Title Page
The Author
The Triumph of Night
The Pelican
The Fullness Of Life
April Showers
A Journey
Afterward
Xingu
About the Publisher
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Wharton was born Edith Newbold Jones into a wealthy New York family on January 24, 1862, at 14 West 23rd St. The third child and only daughter of George Frederic and Lucretia Rhinelander Jones, the young Edith spent much of her childhood in Europe, mainly France, Germany, Italy, developing both her gift for languages and a deep appreciation for beauty – in art, architecture and literature.
At age 17, Edith Jones “came out” into society, making the rounds of dances and parties in Newport and New York, observing the rituals of her privileged world, a world she would later gleefully skewer in her fiction. Her childhood ended with the death of her father in March of 1882, followed by two romantic disappointments. Still unmarried at the age of 23, Edith was rapidly approaching “old maid” status. In 1885 she married Edward Robbins (Teddy) Wharton. Though imperfectly suited for each other, the couple filled their early married years with travel, houses, and dogs.
In 1901, eager to escape Newport, Wharton bought 113-acres in Lenox, then designed and built The Mount, a home that would meet her needs as designer, gardener, hostess, and above all, writer. Every aspect of the estate—including its gardens, architecture, and interior design—evokes the spirit of its creator.
The Whartons would live at The Mount a short ten years. It was a transformational decade for Wharton, full of professional triumphs and emotional turmoil. Here she would write some of her greatest works, including The House of Mirth (1905) and Ethan Frome (1911). All while her marriage disintegrated under the weight of Teddy Wharton’s mental instability. The Whartons sold The Mount in 1911, they divorced in 1913. Edith Wharton moved permanently to France, Teddy returned to his sister’s home in Lenox.
In 1914, when World War I broke out, Edith Wharton was wealthy, famous, recently divorced, and living in her favorite city, Paris. Instead of withdrawing to the safety of England or returning to the United States, Wharton chose to stay and devote herself to creating a complex network of charitable and humanitarian organizations.
At the end of the war, Wharton moved out of Paris to Pavillon Colombe, a suburban villa in the village of St.Brice-sous-Forêt. In 1921, her novel of old New York, The Age of Innocence, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In 1920 she acquired Château Ste.-Claire, a restored convent in the south of France. For the rest of her life, she divided her time between these two homes, devoted to her friends and dogs, writing prolifically, traveling, and gardening. She only returned to the United States twice after her move to France, the final time in 1923 to receive her Honorary Doctorate from Yale.
She died on August 11, 1937, age 75 at Pavillon Colombe. She is buried, in the Cimetière des Gonards in Versailles, close to her good friend Walter Berry.
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IT WAS CLEAR THAT THE sleigh from Weymore had not come; and the shivering young traveller from Boston, who had so confidently counted on jumping into it when he left the train at Northridge Junction, found himself standing alone on the open platform, exposed to the full assault of nightfall and winter.
The blast that swept him came off New Hampshire snow fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black and white landscape. Dark, searching, and sword-like, it alternately muffled and harried its victim, like a bullfighter now whirling his cloak and now planting his darts. This analogy brought home to the young man the fact that he himself had no cloak, and that the overcoat in which he had faced the relatively temperate airs of Boston seemed no thicker than a sheet of paper on the bleak heights of Northridge. George Faxon said to himself that the place was uncommonly well named. It clung to an exposed ledge over the valley from which the train had lifted him, and the wind combed it with teeth of steel that he seemed actually to hear scraping against the wooden sides of the station. Other building there was none: the village lay far down the road, and thither—since the Weymore sleigh had not come—Faxon saw himself under the immediate necessity of plodding through several feet of snow.
He understood well enough what had happened at Weymore: his hostess had forgotten that he was coming. Young as Faxon was, this sad lucidity of soul had been acquired as the result of long experience, and he knew that the visitors who can least afford to hire a carriage are almost always those whom their hosts forget to send for. Yet to say Mrs. Culme had forgotten him was perhaps too crude a way of putting it. Similar incidents led him to think that she had probably told her maid to tell the butler to telephone the coachman to tell one of the grooms (if no one else needed him) to drive over to Northridge to fetch the new secretary; but on a night like this what groom who respected his rights would fail to forget the order?
Faxon's obvious course was to struggle through the drifts to the village, and there rout out a sleigh to convey him to Weymore; but what if, on his arrival at Mrs. Culme's, no one remembered to ask him what this devotion to duty had cost? That, again, was one of the contingencies he had expensively learned to look out for, and the perspicacity so acquired told him it would be cheaper to spend the night at the Northridge inn, and advise Mrs. Culme of his presence there by telephone. He had reached this decision, and was about to entrust his luggage to a vague man with a lantern who seemed to have some loose connection with the railway company, when his hopes were raised by the sound of sleigh bells.
Two vehicles were just dashing up to the station, and from the foremost there sprang a young man swathed in furs.
"Weymore?—No, these are not the Weymore sleighs."
The voice was that of the youth who had jumped to the platform—a voice so agreeable that, in spite of the words, it fell reassuringly on Faxon's ears. At the same moment the wandering station-lantern, casting a transient light on the speaker, showed his features to be in the pleasantest harmony with his voice. He was very fair and very young—hardly in the twenties, Faxon thought—but his face, though full of a morning freshness, was a trifle too thin and fine-drawn, as though a vivid spirit contended in him with a strain of physical weakness. Faxon was perhaps the quicker to notice such delicacies of balance because his own temperament hung on lightly vibrating nerves, which yet, as he believed, would never quite swing him beyond the arc of a normal sensibility.
"You expected a sleigh from Weymore?" the youth continued, standing beside Faxon like a slender column of fur.
Mrs. Culme's secretary explained his difficulty, and the newcomer brushed it aside with a contemptuous "Oh, Mrs. Culme!" that carried both speakers a long way toward reciprocal understanding.
"But then you must be—" The youth broke off with a smile of interrogation.
"The new secretary? Yes. But apparently there are no notes to be answered this evening." Faxon's laugh deepened the sense of solidarity which had so promptly established itself between the two.
The newcomer laughed also. "Mrs. Culme," he explained, "was lunching at my uncle's today, and she said you were due this evening. But seven hours is a long time for Mrs. Culme to remember anything."
"Well," said Faxon philosophically, "I suppose that's one of the reasons why she needs a secretary. And I've always the inn at Northridge," he concluded.
The youth laughed again. He was at the age when predicaments are food for gaiety.
"Oh, but you haven't, though! It burned down last week."
"The deuce it did!" said Faxon; but the humor of the situation struck him also before its inconvenience. His life, for years past, had been mainly a succession of resigned adaptations, and he had learned, before dealing practically with his embarrassments, to extract from most of them a small tribute of amusement.
"Oh, well, there's sure to be somebody in the place who can put me up."
"No one you could put up with. Besides, Northridge is three miles off, and our place—in the opposite direction—is a little nearer." Through the darkness, Faxon saw his friend sketch a gesture of self-introduction. "My name's Frank Rainer, and I'm staying with my uncle at Overdale. I've driven over to meet two friends of his, who are due in a few minutes from New York. If you don't mind waiting till they arrive I'm sure Overdale can do you better than Northridge. We're only down from town for a few days, but the house is always ready for a lot of people."
"But your uncle—?" Faxon could only object, with the odd sense, through his embarrassment, that it would be magically dispelled by his invisible friend's next words.
"Oh, my uncle—you'll see! I answer for HIM! I dare say you've heard of him—John Lavington?"
John Lavington! There was a certain irony in asking if one had heard of John Lavington! Even from a post of observation as obscure as that of Mrs. Culme's secretary, the rumor of John Lavington's money, of his pictures, his politics, his charities and his hospitality, was as difficult to escape as the roar of a cataract in a mountain solitude. It might almost have been said that the one place in which one would not have expected to come upon him was in just such a solitude as now surrounded the speakers—at least in this deepest hour of its desertedness. But it was just like Lavington's brilliant ubiquity to put one in the wrong even there.
"Oh, yes, I've heard of your uncle."
"Then you WILL come, won't you? We've only five minutes to wait," young Rainer urged, in the tone that dispels scruples by ignoring them; and Faxon found himself accepting the invitation as simply as it was offered.
A delay in the arrival of the New York train lengthened their five minutes to fifteen; and as they paced the icy platform Faxon began to see why it had seemed the most natural thing in the world to accede to his new acquaintance's suggestion. It was because Frank Rainer was one of the privileged beings who simplify human intercourse by the atmosphere of confidence and good humor they diffuse. He produced this effect, Faxon noted, by the exercise of no gift save his youth, of no art save his sincerity; but these qualities were revealed in a smile of such appealing sweetness that Faxon felt, as never before, what Nature can achieve when she deigns to match the face with the mind.
He learned that the young man was the ward, and only nephew, of John Lavington, with whom he had made his home since the death of his mother, the great man's sister. Mr. Lavington, Rainer said, had been "a regular brick" to him—"But then he is to every one, you know"—and the young fellow's situation seemed in fact to be perfectly in keeping with his person. Apparently the only shade that had ever rested on him was cast by the physical weakness which Faxon had already detected. Young Rainer had been threatened with a disease of the lungs which, according to the highest authorities, made banishment to Arizona or New Mexico inevitable. "But luckily my uncle didn't pack me off, as most people would have done, without getting another opinion. Whose? Oh, an awfully clever chap, a young doctor with a lot of new ideas, who simply laughed at my being sent away, and said I'd do perfectly well in New York if I didn't dine out too much, and if I dashed off occasionally to Northridge for a little fresh air. So it's really my uncle's doing that I'm not in exile—and I feel no end better since the new chap told me I needn't bother." Young Rainer went on to confess that he was extremely fond of dining out, dancing, and other urban distractions; and Faxon, listening to him, concluded that the physician who had refused to cut him off altogether from these pleasures was probably a better psychologist than his seniors.
"All the same you ought to be careful, you know." The sense of elder brotherly concern that forced the words from Faxon made him, as he spoke, slip his arm impulsively through Frank Rainer's.
The latter met the movement with a responsive pressure. "Oh, I AM: awfully, awfully. And then my uncle has such an eye on me!"
"But if your uncle has such an eye on you, what does he say to your swallowing knives out here in this Siberian wild?"
Rainer raised his fur collar with a careless gesture. "It's not that that does it—the cold's good for me."
"And it's not the dinners and dances? What is it, then?" Faxon good-humoredly insisted; to which his companion answered with a laugh: "Well, my uncle says it's being bored; and I rather think he's right!"
His laugh ended in a spasm of coughing and a struggle for breath that made Faxon, still holding his arm, guide him hastily into the shelter of the fireless waiting room.
Young Rainer had dropped down on the bench against the wall and pulled off one of his fur gloves to grope for a handkerchief. He tossed aside his cap and drew the handkerchief across his forehead, which was intensely white, and beaded with moisture, though his face retained a healthy glow. But Faxon's gaze remained fastened to the hand he had uncovered: it was so long, so colorless, so wasted, so much older than the brow he passed it over.
"It's queer—a healthy face but dying hands," the secretary mused; he somehow wished young Rainer had kept on his glove.
The whistle of the express drew the young men to their feet, and the next moment two heavily furred gentlemen had descended to the platform and were breasting the rigor of the night. Frank Rainer introduced them as Mr. Grisben and Mr. Balch, and Faxon, while their luggage was being lifted into the second sleigh, discerned them, by the roving lantern gleam, to be an elderly gray-headed pair, apparently of the average prosperous business cut.
They saluted their host's nephew with friendly familiarity, and Mr. Grisben, who seemed the spokesman of the two, ended his greeting with a genial—"and many many more of them, dear boy!" which suggested to Faxon that their arrival coincided with an anniversary. But he could not press the inquiry, for the seat allotted him was at the coachman's side, while Frank Rainer joined his uncle's guests inside the sleigh.
A swift flight (behind such horses as one could be sure of John Lavington's having) brought them to tall gateposts, an illuminated lodge, and an avenue on which the snow had been levelled to the smoothness of marble. At the end of the avenue the long house loomed through trees, its principal bulk dark but one wing sending out a ray of welcome; and the next moment Faxon was receiving a violent impression of warmth and light, of hothouse plants, hurrying servants, a vast spectacular oak hall like a stage setting, and, in its unreal middle distance, a small concise figure, correctly dressed, conventionally featured, and utterly unlike his rather florid conception of the great John Lavington.
The shock of the contrast remained with him through his hurried dressing in the large impersonally luxurious bedroom to which he had been shown. "I don't see where he comes in," was the only way he could put it, so difficult was it to fit the exuberance of Lavington's public personality into his host's contracted frame and manner. Mr. Lavington, to whom Faxon's case had been rapidly explained by young Rainer, had welcomed him with a sort of dry and stilted cordiality that exactly matched his narrow face, his stiff hand, the whiff of scent on his evening handkerchief. "Make yourself at home—at home!" he had repeated, in a tone that suggested, on his own part, a complete inability to perform the feat he urged on his visitor. "Any friend of Frank's ... delighted ... make yourself thoroughly at home!"
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IN SPITE OF THE BALMY temperature and complicated conveniences of Faxon's bedroom, the injunction was not easy to obey. It was wonderful luck to have found a night's shelter under the opulent roof of Overdale, and he tasted the physical satisfaction to the full. But the place, for all its ingenuities of comfort, was oddly cold and unwelcoming. He couldn't have said why, and could only suppose that Mr. Lavington's intense personality—intensely negative, but intense all the same—must, in some occult way, have penetrated every corner of his dwelling. Perhaps, though, it was merely that Faxon himself was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than he had known till he came in from the cold, and unutterably sick of all strange houses, and of the prospect of perpetually treading other people's stairs.
"I hope you're not famished?" Rainer's slim figure was in the doorway. "My uncle has a little business to attend to with Mr. Grisben, and we don't dine for half an hour. Shall I fetch you, or can you find your way down? Come straight to the dining room—the second door on the left of the long gallery."
He disappeared, leaving a ray of warmth behind him, and Faxon, relieved, lit a cigarette and sat down by the fire.
Looking about with less haste, he was struck by a detail that had escaped him. The room was full of flowers—a mere "bachelor's room," in the wing of a house opened only for a few days, in the dead middle of a New Hampshire winter! Flowers were everywhere, not in senseless profusion, but placed with the same conscious art he had remarked in the grouping of the blossoming shrubs that filled the hall. A vase of arums stood on the writing table, a cluster of strange-hued carnations on the stand at his elbow, and from wide bowls of glass and porcelain clumps of freesia bulbs diffused their melting fragrance. The fact implied acres of glass —but that was the least interesting part of it. The flowers themselves, their quality, selection and arrangement, attested on some one's part—and on whose but John Lavington's?—a solicitous and sensitive passion for that particular embodiment of beauty. Well, it simply made the man, as he had appeared to Faxon, all the harder to understand!
The half-hour elapsed, and Faxon, rejoicing at the near prospect of food, set out to make his way to the dining room. He had not noticed the direction he had followed in going to his room, and was puzzled, when he left it, to find that two staircases, of apparently equal importance, invited him. He chose the one to his right, and reached, at its foot, a long gallery such as Rainer had described. The gallery was empty, the doors down its length were closed; but Rainer had said: "The second to the left," and Faxon, after pausing for some chance enlightenment which did not come, laid his hand on the second knob to the left.
The room he entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In its centre, about a table lit by veiled lamps, he fancied Mr. Lavington and his guests to be already seated at dinner; then he perceived that the table was covered not with viands but with papers, and that he had blundered into what seemed to be his host's study. As he paused in the irresolution of embarrassment Frank Rainer looked up.
"Oh, here's Mr. Faxon. Why not ask him—?"
Mr. Lavington, from the end of the table, reflected his nephew's smile in a glance of impartial benevolence.
"Certainly. Come in, Mr. Faxon. If you won't think it a liberty—"
Mr. Grisben, who sat opposite his host, turned his solid head toward the door. "Of course Mr. Faxon's an American citizen?"
Frank Rainer laughed. "That all right! ... Oh, no, not one of your pin-pointed pens, Uncle Jack! Haven't you got a quill somewhere?"
Mr. Balch, who spoke slowly and as if reluctantly, in a muffled voice of which there seemed to be very little left, raised his hand to say: "One moment: you acknowledge this to be—?"
"My last will and testament?" Rainer's laugh redoubled. "Well, I won't answer for the 'last.' It's the first one, anyway."
"It's a mere formula," Mr. Balch explained.
"Well, here goes." Rainer dipped his quill in the inkstand his uncle had pushed in his direction, and dashed a gallant signature across the document.
Faxon, understanding what was expected of him, and conjecturing that the young man was signing his will on the attainment of his majority, had placed himself behind Mr. Grisben, and stood awaiting his turn to affix his name to the instrument. Rainer, having signed, was about to push the paper across the table to Mr. Balch; but the latter, again raising his hand, said in his sad imprisoned voice: "The seal—?"
"Oh, does there have to be a seal?"
Faxon, looking over Mr. Grisben at John Lavington, saw a faint frown between his impassive eyes. "Really, Frank!" He seemed, Faxon thought, slightly irritated by his nephew's frivolity.
"Who's got a seal?" Frank Rainer continued, glancing about the table. "There doesn't seem to be one here."
Mr. Grisben interposed. "A wafer will do. Lavington, you have a wafer?"
Mr. Lavington had recovered his serenity. "There must be some in one of the drawers. But I'm ashamed to say I don't know where my secretary keeps these things. He ought, of course, to have seen to it that a wafer was sent with the document."
"Oh, hang it—" Frank Rainer pushed the paper aside: "It's the hand of God—and I'm hungry as a wolf. Let's dine first, Uncle Jack."
"I think I've a seal upstairs," said Faxon suddenly.
Mr. Lavington sent him a barely perceptible smile. "So sorry to give you the trouble—"
"Oh, I say, don't send him after it now. Let's wait till after dinner!"
Mr. Lavington continued to smile on his guest, and the latter, as if under the faint coercion of the smile, turned from the room and ran upstairs. Having taken the seal from his writing-case he came down again, and once more opened the door of the study. No one was speaking when he entered—they were evidently awaiting his return with the mute impatience of hunger, and he put the seal in Rainer's reach, and stood watching while Mr. Grisben struck a match and held it to one of the candles flanking the inkstand. As the wax descended on the paper Faxon remarked again the singular emaciation, the premature physical weariness, of the hand that held it: he wondered if Mr. Lavington had ever noticed his nephew's hand, and if it were not poignantly visible to him now.
With this thought in his mind, Faxon raised his eyes to look at Mr. Lavington. The great man's gaze rested on Frank Rainer with an expression of untroubled benevolence; and at the same instant Faxon's attention was attracted by the presence in the room of another person, who must have joined the group while he was upstairs searching for the seal. The new-comer was a man of about Mr. Lavington's age and figure, who stood directly behind his chair, and who, at the moment when Faxon first saw him, was gazing at young Rainer with an equal intensity of attention. The likeness between the two men—perhaps increased by the fact that the hooded lamps on the table left the figure behind the chair in shadow— struck Faxon the more because of the strange contrast in their expression. John Lavington, during his nephew's blundering attempt to drop the wax and apply the seal, continued to fasten on him a look of half-amused affection; while the man behind the chair, so oddly reduplicating the lines of his features and figure, turned on the boy a face of pale hostility.
The impression was so startling Faxon forgot what was going on about him. He was just dimly aware of young Rainer's exclaiming: "Your turn, Mr. Grisben!" of Mr. Grisben's ceremoniously protesting: "No—no; Mr. Faxon first," and of the pen's being thereupon transferred to his own hand. He received it with a deadly sense of being unable to move, or even to understand what was expected of him, till he became conscious of Mr. Grisben's paternally pointing out the precise spot on which he was to leave his autograph. The effort to fix his attention and steady his hand prolonged the process of signing, and when he stood up—a strange weight of fatigue on all his limbs—the figure behind Mr. Lavington's chair was gone.
Faxon felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man's exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but the door behind Mr. Lavington was screened by a tapestry hanging, and Faxon concluded that the unknown looker-on had merely had to raise it to pass out. At any rate, he was gone, and with his withdrawal the strange weight was lifted. Young Rainer was lighting a cigarette, Mr. Balch meticulously inscribing his name at the foot of the document, Mr. Lavington—his eyes no longer on his nephew— examining a strange white-winged orchid in the vase at his elbow. Everything suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple again, and Faxon found himself responding with a smile to the affable gesture with which his host declared: "And now, Mr. Faxon, we'll dine."
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"I WONDER HOW I BLUNDERED into the wrong room just now; I thought you told me to take the second door to the left," Faxon said to Frank Rainer as they followed the older men down the gallery.
"So I did; but I probably forgot to tell you which staircase to take. Coming from your bedroom, I ought to have said the fourth door to the right. It's a puzzling house, because my uncle keeps adding to it from year to year. He built this room last summer for his modern pictures."
Young Rainer, pausing to open another door, touched an electric button which sent a circle of light about the walls of a long room hung with canvases of the French impressionist school.
Faxon advanced, attracted by a shimmering Monet, but Rainer laid a hand on his arm.
"He bought that last week for a thundering price. But come along— I'll show you all this after dinner. Or HE will rather—he loves it."
"Does he really love things?"
Rainer stared, clearly perplexed at the question. "Rather! Flowers and pictures especially! Haven't you noticed the flowers? I suppose you think his manner's cold; it seems so at first; but he's really awfully keen about things."
Faxon looked quickly at the speaker. "Has your uncle a brother?"
"Brother? No—never had. He and my mother were the only ones."
"Or any relation who—who looks like him? Who might be mistaken for him?"
"Not that I ever heard of. Does he remind you of some one?"
"Yes."
"That's queer. We'll ask him if he's got a double. Come on!"
But another picture had arrested Faxon, and some minutes elapsed before he and his young host reached the dining-room. It was a large room, with the same conventionally handsome furniture and delicately grouped flowers; and Faxon's first glance showed him that only three men were seated about the dining-table. The man who had stood behind Mr. Lavington's chair was not present, and no seat awaited him.
When the young men entered, Mr. Grisben was speaking, and his host, who faced the door, sat looking down at his untouched soup- plate and turning the spoon about in his small dry hand.
"It's pretty late to call them rumors—they were devilish close to facts when we left town this morning," Mr. Grisben was saying, with an unexpected incisiveness of tone.
Mr. Lavington laid down his spoon and smiled interrogatively. "Oh, facts—what are facts! Just the way a thing happens to look at a given minute."
"You haven't heard anything from town?" Mr. Grisben persisted.
"Not a syllable. So you see ... Balch, a little more of that petite marmite. Mr. Faxon ... between Frank and Mr. Grisben, please."