_ 17
Miss Bart had not revealed to Gerty the full extent of her
anxiety. She was in fact in urgent and immediate need of money:
money to meet the vulgar weekly claims which could neither be
deferred nor evaded. To give up her apartment, and shrink to the
obscurity of a boarding-house, or the provisional hospitality of
a bed in Gerty Farish's sitting-room, was an expedient which
could only postpone the problem confronting her; and it seemed
wiser as well as more agreeable to remain where she was and find
some means of earning her living. The possibility of having to do
this was one which she had never before seriously considered, and
the discovery that, as a bread-winner, she was likely to prove as
helpless and ineffectual as poor Miss Silverton, was a severe
shock to her self-confidence.
Having been accustomed to take herself at the popular valuation,
as a person of energy and resource, naturally fitted to dominate
any situation in which she found herself, she vaguely imagined
that such gifts would be of value to seekers after social
guidance; but there was unfortunately no specific head under
which the art of saying and doing the right thing could be
offered in the market, and even Mrs. Fisher's resourcefulness
failed before the difficulty of discovering a workable vein in
the vague wealth of Lily's graces. Mrs. Fisher was full of
indirect expedients for enabling her friends to earn a living,
and could conscientiously assert that she had put several
opportunities of this kind before Lily; but more legitimate
methods of bread-winning were as much out of her line as they
were beyond the capacity of the sufferers she was generally
called upon to assist. Lily's failure to profit by the chances
already afforded her might, moreover, have justified the
abandonment of farther effort on her behalf; but Mrs. Fisher's
inexhaustible good-nature made her an adept at creating
artificial demands in response to an actual supply. In the
pursuance of this end she at once started on a voyage of
discovery in Miss Bart's behalf; and as the result of her
explorations she now summoned the latter with the
announcement that she had "found something."
Left to herself, Gerty mused distressfully upon her friend's
plight, and her own inability to relieve it. It was clear to her
that Lily, for the present, had no wish for the kind of help she
could give. Miss Farish could see no hope for her friend but in a
life completely reorganized and detached from its old
associations; whereas all Lily's energies were centred in the
determined effort to hold fast to those associations, to keep
herself visibly identified with them, as long as the illusion
could be maintained. Pitiable as such an attitude seemed to
Gerty, she could not judge it as harshly as Selden, for instance,
might have done. She had not forgotten the night of emotion when
she and Lily had lain in each other's arms, and she had seemed to
feel her very heart's blood passing into her friend. The
sacrifice she had made had seemed unavailing enough; no trace
remained in Lily of the subduing influences of that hour; but
Gerty's tenderness, disciplined by long years of contact with
obscure and inarticulate suffering, could wait on its object with
a silent forbearance which took no account of time. She could
not, however, deny herself the solace of taking anxious counsel
with Lawrence Selden, with whom, since his return from Europe,
she had renewed her old relation of cousinly confidence.
Selden himself had never been aware of any change in their
relation. He found Gerty as he had left her, simple, undemanding
and devoted, but with a quickened intelligence of the heart which
he recognized without seeking to explain it. To Gerty herself it
would once have seemed impossible that she should ever again talk
freely with him of Lily Bart; but what had passed in the secrecy
of her own breast seemed to resolve itself, when the mist of the
struggle cleared, into a breaking down of the bounds of self, a
deflecting of the wasted personal emotion into the general
current of human understanding.
It was not till some two weeks after her visit from Lily that
Gerty had the opportunity of communicating her fears to Selden.
The latter, having presented himself on a Sunday afternoon, had
lingered on through the dowdy animation of his cousin's
tea-hour, conscious of something in her voice and eye which
solicited a word apart; and as soon as the last visitor was gone
Gerty opened her case by asking how lately he had seen Miss Bart.
Selden's perceptible pause gave her time for a slight stir of
surprise.
"I haven't seen her at all--I've perpetually missed seeing her
since she came back."
This unexpected admission made Gerty pause too; and she was still
hesitating on the brink of her subject when he relieved her by
adding: "I've wanted to see her--but she seems to have been
absorbed by the Gormer set since her return from Europe."
"That's all the more reason: she's been very unhappy."
"Unhappy at being with the Gormers?"
"Oh, I don't defend her intimacy with the Gormers; but that too
is at an end now, I think. You know people have been very unkind
since Bertha Dorset quarrelled with her."
"Ah---" Selden exclaimed, rising abruptly to walk to the window,
where he remained with his eyes on the darkening street while his
cousin continued to explain: "Judy Trenor and her own family have
deserted her too--and all because Bertha Dorset has said such
horrible things. And she is very poor--you know Mrs. Peniston cut
her off with a small legacy, after giving her to understand that
she was to have everything."
"Yes--I know," Selden assented curtly, turning back into the
room, but only to stir about with restless steps in the
circumscribed space between door and window. "Yes--she's been
abominably treated; but it's unfortunately the precise thing that
a man who wants to show his sympathy can't say to her."
His words caused Gerty a slight chill of disappointment. "There
would be other ways of showing your sympathy," she suggested.
Selden, with a slight laugh, sat down beside her on the little
sofa which projected from the hearth. "What are you thinking of,
you incorrigible missionary?" he asked.
Gerty's colour rose, and her blush was for a moment her only
answer. Then she made it more explicit by saying: "I am
thinking of the fact that you and she used to be great
friends--that she used to care immensely for what you thought of
her--and that, if she takes your staying away as a sign of what
you think now, I can imagine its adding a great deal to her
unhappiness."
"My dear child, don't add to it still more--at least to your
conception of it--by attributing to her all sorts of
susceptibilities of your own." Selden, for his life, could not
keep a note of dryness out of his voice; but he met Gerty's look
of perplexity by saying more mildly: "But, though you immensely
exaggerate the importance of anything I could do for Miss Bart,
you can't exaggerate my readiness to do it--if you ask me to." He
laid his hand for a moment on hers, and there passed between
them, on the current of the rare contact, one of those exchanges
of meaning which fill the hidden reservoirs of affection. Gerty
had the feeling that he measured the cost of her request as
plainly as she read the significance of his reply; and the sense
of all that was suddenly clear between them made her next words
easier to find.
"I do ask you, then; I ask you because she once told me that you
had been a help to her, and because she needs help now as she has
never needed it before. You know how dependent she has always
been on ease and luxury--how she has hated what was shabby and
ugly and uncomfortable. She can't help it--she was brought up
with those ideas, and has never been able to find her way out of
them. But now all the things she cared for have been taken from
her, and the people who taught her to care for them have
abandoned her too; and it seems to me that if some one could
reach out a hand and show her the other side--show her how much
is left in life and in herself---" Gerty broke off, abashed at
the sound of her own eloquence, and impeded by the difficulty of
giving precise expression to her vague yearning for her friend's
retrieval. "I can't help her myself: she's passed out of my
reach," she continued. "I think she's afraid of being a burden to
me. When she was last here, two weeks ago, she seemed dreadfully
worried about her future: she said Carry Fisher was trying to
find something for her to do. A few days later she wrote me that
she had taken a position as private secretary, and that I was not
to be anxious, for everything was all right, and she
would come in and tell me about it when she had time; but she has
never come, and I don't like to go to her, because I am afraid of
forcing myself on her when I'm not wanted. Once, when we were
children, and I had rushed up after a long separation, and thrown
my arms about her, she said:'Please don't kiss me unless I ask
you to, Gerty'--and she DID ask me, a minute later; but since
then I've always waited to be asked."
Selden had listened in silence, with the concentrated look which
his thin dark face could assume when he wished to guard it
against any involuntary change of expression. When his cousin
ended, he said with a slight smile: "Since you've learned the
wisdom of waiting, I don't see why you urge me to rush in_ n but
the troubled appeal of her eyes made him add, as he rose to take
leave: "Still, I'll do what you wish, and not hold you
responsible for my failure." Selden's avoidance of Miss Bart had
not been as unintentional as he had allowed his cousin to think.
At first, indeed, while the memory of their last hour at Monte
Carlo still held the full heat of his indignation, he had
anxiously watched for her return; but she had disappointed him by
lingering in England, and when she finally reappeared it happened
that business had called him to the West, whence he came back
only to learn that she was starting for Alaska with the Gormers.
The revelation of this suddenly-established intimacy effectually
chilled his desire to see her. If, at a moment when her whole
life seemed to be breaking up, she could cheerfully commit its
reconstruction to the Gormers, there was no reason why such
accidents should ever strike her as irreparable. Every step she
took seemed in fact to carry her farther from the region where,
once or twice, he and she had met for an illumined moment; and
the recognition of this fact, when its first pang had been
surmounted, produced in him a sense of negative relief. It was
much simpler for him to judge Miss Bart by her habitual conduct
than by the rare deviations from it which had thrown her so
disturbingly in his way; and every act of hers which made the
recurrence of such deviations more unlikely, confirmed the sense
of relief with which he returned to the conventional view of her.
But Gerty Farish's words had sufficed to make him see how
little this view was really his, and how impossible it was for
him to live quietly with the thought of Lily Bart. To hear that
she was in need of help--even such vague help as he could
offer--was to be at once repossessed by that thought; and by the
time he reached the street he had sufficiently convinced himself
of the urgency of his cousin's appeal to turn his steps directly
toward Lily's hotel.
There his zeal met a check in the unforeseen news that Miss Bart
had moved away; but, on his pressing his enquiries, the clerk
remembered that she had left an address, for which he presently
began to search through his books.
It was certainly strange that she should have taken this step
without letting Gerty Farish know of her decision; and Selden
waited with a vague sense of uneasiness while the address was
sought for. The process lasted long enough for uneasiness to turn
to apprehension; but when at length a slip of paper was handed
him, and he read on it: "Care of Mrs. Norma Hatch, Emporium
Hotel," his apprehension passed into an incredulous stare, and
this into the gesture of disgust with which he tore the paper in
two, and turned to walk quickly homeward.
When Lily woke on the morning after her translation to the
Emporium Hotel, her first feeling was one of purely physical
satisfaction. The force of contrast gave an added keenness to the
luxury of lying once more in a soft-pillowed bed, and looking
across a spacious sunlit room at a breakfast-table set invitingly
near the fire. Analysis and introspection might come later; but
for the moment she was not even troubled by the excesses of the
upholstery or the restless convolutions of the furniture. The
sense of being once more lapped and folded in ease, as in some
dense mild medium impenetrable to discomfort, effectually stilled
the faintest note of criticism.
When, the afternoon before, she had presented herself to the lady
to whom Carry Fisher had directed her, she had been conscious of
entering a new world. Carry's vague presentment of Mrs. Norma
Hatch (whose reversion to her Christian name was explained as the
result of her latest divorce), left her under the implication of
coming "from the West," with the not unusual extenuation of
having brought a great deal of money with her. She was, in short,
rich, helpless, unplaced: the very subject for Lily's hand. Mrs.
Fisher had not specified the line her friend was to take; she
owned herself unacquainted with Mrs. Hatch, whom she "knew about"
through Melville Stancy, a lawyer in his leisure moments, and the
Falstaff of a certain section of festive dub life. Socially, Mr.
Stancy might have been said to form a connecting link between the
Gormer world and the more dimly-lit region on which Miss Bart now
found herself entering. It was, however, only figuratively that
the illumination of Mrs. Hatch's world could be described as dim:
in actual fact, Lily found her seated in a blaze of electric
light, impartially projected from various ornamental excrescences
on a vast concavity of pink damask and gilding, from which she
rose like Venus from her shell. The analogy was justified by the
appearance of the lady, whose large-eyed prettiness had the
fixity of something impaled and shown under glass. This did not
preclude the immediate discovery that she was some years younger
than her visitor, and that under her showiness, her ease,
the aggression of her dress and voice, there persisted that
ineradicable innocence which, in ladies of her nationality, so
curiously coexists with startling extremes of experience.
The environment in which Lily found herself was as strange to her
as its inhabitants. She was unacquainted with the world of the
fashionable New York hotel--a world over-heated,
over-upholstered, and over-fitted with mechanical appliances for
the gratification of fantastic requirements, while the comforts
of a civilized life were as unattainable as in a desert. Through
this atmosphere of torrid splendour moved wan beings as richly
upholstered as the furniture, beings without definite pursuits or
permanent relations, who drifted on a languid tide of curiosity
from restaurant to concert-hall, from palm-garden to music-room,
from "art exhibit" to dress-maker's opening. High-stepping horses
or elaborately equipped motors waited to carry these ladies into
vague metropolitan distances, whence they returned, still more
wan from the weight of their sables, to be sucked back into the
stifling inertia of the hotel routine. Somewhere behind them, in
the background of their lives, there was doubtless a real past,
peopled by real human activities: they themselves were probably
the product of strong ambitions, persistent energies, diversified
contacts with the wholesome roughness of life; yet they had no
more real existence than the poet's shades in limbo.
Lily had not been long in this pallid world without discovering
that Mrs. Hatch was its most substantial figure. That lady,
though still floating in the void, showed faint symptoms of
developing an outline; and in this endeavour she was actively
seconded by Mr. Melville Stancy. It was Mr. Stancy, a man of
large resounding presence, suggestive of convivial occasions and
of a chivalry finding expression in "first-night" boxes and
thousand dollar bonbonnieres, who had transplanted Mrs. Hatch
from the scene of her first development to the higher stage of
hotel life in the metropolis. It was he who had selected the
horses with which she had taken the blue ribbon at the Show, had
introduced her to the photographer whose portraits of her formed
the recurring ornament of "Sunday Supplements," and had got
together the group which constituted her social world. It was a
small group still, with heterogeneous figures suspended
in large unpeopled spaces; but Lily did not take long to learn
that its regulation was no longer in Mr. Stancy's hands. As often
happens, the pupil had outstripped the teacher, and Mrs. Hatch
was already aware of heights of elegance as well as depths of
luxury beyond the world of the Emporium. This discovery at once
produced in her a craving for higher guidance, for the adroit
feminine hand which should give the right turn to her
correspondence, the right "look" to her hats, the right
succession to the items of her MENUS. It was, in short, as the
regulator of a germinating social life that Miss Bart's guidance
was required; her ostensible duties as secretary being restricted
by the fact that Mrs. Hatch, as yet, knew hardly any one to write
to. _