The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton [149]
“I wonder which floor—?” Dallas conjectured; and moving toward the porte-cochère he put his head into the porter’s lodge, and came back to say: “The fifth. It must be the one with the awnings.”
Archer remained motionless, gazing at the upper windows as if the end of their pilgrimage had been attained.
“I say, you know, it’s nearly six,” his son at length reminded him.
The father glanced away at an empty bench under the trees.
“I believe I’ll sit there a moment,” he said.
“Why—aren’t you well?” his son exclaimed.
“Oh, perfectly. But I should like you, please, to go up without me.”
Dallas paused before him, visibly bewildered. “But, I say, Dad: do you mean you won’t come up at all?”
“I don’t know,” said Archer slowly.
“If you don’t she won’t understand.”
“Go, my boy; perhaps I shall follow you.”
Dallas gave him a long look through the twilight.
“But what on earth shall I say?”
“My dear fellow, don’t you always know what to say?” his father rejoined with a smile.
“Very well. I shall say you’re old-fashioned, and prefer walking up the five flights because you don’t like lifts.”
His father smiled again. “Say I’m old-fashioned: that’s enough.”
Dallas looked at him again, and then, with an incredulous gesture, passed out of sight under the vaulted doorway.
Archer sat down on the bench and continued to gaze at the awninged balcony. He calculated the time it would take his son to be carried up in the lift to the fifth floor, to ring the bell, and be admitted to the hall, and then ushered into the drawing room. He pictured Dallas entering that room with his quick assured step and high delightful smile, and wondered if the people were right who said that his boy “took after him.”
Then he tried to see the persons already in the room—for probably at that sociable hour there would be more than one—and among them a dark lady, pale and dark, who would look up quickly, half rise, and hold out a long thin hand with three rings on it ... He thought she would be sitting in a sofa-corner near the fire, with azaleas banked behind her on a table.
“It’s more real to me here than if I went up,” he suddenly heard himself say; and the fear lest that last shadow of reality should lose its edge kept him rooted to his seat as the minutes succeeded each other.
He sat for a long time on the bench in the thickening dusk, his eyes never turning from the balcony. At length a light shone through the windows, and a moment later a man-servant came out on the balcony, drew up the awnings, and closed the shutters.
At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for, Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel.
ENDNOTES
1 (p. 8) “We’ll read Faust together ... by the Italian lakes ... ” he thought: Edith Wharton was acquainted not only with Gounod’s opera of the Faust legend but also with the epic poetic drama by Johann von Goethe (1749-1832) in which Faust, an aging intellectual, makes a contract with the devil, Mephistopheles, to procure immortality. Wharton knew German and copied passages by Goethe into her notebook (unpublished), translating some verses. Her use of the opera in The Age of Innocence not only reproduces the fashion of the day but provides a contrast between Faust’s contract and Newland’s honor and, at the end of the novel, his aging. In the opera, when Faust’s lover, Marguerite, becomes pregnant, he runs off. For Newland Archer, May’s announcement of the coming child seals his fate.
2 (p. 13) like her Imperial namesake, she had won her way to success by strength of will: This passage displays Catherine Mingott’s free spirit in her acquaintance with singers and dancers of note, with European nobility, and even with Catholics. Wharton allies her with Ellen Olenska, Medora Manson, Mrs. Struthers, Ned Winsett—characters in the novel who are not bound by convention. Like Catherine the Great (1729-1796), the powerful Empress with a flamboyant sexual nature, Catherine Mingott has been a patron of the arts, but she never shared in the Czarina’s sexual