The House of Mirth

ook II, Chapter 1

It came vividly to Selden on the Casino steps that Monte Carlo
had, more than any other place he knew, the gift of accommodating
itself to each man’s humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a
festive readiness of welcome that might well, in a disenchanted
eye, have turned to paint and facility. So frank an appeal for
participation—so outspoken a recognition of the holiday vein in
human nature—struck refreshingly on a mind jaded by prolonged
hard work in surroundings made for the discipline of the senses.
As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry of
architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which
suggested a sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting
of scenes—as he took in the whole outspread effect of light and
leisure, he felt a movement of revulsion from the last few months
of his life.

The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and
furious air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the
gritty wind ground into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work,
had told himself that external conditions did not matter to a man
in his state, and that cold and ugliness were a good tonic for
relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent case summoned him abroad
to confer with a client in Paris, he broke reluctantly with the
routine of the office; and it was only now that, having despatched
his business, and slipped away for a week in the south, he began to
feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of those
who take an objective interest in life.

The multiplicity of its appeals—the perpetual surprise of its
contrasts and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the
show were upon him with a spring as he descended the Casino steps
and paused on the pavement at its doors. He had not been abroad
for seven years—and what changes the renewed contact produced! If
the central depths were untouched, hardly a pin-point of surface
remained the same. And this was the very place to bring out the
completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the perpetuities,
might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a day’s
revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its
climax and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens
would soon dissolve and reform in other scenes. Meanwhile the last
moments of the performance seemed to gain an added brightness
from the hovering threat of the curtain. The quality of the air,
the exuberance of the flowers, the blue intensity of sea and sky,
produced the effect of a closing TABLEAU, when all the lights are
turned on at once. This impression was presently heightened by the
way in which a consciously conspicuous group of people advanced
to the middle front, and stood before Selden with the air of the
chief performers gathered together by the exigencies of the final
effect. Their appearance confirmed the impression that the show had
been staged regardless of expense, and emphasized its resemblance
to one of those “costume-plays” in which the protagonists walk
through the passions without displacing a drapery. The ladies stood
in unrelated attitudes calculated to isolate their effects, and the
men hung about them as irrelevantly as stage heroes whose tailors
are named in the programme. It was Selden himself who unwittingly
fused the group by arresting the attention of one of its members.

“Why, Mr. Selden!” Mrs. Fisher exclaimed in surprise; and with a
gesture toward Mrs. Jack Stepney and Mrs. Wellington Bry, she added
plaintively: “We’re starving to death because we can’t decide where
to lunch.”

Welcomed into their group, and made the confidant of their
difficulty, Selden learned with amusement that there were several
places where one might miss something by not lunching, or forfeit
something by lunching; so that eating actually became a minor
consideration on the very spot consecrated to its rites.

“Of course one gets the best things at the TERRASSE—but that looks
as if one hadn’t any other reason for being there: the Americans
who don’t know any one always rush for the best food. And the
Duchess of Beltshire has taken up Becassin’s lately,” Mrs. Bry
earnestly summed up.

Mrs. Bry, to Mrs. Fisher’s despair, had not progressed beyond the
point of weighing her social alternatives in public. She could not
acquire the air of doing things because she wanted to, and making
her choice the final seal of their fitness.

Mr. Bry, a short pale man, with a business face and leisure
clothes, met the dilemma hilariously.

“I guess the Duchess goes where it’s cheapest, unless she can get
her meal paid for. If you offered to blow her off at the TERRASSE
she’d turn up fast enough.”

But Mrs. Jack Stepney interposed. “The Grand Dukes go to that
little place at the Condamine. Lord Hubert says it’s the only
restaurant in Europe where they can cook peas.”

Lord Hubert Dacey, a slender shabby-looking man, with a charming
worn smile, and the air of having spent his best years in piloting
the wealthy to the right restaurant, assented with gentle emphasis:
“It’s quite that.”

“PEAS?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It
just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a
fellow can make a reputation cooking peas!”

Jack Stepney intervened with authority. “I don’t know that I quite
agree with Dacey: there’s a little hole in Paris, off the Quai
Voltaire—but in any case, I can’t advise the Condamine GARGOTE; at
least not with ladies.”

Stepney, since his marriage, had thickened and grown prudish, as
the Van Osburgh husbands were apt to do; but his wife, to his
surprise and discomfiture, had developed an earth-shaking fastness
of gait which left him trailing breathlessly in her wake.

“That’s where we’ll go then!” she declared, with a heavy toss of
her plumage. “I’m so tired of the TERRASSE: it’s as dull as one
of mother’s dinners. And Lord Hubert has promised to tell us who
all the awful people are at the other place—hasn’t he, Carry? Now,
Jack, don’t look so solemn!”

“Well,” said Mrs. Bry, “all I want to know is who their
dress-makers are.”

“No doubt Dacey can tell you that too,” remarked Stepney, with an
ironic intention which the other received with the light murmur,
“I can at least FIND OUT, my dear fellow”; and Mrs. Bry having
declared that she couldn’t walk another step, the party hailed
two or three of the light phaetons which hover attentively on the
confines of the gardens, and rattled off in procession toward the
Condamine.

Their destination was one of the little restaurants overhanging
the boulevard which dips steeply down from Monte Carlo to the low
intermediate quarter along the quay. From the window in which
they presently found themselves installed, they overlooked the
intense blue curve of the harbour, set between the verdure of twin
promontories: to the right, the cliff of Monaco, topped by the
mediaeval silhouette of its church and castle, to the left the
terraces and pinnacles of the gambling-house. Between the two,
the waters of the bay were furrowed by a light coming and going
of pleasure-craft, through which, just at the culminating moment
of luncheon, the majestic advance of a great steam-yacht drew the
company’s attention from the peas.

“By Jove, I believe that’s the Dorsets back!” Stepney exclaimed;
and Lord Hubert, dropping his single eye-glass, corroborated: “It’s
the Sabrina—yes.”

“So soon? They were to spend a month in Sicily,” Mrs. Fisher
observed.

“I guess they feel as if they had: there’s only one up-to-date
hotel in the whole place,” said Mr. Bry disparagingly.

“It was Ned Silverton’s idea—but poor Dorset and Lily Bart must
have been horribly bored.” Mrs. Fisher added in an undertone to
Selden: “I do hope there hasn’t been a row.”

“It’s most awfully jolly having Miss Bart back,” said Lord Hubert,
in his mild deliberate voice; and Mrs. Bry added ingenuously: “I
daresay the Duchess will dine with us, now that Lily’s here.”

“The Duchess admires her immensely: I’m sure she’d be charmed
to have it arranged,” Lord Hubert agreed, with the professional
promptness of the man accustomed to draw his profit from
facilitating social contacts: Selden was struck by the businesslike
change in his manner.

“Lily has been a tremendous success here,” Mrs. Fisher continued,
still addressing herself confidentially to Selden. “She looks ten
years younger—I never saw her so handsome. Lady Skiddaw took her
everywhere in Cannes, and the Crown Princess of Macedonia had her
to stop for a week at Cimiez. People say that was one reason why
Bertha whisked the yacht off to Sicily: the Crown Princess didn’t
take much notice of her, and she couldn’t bear to look on at Lily’s
triumph.”

Selden made no reply. He was vaguely aware that Miss Bart was
cruising in the Mediterranean with the Dorsets, but it had not
occurred to him that there was any chance of running across her on
the Riviera, where the season was virtually at an end. As he leaned
back, silently contemplating his filigree cup of Turkish coffee,
he was trying to put some order in his thoughts, to tell himself
how the news of her nearness was really affecting him. He had a
personal detachment enabling him, even in moments of emotional
high-pressure, to get a fairly clear view of his feelings, and
he was sincerely surprised by the disturbance which the sight
of the Sabrina had produced in him. He had reason to think that
his three months of engrossing professional work, following on
the sharp shock of his disillusionment, had cleared his mind of
its sentimental vapours. The feeling he had nourished and given
prominence to was one of thankfulness for his escape: he was like a
traveller so grateful for rescue from a dangerous accident that at
first he is hardly conscious of his bruises. Now he suddenly felt
the latent ache, and realized that after all he had not come off
unhurt.

An hour later, at Mrs. Fisher’s side in the Casino gardens, he was
trying to find fresh reasons for forgetting the injury received in
the contemplation of the peril avoided. The party had dispersed
with the loitering indecision characteristic of social movements
at Monte Carlo, where the whole place, and the long gilded hours
of the day, seem to offer an infinity of ways of being idle. Lord
Hubert Dacey had finally gone off in quest of the Duchess of
Beltshire, charged by Mrs. Bry with the delicate negotiation of
securing that lady’s presence at dinner, the Stepneys had left for
Nice in their motor-car, and Mr. Bry had departed to take his place
in the pigeon shooting match which was at the moment engaging his
highest faculties.

Mrs. Bry, who had a tendency to grow red and stertorous after
luncheon, had been judiciously prevailed upon by Carry Fisher to
withdraw to her hotel for an hour’s repose; and Selden and his
companion were thus left to a stroll propitious to confidences.
The stroll soon resolved itself into a tranquil session on a bench
overhung with laurel and Banksian roses, from which they caught a
dazzle of blue sea between marble balusters, and the fiery shafts
of cactus-blossoms shooting meteor-like from the rock. The soft
shade of their niche, and the adjacent glitter of the air, were
conducive to an easy lounging mood, and to the smoking of many
cigarettes; and Selden, yielding to these influences, suffered Mrs.
Fisher to unfold to him the history of her recent experiences. She
had come abroad with the Welly Brys at the moment when fashion
flees the inclemency of the New York spring. The Brys, intoxicated
by their first success, already thirsted for new kingdoms, and
Mrs. Fisher, viewing the Riviera as an easy introduction to London
society, had guided their course thither. She had affiliations
of her own in every capital, and a facility for picking them up
again after long absences; and the carefully disseminated rumour
of the Brys’ wealth had at once gathered about them a group of
cosmopolitan pleasure-seekers.

“But things are not going as well as I expected,” Mrs. Fisher
frankly admitted. “It’s all very well to say that every body with
money can get into society; but it would be truer to say that
NEARLY everybody can. And the London market is so glutted with new
Americans that, to succeed there now, they must be either very
clever or awfully queer. The Brys are neither. HE would get on well
enough if she’d let him alone; they like his slang and his brag and
his blunders. But Louisa spoils it all by trying to repress him and
put herself forward. If she’d be natural herself—fat and vulgar and
bouncing—it would be all right; but as soon as she meets anybody
smart she tries to be slender and queenly. She tried it with the
Duchess of Beltshire and Lady Skiddaw, and they fled. I’ve done my
best to make her see her mistake—I’ve said to her again and again:
‘Just let yourself go, Louisa’; but she keeps up the humbug even
with me—I believe she keeps on being queenly in her own room, with
the door shut.

“The worst of it is,” Mrs. Fisher went on, “that she thinks it’s
all MY fault. When the Dorsets turned up here six weeks ago, and
everybody began to make a fuss about Lily Bart, I could see Louisa
thought that if she’d had Lily in tow instead of me she would have
been hob-nobbing with all the royalties by this time. She doesn’t
realize that it’s Lily’s beauty that does it: Lord Hubert tells me
Lily is thought even handsomer than when he knew her at Aix ten
years ago. It seems she was tremendously admired there. An Italian
Prince, rich and the real thing, wanted to marry her; but just at
the critical moment a good-looking step-son turned up, and Lily
was silly enough to flirt with him while her marriage-settlements
with the step-father were being drawn up. Some people said the
young man did it on purpose. You can fancy the scandal: there was
an awful row between the men, and people began to look at Lily
so queerly that Mrs. Peniston had to pack up and finish her cure
elsewhere. Not that SHE ever understood: to this day she thinks
that Aix didn’t suit her, and mentions her having been sent there
as proof of the incompetence of French doctors. That’s Lily all
over, you know: she works like a slave preparing the ground and
sowing her seed; but the day she ought to be reaping the harvest
she over-sleeps herself or goes off on a picnic.”

Mrs. Fisher paused and looked reflectively at the deep shimmer of
sea between the cactus-flowers. “Sometimes,” she added, “I think
it’s just flightiness—and sometimes I think it’s because, at heart,
she despises the things she’s trying for. And it’s the difficulty
of deciding that makes her such an interesting study.” She glanced
tentatively at Selden’s motionless profile, and resumed with a
slight sigh: “Well, all I can say is, I wish she’d give ME some of
her discarded opportunities. I wish we could change places now,
for instance. She could make a very good thing out of the Brys
if she managed them properly, and I should know just how to look
after George Dorset while Bertha is reading Verlaine with Neddy
Silverton.”

She met Selden’s sound of protest with a sharp derisive glance.
“Well, what’s the use of mincing matters? We all know that’s what
Bertha brought her abroad for. When Bertha wants to have a good
time she has to provide occupation for George. At first I thought
Lily was going to play her cards well THIS time, but there are
rumours that Bertha is jealous of her success here and at Cannes,
and I shouldn’t be surprised if there were a break any day. Lily’s
only safeguard is that Bertha needs her badly—oh, very badly.
The Silverton affair is in the acute stage: it’s necessary that
George’s attention should be pretty continuously distracted. And
I’m bound to say Lily DOES distract it: I believe he’d marry her
tomorrow if he found out there was anything wrong with Bertha. But
you know him—he’s as blind as he’s jealous; and of course Lily’s
present business is to keep him blind. A clever woman might know
just the right moment to tear off the bandage: but Lily isn’t
clever in that way, and when George does open his eyes she’ll
probably contrive not to be in his line of vision.”

Selden tossed away his cigarette. “By Jove—it’s time for my train,”
he exclaimed, with a glance at his watch; adding, in reply to Mrs.
Fisher’s surprised comment—“Why, I thought of course you were at
Monte!”—a murmured word to the effect that he was making Nice his
head-quarters.

“The worst of it is, she snubs the Brys now,” he heard irrelevantly
flung after him.

Ten minutes later, in the high-perched bedroom of an hotel
overlooking the Casino, he was tossing his effects into a couple of
gaping portmanteaux, while the porter waited outside to transport
them to the cab at the door. It took but a brief plunge down the
steep white road to the station to land him safely in the afternoon
express for Nice; and not till he was installed in the corner of
an empty carriage, did he exclaim to himself, with a reaction of
self-contempt: “What the deuce am I running away from?”

The pertinence of the question checked Selden’s fugitive impulse
before the train had started. It was ridiculous to be flying like
an emotional coward from an infatuation his reason had conquered.
He had instructed his bankers to forward some important business
letters to Nice, and at Nice he would quietly await them. He was
already annoyed with himself for having left Monte Carlo, where he
had intended to pass the week which remained to him before sailing;
but it would now be difficult to return on his steps without an
appearance of inconsistency from which his pride recoiled. In his
inmost heart he was not sorry to put himself beyond the probability
of meeting Miss Bart. Completely as he had detached himself from
her, he could not yet regard her merely as a social instance;
and viewed in a more personal ways she was not likely to be a
reassuring object of study. Chance encounters, or even the repeated
mention of her name, would send his thoughts back into grooves
from which he had resolutely detached them; whereas, if she could
be entirely excluded from his life, the pressure of new and varied
impressions, with which no thought of her was connected, would soon
complete the work of separation. Mrs. Fisher’s conversation had,
indeed, operated to that end; but the treatment was too painful
to be voluntarily chosen while milder remedies were untried; and
Selden thought he could trust himself to return gradually to a
reasonable view of Miss Bart, if only he did not see her.

Having reached the station early, he had arrived at this point in
his reflections before the increasing throng on the platform warned
him that he could not hope to preserve his privacy; the next moment
there was a hand on the door, and he turned to confront the very
face he was fleeing.

Miss Bart, glowing with the haste of a precipitate descent upon the
train, headed a group composed of the Dorsets, young Silverton and
Lord Hubert Dacey, who had barely time to spring into the carriage,
and envelop Selden in ejaculations of surprise and welcome, before
the whistle of departure sounded. The party, it appeared, were
hastening to Nice in response to a sudden summons to dine with the
Duchess of Beltshire and to see the water-fete in the bay; a plan
evidently improvised—in spite of Lord Hubert’s protesting “Oh, I
say, you know,”—for the express purpose of defeating Mrs. Bry’s
endeavour to capture the Duchess.

During the laughing relation of this manoeuvre, Selden had time for
a rapid impression of Miss Bart, who had seated herself opposite
to him in the golden afternoon light. Scarcely three months had
elapsed since he had parted from her on the threshold of the Brys’
conservatory; but a subtle change had passed over the quality
of her beauty. Then it had had a transparency through which the
fluctuations of the spirit were sometimes tragically visible; now
its impenetrable surface suggested a process of crystallization
which had fused her whole being into one hard brilliant substance.
The change had struck Mrs. Fisher as a rejuvenation: to Selden it
seemed like that moment of pause and arrest when the warm fluidity
of youth is chilled into its final shape.

He felt it in the way she smiled on him, and in the readiness and
competence with which, flung unexpectedly into his presence, she
took up the thread of their intercourse as though that thread had
not been snapped with a violence from which he still reeled. Such
facility sickened him—but he told himself that it was with the
pang which precedes recovery. Now he would really get well—would
eject the last drop of poison from his blood. Already he felt
himself calmer in her presence than he had learned to be in the
thought of her. Her assumptions and elisions, her short-cuts and
long DETOURS, the skill with which she contrived to meet him at a
point from which no inconvenient glimpses of the past were visible,
suggested what opportunities she had had for practising such arts
since their last meeting. He felt that she had at last arrived at
an understanding with herself: had made a pact with her rebellious
impulses, and achieved a uniform system of self-government, under
which all vagrant tendencies were either held captive or forced
into the service of the state.

And he saw other things too in her manner: saw how it had adjusted
itself to the hidden intricacies of a situation in which, even
after Mrs. Fisher’s elucidating flashes, he still felt himself
agrope. Surely Mrs. Fisher could no longer charge Miss Bart with
neglecting her opportunities! To Selden’s exasperated observation
she was only too completely alive to them. She was “perfect”
to every one: subservient to Bertha’s anxious predominance,
good-naturedly watchful of Dorset’s moods, brightly companionable
to Silverton and Dacey, the latter of whom met her on an evident
footing of old admiration, while young Silverton, portentously
self-absorbed, seemed conscious of her only as of something vaguely
obstructive. And suddenly, as Selden noted the fine shades of
manner by which she harmonized herself with her surroundings, it
flashed on him that, to need such adroit handling, the situation
must indeed be desperate. She was on the edge of something—that was
the impression left with him. He seemed to see her poised on the
brink of a chasm, with one graceful foot advanced to assert her
unconsciousness that the ground was failing her.

On the Promenade des Anglais, where Ned Silverton hung on him for
the half hour before dinner, he received a deeper impression of the
general insecurity. Silverton was in a mood of Titanic pessimism.
How any one could come to such a damned hole as the Riviera—any
one with a grain of imagination—with the whole Mediterranean to
choose from: but then, if one’s estimate of a place depended on
the way they broiled a spring chicken! Gad! what a study might be
made of the tyranny of the stomach—the way a sluggish liver or
insufficient gastric juices might affect the whole course of the
universe, overshadow everything in reach—chronic dyspepsia ought
to be among the “statutory causes”; a woman’s life might be ruined
by a man’s inability to digest fresh bread. Grotesque? Yes—and
tragic—like most absurdities. There’s nothing grimmer than the
tragedy that wears a comic mask.... Where was he? Oh—the reason
they chucked Sicily and rushed back? Well—partly, no doubt, Miss
Bart’s desire to get back to bridge and smartness. Dead as a stone
to art and poetry—the light never WAS on sea or land for her! And
of course she persuaded Dorset that the Italian food was bad for
him. Oh, she could make him believe anything—ANYTHING! Mrs. Dorset
was aware of it—oh, perfectly: nothing SHE didn’t see! But she
could hold her tongue—she’d had to, often enough. Miss Bart was an
intimate friend—she wouldn’t hear a word against her. Only it hurts
a woman’s pride—there are some things one doesn’t get used to....
All this in confidence, of course? Ah—and there were the ladies
signalling from the balcony of the hotel.... He plunged across the
Promenade, leaving Selden to a meditative cigar.

The conclusions it led him to were fortified, later in the evening,
by some of those faint corroborative hints that generate a light
of their own in the dusk of a doubting mind. Selden, stumbling on
a chance acquaintance, had dined with him, and adjourned, still
in his company, to the brightly lit Promenade, where a line of
crowded stands commanded the glittering darkness of the waters.
The night was soft and persuasive. Overhead hung a summer sky
furrowed with the rush of rockets; and from the east a late moon,
pushing up beyond the lofty bend of the coast, sent across the bay
a shaft of brightness which paled to ashes in the red glitter of
the illuminated boats. Down the lantern-hung Promenade, snatches
of band-music floated above the hum of the crowd and the soft
tossing of boughs in dusky gardens; and between these gardens and
the backs of the stands there flowed a stream of people in whom the
vociferous carnival mood seemed tempered by the growing languor of
the season.

Selden and his companion, unable to get seats on one of the stands
facing the bay, had wandered for a while with the throng, and
then found a point of vantage on a high garden-parapet above the
Promenade. Thence they caught but a triangular glimpse of the
water, and of the flashing play of boats across its surface; but
the crowd in the street was under their immediate view, and seemed
to Selden, on the whole, of more interest than the show itself.
After a while, however, he wearied of his perch and, dropping
alone to the pavement, pushed his way to the first corner and
turned into the moonlit silence of a side street. Long garden-walls
overhung by trees made a dark boundary to the pavement; an empty
cab trailed along the deserted thoroughfare, and presently Selden
saw two persons emerge from the opposite shadows, signal to the
cab, and drive off in it toward the centre of the town. The
moonlight touched them as they paused to enter the carriage, and he
recognized Mrs. Dorset and young Silverton.

Beneath the nearest lamp-post he glanced at his watch and saw
that the time was close on eleven. He took another cross street,
and without breasting the throng on the Promenade, made his way
to the fashionable club which overlooks that thoroughfare. Here,
amid the blaze of crowded baccarat tables, he caught sight of Lord
Hubert Dacey, seated with his habitual worn smile behind a rapidly
dwindling heap of gold. The heap being in due course wiped out,
Lord Hubert rose with a shrug, and joining Selden, adjourned with
him to the deserted terrace of the club. It was now past midnight,
and the throng on the stands was dispersing, while the long trails
of red-lit boats scattered and faded beneath a sky repossessed by
the tranquil splendour of the moon.

Lord Hubert looked at his watch. “By Jove, I promised to join the
Duchess for supper at the LONDON HOUSE; but it’s past twelve, and
I suppose they’ve all scattered. The fact is, I lost them in the
crowd soon after dinner, and took refuge here, for my sins. They
had seats on one of the stands, but of course they couldn’t stop
quiet: the Duchess never can. She and Miss Bart went off in quest
of what they call adventures—gad, it ain’t their fault if they
don’t have some queer ones!” He added tentatively, after pausing
to grope for a cigarette: “Miss Bart’s an old friend of yours,
I believe? So she told me.—Ah, thanks—I don’t seem to have one
left.” He lit Selden’s proffered cigarette, and continued, in his
high-pitched drawling tone: “None of my business, of course, but I
didn’t introduce her to the Duchess. Charming woman, the Duchess,
you understand; and a very good friend of mine; but RATHER a
liberal education.”

Selden received this in silence, and after a few puffs Lord Hubert
broke out again: “Sort of thing one can’t communicate to the young
lady—though young ladies nowadays are so competent to judge for
themselves; but in this case—I’m an old friend too, you know . . .
and there seemed no one else to speak to. The whole situation’s a
little mixed, as I see it—but there used to be an aunt somewhere, a
diffuse and innocent person, who was great at bridging over chasms
she didn’t see.... Ah, in New York, is she? Pity New York’s such a
long way off!”