________________________________________________
_ 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
comer 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 empoverishment--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 tom 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. _
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