The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton
A Ten-Part Collection
Part Two
Contents of Part Two
Stories
AFTERWARD............................January 1910
THE FULNESS OF LIFE..................December 1893
A VENETIAN NIGHT'S ENTERTAINMENT.....December 1903
XINGU................................December 1911
THE VERDICT..........................June 1908
THE RECKONING........................August 1902
Verse
BOTTICELLI'S MADONNA IN THE LOUVRE...January 1891
THE TOMB OF ILARIA GIUNIGI...........February 1891
THE SONNET...........................November 1891
TWO BACKGROUNDS......................November 1892
EXPERIENCE...........................January 1893
CHARTRES.............................September 1893
LIFE.................................June 1894
AN AUTUMN SUNSET.....................October 1894
AFTERWARD
January 1910
I
"Oh, there IS one, of course, but you'll never know it."
The assertion, laughingly flung out six months earlier in a
bright June garden, came back to Mary Boyne with a sharp
perception of its latent significance as she stood, in the
December dusk, waiting for the lamps to be brought into the
library.
The words had been spoken by their friend Alida Stair, as they
sat at tea on her lawn at Pangbourne, in reference to the very
house of which the library in question was the central, the
pivotal "feature." Mary Boyne and her husband, in quest of a
country place in one of the southern or southwestern counties,
had, on their arrival in England, carried their problem straight
to Alida Stair, who had successfully solved it in her own case;
but it was not until they had rejected, almost capriciously,
several practical and judicious suggestions that she threw it
out: "Well, there's Lyng, in Dorsetshire. It belongs to Hugo's
cousins, and you can get it for a song."
The reasons she gave for its being obtainable on these terms--its
remoteness from a station, its lack of electric light, hot-water
pipes, and other vulgar necessities--were exactly those pleading
in its favor with two romantic Americans perversely in search of
the economic drawbacks which were associated, in their tradition,
with unusual architectural felicities.
"I should never believe I was living in an old house unless I was
thoroughly uncomfortable," Ned Boyne, the more extravagant of the
two, had jocosely insisted; "the least hint of 'convenience'
would make me think it had been bought out of an exhibition, with
the pieces numbered, and set up again." And they had proceeded
to enumerate, with humorous precision, their various suspicions
and exactions, refusing to believe that the house their cousin
recommended was REALLY Tudor till they learned it had no heating
system, or that the village church was literally in the grounds
till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the watersupply.
"It's too uncomfortable to be true!" Edward Boyne had continued
to exult as the avowal of each disadvantage was successively
wrung from her; but he had cut short his rhapsody to ask, with a
sudden relapse to distrust: "And the ghost? You've been
concealing from us the fact that there is no ghost!"
Mary, at the moment, had laughed with him, yet almost with her
laugh, being possessed of several sets of independent
perceptions, had noted a sudden flatness of tone in Alida's
answering hilarity.
"Oh, Dorsetshire's full of ghosts, you know."
"Yes, yes; but that do. I want to have to drive ten
miles to see somebody else's ghost. I want one of my own on the
premises. IS there a ghost at Lyng?"
His rejoinder had made Alida laugh again, and it was then that
she had flung back tantalizingly: "Oh, there IS one, of course,
but you'll never know it."
"Never know it?" Boyne pulled her up. "But what in the world
constitutes a ghost except the fact of its being known for one?"
"I can't say. But that's the story."
"That there's a ghost, but that nobody knows a ghost?"
"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."
"Till afterward?"
"Not till long, long afterward."
"But if once been identified as an unearthly visitant, why
hasn't its signalement been handed down in the family? How has
it managed to preserve its incognito?"
Alida could only shake her head. "ask me. But it has."
"And then suddenly--" Mary spoke up as if from some cavernous
depth of divination--"suddenly, long afterward, one says to self, 'THAT WAS it?'"
She was oddly startled at the sepulchral sound with which her
question fell on the banter of the other two, and she saw the
shadow of the same surprise flit across Alida's clear pupils.
"I suppose so. One just has to wait."
"Oh, hang waiting!" Ned broke in. "Life's too short for a ghost
who can only be enjoyed in retrospect. Can't we do better than
that, Mary?"
But it turned out that in the event they were not destined to,
for within three months of their conversation with Mrs. Stair
they were established at Lyng, and the life they had yearned for
to the point of planning it out in all its daily details had
actually begun for them.
It was to sit, in the thick December dusk, by just such a widehooded fireplace, under just such black oak rafters, with the
sense that beyond the mullioned panes the downs were darkening to
a deeper solitude: it was for the ultimate indulgence in such
sensations that Mary Boyne had endured for nearly fourteen years
the soul-deadening ugliness of the Middle West, and that Boyne
had ground on doggedly at his engineering till, with a suddenness
that still made her blink, the prodigious windfall of the Blue
Star Mine had put them at a stroke in possession of life and the
leisure to taste it. They had never for a moment meant their new
state to be one of idleness; but they meant to give themselves
only to harmonious activities. She had her vision of painting
and gardening (against a background of gray walls), he dreamed of
the production of his long-planned book on the "Economic Basis of
Culture"; and with such absorbing work ahead no existence could
be too sequestered; they could not get far enough from the world,
or plunge deep enough into the past.
Dorsetshire had attracted them from the first by a semblance of
remoteness out of all proportion to its geographical position.
But to the Boynes it was one of the ever-recurring wonders of the
whole incredibly compressed island--a nest of counties, as they
put it--that for the production of its effects so little of a
given quality went so far: that so few miles made a distance, and
so short a distance a difference.
"It's that," Ned had once enthusiastically explained, "that gives
such depth to their effects, such relief to their least
contrasts. They've been able to lay the butter so thick on every
exquisite mouthful."
The butter had certainly been laid on thick at Lyng: the old gray
house, hidden under a shoulder of the downs, had almost all the
finer marks of commerce with a protracted past. The mere fact
that it was neither large nor exceptional made it, to the Boynes,
abound the more richly in its special sense--the sense of having
been for centuries a deep, dim reservoir of life. The life had
probably not been of the most vivid order: for long periods, no
doubt, it had fallen as noiselessly into the past as the quiet
drizzle of autumn fell, hour after hour, into the green fish-pond
between the yews; but these back-waters of existence sometimes
breed, in their sluggish depths, strange acuities of emotion, and
Mary Boyne had felt from the first the occasional brush of an
intenser memory.
The feeling had never been stronger than on the December
afternoon when, waiting in the library for the belated lamps, she
rose from her seat and stood among the shadows of the hearth.
Her husband had gone off, after luncheon, for one of his long
tramps on the downs. She had noticed of late that he preferred
to be unaccompanied on these occasions; and, in the tried
security of their personal relations, had been driven to conclude
that his book was bothering him, and that he needed the
afternoons to turn over in solitude the problems left from the
morning's work. Certainly the book was not going as smoothly as
she had imagined it would, and the lines of perplexity between
his eyes had never been there in his engineering days. Then he
had often looked fagged to the verge of illness, but the native
demon of "worry" had never branded his brow. Yet the few pages
he had so far read to her--the introduction, and a synopsis of
the opening chapter--gave evidences of a firm possession of his
subject, and a deepening confidence in his powers.
The fact threw her into deeper perplexity, since, now that he had
done with "business" and its disturbing contingencies, the one
other possible element of anxiety was eliminated. Unless it were
his health, then? But physically he had gained since they had
come to Dorsetshire, grown robuster, ruddier, and fresher-eyed.
It was only within a week that she had felt ...
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