Edith Wharton
The Letters
About the print version
The Letters
Edith Wharton Illustrator Sigismond de Ivanowski
1st Edition
Century Magazine
New York
1910
Published: 1910
Wharton, Edith. "The Letters."
Century Magazine 80 (Aug. 1910): 485-92; 80 (Sept. 1910):641-50; 80 (Oct. 1910):
812-19.
THE LETTERS
IN THREE PARTS: PART I
By Edith Wharton,
Author of "The House of Mirth," etc.
I
UP the long hill from the station at St.-Cloud, Lizzie West climbed in the
cold spring sunshine. As she breasted the incline, she noticed the first waves
of wistaria over courtyard railings and the high lights of new foliage against
the walls of ivy-matted gardens; and she thought again, as she had thought a
hundred times before, that she had never seen so beautiful a spring.
She was on her way to the Deerings' house, in a street near the hilltop; and
every step was dear and familiar to her. She went there five times a week to
teach little Juliet Deering, the daughter of Mr. Vincent Deering, the
distinguished American artist. Juliet had been her pupil for two years, and day
after day, during that time, Lizzie West had mounted the hill in all weathers;
sometimes with her umbrella bent against a driving rain, sometimes with her
frail cotton parasol unfurled beneath a fiery sun, sometimes with the snow
soaking through her patched boots or a bitter wind piercing her thin jacket,
sometimes with the dust whirling about her and bleaching the flowers of the poor
little hat that had to "carry her through" till next summer.
At first the ascent had seemed tedious enough, as dull as the trudge to her
other lessons. Lizzie was not a heaven-sent teacher; she had no born zeal for
her calling, and though she dealt kindly and dutifully with her pupils, she did
not fly to them on winged feet. But one day something had happened to change the
face of life, and since then the climb to the Deering house had seemed like a
dream-flight up a heavenly stairway.
Her heart beat faster as she remembered it -- no longer in a tumult of
fright and self-reproach, but softly, peacefully, as if brooding over a
possession that none could take from her.
It was on a day of the previous October that she had stopped, after Juliet's
lesson, to ask if she might speak to Juliet's papa. One had always to apply to
Mr. Deering if there was anything to be said about the lessons. Mrs. Deering lay
on her lounge up-stairs, reading greasy relays of dog-eared novels, the choice
of which she left to the cook and the nurse, who were always fetching them
for her from the cabinet de lecture; and it was understood in the house that she
was not to be "bothered" about Juliet. Mr. Deering's interest in his daughter
was fitful rather than consecutive; but at least he was approachable, and
listened sympathetically, if a little absently, stroking his long, fair
mustache, while Lizzie stated her difficulty or put in her plea for maps or
copy-books.
"Yes, yes -- of course -- whatever you think right," he would always assent,
sometimes drawing a five-franc piece from his pocket, and laying it carelessly
on the table, or oftener saying, with his charming smile: "Get what you please,
and just put it on your account, you know."
But this time Lizzie had not come to ask for maps or copy-books, or even to
hint, in crimson misery, -- as once, poor soul! she had had to do, -- that Mr.
Deering had overlooked her last little account -- had probably not noticed that she had left it, some two months earlier, on a
corner of his littered writing-table. That hour had been bad enough, though he
had done his best to make it easy to carry it off gallantly and gaily; but this
was infinitely worse. For she had come to complain of her pupil; to say that,
much as she loved little Juliet, it was useless, unless Mr. Deering could "do
something," to go on with the lessons.
"It wouldn't be honest -- I should be robbing you; I'm not sure that I
haven't already," she half laughed, through mounting tears, as she put her case.
Little Juliet would not work, would not obey. Her poor, little, drifting
existence floated aimlessly between the kitchen and the lingerie, and all the
groping tendrils of her curiosity were fastened about the doings of the
backstairs.
It was the same kind of curiosity that Mrs. Deering, overhead in her
drug-scented room, lavished on her dog-eared novels and on the "society notes" of
the morning paper; but since Juliet's horizon was not yet wide enough to embrace
these loftier objects, her interest was centered in the anecdotes that Celeste
and Suzanne brought back from the market and the library. That these were not
always of an edifying nature the child's artless prattle too often betrayed; but
unhappily they occupied her fancy to the complete exclusion of such nourishing
items as dates and dynasties, and the sources of the principal European rivers.
At length the crisis became so acute that poor Lizzie felt herself bound to
resign her charge or ask Mr. Deering's intervention; and for Juliet's sake she
chose the harder alternative. It was hard to speak to him not only because one
hated still more to ascribe it to such vulgar causes, but because one blushed to
bring them to the notice of a spirit engaged with higher things. Mr. Deering was
very busy at that moment: he had a new picture "on." And Lizzie entered the
studio with the flutter of one profanely intruding on some sacred rite; she
almost heard the rustle of retreating wings as she approached.
And then -- and then -- how differently it had all turned out! Perhaps it
wouldn't have, if she hadn't been such a goose -- she who so seldom cried, so
prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering cageful of
"feelings." But if she had cried, it was because he had looked at her so kindly,
so softly, and because she had nevertheless felt him so pained and shamed by
what she said. The pain, of course, lay for both in the implication behind her
words -- in the one word they left unspoken. If little Juliet was as she was, it
was because of the mother up-stairs -- the mother who had given her child her
futile impulses, and grudged her the care that might have guided them. The
wretched case so obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr.
Deering had murmured, "Of course if my wife were not an invalid," they both
turned with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant "bad example" of Celeste and
Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended in his crying out,
"All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?"
"But if I do her no good?" Lizzie wailed; and it was then that, -- when he
took her hand and assured her gently, "But you do, you do!" -- it was then that,
in the traditional phrase, she "brokedown," and her conventional protest
quivered off into tears.
"You do me good, at any rate -- you make the house seem less like a desert,"
she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself drawn to him, and they
kissed each other through her weeping.
They kissed each other -- there was the new fact. One does not, if one is a
poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin's Pension Suisse at Passy, and if one
has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to other eyes -- one
does not, under these common but defenseless conditions, arrive at the age of
twenty-five without being now and then kissed, -- waylaid once by a noisy
student between two doors, surprised once by one's gray-bearded professor as one
bent over the "theme" he was correcting, -- but these episodes, if they tarnish
the surface, do not reach the heart: it is not the kiss endured, but the kiss
returned, that lives. And Lizzie West's first kiss was for Vincent Deering.
As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her -- something deeper
than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of Mrs. Deering. A
sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out blindly to seek the
sun.
She might have felt differently, perhaps, -- the shame and penitence might
have prevailed, -- had she not known him so kind and tender, and guessed him so
baffled, poor, and disappointed. She knew the failure of his married life, and
she divined a corresponding failure in his artistic career. Lizzie, who had made
her own faltering snatch at the same laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency
to bear on the question of his ...
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