The Early Short Fiction Part Two #(早斯短篇小说(第二部))

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A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

A Ten-Part Collection

Part Two

Edith Wharton

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

AFTERWARD January 1910

"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

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

grounds till she assured them of the deplorable uncertainty of the water-

supply.

"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 won't do. I don't 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 it's a ghost?"

"Well--not till afterward, at any rate."

"Till afterward?"

"Not till long, long afterward."

"But if it's 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. "Don't 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 one's 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

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

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 wide- hooded

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

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

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 in him the undefinable change that made her restless in his absence,

and as tongue-tied in his presence as though it were SHE who had a secret

to keep from him!

The thought that there WAS a secret somewhere between them struck

her with a sudden smart rap of wonder, and she looked about her down the

dim, long room.

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

"Can it be the house?" she mused.

The room itself might have been full of secrets. They seemed to be

piling themselves up, as evening fell, like the layers and layers of velvet

shadow dropping from the low ceiling, the dusky walls of books, the

smoke-blurred sculpture of the hooded hearth.

"Why, of course--the house is haunted!" she reflected.

The ghost--Alida's imperceptible ghost--after figuring largely in the

banter of their first month or two at Lyng, had been gradually discarded as

too ineffectual for imaginative use. Mary had, indeed, as became the

tenant of a haunted house, made the customary inquiries among her few

rural neighbors, but, beyond a vague, "They du say so, Ma'am," the

villagers had nothing to impart. The elusive specter had apparently never

had sufficient identity for a legend to crystallize about it, and after a time

the Boynes had laughingly set the matter down to their profit- and-loss

account, agreeing that Lyng was one of the few houses good enough in

itself to dispense with supernatural enhancements.

"And I suppose, poor, ineffectual demon, that's why it beats its

beautiful wings in vain in the void," Mary had laughingly concluded.

"Or, rather," Ned answered, in the same strain, "why, amid so much

that's ghostly, it can never affirm its separate existence as THE ghost."

And thereupon their invisible housemate had finally dropped out of their

references, which were numerous enough to make them promptly unaware

of the loss.

Now, as she stood on the hearth, the subject of their earlier curiosity

revived in her with a new sense of its meaning--a sense gradually acquired

through close daily contact with the scene of the lurking mystery. It was

the house itself, of course, that possessed the ghost-seeing faculty, that

communed visually but secretly with its own past; and if one could only

get into close enough communion with the house, one might surprise its

secret, and acquire the ghost-sight on one's own account. Perhaps, in his

long solitary hours in this very room, where she never trespassed till the

afternoon, her husband HAD acquired it already, and was silently carrying

the dread weight of whatever it had revealed to him. Mary was too well-

versed in the code of the spectral world not to know that one could not talk

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

about the ghosts one saw: to do so was almost as great a breach of good-

breeding as to name a lady in a club. But this explanation did not really

satisfy her. "What, after all, except for the fun of the frisson," she reflected,

"would he really care for any of their old ghosts?" And thence she was

thrown back once more on the fundamental dilemma: the fact that one's

greater or less susceptibility to spectral influences had no particular

bearing on the case, since, when one DID see a ghost at Lyng, one did not

know it.

"Not till long afterward," Alida Stair had said. Well, supposing Ned

HAD seen one when they first came, and had known only within the last

week what had happened to him? More and more under the spell of the

hour, she threw back her searching thoughts to the early days of their

tenancy, but at first only to recall a gay confusion of unpacking, settling,

arranging of books, and calling to each other from remote corners of the

house as treasure after treasure of their habitation revealed itself to them.

It was in this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain soft

afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the first rapturous

flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of the old house, she had

pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel that opened at her touch, on a

narrow flight of stairs leading to an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the

roof which, from below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for

any but practised feet to scale.

The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown

down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of her

discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow ledge, he had

passed his arm about her while their gaze flew to the long, tossed horizon-

line of the downs, and then dropped contentedly back to trace the

arabesque of yew hedges about the fish-pond, and the shadow of the cedar

on the lawn.

"And now the other way," he had said, gently turning her about within

his arm; and closely pressed to him, she had absorbed, like some long,

satisfying draft, the picture of the gray-walled court, the squat lions on the

gates, and the lime-avenue reaching up to the highroad under the downs.

It was just then, while they gazed and held each other, that she had felt

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

his arm relax, and heard a sharp "Hullo!" that made her turn to glance at

him.

Distinctly, yes, she now recalled she had seen, as she glanced, a

shadow of anxiety, of perplexity, rather, fall across his face; and, following

his eyes, had beheld the figure of a man--a man in loose, grayish clothes,

as it appeared to her--who was sauntering down the lime-avenue to the

court with the tentative gait of a stranger seeking his way. Her short-

sighted eyes had given her but a blurred impression of slightness and

grayness, with something foreign, or at least unlocal, in the cut of the

figure or its garb; but her husband had apparently seen more--seen enough

to make him push past her with a sharp "Wait!" and dash down the

twisting stairs without pausing to give her a hand for the descent.

A slight tendency to dizziness obliged her, after a provisional clutch at

the chimney against which they had been leaning, to follow him down

more cautiously; and when she had reached the attic landing she paused

again for a less definite reason, leaning over the oak banister to strain her

eyes through the silence of the brown, sun-flecked depths below. She

lingered there till, somewhere in those depths, she heard the closing of a

door; then, mechanically impelled, she went down the shallow flights of

steps till she reached the lower hall.

The front door stood open on the mild sunlight of the court, and hall

and court were empty. The library door was open, too, and after listening

in vain for any sound of voices within, she quickly crossed the threshold,

and found her husband alone, vaguely fingering the papers on his desk.

He looked up, as if surprised at her precipitate entrance, but the

shadow of anxiety had passed from his face, leaving it even, as she fancied,

a little brighter and clearer than usual.

"What was it? Who was it?" she asked.

"Who?" he repeated, with the surprise still all on his side.

"The man we saw coming toward the house."

He seemed honestly to reflect. "The man? Why, I thought I saw Peters;

I dashed after him to say a word about the stable-drains, but he had

disappeared before I could get down."

"Disappeared? Why, he seemed to be walking so slowly when we saw

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

him."

Boyne shrugged his shoulders. "So I thought; but he must have got up

steam in the interval. What do you say to our trying a scramble up Meldon

Steep before sunset?"

That was all. At the time the occurrence had been less than nothing,

had, indeed, been immediately obliterated by the magic of their first vision

from Meldon Steep, a height which they had dreamed of climbing ever

since they had first seen its bare spine heaving itself above the low roof of

Lyng. Doubtless it was the mere fact of the other incident's having

occurred on the very day of their ascent to Meldon that had kept it stored

away in the unconscious fold of association from which it now emerged;

for in itself it had no mark of the portentous. At the moment there could

have been nothing more natural than that Ned should dash himself from

the roof in the pursuit of dilatory tradesmen. It was the period when they

were always on the watch for one or the other of the specialists employed

about the place; always lying in wait for them, and dashing out at them

with questions, reproaches, or reminders. And certainly in the distance the

gray figure had looked like Peters.

Yet now, as she reviewed the rapid scene, she felt her husband's

explanation of it to have been invalidated by the look of anxiety on his

face. Why had the familiar appearance of Peters made him anxious? Why,

above all, if it was of such prime necessity to confer with that authority on

the subject of the stable-drains, had the failure to find him produced such a

look of relief? Mary could not say that any one of these considerations had

occurred to her at the time, yet, from the promptness with which they now

marshaled themselves at her summons, she had a sudden sense that they

must all along have been there, waiting their hour.

Weary with her thoughts, she moved toward the window. The library

was now completely dark, and she was surprised to see how much faint

light the outer world still held.

As she peered out into it across the court, a figure shaped itself in the

A Ten-Part Collection Part Two

tapering perspective of bare lines: it looked a mere blot of deeper gray in

the grayness, and for an instant, as it moved toward her, her heart thumped

to the thought, "It's the ghost!"

She had time, in that long instant, to feel suddenly that the man of

whom, two months earlier, she had a brief distant vision from the roof was

now, at his predestined hour, about to reveal himself as NOT having been

Peters; and her spirit sank under the impending fear of the disclosure. But

almost with the next tick of the clock the ambiguous figure, gaining

substance and character, showed itself even to her weak sight as her

husband's; and she turned away to meet him, as he entered, with the

confession of her folly.

"It's really too absurd," she laughed out from the threshold, "but I

never CAN remember!"

"Remember what?" Boyne questioned as they drew together.

"That when one sees the Lyng ghost one never knows it."

Her hand was on his sleeve, and he kept it there, but with no response

in his gesture or in the lines of his fagged, preoccupied face.

"Did you think you'd seen it?" he asked, after an appreciable interval.

"Why, I actually took YOU for it, my dear, in my mad determination

to spot it!"

"Me--just now?" His arm dropped away, and he turned from her with a

faint echo of her laugh. "Really, dearest, you'd better give it up, if that's the

best you can do."

"Yes, I give it up--I give it up. Have YOU?" she asked, turning round

on him abruptly.

The parlor-maid had entered with letters and a lamp, and the light

struck up into Boyne's face as he bent above the tray she presented.

"Have YOU?" Mary perversely insisted, when the servant had

disappeared on her errand of illumination.

"Have I what?" he rejoined absently, the light bringing out the sharp

stamp of worry between his brows as he turned over the letters.

"Given up trying to see the ghost." Her heart beat a little at the

experiment she was making.

Her husband, laying his letters aside, moved away into the shadow of

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ATen-PartCollectionPartTwo1ATen-PartCollectionPartTwoEdithWhartonATen-PartCollectionPartTwo2AFTERWARDJanuary1910I"Oh,thereISone,ofcourse,butyou'llneverknowit."Theassertion,laughinglyflungoutsixmonthsearlierinabrightJunegarden,camebacktoMaryBoynewithasharpperceptionofitslatentsignificanceasshestood,i...

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