The House of Mirth

Miss Bart had in fact been treading a devious way, and none of her critics could have been more alive to the fact than herself; but she had a fatalistic sense of being drawn from one wrong turning to another, without ever perceiving the right road till it was too late to take it.

Lily, who considered herself above narrow prejudices, had not imagined that the fact of letting Gus Trenor make a little money for her would ever disturb her self-complacency.  And the fact in itself still seemed harmless enough; only it was a fertile source of harmful complications.  As she exhausted the amusement of spending the money these complications be came more pressing, and Lily, whose mind could be severely logical in tracing the causes of her ill-luck to others, justified herself by the thought that she owed all her troubles to the enmity of Bertha Dorset.  This enmity, however, had apparently expired in a renewal of friendliness between the two women.  Lily’s visit to the Dorsets had resulted, for both, in the discovery that they could be of use to each other; and the civilized instinct finds a subtler pleasure in making use of its antagonist than in confounding him.  Mrs. Dorset was, in fact, engaged in a new sentimental experiment, of which Mrs. Fisher’s late property, Ned Silverton, was the rosy victim; and at such moments, as Judy Trenor had once remarked, she felt a peculiar need of distracting her husband’s attention.  Dorset was as difficult to amuse as a savage; but even his self-engrossment was not proof against Lily’s arts, or rather these were especially adapted to soothe an uneasy egoism.  Her experience with Percy Gryce stood her in good stead in ministering to Dorset’s humours, and if the incentive to please was less urgent, the difficulties of her situation were teaching her to make much of minor opportunities.

Intimacy with the Dorsets was not likely to lessen such difficulties on the material side.  Mrs. Dorset had none of Judy Trenor’s lavish impulses, and Dorset’s admiration was not likely to express itself in financial “tips,” even had Lily cared to renew her experiences in that line.  What she required, for the moment, of the Dorsets’ friendship, was simply its social sanction.  She knew that people were beginning to talk of her; but this fact did not alarm her as it had alarmed Mrs. Peniston.  In her set such gossip was not unusual, and a handsome girl who flirted with a married man was merely assumed to be pressing to the limit of her opportunities.  It was Trenor himself who frightened her.  Their walk in the Park had not been a success.  Trenor had married young, and since his marriage his intercourse with women had not taken the form of the sentimental small-talk which doubles upon itself like the paths in a maze.  He was first puzzled and then irritated to find himself always led back to the same starting-point, and Lily felt that she was gradually losing control of the situation.  Trenor was in truth in an unmanageable mood.  In spite of his understanding with Rosedale he had been somewhat heavily “touched” by the fall in stocks; his household expenses weighed on him, and he seemed to be meeting, on all sides, a sullen opposition to his wishes, instead of the easy good luck he had hitherto encountered.

Mrs. Trenor was still at Bellomont, keeping the town-house open, and descending on it now and then for a taste of the world, but preferring the recurrent excitement of week-end parties to the restrictions of a dull season.  Since the holidays she had not urged Lily to return to Bellomont, and the first time they met in town Lily fancied there was a shade of coldness in her manner.  Was it merely the expression of her displeasure at Miss Bart’s neglect, or had disquieting rumours reached her?  The latter contingency seemed improbable, yet Lily was not without a sense of uneasiness.  If her roaming sympathies had struck root anywhere, it was in her friendship with Judy Trenor.  She believed in the sincerity of her friend’s affection, though it sometimes showed itself in self-interested ways, and she shrank with peculiar reluctance from any risk of estranging it.  But, aside from this, she was keenly conscious of the way in which such an estrangement would react on herself.  The fact that Gus Trenor was Judy’s husband was at times Lily’s strongest reason for disliking him, and for resenting the obligation under which he had placed her.  To set her doubts at rest, Miss Bart, soon after the New Year, “proposed” herself for a week-end at Bellomont.  She had learned in advance that the presence of a large party would protect her from too great assiduity on Trenor’s part, and his wife’s telegraphic “come by all means” seemed to as sure her of her usual welcome.

Judy received her amicably.  The cares of a large party always prevailed over personal feelings, and Lily saw no change in her hostess’s manner.  Nevertheless, she was soon aware that the experiment of coming to Bellomont was destined not to be successful.  The party was made up of what Mrs. Trenor called “poky people”—­her generic name for persons who did not play bridge—­and, it being her habit to group all such obstructionists in one class, she usually invited them together, regardless of their other characteristics.  The result was apt to be an irreducible combination of persons having no other quality in common than their abstinence from bridge, and the antagonisms developed in a group lacking the one taste which might have amalgamated them, were in this case aggravated by bad weather, and by the ill-concealed boredom of their host and hostess.  In such emergencies, Judy would usually have turned to Lily to fuse the discordant elements; and Miss Bart, assuming that such a service was expected of her, threw herself into it with her accustomed zeal.  But at the outset she perceived a subtle resistance to her efforts.  If Mrs. Trenor’s manner toward her was unchanged, there was certainly a faint coldness in that of the other ladies.  An occasional caustic allusion to “your friends the Wellington Brys,” or to “the little Jew who has bought the Greiner house—­some one told us you knew him, Miss Bart,”—­showed Lily that she was in disfavour with that portion of society which, while contributing least to its amusement, has assumed the right to decide what forms that amusement shall take.  The indication was a slight one, and a year ago Lily would have smiled at it, trusting to the charm of her personality to dispel any prejudice against her.  But now she had grown more sensitive to criticism and less confident in her power of disarming it.  She knew, moreover, that if the ladies at Bellomont permitted themselves to criticize her friends openly, it was a proof that they were not afraid of subjecting her to the same treatment behind her back.  The nervous dread lest anything in Trenor’s manner should seem to justify their disapproval made her seek every pretext for avoiding him, and she left Bellomont con scious of having failed in every purpose which had taken her there.

In town she returned to preoccupations which, for the moment, had the happy effect of banishing troublesome thoughts.  The Welly Brys, after much debate, and anxious counsel with their newly acquired friends, had decided on the bold move of giving a general entertainment.  To attack society collectively, when one’s means of approach are limited to a few acquaintances, is like advancing into a strange country with an insufficient number of scouts; but such rash tactics have sometimes led to brilliant victories, and the Brys had determined to put their fate to the touch.  Mrs. Fisher, to whom they had entrusted the conduct of the affair, had decided that TABLEAUX VIVANTS and expensive music were the two baits most likely to attract the desired prey, and after prolonged negotiations, and the kind of wire-pulling in which she was known to excel, she had induced a dozen fashionable women to exhibit themselves in a series of pictures which, by a farther miracle of persuasion, the distinguished portrait painter, Paul Morpeth, had been prevailed upon to organize.

Lily was in her element on such occasions.  Under Morpeth’s guidance her vivid plastic sense, hitherto nurtured on no higher food than dress-making and upholstery, found eager expression in the disposal of draperies, the study of attitudes, the shifting of lights and shadows.  Her dramatic instinct was roused by the choice of subjects, and the gorgeous reproductions of historic dress stirred an imagination which only visual impressions could reach.  But keenest of all was the exhilaration of displaying her own beauty under a new aspect:  of showing that her loveliness was no mere fixed quality, but an element shaping all emotions to fresh forms of grace.

Mrs. Fisher’s measures had been well-taken, and society, surprised in a dull moment, succumbed to the temptation of Mrs. Bry’s hospitality.  The protesting minority were forgotten in the throng which abjured and came; and the audience was almost as brilliant as the show.

Lawrence Selden was among those who had yielded to the proffered inducements.  If he did not often act on the accepted social axiom that a man may go where he pleases, it was because he had long since learned that his pleasures were mainly to be found in a small group of the like-minded.  But he enjoyed spectacular effects, and was not insensible to the part money plays in their production:  all he asked was that the very rich should live up to their calling as stage-managers, and not spend their money in a dull way.  This the Brys could certainly not be charged with doing.  Their recently built house, whatever it might lack as a frame for domesticity, was almost as well-designed for the display of a festal assemblage as one of those airy pleasure-halls which the Italian architects improvised to set off the hospitality of princes.  The air of improvisation was in fact strikingly present:  so recent, so rapidly-evoked was the whole MISE-EN-scene that one had to touch the marble columns to learn they were not of cardboard, to seat one’s self in one of the damask-and-gold arm-chairs to be sure it was not painted against the wall.

Selden, who had put one of these seats to the test, found himself, from an angle of the ball-room, surveying the scene with frank enjoyment.  The company, in obedience to the decorative instinct which calls for fine clothes in fine surroundings, had dressed rather with an eye to Mrs. Bry’s background than to herself.  The seated throng, filling the immense room without undue crowding, presented a surface of rich tissues and jewelled shoulders in harmony with the festooned and gilded walls, and the flushed splendours of the Venetian ceiling.  At the farther end of the room a stage had been constructed behind a proscenium arch curtained with folds of old damask; but in the pause before the parting of the folds there was little thought of what they might reveal, for every woman who had accepted Mrs. Bry’s invitation was engaged in trying to find out how many of her friends had done the same.

Gerty Farish, seated next to Selden, was lost in that indiscriminate and uncritical enjoyment so irritating to Miss Bart’s finer perceptions.  It may be that Selden’s nearness had something to do with the quality of his cousin’s pleasure; but Miss Farish was so little accustomed to refer her enjoyment of such scenes to her own share in them, that she was merely conscious of a deeper sense of contentment.

“Wasn’t it dear of Lily to get me an invitation?  Of course it would never have occurred to Carry Fisher to put me on the list, and I should have been so sorry to miss seeing it all—­and especially Lily herself.  Some one told me the ceiling was by Veronese—­you would know, of course, Lawrence.  I suppose it’s very beautiful, but his women are so dreadfully fat.  Goddesses?  Well, I can only say that if they’d been mortals and had to wear corsets, it would have been better for them.  I think our women are much handsomer.  And this room is wonderfully becoming—­every one looks so well!  Did you ever see such jewels?  Do look at Mrs. George Dorset’s pearls—­I suppose the smallest of them would pay the rent of our Girls’ Club for a year.  Not that I ought to complain about the dub; every one has been so wonderfully kind.  Did I tell you that Lily had given us three hundred dollars?  Wasn’t it splendid of her?  And then she collected a lot of money from her friends—­Mrs. Bry gave us five hundred, and Mr. Rosedale a thousand.  I wish Lily were not so nice to Mr. Rosedale, but she says it’s no use being rude to him, because he doesn’t see the difference.  She really can’t bear to hurt people’s feelings—­it makes me so angry when I hear her called cold and conceited!  The girls at the dub don’t call her that.  Do you know she has been there with me twice?—­yes, Lily!  And you should have seen their eyes!  One of them said it was as good as a day in the country just to look at her.  And she sat there, and laughed and talked with them—­not a bit as if she were being charitable, you know, but as if she liked it as much as they did.  They’ve been asking ever since when she’s coming back; and she’s promised me—–­oh!”

Miss Farish’s confidences were cut short by the parting of the curtain on the first tableau—­a group of nymphs dancing across flower-strewn sward in the rhythmic postures of Botticelli’s Spring.  TABLEAUX VIVANTS depend for their effect not only on the happy disposal of lights and the delusive-interposition of layers of gauze, but on a corresponding adjustment of the mental vision.  To unfurnished minds they remain, in spite of every enhancement of art, only a superior kind of wax-works; but to the responsive fancy they may give magic glimpses of the boundary world between fact and imagination.  Selden’s mind was of this order:  he could yield to vision-making influences as completely as a child to the spell of a fairy-tale.  Mrs. Bry’s TABLEAUX wanted none of the qualities which go to the producing of such illusions, and under Morpeth’s organizing hand the pictures succeeded each other with the rhythmic march of some splendid frieze, in which the fugitive curves of living flesh and the wandering light of young eyes have been subdued to plastic harmony without losing the charm of life.

The scenes were taken from old pictures, and the participators had been cleverly fitted with characters suited to their types.  No one, for instance, could have made a more typical Goya than Carry Fisher, with her short dark-skinned face, the exaggerated glow of her eyes, the provocation of her frankly-painted smile.  A brilliant Miss Smedden from Brooklyn showed to perfection the sumptuous curves of Titian’s Daughter, lifting her gold salver laden with grapes above the harmonizing gold of rippled hair and rich brocade, and a young Mrs. Van Alstyne, who showed the frailer Dutch type, with high blue-veined forehead and pale eyes and lashes, made a characteristic Vandyck, in black satin, against a curtained archway.  Then there were Kauffmann nymphs garlanding the altar of Love; a Veronese supper, all sheeny textures, pearl-woven heads and marble architecture; and a Watteau group of lute-playing comedians, lounging by a fountain in a sunlit glade.

Each evanescent picture touched the vision-building faculty in Selden, leading him so far down the vistas of fancy that even Gerty Farish’s running commentary—­“Oh, how lovely Lulu Melson looks!” or:  “That must be Kate Corby, to the right there, in purple”—­did not break the spell of the illusion.  Indeed, so skilfully had the personality of the actors been subdued to the scenes they figured in that even the least imaginative of the audience must have felt a thrill of contrast when the curtain suddenly parted on a picture which was simply and undisguisedly the portrait of Miss Bart.

Here there could be no mistaking the predominance of personality—­the unanimous “Oh!” of the spectators was a tribute, not to the brush-work of Reynolds’s “Mrs. Lloyd” but to the flesh and blood loveliness of Lily Bart.  She had shown her artistic intelligence in selecting a type so like her own that she could embody the person represented without ceasing to be herself.  It was as though she had stepped, not out of, but into, Reynolds’s canvas, banishing the phantom of his dead beauty by the beams of her living grace.  The impulse to show herself in a splendid setting—­she had thought for a moment of representing Tiepolo’s Cleopatra—­had yielded to the truer instinct of trusting to her unassisted beauty, and she had purposely chosen a picture without distracting accessories of dress or surroundings.  Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm.  The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her.  Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of that eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.

“Deuced bold thing to show herself in that get-up; but, gad, there isn’t a break in the lines anywhere, and I suppose she wanted us to know it!”

These words, uttered by that experienced connoisseur, Mr. Ned Van Alstyne, whose scented white moustache had brushed Selden’s shoulder whenever the parting of the curtains presented any exceptional opportunity for the study of the female outline, affected their hearer in an unexpected way.  It was not the first time that Selden had heard Lily’s beauty lightly remarked on, and hitherto the tone of the comments had imperceptibly coloured his view of her.  But now it woke only a motion of indignant contempt.  This was the world she lived in, these were the standards by which she was fated to be measured!  Does one go to Caliban for a judgment on Miranda?

In the long moment before the curtain fell, he had time to feel the whole tragedy of her life.  It was as though her beauty, thus detached from all that cheapened and vulgarized it, had held out suppliant hands to him from the world in which he and she had once met for a moment, and where he felt an overmastering longing to be with her again.

He was roused by the pressure of ecstatic fingers.  “Wasn’t she too beautiful, Lawrence?  Don’t you like her best in that simple dress?  It makes her look like the real Lily—­the Lily I know.”

He met Gerty Farish’s brimming gaze.  “The Lily we know,” he corrected; and his cousin, beaming at the implied understanding, exclaimed joyfully:  “I’ll tell her that!  She always says you dislike her.”

The performance over, Selden’s first impulse was to seek Miss Bart.  During the interlude of music which succeeded the TABLEAUX, the actors had seated themselves here and there in the audience, diversifying its conventional appearance by the varied picturesqueness of their dress.  Lily, however, was not among them, and her absence served to protract the effect she had produced on Selden:  it would have broken the spell to see her too soon in the surroundings from which accident had so happily detached her.  They had not met since the day of the Van Osburgh wedding, and on his side the avoidance had been intentional.  Tonight, however, he knew that, sooner or later, he should find himself at her side; and though he let the dispersing crowd drift him whither it would, without making an immediate effort to reach her, his procrastination was not due to any lingering resistance, but to the desire to luxuriate a moment in the sense of complete surrender.

Lily had not an instant’s doubt as to the meaning of the murmur greeting her appearance.  No other tableau had been received with that precise note of approval:  it had obviously been called forth by herself, and not by the picture she impersonated.  She had feared at the last moment that she was risking too much in dispensing with the advantages of a more sumptuous setting, and the completeness of her triumph gave her an intoxicating sense of recovered power.  Not caring to diminish the impression she had produced, she held herself aloof from the audience till the movement of dispersal before supper, and thus had a second opportunity of showing herself to advantage, as the throng poured slowly into the empty drawing-room where she was standing.

She was soon the centre of a group which increased and renewed itself as the circulation became general, and the individual comments on her success were a delightful prolongation of the collective applause.  At such moments she lost something of her natural fastidiousness, and cared less for the quality of the admiration received than for its quantity.  Differences of personality were merged in a warm atmosphere of praise, in which her beauty expanded like a flower in sunlight; and if Selden had approached a moment or two sooner he would have seen her turning on Ned Van Alstyne and George Dorset the look he had dreamed of capturing for himself.

Fortune willed, however, that the hurried approach of Mrs. Fisher, as whose aide-de-camp Van Alstyne was acting, should break up the group before Selden reached the threshold of the room.  One or two of the men wandered off in search of their partners for supper, and the others, noticing Selden’s approach, gave way to him in accordance with the tacit freemasonry of the ball-room.  Lily was therefore standing alone when he reached her; and finding the expected look in her eye, he had the satisfaction of supposing he had kindled it.  The look did indeed deepen as it rested on him, for even in that moment of self-intoxication Lily felt the quicker beat of life that his nearness always produced.  She read, too, in his answering gaze the delicious confirmation of her triumph, and for the moment it seemed to her that it was for him only she cared to be beautiful.

Selden had given her his arm without speaking.  She took it in silence, and they moved away, not toward the supper-room, but against the tide which was setting thither.  The faces about her flowed by like the streaming images of sleep:  she hardly noticed where Selden was leading her, till they passed through a glass doorway at the end of the long suite of rooms and stood suddenly in the fragrant hush of a garden.  Gravel grated beneath their feet, and about them was the transparent dimness of a midsummer night.  Hanging lights made emerald caverns in the depths of foliage, and whitened the spray of a fountain falling among lilies.  The magic place was deserted:  there was no sound but the splash of the water on the lily-pads, and a distant drift of music that might have been blown across a sleeping lake.

Selden and Lily stood still, accepting the unreality of the scene as a part of their own dream-like sensations.  It would not have surprised them to feel a summer breeze on their faces, or to see the lights among the boughs reduplicated in the arch of a starry sky.  The strange solitude about them was no stranger than the sweetness of being alone in it together.  At length Lily withdrew her hand, and moved away a step, so that her white-robed slimness was outlined against the dusk of the branches.  Selden followed her, and still without speaking they seated themselves on a bench beside the fountain.

Suddenly she raised her eyes with the beseeching earnestness of a child.  “You never speak to me—­you think hard things of me,” she murmured.

“I think of you at any rate, God knows!” he said.

“Then why do we never see each other?  Why can’t we be friends?  You promised once to help me,” she continued in the same tone, as though the words were drawn from her unwillingly.

“The only way I can help you is by loving you,” Selden said in a low voice.

She made no reply, but her face turned to him with the soft motion of a flower.  His own met it slowly, and their lips touched.  She drew back and rose from her seat.  Selden rose too, and they stood facing each other.  Suddenly she caught his hand and pressed it a moment against her cheek.

“Ah, love me, love me—­but don’t tell me so!” she sighed with her eyes in his; and before he could speak she had turned and slipped through the arch of boughs, disappearing in the brightness of the room beyond.

Selden stood where she had left him.  He knew too well the transiency of exquisite moments to attempt to follow her; but presently he reentered the house and made his way through the deserted rooms to the door.  A few sumptuously-cloaked ladies were already gathered in the marble vestibule, and in the coat-room he found Van Alstyne and Gus Trenor.

The former, at Selden’s approach, paused in the careful selection of a cigar from one of the silver boxes invitingly set out near the door.

“Hallo, Selden, going too?  You’re an Epicurean like myself, I see:  you don’t want to see all those goddesses gobbling terrapin.  Gad, what a show of good-looking women; but not one of ’em could touch that little cousin of mine.  Talk of jewels—­what’s a woman want with jewels when she’s got herself to show?  The trouble is that all these fal-bals they wear cover up their figures when they’ve got ’em.  I never knew till tonight what an outline Lily has.”

“It’s not her fault if everybody don’t know it now,” growled Trenor, flushed with the struggle of getting into his fur-lined coat.  “Damned bad taste, I call it—­no, no cigar for me.  You can’t tell what you’re smoking in one of these new houses—­likely as not the CHEF buys the cigars.  Stay for supper?  Not if I know it!  When people crowd their rooms so that you can’t get near any one you want to speak to, I’d as soon sup in the elevated at the rush hour.  My wife was dead right to stay away:  she says life’s too short to spend it in breaking in new people.”