The House of Mirth

ook II, Chapter 13

The street-lamps were lit, but the rain had ceased, and there was
a momentary revival of light in the upper sky. Lily walked on
unconscious of her surroundings. She was still treading the buoyant
ether which emanates from the high moments of life. But gradually
it shrank away from her and she felt the dull pavement beneath
her feet. The sense of weariness returned with accumulated force,
and for a moment she felt that she could walk no farther. She had
reached the corner of Forty-first Street and Fifth Avenue, and she
remembered that in Bryant Park there were seats where she might
rest.

That melancholy pleasure-ground was almost deserted when she
entered it, and she sank down on an empty bench in the glare of
an electric street-lamp. The warmth of the fire had passed out of
her veins, and she told herself that she must not sit long in the
penetrating dampness which struck up from the wet asphalt. But her
will-power seemed to have spent itself in a last great effort, and
she was lost in the blank reaction which follows on an unwonted
expenditure of energy. And besides, what was there to go home to?
Nothing but the silence of her cheerless room—that silence of the
night which may be more racking to tired nerves than the most
discordant noises: that, and the bottle of chloral by her bed.
The thought of the chloral was the only spot of light in the dark
prospect: she could feel its lulling influence stealing over her
already. But she was troubled by the thought that it was losing
its power—she dared not go back to it too soon. Of late the sleep
it had brought her had been more broken and less profound; there
had been nights when she was perpetually floating up through it
to consciousness. What if the effect of the drug should gradually
fail, as all narcotics were said to fail? She remembered the
chemist’s warning against increasing the dose; and she had heard
before of the capricious and incalculable action of the drug. Her
dread of returning to a sleepless night was so great that she
lingered on, hoping that excessive weariness would reinforce the
waning power of the chloral.

Night had now closed in, and the roar of traffic in Forty-second
Street was dying out. As complete darkness fell on the square the
lingering occupants of the benches rose and dispersed; but now and
then a stray figure, hurrying homeward, struck across the path
where Lily sat, looming black for a moment in the white circle of
electric light. One or two of these passers-by slackened their
pace to glance curiously at her lonely figure; but she was hardly
conscious of their scrutiny.

Suddenly, however, she became aware that one of the passing shadows
remained stationary between her line of vision and the gleaming
asphalt; and raising her eyes she saw a young woman bending over
her.

“Excuse me—are you sick?—Why, it’s Miss Bart!” a half-familiar
voice exclaimed.

Lily looked up. The speaker was a poorly-dressed young woman
with a bundle under her arm. Her face had the air of unwholesome
refinement which ill-health and over-work may produce, but its
common prettiness was redeemed by the strong and generous curve of
the lips.

“You don’t remember me,” she continued, brightening with the
pleasure of recognition, “but I’d know you anywhere, I’ve thought
of you such a lot. I guess my folks all know your name by heart.
I was one of the girls at Miss Farish’s club—you helped me to go
to the country that time I had lung-trouble. My name’s Nettie
Struther. It was Nettie Crane then—but I daresay you don’t remember
that either.”

Yes: Lily was beginning to remember. The episode of Nettie Crane’s
timely rescue from disease had been one of the most satisfying
incidents of her connection with Gerty’s charitable work. She had
furnished the girl with the means to go to a sanatorium in the
mountains: it struck her now with a peculiar irony that the money
she had used had been Gus Trenor’s.

She tried to reply, to assure the speaker that she had not
forgotten; but her voice failed in the effort, and she felt herself
sinking under a great wave of physical weakness. Nettie Struther,
with a startled exclamation, sat down and slipped a shabbily-clad
arm behind her back.

“Why, Miss Bart, you ARE sick. Just lean on me a little till you
feel better.”

A faint glow of returning strength seemed to pass into Lily from
the pressure of the supporting arm.

“I’m only tired—it is nothing,” she found voice to say in a moment;
and then, as she met the timid appeal of her companion’s eyes, she
added involuntarily: “I have been unhappy—in great trouble.”

“YOU in trouble? I’ve always thought of you as being so high up,
where everything was just grand. Sometimes, when I felt real mean,
and got to wondering why things were so queerly fixed in the world,
I used to remember that you were having a lovely time, anyhow, and
that seemed to show there was a kind of justice somewhere. But
you mustn’t sit here too long—it’s fearfully damp. Don’t you feel
strong enough to walk on a little ways now?” she broke off.

“Yes—yes; I must go home,” Lily murmured, rising.

Her eyes rested wonderingly on the thin shabby figure at her side.
She had known Nettie Crane as one of the discouraged victims of
over-work and anaemic parentage: one of the superfluous fragments
of life destined to be swept prematurely into that social
refuse-heap of which Lily had so lately expressed her dread. But
Nettie Struther’s frail envelope was now alive with hope and
energy: whatever fate the future reserved for her, she would not be
cast into the refuse-heap without a struggle.

“I am very glad to have seen you,” Lily continued, summoning a
smile to her unsteady lips. “It’ll be my turn to think of you as
happy—and the world will seem a less unjust place to me too.”

“Oh, but I can’t leave you like this—you’re not fit to go home
alone. And I can’t go with you either!” Nettie Struther wailed
with a start of recollection. “You see, it’s my husband’s
night-shift—he’s a motor-man—and the friend I leave the baby with
has to step upstairs to get HER husband’s supper at seven. I didn’t
tell you I had a baby, did I? She’ll be four months old day after
tomorrow, and to look at her you wouldn’t think I’d ever had a sick
day. I’d give anything to show you the baby, Miss Bart, and we live
right down the street here—it’s only three blocks off.” She lifted
her eyes tentatively to Lily’s face, and then added with a burst
of courage: “Why won’t you get right into the cars and come home
with me while I get baby’s supper? It’s real warm in our kitchen,
and you can rest there, and I’ll take YOU home as soon as ever she
drops off to sleep.”

It WAS warm in the kitchen, which, when Nettie Struther’s match had
made a flame leap from the gas-jet above the table, revealed itself
to Lily as extraordinarily small and almost miraculously clean. A
fire shone through the polished flanks of the iron stove, and near
it stood a crib in which a baby was sitting upright, with incipient
anxiety struggling for expression on a countenance still placid
with sleep.

Having passionately celebrated her reunion with her offspring, and
excused herself in cryptic language for the lateness of her return,
Nettie restored the baby to the crib and shyly invited Miss Bart to
the rocking-chair near the stove.

“We’ve got a parlour too,” she explained with pardonable pride;
“but I guess it’s warmer in here, and I don’t want to leave you
alone while I’m getting baby’s supper.”

On receiving Lily’s assurance that she much preferred the friendly
proximity of the kitchen fire, Mrs. Struther proceeded to prepare a
bottle of infantile food, which she tenderly applied to the baby’s
impatient lips; and while the ensuing degustation went on, she
seated herself with a beaming countenance beside her visitor.

“You’re sure you won’t let me warm up a drop of coffee for you,
Miss Bart? There’s some of baby’s fresh milk left over—well,
maybe you’d rather just sit quiet and rest a little while. It’s
too lovely having you here. I’ve thought of it so often that I
can’t believe it’s really come true. I’ve said to George again
and again: ‘I just wish Miss Bart could see me NOW—’ and I used
to watch for your name in the papers, and we’d talk over what you
were doing, and read the descriptions of the dresses you wore. I
haven’t seen your name for a long time, though, and I began to be
afraid you were sick, and it worried me so that George said I’d get
sick myself, fretting about it.” Her lips broke into a reminiscent
smile. “Well, I can’t afford to be sick again, that’s a fact: the
last spell nearly finished me. When you sent me off that time I
never thought I’d come back alive, and I didn’t much care if I did.
You see I didn’t know about George and the baby then.”

She paused to readjust the bottle to the child’s bubbling mouth.

“You precious—don’t you be in too much of a hurry! Was it mad with
mommer for getting its supper so late? Marry Anto’nette—that’s what
we call her: after the French queen in that play at the Garden—I
told George the actress reminded me of you, and that made me fancy
the name.... I never thought I’d get married, you know, and I’d
never have had the heart to go on working just for myself.”

She broke off again, and meeting the encouragement in Lily’s eyes,
went on, with a flush rising under her anaemic skin: “You see I
wasn’t only just SICK that time you sent me off—I was dreadfully
unhappy too. I’d known a gentleman where I was employed—I don’t
know as you remember I did type-writing in a big importing
firm—and—well—I thought we were to be married: he’d gone steady
with me six months and given me his mother’s wedding ring. But I
presume he was too stylish for me—he travelled for the firm, and
had seen a great deal of society. Work girls aren’t looked after
the way you are, and they don’t always know how to look after
themselves. I didn’t . . . and it pretty near killed me when he
went away and left off writing....

“It was then I came down sick—I thought it was the end of
everything. I guess it would have been if you hadn’t sent me off.
But when I found I was getting well I began to take heart in spite
of myself. And then, when I got back home, George came round and
asked me to marry him. At first I thought I couldn’t, because we’d
been brought up together, and I knew he knew about me. But after a
while I began to see that that made it easier. I never could have
told another man, and I’d never have married without telling; but
if George cared for me enough to have me as I was, I didn’t see why
I shouldn’t begin over again—and I did.”

The strength of the victory shone forth from her as she lifted
her irradiated face from the child on her knees. “But, mercy, I
didn’t mean to go on like this about myself, with you sitting there
looking so fagged out. Only it’s so lovely having you here, and
letting you see just how you’ve helped me.” The baby had sunk back
blissfully replete, and Mrs. Struther softly rose to lay the bottle
aside. Then she paused before Miss Bart.

“I only wish I could help YOU—but I suppose there’s nothing on
earth I could do,” she murmured wistfully.

Lily, instead of answering, rose with a smile and held out her
arms; and the mother, understanding the gesture, laid her child in
them.

The baby, feeling herself detached from her habitual anchorage,
made an instinctive motion of resistance; but the soothing
influences of digestion prevailed, and Lily felt the soft weight
sink trustfully against her breast. The child’s confidence in its
safety thrilled her with a sense of warmth and returning life, and
she bent over, wondering at the rosy blur of the little face, the
empty clearness of the eyes, the vague tendrilly motions of the
folding and unfolding fingers. At first the burden in her arms
seemed as light as a pink cloud or a heap of down, but as she
continued to hold it the weight increased, sinking deeper, and
penetrating her with a strange sense of weakness, as though the
child entered into her and became a part of herself.

She looked up, and saw Nettie’s eyes resting on her with tenderness
and exultation.

“Wouldn’t it be too lovely for anything if she could grow up to be
just like you? Of course I know she never COULD—but mothers are
always dreaming the craziest things for their children.”

Lily clasped the child close for a moment and laid her back in her
mother’s arms.

“Oh, she must not do that—I should be afraid to come and see
her too often!” she said with a smile; and then, resisting Mrs.
Struther’s anxious offer of companionship, and reiterating the
promise that of course she would come back soon, and make George’s
acquaintance, and see the baby in her bath, she passed out of the
kitchen and went alone down the tenement stairs.

* * * * *

As she reached the street she realized that she felt stronger
and happier: the little episode had done her good. It was the
first time she had ever come across the results of her spasmodic
benevolence, and the surprised sense of human fellowship took the
mortal chill from her heart.

It was not till she entered her own door that she felt the reaction
of a deeper loneliness. It was long after seven o’clock, and the
light and odours proceeding from the basement made it manifest that
the boarding-house dinner had begun. She hastened up to her room,
lit the gas, and began to dress. She did not mean to pamper herself
any longer, to go without food because her surroundings made it
unpalatable. Since it was her fate to live in a boarding-house, she
must learn to fall in with the conditions of the life. Nevertheless
she was glad that, when she descended to the heat and glare of the
dining-room, the repast was nearly over.

* * * * *

In her own room again, she was seized with a sudden fever of
activity. For weeks past she had been too listless and indifferent
to set her possessions in order, but now she began to examine
systematically the contents of her drawers and cupboard. She had a
few handsome dresses left—survivals of her last phase of splendour,
on the Sabrina and in London—but when she had been obliged to
part with her maid she had given the woman a generous share of
her cast-off apparel. The remaining dresses, though they had lost
their freshness, still kept the long unerring lines, the sweep
and amplitude of the great artist’s stroke, and as she spread
them out on the bed the scenes in which they had been worn rose
vividly before her. An association lurked in every fold: each fall
of lace and gleam of embroidery was like a letter in the record
of her past. She was startled to find how the atmosphere of her
old life enveloped her. But, after all, it was the life she had
been made for: every dawning tendency in her had been carefully
directed toward it, all her interests and activities had been
taught to centre around it. She was like some rare flower grown for
exhibition, a flower from which every bud had been nipped except
the crowning blossom of her beauty.

Last of all, she drew forth from the bottom of her trunk a heap
of white drapery which fell shapelessly across her arm. It was
the Reynolds dress she had worn in the Bry TABLEAUX. It had been
impossible for her to give it away, but she had never seen it since
that night, and the long flexible folds, as she shook them out,
gave forth an odour of violets which came to her like a breath
from the flower-edged fountain where she had stood with Lawrence
Selden and disowned her fate. She put back the dresses one by one,
laying away with each some gleam of light, some note of laughter,
some stray waft from the rosy shores of pleasure. She was still in
a state of highly-wrought impressionability, and every hint of the
past sent a lingering tremor along her nerves.

She had just closed her trunk on the white folds of the Reynolds
dress when she heard a tap at her door, and the red fist of the
Irish maid-servant thrust in a belated letter. Carrying it to the
light, Lily read with surprise the address stamped on the upper
corner of the envelope. It was a business communication from the
office of her aunt’s executors, and she wondered what unexpected
development had caused them to break silence before the appointed
time. She opened the envelope and a cheque fluttered to the floor.
As she stooped to pick it up the blood rushed to her face. The
cheque represented the full amount of Mrs. Peniston’s legacy, and
the letter accompanying it explained that the executors, having
adjusted the business of the estate with less delay than they had
expected, had decided to anticipate the date fixed for the payment
of the bequests.

Lily sat down beside the desk at the foot of her bed, and spreading
out the cheque, read over and over the TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS written
across it in a steely business hand. Ten months earlier the amount
it stood for had represented the depths of penury; but her standard
of values had changed in the interval, and now visions of wealth
lurked in every flourish of the pen. As she continued to gaze at
it, she felt the glitter of the visions mounting to her brain,
and after a while she lifted the lid of the desk and slipped the
magic formula out of sight. It was easier to think without those
five figures dancing before her eyes; and she had a great deal of
thinking to do before she slept.

She opened her cheque-book, and plunged into such anxious
calculations as had prolonged her vigil at Bellomont on the night
when she had decided to marry Percy Gryce. Poverty simplifies
book-keeping, and her financial situation was easier to ascertain
than it had been then; but she had not yet learned the control of
money, and during her transient phase of luxury at the Emporium she
had slipped back into habits of extravagance which still impaired
her slender balance. A careful examination of her cheque-book, and
of the unpaid bills in her desk, showed that, when the latter had
been settled, she would have barely enough to live on for the next
three or four months; and even after that, if she were to continue
her present way of living, without earning any additional money,
all incidental expenses must be reduced to the vanishing point.
She hid her eyes with a shudder, beholding herself at the entrance
of that ever-narrowing perspective down which she had seen Miss
Silverton’s dowdy figure take its despondent way.

It was no longer, however, from the vision of material poverty that
she turned with the greatest shrinking. She had a sense of deeper
impoverishment—of an inner destitution compared to which outward
conditions dwindled into insignificance. It was indeed miserable to
be poor—to look forward to a shabby, anxious middle-age, leading
by dreary degrees of economy and self-denial to gradual absorption
in the dingy communal existence of the boarding-house. But there
was something more miserable still—it was the clutch of solitude at
her heart, the sense of being swept like a stray uprooted growth
down the heedless current of the years. That was the feeling which
possessed her now—the feeling of being something rootless and
ephemeral, mere spin-drift of the whirling surface of existence,
without anything to which the poor little tentacles of self could
cling before the awful flood submerged them. And as she looked
back she saw that there had never been a time when she had had any
real relation to life. Her parents too had been rootless, blown
hither and thither on every wind of fashion, without any personal
existence to shelter them from its shifting gusts. She herself had
grown up without any one spot of earth being dearer to her than
another: there was no centre of early pieties, of grave endearing
traditions, to which her heart could revert and from which it could
draw strength for itself and tenderness for others. In whatever
form a slowly-accumulated past lives in the blood—whether in the
concrete image of the old house stored with visual memories, or
in the conception of the house not built with hands, but made
up of inherited passions and loyalties—it has the same power of
broadening and deepening the individual existence, of attaching
it by mysterious links of kinship to all the mighty sum of human
striving.

Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to
Lily. She had had a premonition of it in the blind motions of her
mating-instinct; but they had been checked by the disintegrating
influences of the life about her. All the men and women she
knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild
centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had
come to her that evening in Nettie Struther’s kitchen.

The poor little working-girl who had found strength to gather up
the fragments of her life, and build herself a shelter with them,
seemed to Lily to have reached the central truth of existence. It
was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant
margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the
frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a
cliff—a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the
lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss.

Yes—but it had taken two to build the nest; the man’s faith as well
as the woman’s courage. Lily remembered Nettie’s words: I KNEW HE
KNEW ABOUT ME. Her husband’s faith in her had made her renewal
possible—it is so easy for a woman to become what the man she loves
believes her to be! Well—Selden had twice been ready to stake his
faith on Lily Bart; but the third trial had been too severe for
his endurance. The very quality of his love had made it the more
impossible to recall to life. If it had been a simple instinct of
the blood, the power of her beauty might have revived it. But the
fact that it struck deeper, that it was inextricably wound up with
inherited habits of thought and feeling, made it as impossible to
restore to growth as a deep-rooted plant torn from its bed. Selden
had given her of his best; but he was as incapable as herself of an
uncritical return to former states of feeling.

There remained to her, as she had told him, the uplifting memory
of his faith in her; but she had not reached the age when a woman
can live on her memories. As she held Nettie Struther’s child in
her arms the frozen currents of youth had loosed themselves and
run warm in her veins: the old life-hunger possessed her, and all
her being clamoured for its share of personal happiness. Yes—it
was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of
it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached
herself from the baser possibilities, and she saw that nothing now
remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.

It was growing late, and an immense weariness once more possessed
her. It was not the stealing sense of sleep, but a vivid wakeful
fatigue, a wan lucidity of mind against which all the possibilities
of the future were shadowed forth gigantically. She was appalled
by the intense cleanness of the vision; she seemed to have broken
through the merciful veil which intervenes between intention and
action, and to see exactly what she would do in all the long
days to come. There was the cheque in her desk, for instance—she
meant to use it in paying her debt to Trenor; but she foresaw
that when the morning came she would put off doing so, would slip
into gradual tolerance of the debt. The thought terrified her—she
dreaded to fall from the height of her last moment with Lawrence
Selden. But how could she trust herself to keep her footing?
She knew the strength of the opposing impulses—she could feel
the countless hands of habit dragging her back into some fresh
compromise with fate. She felt an intense longing to prolong,
to perpetuate, the momentary exaltation of her spirit. If only
life could end now—end on this tragic yet sweet vision of lost
possibilities, which gave her a sense of kinship with all the
loving and foregoing in the world!

She reached out suddenly and, drawing the cheque from her
writing-desk, enclosed it in an envelope which she addressed to
her bank. She then wrote out a cheque for Trenor, and placing it,
without an accompanying word, in an envelope inscribed with his
name, laid the two letters side by side on her desk. After that
she continued to sit at the table, sorting her papers and writing,
till the intense silence of the house reminded her of the lateness
of the hour. In the street the noise of wheels had ceased, and
the rumble of the “elevated” came only at long intervals through
the deep unnatural hush. In the mysterious nocturnal separation
from all outward signs of life, she felt herself more strangely
confronted with her fate. The sensation made her brain reel,
and she tried to shut out consciousness by pressing her hands
against her eyes. But the terrible silence and emptiness seemed to
symbolize her future—she felt as though the house, the street, the
world were all empty, and she alone left sentient in a lifeless
universe.

But this was the verge of delirium . . . she had never hung so
near the dizzy brink of the unreal. Sleep was what she wanted—she
remembered that she had not closed her eyes for two nights. The
little bottle was at her bed-side, waiting to lay its spell upon
her. She rose and undressed hastily, hungering now for the touch of
her pillow. She felt so profoundly tired that she thought she must
fall asleep at once; but as soon as she had lain down every nerve
started once more into separate wakefulness. It was as though a
great blaze of electric light had been turned on in her head, and
her poor little anguished self shrank and cowered in it, without
knowing where to take refuge.

She had not imagined that such a multiplication of wakefulness
was possible: her whole past was reenacting itself at a hundred
different points of consciousness. Where was the drug that could
still this legion of insurgent nerves? The sense of exhaustion
would have been sweet compared to this shrill beat of activities;
but weariness had dropped from her as though some cruel stimulant
had been forced into her veins.

She could bear it—yes, she could bear it; but what strength would
be left her the next day? Perspective had disappeared—the next day
pressed close upon her, and on its heels came the days that were to
follow—they swarmed about her like a shrieking mob. She must shut
them out for a few hours; she must take a brief bath of oblivion.
She put out her hand, and measured the soothing drops into a glass;
but as she did so, she knew they would be powerless against the
supernatural lucidity of her brain. She had long since raised the
dose to its highest limit, but tonight she felt she must increase
it. She knew she took a slight risk in doing so—she remembered
the chemist’s warning. If sleep came at all, it might be a sleep
without waking. But after all that was but one chance in a hundred:
the action of the drug was incalculable, and the addition of a few
drops to the regular dose would probably do no more than procure
for her the rest she so desperately needed....

She did not, in truth, consider the question very closely—the
physical craving for sleep was her only sustained sensation. Her
mind shrank from the glare of thought as instinctively as eyes
contract in a blaze of light—darkness, darkness was what she must
have at any cost. She raised herself in bed and swallowed the
contents of the glass; then she blew out her candle and lay down.

She lay very still, waiting with a sensuous pleasure for the first
effects of the soporific. She knew in advance what form they would
take—the gradual cessation of the inner throb, the soft approach
of passiveness, as though an invisible hand made magic passes over
her in the darkness. The very slowness and hesitancy of the effect
increased its fascination: it was delicious to lean over and look
down into the dim abysses of unconsciousness. Tonight the drug
seemed to work more slowly than usual: each passionate pulse had to
be stilled in turn, and it was long before she felt them dropping
into abeyance, like sentinels falling asleep at their posts. But
gradually the sense of complete subjugation came over her, and she
wondered languidly what had made her feel so uneasy and excited.
She saw now that there was nothing to be excited about—she had
returned to her normal view of life. Tomorrow would not be so
difficult after all: she felt sure that she would have the strength
to meet it. She did not quite remember what it was that she had
been afraid to meet, but the uncertainty no longer troubled her.
She had been unhappy, and now she was happy—she had felt herself
alone, and now the sense of loneliness had vanished.

She stirred once, and turned on her side, and as she did so, she
suddenly understood why she did not feel herself alone. It was
odd—but Nettie Struther’s child was lying on her arm: she felt
the pressure of its little head against her shoulder. She did not
know how it had come there, but she felt no great surprise at the
fact, only a gentle penetrating thrill of warmth and pleasure.
She settled herself into an easier position, hollowing her arm to
pillow the round downy head, and holding her breath lest a sound
should disturb the sleeping child.

As she lay there she said to herself that there was something she
must tell Selden, some word she had found that should make life
clear between them. She tried to repeat the word, which lingered
vague and luminous on the far edge of thought—she was afraid of not
remembering it when she woke; and if she could only remember it and
say it to him, she felt that everything would be well.

Slowly the thought of the word faded, and sleep began to enfold
her. She struggled faintly against it, feeling that she ought
to keep awake on account of the baby; but even this feeling was
gradually lost in an indistinct sense of drowsy peace, through
which, of a sudden, a dark flash of loneliness and terror tore its
way.

She started up again, cold and trembling with the shock: for a
moment she seemed to have lost her hold of the child. But no—she
was mistaken—the tender pressure of its body was still close to
hers: the recovered warmth flowed through her once more, she
yielded to it, sank into it, and slept.