Chapter 12

Old-fashioned New York dined at seven, and after dinner people still paid calls. Archer's set laughed at the custom, but most people kept it.

The young man walked up the long, almost empty Fifth Avenue from Waverley Place. Carriages waited before the Reggie Chiverses', where a dinner for the Duke was going on. At times an elderly gentleman passed in heavy overcoat and muffler, a thick warm neck-cloth. Each climbed a brown stone doorstep and disappeared into a gas-lit hall.

So in Washington Square Archer noted old Mr. du Lac calling on his cousins the Dagonets. At West Tenth Street, Mr. Skipworth of his own firm was clearly on his way to the Miss Lannings.

Farther up, Beaufort appeared on his own doorstep, dark against a blaze of light. He came down to his private brougham and rolled away to some secret place, the kind one does not name.

It was not an Opera night, and no one was giving a party. The trip was surely secret. Archer thought of a little house beyond Lexington Avenue. Flower-boxes and pretty new curtains now showed at its windows. Before its freshly painted door, Miss Fanny Ring's yellow brougham often stood waiting.

Mrs. Archer's world was a small and slippery pyramid — wide below, sharp on top. Beyond it lay an almost unmapped quarter, home of the artists, the musicians, and "people who wrote."

These scattered human beings showed no wish to mix with society. Their ways were odd, but mostly respectable, people said. They kept to themselves.

Medora Manson, in her rich days, once started a "literary salon," an evening gathering for writers and talk. But the writers did not come, and it soon died.

Others tried too. One household was the Blenkers' — a mother full of feeling, never silent, and three untidy daughters who copied her. There one met Edwin Booth, Patti, William Winter, and the new Shakespearian actor George Rignold. And one met the men of the magazines and the judges of new music and books.

Mrs. Archer's group felt a certain fear of these persons — odd, uncertain, with unknown things in their background.

Yet the Archer set deeply respected literature and art. Mrs. Archer often told her children how much finer society once was. It included Washington Irving, Fitz-Greene Halleck, and the poet of "The Culprit Fay." The most famous authors of that generation were "gentlemen."

The unknown men who came after perhaps had gentlemanly feelings. But their origin, their appearance, their hair, and their closeness to the stage and the Opera set them apart. The old New York measures did not fit them.

"When I was a girl," Mrs. Archer used to say, "we knew everybody between the Battery and Canal Street. And only the people one knew had carriages. It was easy then to place anyone. Now one cannot tell, and I prefer not to try."

Only old Catherine Mingott, perhaps, could bridge that deep space. She judged nobody's morals, and cared as little for fine social lines as a newcomer risen from nothing. But she never opened a book or looked at a picture.

She liked music only for its memories of grand nights at the Italiens, the Paris opera house. Those were her great days at the Tuileries, the French court.

Beaufort, her match in daring, could perhaps bring the two worlds together. But his grand house made easy, friendly visiting impossible. So did his footmen in silk stockings, the long fine socks of grand servants.

Besides, Beaufort read as little as old Mrs. Mingott — that is, not at all. To him, "fellows who wrote" were the paid servants of rich men's pleasures. No one rich enough to change his opinion ever questioned it.

Archer grew up knowing all this. It was part of his universe. But he knew of societies where things went the other way. There, painters and poets, writers, men of science, and even great actors were wanted as eagerly as Dukes.

He often pictured life in drawing-rooms where Mérimée led the talk. His "Lettres à une Inconnue" — "Letters to an Unknown Woman" — was a book Archer kept near him. There one might hear Thackeray, Browning, or William Morris. But in New York such things were unthinkable, and unsettling to think of.

Archer knew most of the "fellows who wrote," and the musicians and painters. He met and enjoyed them at the Century, or at the little new clubs of music and theater. At the Blenkers' he was bored, for eager and badly dressed women passed the artists around like rare caught things.

Even after his best talks with Ned Winsett, he came away feeling the same thing. If his world was small, theirs was too. Only a new stage of manners, joining the two, could make either larger.

All this came back as he tried to picture the society where the Countess Olenska once lived and suffered. Perhaps she also tasted strange joys there.

She once told him, amused, that her grandmother Mingott and the Wellands objected to her street. She was living, they said, in a "Bohemian" quarter, given over to "people who wrote." Bohemian meant the free, poor, careless world of artists.

But her family did not dislike the danger of that world. They disliked the poverty. That fine shade escaped her. She thought they found literature itself shameful.

She herself had no fear of it. Books lay all about her drawing-room, where they were usually thought "out of place." Most were novels. Their new names made Archer curious: Paul Bourget, Huysmans, and the Goncourt brothers.

He turned these things over as he came to her door. Once more he felt how strangely she turned his values upside down. To be of use in her present trouble, he must think himself into conditions wholly unlike his own.

Nastasia opened the door with a strange little smile. On the bench lay a heavy overcoat lined with dark, costly fur.

On it sat a tall opera hat of dull silk, the kind made to fold flat. Inside it, the letters J. B. stood in gold. Beside them lay a white silk muffler.

There was no mistaking it. These costly things were Julius Beaufort's.

Archer was so angry that he nearly wrote a word on his card and left. Then he remembered his own note. Out of too much delicacy, he had not said that he wished to see her alone. He could blame only himself if her door stood open to others.

He walked in with one firm plan: to make Beaufort feel unwanted, and to stay after him.

The banker stood leaning against the shelf above the fireplace. Over the shelf hung an old cloth with fine sewn patterns. Heavy candle holders kept it in place, with real church candles, yellow with age.

Beaufort pushed out his chest, his shoulders against the shelf, his weight on one large, shining shoe. As Archer entered, he was smiling down at the lady of the house.

Madame Olenska sat on a sofa at a right angle to the fireplace. Behind it, a table banked with flowers made a screen. Archer knew those orchids and azaleas, rich flowers from Beaufort's hot-houses. Hot-houses were warm glass houses for flowers.

Against them she sat half-lying, head resting on one hand, her wide sleeve leaving the arm bare to the elbow.

Ladies who received in the evening usually wore "simple dinner dresses." This meant a tight, stiff dress of silk, slightly open at the neck, with lace filling the small opening. The tight sleeves ended in a fold, showing just enough wrist. On the wrist shone an old-style gold band, or a band of velvet.

But Madame Olenska paid no attention to tradition. She wore a long dress of red velvet, edged about the chin and down the front with shining black fur.

Archer remembered a picture seen in Paris, by the new painter Carolus Duran. His pictures were the talk of the Salon, the great yearly Paris art show. In it, a lady wore one of these bold, close-wrapping dresses, her chin soft in fur.

Something in it was wrong in a daring way — fur worn in the evening, in a heated room. A covered throat, and bare arms. But the effect, without question, was pleasing.

"Lord love us — three whole days at Skuytercliff!" Beaufort was saying loudly, unkindly, as Archer entered. "You'd better take all your furs, and a hot-water-bottle."

"Why? Is the house so cold?" she asked. She held out her left hand to Archer, as if she strangely expected him to kiss it.

"No. But the missus is," said Beaufort, with a careless nod at Archer. "The missus" was his rude word for the lady of the house.

"But I thought her so kind. She came herself to invite me. Granny says I must go."

"Granny would, of course. And it's a shame. You're going to miss the little oyster supper I planned for you at Delmonico's next Sunday. Campanini and Scalchi will be there, and a lot of amusing people."

She looked from the banker to Archer, in doubt.

"Ah — that is hard to refuse! Except for one evening at Mrs. Struthers's, I have not met a single artist since I came here."

"What kind of artists? I know one or two painters, very good fellows. I could bring them to see you, if you'd allow me," Archer said. It was daring, for him.

"Painters? Are there painters in New York?" asked Beaufort. His tone said plainly that there could be none, since he did not buy their pictures.

Madame Olenska turned to Archer with her quiet, serious smile. "That would be charming. But I really meant artists of the theater — singers, actors, musicians. My husband's house was always full of them."

She said the words "my husband" as if nothing dark hung about them. Her tone seemed almost to sigh over the lost joys of her married life. Was it lightness in her, Archer wondered, or was she hiding what she felt? She was risking her good name to break with her past. Yet she touched it so easily.

"I do think the imprévu adds to one's pleasure," she said to both men. Imprévu is French for "the unexpected." "It is perhaps a mistake to see the same people every day."

"It is deadly dull, anyhow. New York is dying of dullness," said Beaufort, annoyed. "And when I try to wake it up for you, you turn your back on me."

He pressed on. "Come — think again! Sunday is your last chance, for Campanini leaves next week for Baltimore and Philadelphia. I have a private room, and a Steinway piano. They'll sing all night for me."

"How lovely! May I think it over, and write to you tomorrow morning?"

She spoke in a friendly way, yet with the smallest hint that he should go. Beaufort felt it. No one ever sent him away. He stood staring, a hard line between his eyes.

"Why not now?"

"It is too serious a question to decide at this late hour."

"Do you call it late?"

She returned his look coolly. "Yes. Because I still have to talk business with Mr. Archer for a little while."

"Ah," said Beaufort sharply. There was no arguing with her tone. He lifted his shoulders, recovered his calm, and kissed her hand with a practiced air.

From the doorway he called back. "I say, Newland — persuade the Countess to stay in town, and of course you're included in the supper." Then he left the room with his heavy, important step.

For a moment Archer thought Mr. Letterblair had told her of his coming. But her next words had nothing to do with it, and he changed his mind.

"You know painters, then? You live in their milieu?" she asked, her eyes full of interest. Milieu is French for the world one lives in.

"Oh, not exactly. I don't know that the arts have a milieu here at all. They are more like a thin, half-empty edge of the town."

"But you care for such things?"

"Greatly. When I am in Paris or London, I never miss a show of new pictures. I try to keep up."

She looked down at the tip of the small shining boot under her long dress.

"I used to care greatly too. My life was full of such things. But now I want to try not to."

"You want to try not to?"

"Yes. I want to cast off my old life, all of it. I want to become just like everybody else here."

Archer went red. "You will never be like everybody else," he said.

She raised her straight eyebrows a little. "Ah, don't say that. If you knew how I hate to be different!"

Her face grew as dark and still as a tragic mask, the sad fixed face of old plays. She leaned forward, holding her knee in her thin hands, and looked past him into far dark distance.

"I want to get away from it all," she said again.

He waited, and cleared his throat. "I know. Mr. Letterblair has told me."

"Ah?"

"That is why I have come. He asked me to — you see, I am in the firm."

She looked surprised, and then her eyes grew bright. "You mean you can manage it for me? I can talk to you instead of Mr. Letterblair? Oh, that will be so much easier!"

Her tone touched him, and his confidence grew along with his satisfaction in himself. He saw now that she had spoken of business to Beaufort only to get rid of him. It felt like winning the field.

"I am here to talk about it," he said again.

She sat silent, her head resting on the sofa's back. Her face looked pale, its light put out by the rich red of her dress. All at once she struck Archer as a sad, even pitiful figure.

"Now we are coming to hard facts," he thought. He felt himself pull back, deep inside — the very habit he blamed in his mother and her generation.

He had almost no practice with unusual situations. Even the words for them felt foreign — words from novels and the stage. Before what was coming he felt like a boy, unsure of every word.

After a pause, Madame Olenska broke out with sudden force. "I want to be free. I want to wipe out all the past."

"I understand that."

Her face grew warm. "Then you'll help me?"

"First—" He paused. "Perhaps I ought to know a little more."

She seemed surprised. "You know about my husband — my life with him?"

He nodded.

"Well — then — what more is there? Does this country accept such things? I am a Protestant. In such cases as mine, our church allows divorce."

"Certainly not."

They were silent again. Archer felt between them the ghost of Count Olenski's letter, making its ugly face. The letter filled only half a page. It was, as he told Mr. Letterblair, the vague charge of an angry blackguard.

But how much truth lay behind it? Only Count Olenski's wife could tell.

"I have looked through the papers you gave Mr. Letterblair," he said at last.

"Well — can there be anything more hateful?"

"No."

She changed her position slightly, lifting a hand to screen her eyes.

"Of course you know," Archer went on, "that if your husband fights the case — as he threatens to—"

"Yes—?"

"He can say things — things that might be unpl— might be painful for you. He can say them publicly, so that the talk spreads and harms you. Even if—"

"If—?"

"I mean, no matter how empty of truth they are."

Her pause was long. He looked away from her shaded face, down at her other hand, the one on her knee. He learned by heart its shape, and the three rings on her fourth and fifth fingers.

A wedding ring, he noticed, was not among them.

"What harm could such charges do me here, even if he made them publicly?"

The words that rose to his lips were, "My poor child — far more harm here than anywhere else!" He did not say them. He answered instead, in a voice that sounded to him like Mr. Letterblair's.

"New York society is a very small world, compared with the one you lived in. And whatever it looks like, a few people with — well, rather old-fashioned ideas rule it."

She said nothing, and he went on. "Our ideas about marriage and divorce are especially old-fashioned. Our laws favour divorce. Our social customs do not."

"Never?"

"Well — not if the woman has appearances against her, even in the smallest degree. She may be injured. She may be blameless. But if any free, unusual act of hers has laid her open to ugly hints, to insulting talk—"

She let her head sink a little lower. He waited, hoping hard for a flash of anger, or at least one quick cry of "Not true!"

None came.

A little travelling clock sounded softly at her elbow. A piece of wood broke in the fire, and bright points flew up. The quiet room seemed to hold its breath with Archer.

"Yes," she said at last, very low. "That is what my family tell me."

The words gave him a small, quick pain. "It is natural enough—"

"Our family," she corrected herself, and Archer went red. "For you will be my cousin soon," she said gently.

"I hope so."

"And you take their view?"

He stood up and wandered across the room. He stared with empty eyes at a picture on the old red cloth of the wall. Then he came back, unable to decide anything. How could he say, "Yes — if what your husband hints is true, or if you cannot prove it false"?

"Honestly—" she broke in, as he was about to speak.

He looked down into the fire. "Honestly, then — what would you gain? Would it pay for the talk that might come? No — that would surely come."

"But my freedom — is that nothing?"

At that instant a thought flashed across him. The charge in the letter was true, and she hoped to marry the partner of her guilt. If that plan lay in her heart, the laws of the State stood firmly against it.

How was he to tell her? The mere thought made him hard and impatient toward her.

"But are you not as free as air already?" he answered. "Who can touch you? Mr. Letterblair tells me the money question is settled—"

"Oh, yes," she said flatly.

"Well, then — is it worth the risk? What may come could be endlessly painful. Think of the newspapers — how low and dirty they are! It is all stupid and narrow and unjust. But one cannot remake society."

"No," she agreed. Her voice was so small and lost that he felt sudden shame for his hard thoughts.

"In such cases, society nearly always sacrifices the single person. That person is given up, like an offering, for what people call the good of all. People hold on to any custom that keeps the family together. Any custom that protects the children, if there are children," he went on, and could not stop.

He poured out the old ready-made phrases. Her silence seemed to lay some ugly truth bare, and he burned to cover it over.

She would not, or could not, say the one word that would clear the air. So he must not seem to dig at her secret. Better to stay on the surface, in the careful old New York way. Better that than to uncover a wound he could not heal.

He went on. "It is my business, you know, to help you see these things as your own people see them. The Mingotts, the Wellands, the van der Luydens — all your friends and relations. I mean the people who love you best."

"If I did not show you honestly how they judge such questions, it would not be fair of me. Would it?" He pressed the words on her, almost begging, eager to cover that wide-open silence.

She said slowly, "No. It would not be fair."

By now the fire was sinking into grey. One of the lamps made a small sound, asking for attention. Madame Olenska rose, wound it up, and returned to the fire. But she did not sit down again.

Her standing seemed to mean there was nothing more to say. Archer stood up too.

"Very well. I will do what you wish," she said suddenly.

The blood rushed to his forehead. She gave way so suddenly that it shook him. He caught her two hands in his, hardly knowing what he did.

"I — I do want to help you," he said.

"You do help me. Good night, my cousin."

He bent and laid his lips on her hands. They were cold and without life. She drew them away.

He turned to the door, found his coat and hat under the weak gas-light, and pushed into the winter night. And now, too late, the words came — a whole flood of them. They burst up in a man who could not speak when speaking mattered.