The Age of Innocence

he next morning, when Archer got out of the Fall River train, he
emerged upon a steaming midsummer Boston. The streets near the station
were full of the smell of beer and coffee and decaying fruit and a
shirt-sleeved populace moved through them with the intimate abandon of
boarders going down the passage to the bathroom.

Archer found a cab and drove to the Somerset Club for breakfast. Even
the fashionable quarters had the air of untidy domesticity to which no
excess of heat ever degrades the European cities. Care-takers in
calico lounged on the door-steps of the wealthy, and the Common looked
like a pleasure-ground on the morrow of a Masonic picnic. If Archer
had tried to imagine Ellen Olenska in improbable scenes he could not
have called up any into which it was more difficult to fit her than
this heat-prostrated and deserted Boston.

He breakfasted with appetite and method, beginning with a slice of
melon, and studying a morning paper while he waited for his toast and
scrambled eggs. A new sense of energy and activity had possessed him
ever since he had announced to May the night before that he had
business in Boston, and should take the Fall River boat that night and
go on to New York the following evening. It had always been understood
that he would return to town early in the week, and when he got back
from his expedition to Portsmouth a letter from the office, which fate
had conspicuously placed on a corner of the hall table, sufficed to
justify his sudden change of plan. He was even ashamed of the ease
with which the whole thing had been done: it reminded him, for an
uncomfortable moment, of Lawrence Lefferts's masterly contrivances for
securing his freedom. But this did not long trouble him, for he was
not in an analytic mood.

After breakfast he smoked a cigarette and glanced over the Commercial
Advertiser. While he was thus engaged two or three men he knew came
in, and the usual greetings were exchanged: it was the same world after
all, though he had such a queer sense of having slipped through the
meshes of time and space.

He looked at his watch, and finding that it was half-past nine got up
and went into the writing-room. There he wrote a few lines, and
ordered a messenger to take a cab to the Parker House and wait for the
answer. He then sat down behind another newspaper and tried to
calculate how long it would take a cab to get to the Parker House.

"The lady was out, sir," he suddenly heard a waiter's voice at his
elbow; and he stammered: "Out?--" as if it were a word in a strange
language.

He got up and went into the hall. It must be a mistake: she could not
be out at that hour. He flushed with anger at his own stupidity: why
had he not sent the note as soon as he arrived?

He found his hat and stick and went forth into the street. The city
had suddenly become as strange and vast and empty as if he were a
traveller from distant lands. For a moment he stood on the door-step
hesitating; then he decided to go to the Parker House. What if the
messenger had been misinformed, and she were still there?

He started to walk across the Common; and on the first bench, under a
tree, he saw her sitting. She had a grey silk sunshade over her
head--how could he ever have imagined her with a pink one? As he
approached he was struck by her listless attitude: she sat there as if
she had nothing else to do. He saw her drooping profile, and the knot
of hair fastened low in the neck under her dark hat, and the long
wrinkled glove on the hand that held the sunshade. He came a step or
two nearer, and she turned and looked at him.

"Oh"--she said; and for the first time he noticed a startled look on
her face; but in another moment it gave way to a slow smile of wonder
and contentment.

"Oh"--she murmured again, on a different note, as he stood looking down
at her; and without rising she made a place for him on the bench.

"I'm here on business--just got here," Archer explained; and, without
knowing why, he suddenly began to feign astonishment at seeing her.
"But what on earth are you doing in this wilderness?" He had really no
idea what he was saying: he felt as if he were shouting at her across
endless distances, and she might vanish again before he could overtake
her.

"I? Oh, I'm here on business too," she answered, turning her head
toward him so that they were face to face. The words hardly reached
him: he was aware only of her voice, and of the startling fact that not
an echo of it had remained in his memory. He had not even remembered
that it was low-pitched, with a faint roughness on the consonants.

"You do your hair differently," he said, his heart beating as if he had
uttered something irrevocable.

"Differently? No--it's only that I do it as best I can when I'm
without Nastasia."

"Nastasia; but isn't she with you?"

"No; I'm alone. For two days it was not worth while to bring her."

"You're alone--at the Parker House?"

She looked at him with a flash of her old malice. "Does it strike you
as dangerous?"

"No; not dangerous--"

"But unconventional? I see; I suppose it is." She considered a
moment. "I hadn't thought of it, because I've just done something so
much more unconventional." The faint tinge of irony lingered in her
eyes. "I've just refused to take back a sum of money--that belonged to
me."

Archer sprang up and moved a step or two away. She had furled her
parasol and sat absently drawing patterns on the gravel. Presently he
came back and stood before her.

"Some one--has come here to meet you?"

"Yes."

"With this offer?"

She nodded.

"And you refused--because of the conditions?"

"I refused," she said after a moment.

He sat down by her again. "What were the conditions?"

"Oh, they were not onerous: just to sit at the head of his table now
and then."

There was another interval of silence. Archer's heart had slammed
itself shut in the queer way it had, and he sat vainly groping for a
word.

"He wants you back--at any price?"

"Well--a considerable price. At least the sum is considerable for me."

He paused again, beating about the question he felt he must put.

"It was to meet him here that you came?"

She stared, and then burst into a laugh. "Meet him--my husband? HERE?
At this season he's always at Cowes or Baden."

"He sent some one?"

"Yes."

"With a letter?"

She shook her head. "No; just a message. He never writes. I don't
think I've had more than one letter from him." The allusion brought
the colour to her cheek, and it reflected itself in Archer's vivid
blush.

"Why does he never write?"

"Why should he? What does one have secretaries for?"

The young man's blush deepened. She had pronounced the word as if it
had no more significance than any other in her vocabulary. For a
moment it was on the tip of his tongue to ask: "Did he send his
secretary, then?" But the remembrance of Count Olenski's only letter
to his wife was too present to him. He paused again, and then took
another plunge.

"And the person?"--

"The emissary? The emissary," Madame Olenska rejoined, still smiling,
"might, for all I care, have left already; but he has insisted on
waiting till this evening ... in case ... on the chance ..."

"And you came out here to think the chance over?"

"I came out to get a breath of air. The hotel's too stifling. I'm
taking the afternoon train back to Portsmouth."

They sat silent, not looking at each other, but straight ahead at the
people passing along the path. Finally she turned her eyes again to
his face and said: "You're not changed."

He felt like answering: "I was, till I saw you again;" but instead he
stood up abruptly and glanced about him at the untidy sweltering park.

"This is horrible. Why shouldn't we go out a little on the bay?
There's a breeze, and it will be cooler. We might take the steamboat
down to Point Arley." She glanced up at him hesitatingly and he went
on: "On a Monday morning there won't be anybody on the boat. My train
doesn't leave till evening: I'm going back to New York. Why shouldn't
we?" he insisted, looking down at her; and suddenly he broke out:
"Haven't we done all we could?"

"Oh"--she murmured again. She stood up and reopened her sunshade,
glancing about her as if to take counsel of the scene, and assure
herself of the impossibility of remaining in it. Then her eyes
returned to his face. "You mustn't say things like that to me," she
said.

"I'll say anything you like; or nothing. I won't open my mouth unless
you tell me to. What harm can it do to anybody? All I want is to
listen to you," he stammered.

She drew out a little gold-faced watch on an enamelled chain. "Oh,
don't calculate," he broke out; "give me the day! I want to get you
away from that man. At what time was he coming?"

Her colour rose again. "At eleven."

"Then you must come at once."

"You needn't be afraid--if I don't come."

"Nor you either--if you do. I swear I only want to hear about you, to
know what you've been doing. It's a hundred years since we've met--it
may be another hundred before we meet again."

She still wavered, her anxious eyes on his face. "Why didn't you come
down to the beach to fetch me, the day I was at Granny's?" she asked.

"Because you didn't look round--because you didn't know I was there. I
swore I wouldn't unless you looked round." He laughed as the
childishness of the confession struck him.

"But I didn't look round on purpose."

"On purpose?"

"I knew you were there; when you drove in I recognised the ponies. So
I went down to the beach."

"To get away from me as far as you could?"

She repeated in a low voice: "To get away from you as far as I could."

He laughed out again, this time in boyish satisfaction. "Well, you see
it's no use. I may as well tell you," he added, "that the business I
came here for was just to find you. But, look here, we must start or
we shall miss our boat."

"Our boat?" She frowned perplexedly, and then smiled. "Oh, but I must
go back to the hotel first: I must leave a note--"

"As many notes as you please. You can write here." He drew out a
note-case and one of the new stylographic pens. "I've even got an
envelope--you see how everything's predestined! There--steady the
thing on your knee, and I'll get the pen going in a second. They have
to be humoured; wait--" He banged the hand that held the pen against
the back of the bench. "It's like jerking down the mercury in a
thermometer: just a trick. Now try--"

She laughed, and bending over the sheet of paper which he had laid on
his note-case, began to write. Archer walked away a few steps, staring
with radiant unseeing eyes at the passersby, who, in their turn, paused
to stare at the unwonted sight of a fashionably-dressed lady writing a
note on her knee on a bench in the Common.

Madame Olenska slipped the sheet into the envelope, wrote a name on it,
and put it into her pocket. Then she too stood up.

They walked back toward Beacon Street, and near the club Archer caught
sight of the plush-lined "herdic" which had carried his note to the
Parker House, and whose driver was reposing from this effort by bathing
his brow at the corner hydrant.

"I told you everything was predestined! Here's a cab for us. You
see!" They laughed, astonished at the miracle of picking up a public
conveyance at that hour, and in that unlikely spot, in a city where
cab-stands were still a "foreign" novelty.

Archer, looking at his watch, saw that there was time to drive to the
Parker House before going to the steamboat landing. They rattled
through the hot streets and drew up at the door of the hotel.

Archer held out his hand for the letter. "Shall I take it in?" he
asked; but Madame Olenska, shaking her head, sprang out and disappeared
through the glazed doors. It was barely half-past ten; but what if the
emissary, impatient for her reply, and not knowing how else to employ
his time, were already seated among the travellers with cooling drinks
at their elbows of whom Archer had caught a glimpse as she went in?

He waited, pacing up and down before the herdic. A Sicilian youth with
eyes like Nastasia's offered to shine his boots, and an Irish matron to
sell him peaches; and every few moments the doors opened to let out hot
men with straw hats tilted far back, who glanced at him as they went
by. He marvelled that the door should open so often, and that all the
people it let out should look so like each other, and so like all the
other hot men who, at that hour, through the length and breadth of the
land, were passing continuously in and out of the swinging doors of
hotels.

And then, suddenly, came a face that he could not relate to the other
faces. He caught but a flash of it, for his pacings had carried him to
the farthest point of his beat, and it was in turning back to the hotel
that he saw, in a group of typical countenances--the lank and weary,
the round and surprised, the lantern-jawed and mild--this other face
that was so many more things at once, and things so different. It was
that of a young man, pale too, and half-extinguished by the heat, or
worry, or both, but somehow, quicker, vivider, more conscious; or
perhaps seeming so because he was so different. Archer hung a moment
on a thin thread of memory, but it snapped and floated off with the
disappearing face--apparently that of some foreign business man,
looking doubly foreign in such a setting. He vanished in the stream of
passersby, and Archer resumed his patrol.

He did not care to be seen watch in hand within view of the hotel, and
his unaided reckoning of the lapse of time led him to conclude that, if
Madame Olenska was so long in reappearing, it could only be because she
had met the emissary and been waylaid by him. At the thought Archer's
apprehension rose to anguish.

"If she doesn't come soon I'll go in and find her," he said.

The doors swung open again and she was at his side. They got into the
herdic, and as it drove off he took out his watch and saw that she had
been absent just three minutes. In the clatter of loose windows that
made talk impossible they bumped over the disjointed cobblestones to
the wharf.

Seated side by side on a bench of the half-empty boat they found that
they had hardly anything to say to each other, or rather that what they
had to say communicated itself best in the blessed silence of their
release and their isolation.

As the paddle-wheels began to turn, and wharves and shipping to recede
through the veil of heat, it seemed to Archer that everything in the
old familiar world of habit was receding also. He longed to ask Madame
Olenska if she did not have the same feeling: the feeling that they
were starting on some long voyage from which they might never return.
But he was afraid to say it, or anything else that might disturb the
delicate balance of her trust in him. In reality he had no wish to
betray that trust. There had been days and nights when the memory of
their kiss had burned and burned on his lips; the day before even, on
the drive to Portsmouth, the thought of her had run through him like
fire; but now that she was beside him, and they were drifting forth
into this unknown world, they seemed to have reached the kind of deeper
nearness that a touch may sunder.

As the boat left the harbour and turned seaward a breeze stirred about
them and the bay broke up into long oily undulations, then into ripples
tipped with spray. The fog of sultriness still hung over the city, but
ahead lay a fresh world of ruffled waters, and distant promontories
with light-houses in the sun. Madame Olenska, leaning back against the
boat-rail, drank in the coolness between parted lips. She had wound a
long veil about her hat, but it left her face uncovered, and Archer was
struck by the tranquil gaiety of her expression. She seemed to take
their adventure as a matter of course, and to be neither in fear of
unexpected encounters, nor (what was worse) unduly elated by their
possibility.

In the bare dining-room of the inn, which he had hoped they would have
to themselves, they found a strident party of innocent-looking young
men and women--school-teachers on a holiday, the landlord told
them--and Archer's heart sank at the idea of having to talk through
their noise.

"This is hopeless--I'll ask for a private room," he said; and Madame
Olenska, without offering any objection, waited while he went in search
of it. The room opened on a long wooden verandah, with the sea coming
in at the windows. It was bare and cool, with a table covered with a
coarse checkered cloth and adorned by a bottle of pickles and a
blueberry pie under a cage. No more guileless-looking cabinet
particulier ever offered its shelter to a clandestine couple: Archer
fancied he saw the sense of its reassurance in the faintly amused smile
with which Madame Olenska sat down opposite to him. A woman who had
run away from her husband--and reputedly with another man--was likely
to have mastered the art of taking things for granted; but something in
the quality of her composure took the edge from his irony. By being so
quiet, so unsurprised and so simple she had managed to brush away the
conventions and make him feel that to seek to be alone was the natural
thing for two old friends who had so much to say to each other....