บทที่ บทที่ 2 · 第2章

In the hansom she leaned back with a sigh. Why must a girl pay so

dearly for her least escape from routine? Why could one never do

a natural thing without having to screen it behind a structure of

artifice? She had yielded to a passing impulse in going to Lawrence

Selden’s rooms, and it was so seldom that she could allow herself

the luxury of an impulse! This one, at any rate, was going to cost

her rather more than she could afford. She was vexed to see that,

in spite of so many years of vigilance, she had blundered twice

within five minutes. That stupid story about her dress-maker was

bad enough—it would have been so simple to tell Rosedale that she

had been taking tea with Selden! The mere statement of the fact

would have rendered it innocuous. But, after having let herself

be surprised in a falsehood, it was doubly stupid to snub the

witness of her discomfiture. If she had had the presence of mind to

let Rosedale drive her to the station, the concession might have

purchased his silence. He had his race’s accuracy in the appraisal

of values, and to be seen walking down the platform at the crowded

afternoon hour in the company of Miss Lily Bart would have been

money in his pocket, as he might himself have phrased it. He knew,

of course, that there would be a large house-party at Bellomont,

and the possibility of being taken for one of Mrs. Trenor’s guests

was doubtless included in his calculations. Mr. Rosedale was still

at a stage in his social ascent when it was of importance to

produce such impressions.

The provoking part was that Lily knew all this—knew how easy it

would have been to silence him on the spot, and how difficult it

might be to do so afterward. Mr. Simon Rosedale was a man who

made it his business to know everything about every one, whose

idea of showing himself to be at home in society was to display

an inconvenient familiarity with the habits of those with whom

he wished to be thought intimate. Lily was sure that within

twenty-four hours the story of her visiting her dress-maker at

the Benedick would be in active circulation among Mr. Rosedale’s

acquaintances. The worst of it was that she had always snubbed and

ignored him. On his first appearance—when her improvident cousin,

Jack Stepney, had obtained for him (in return for favours too

easily guessed) a card to one of the vast impersonal Van Osburgh

“crushes”—Rosedale, with that mixture of artistic sensibility and

business astuteness which characterizes his race, had instantly

gravitated toward Miss Bart. She understood his motives, for

her own course was guided by as nice calculations. Training and

experience had taught her to be hospitable to newcomers, since the

most unpromising might be useful later on, and there were plenty

of available OUBLIETTES to swallow them if they were not. But

some intuitive repugnance, getting the better of years of social

discipline, had made her push Mr. Rosedale into his OUBLIETTE

without a trial. He had left behind only the ripple of amusement

which his speedy despatch had caused among her friends; and though

later (to shift the metaphor) he reappeared lower down the stream,

it was only in fleeting glimpses, with long submergences between.

Hitherto Lily had been undisturbed by scruples. In her little set

Mr. Rosedale had been pronounced “impossible,” and Jack Stepney

roundly snubbed for his attempt to pay his debts in dinner

invitations. Even Mrs. Trenor, whose taste for variety had led

her into some hazardous experiments, resisted Jack’s attempts to

disguise Mr. Rosedale as a novelty, and declared that he was the

same little Jew who had been served up and rejected at the social

board a dozen times within her memory; and while Judy Trenor was

obdurate there was small chance of Mr. Rosedale’s penetrating

beyond the outer limbo of the Van Osburgh crushes. Jack gave up the

contest with a laughing “You’ll see,” and, sticking manfully to his

guns, showed himself with Rosedale at the fashionable restaurants,

in company with the personally vivid if socially obscure ladies who

are available for such purposes. But the attempt had hitherto been

vain, and as Rosedale undoubtedly paid for the dinners, the laugh

remained with his debtor.

Mr. Rosedale, it will be seen, was thus far not a factor to be

feared—unless one put one’s self in his power. And this was

precisely what Miss Bart had done. Her clumsy fib had let him see

that she had something to conceal; and she was sure he had a score

to settle with her. Something in his smile told her he had not

forgotten. She turned from the thought with a little shiver, but

it hung on her all the way to the station, and dogged her down the

platform with the persistency of Mr. Rosedale himself.

She had just time to take her seat before the train started; but

having arranged herself in her corner with the instinctive feeling

for effect which never forsook her, she glanced about in the hope

of seeing some other member of the Trenors’ party. She wanted to

get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of

escape that she knew.

Her search was rewarded by the discovery of a very blond young man

with a soft reddish beard, who, at the other end of the carriage,

appeared to be dissembling himself behind an unfolded newspaper.

Lily’s eye brightened, and a faint smile relaxed the drawn lines

of her mouth. She had known that Mr. Percy Gryce was to be at

Bellomont, but she had not counted on the luck of having him to

herself in the train; and the fact banished all perturbing thoughts

of Mr. Rosedale. Perhaps, after all, the day was to end more

favourably than it had begun.

She began to cut the pages of a novel, tranquilly studying her

prey through downcast lashes while she organized a method of

attack. Something in his attitude of conscious absorption told

her that he was aware of her presence: no one had ever been quite

so engrossed in an evening paper! She guessed that he was too shy

to come up to her, and that she would have to devise some means

of approach which should not appear to be an advance on her part.

It amused her to think that any one as rich as Mr. Percy Gryce

should be shy; but she was gifted with treasures of indulgence for

such idiosyncrasies, and besides, his timidity might serve her

purpose better than too much assurance. She had the art of giving

self-confidence to the embarrassed, but she was not equally sure of

being able to embarrass the self-confident.

She waited till the train had emerged from the tunnel and was

racing between the ragged edges of the northern suburbs. Then,

as it lowered its speed near Yonkers, she rose from her seat and

drifted slowly down the carriage. As she passed Mr. Gryce, the

train gave a lurch, and he was aware of a slender hand gripping the

back of his chair. He rose with a start, his ingenuous face looking

as though it had been dipped in crimson: even the reddish tint in

his beard seemed to deepen. The train swayed again, almost flinging

Miss Bart into his arms.

She steadied herself with a laugh and drew back; but he was

enveloped in the scent of her dress, and his shoulder had felt her

fugitive touch.

“Oh, Mr. Gryce, is it you? I’m so sorry—I was trying to find the

porter and get some tea.”

She held out her hand as the train resumed its level rush, and they

stood exchanging a few words in the aisle. Yes—he was going to

Bellomont. He had heard she was to be of the party—he blushed again

as he admitted it. And was he to be there for a whole week? How

delightful!

But at this point one or two belated passengers from the last

station forced their way into the carriage, and Lily had to retreat

to her seat.

“The chair next to mine is empty—do take it,” she said over her

shoulder; and Mr. Gryce, with considerable embarrassment, succeeded

in effecting an exchange which enabled him to transport himself and

his bags to her side.

“Ah—and here is the porter, and perhaps we can have some tea.”

She signalled to that official, and in a moment, with the ease that

seemed to attend the fulfilment of all her wishes, a little table

had been set up between the seats, and she had helped Mr. Gryce to

bestow his encumbering properties beneath it.

When the tea came he watched her in silent fascination while

her hands flitted above the tray, looking miraculously fine and

slender in contrast to the coarse china and lumpy bread. It seemed

wonderful to him that any one should perform with such careless

ease the difficult task of making tea in public in a lurching

train. He would never have dared to order it for himself, lest he

should attract the notice of his fellow-passengers; but, secure in

the shelter of her conspicuousness, he sipped the inky draught with

a delicious sense of exhilaration.

Lily, with the flavour of Selden’s caravan tea on her lips, had

no great fancy to drown it in the railway brew which seemed such

nectar to her companion; but, rightly judging that one of the

charms of tea is the fact of drinking it together, she proceeded

to give the last touch to Mr. Gryce’s enjoyment by smiling at him

across her lifted cup.

“Is it quite right—I haven’t made it too strong?” she asked

solicitously; and he replied with conviction that he had never

tasted better tea.

“I daresay it is true,” she reflected; and her imagination was

fired by the thought that Mr. Gryce, who might have sounded the

depths of the most complex self-indulgence, was perhaps actually

taking his first journey alone with a pretty woman.

It struck her as providential that she should be the instrument

of his initiation. Some girls would not have known how to

manage him. They would have over-emphasized the novelty of the

adventure, trying to make him feel in it the zest of an escapade.

But Lily’s methods were more delicate. She remembered that her

cousin Jack Stepney had once defined Mr. Gryce as the young man

who had promised his mother never to go out in the rain without

his overshoes; and acting on this hint, she resolved to impart a

gently domestic air to the scene, in the hope that her companion,

instead of feeling that he was doing something reckless or unusual,

would merely be led to dwell on the advantage of always having a

companion to make one’s tea in the train.

But in spite of her efforts, conversation flagged after the tray

had been removed, and she was driven to take a fresh measurement

of Mr. Gryce’s limitations. It was not, after all, opportunity but

imagination that he lacked: he had a mental palate which would

never learn to distinguish between railway tea and nectar. There

was, however, one topic she could rely on: one spring that she

had only to touch to set his simple machinery in motion. She had

refrained from touching it because it was a last resource, and she

had relied on other arts to stimulate other sensations; but as a

settled look of dulness began to creep over his candid features,

she saw that extreme measures were necessary.

“And how,” she said, leaning forward, “are you getting on with your

Americana?”

His eye became a degree less opaque: it was as though an incipient

film had been removed from it, and she felt the pride of a skilful

operator.

“I’ve got a few new things,” he said, suffused with pleasure, but

lowering his voice as though he feared his fellow-passengers might

be in league to despoil him.

She returned a sympathetic enquiry, and gradually he was drawn

on to talk of his latest purchases. It was the one subject which

enabled him to forget himself, or allowed him, rather, to remember

himself without constraint, because he was at home in it, and could

assert a superiority that there were few to dispute. Hardly any of

his acquaintances cared for Americana, or knew anything about them;

and the consciousness of this ignorance threw Mr. Gryce’s knowledge

into agreeable relief. The only difficulty was to introduce the

topic and to keep it to the front; most people showed no desire to

have their ignorance dispelled, and Mr. Gryce was like a merchant

whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity.

But Miss Bart, it appeared, really did want to know about

Americana; and moreover, she was already sufficiently informed to

make the task of farther instruction as easy as it was agreeable.

She questioned him intelligently, she heard him submissively; and,

prepared for the look of lassitude which usually crept over his

listeners’ faces, he grew eloquent under her receptive gaze. The

“points” she had had the presence of mind to glean from Selden, in

anticipation of this very contingency, were serving her to such

good purpose that she began to think her visit to him had been the

luckiest incident of the day. She had once more shown her talent

for profiting by the unexpected, and dangerous theories as to the

advisability of yielding to impulse were germinating under the

surface of smiling attention which she continued to present to her

companion.

Mr. Gryce’s sensations, if less definite, were equally agreeable.

He felt the confused titillation with which the lower organisms

welcome the gratification of their needs, and all his senses

floundered in a vague well-being, through which Miss Bart’s

personality was dimly but pleasantly perceptible.

Mr. Gryce’s interest in Americana had not originated with himself:

it was impossible to think of him as evolving any taste of his

own. An uncle had left him a collection already noted among

bibliophiles; the existence of the collection was the only fact

that had ever shed glory on the name of Gryce, and the nephew took

as much pride in his inheritance as though it had been his own

work. Indeed, he gradually came to regard it as such, and to feel a

sense of personal complacency when he chanced on any reference to

the Gryce Americana. Anxious as he was to avoid personal notice, he

took, in the printed mention of his name, a pleasure so exquisite

and excessive that it seemed a compensation for his shrinking from

publicity.

To enjoy the sensation as often as possible, he subscribed to all

the reviews dealing with book-collecting in general, and American

history in particular, and as allusions to his library abounded

in the pages of these journals, which formed his only reading, he

came to regard himself as figuring prominently in the public eye,

and to enjoy the thought of the interest which would be excited

if the persons he met in the street, or sat among in travelling,

were suddenly to be told that he was the possessor of the Gryce

Americana.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was

discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in

proportion to the outer self-depreciation. With a more confident

person she would not have dared to dwell so long on one topic,

or to show such exaggerated interest in it; but she had rightly

guessed that Mr. Gryce’s egoism was a thirsty soil, requiring

constant nurture from without. Miss Bart had the gift of following

an undercurrent of thought while she appeared to be sailing on the

surface of conversation; and in this case her mental excursion

took the form of a rapid survey of Mr. Percy Gryce’s future as

combined with her own. The Gryces were from Albany, and but lately

introduced to the metropolis, where the mother and son had come,

after old Jefferson Gryce’s death, to take possession of his house

in Madison Avenue—an appalling house, all brown stone without and

black walnut within, with the Gryce library in a fire-proof annex

that looked like a mausoleum. Lily, however, knew all about them:

young Mr. Gryce’s arrival had fluttered the maternal breasts of

New York, and when a girl has no mother to palpitate for her she

must needs be on the alert for herself. Lily, therefore, had not

only contrived to put herself in the young man’s way, but had made

the acquaintance of Mrs. Gryce, a monumental woman with the voice

of a pulpit orator and a mind preoccupied with the iniquities of

her servants, who came sometimes to sit with Mrs. Peniston and

learn from that lady how she managed to prevent the kitchen-maid’s

smuggling groceries out of the house. Mrs. Gryce had a kind of

impersonal benevolence: cases of individual need she regarded

with suspicion, but she subscribed to Institutions when their

annual reports showed an impressive surplus. Her domestic duties

were manifold, for they extended from furtive inspections of the

servants’ bedrooms to unannounced descents to the cellar; but she

had never allowed herself many pleasures. Once, however, she had

had a special edition of the Sarum Rule printed in rubric and

presented to every clergyman in the diocese; and the gilt album in

which their letters of thanks were pasted formed the chief ornament

of her drawing-room table.

Percy had been brought up in the principles which so excellent a

woman was sure to inculcate. Every form of prudence and suspicion

had been grafted on a nature originally reluctant and cautious,

with the result that it would have seemed hardly needful for Mrs.

Gryce to extract his promise about the overshoes, so little likely

was he to hazard himself abroad in the rain. After attaining his

majority, and coming into the fortune which the late Mr. Gryce had

made out of a patent device for excluding fresh air from hotels,

the young man continued to live with his mother in Albany; but

on Jefferson Gryce’s death, when another large property passed

into her son’s hands, Mrs. Gryce thought that what she called his

“interests” demanded his presence in New York. She accordingly

installed herself in the Madison Avenue house, and Percy, whose

sense of duty was not inferior to his mother’s, spent all his week

days in the handsome Broad Street office where a batch of pale men

on small salaries had grown grey in the management of the Gryce

estate, and where he was initiated with becoming reverence into

every detail of the art of accumulation.

As far as Lily could learn, this had hitherto been Mr. Gryce’s only

occupation, and she might have been pardoned for thinking it not

too hard a task to interest a young man who had been kept on such

low diet. At any rate, she felt herself so completely in command of

the situation that she yielded to a sense of security in which all

fear of Mr. Rosedale, and of the difficulties on which that fear

was contingent, vanished beyond the edge of thought.

The stopping of the train at Garrisons would not have distracted

her from these thoughts, had she not caught a sudden look of

distress in her companion’s eye. His seat faced toward the door,

and she guessed that he had been perturbed by the approach of an

acquaintance; a fact confirmed by the turning of heads and general

sense of commotion which her own entrance into a railway-carriage

was apt to produce.

She knew the symptoms at once, and was not surprised to be hailed

by the high notes of a pretty woman, who entered the train

accompanied by a maid, a bull-terrier, and a footman staggering

under a load of bags and dressing-cases.

“Oh, Lily—are you going to Bellomont? Then you can’t let me

have your seat, I suppose? But I MUST have a seat in this

carriage—porter, you must find me a place at once. Can’t some one

be put somewhere else? I want to be with my friends. Oh, how do you

do, Mr. Gryce? Do please make him understand that I must have a

seat next to you and Lily.”

Mrs. George Dorset, regardless of the mild efforts of a traveller

with a carpet-bag, who was doing his best to make room for her

by getting out of the train, stood in the middle of the aisle,

diffusing about her that general sense of exasperation which a

pretty woman on her travels not infrequently creates.

She was smaller and thinner than Lily Bart, with a restless

pliability of pose, as if she could have been crumpled up and run

through a ring, like the sinuous draperies she affected. Her small

pale face seemed the mere setting of a pair of dark exaggerated

eyes, of which the visionary gaze contrasted curiously with her

self-assertive tone and gestures; so that, as one of her friends

observed, she was like a disembodied spirit who took up a great

deal of room.

Having finally discovered that the seat adjoining Miss Bart’s

was at her disposal, she possessed herself of it with a farther

displacement of her surroundings, explaining meanwhile that she had

come across from Mount Kisco in her motor-car that morning, and had

been kicking her heels for an hour at Garrisons, without even the

alleviation of a cigarette, her brute of a husband having neglected

to replenish her case before they parted that morning.

“And at this hour of the day I don’t suppose you’ve a single one

left, have you, Lily?” she plaintively concluded.

Miss Bart caught the startled glance of Mr. Percy Gryce, whose own

lips were never defiled by tobacco.

“What an absurd question, Bertha!” she exclaimed, blushing at the

thought of the store she had laid in at Lawrence Selden’s.

“Why, don’t you smoke? Since when have you given it up? What—you

never—— And you don’t either, Mr. Gryce? Ah, of course—how stupid

of me—I understand.”

And Mrs. Dorset leaned back against her travelling cushions with a

smile which made Lily wish there had been no vacant seat beside her

own.