spoke Mrs. Ansley had risen unsteadily to her feet. Her bag, her
knitting and gloves, slid in a panic-stricken heap to the ground. She looked at
Mrs. Slade as though she were looking at a ghost.

 
          
“No,
no—don’t,” she faltered out.

 
          
“Why not?
Listen, if you don’t believe me. ‘My one darling,
things can’t go on like this. I must see you alone. Come to the Colosseum
immediately after dark tomorrow. There will be somebody to let you in. No one
whom you need fear will suspect’—but perhaps you’ve forgotten what the letter
said?”

 
          
Mrs.
Ansley met the challenge with an unexpected composure. Steadying herself
against the chair she looked at her friend, and replied: “No; I know it by
heart too.”