Edith Wharton - SSC 09

 

 

Human Nature.

 

 

   1933   

 

Contents

 

Her Son.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

The Day of the Funeral.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

A Glimpse.

I.

II.

III.

Joy in the House.

I.

II.

III.

Diagnosis.

I.

II.

III.

IV.

V.

VI.

 

 

 Her Son.

 

 

 I.
 
 

            I did not recognise Mrs. Stephen Glenn when I first saw her on the deck of the Scythian.

            The voyage was more than half over, and we were counting on Cherbourg within forty-eight hours, when she appeared on deck and sat down beside me. She was as handsome as ever, and not a day older looking than when we had last met—toward the end of the war, in 1917 it must have been, not long before her only son, the aviator, was killed. Yet now, five years later, I was looking at her as if she were a stranger. Why? Not, certainly, because of her white hair. She had had the American woman’s frequent luck of acquiring it while the face beneath was still fresh, and a dozen years earlier, when we used to meet at dinners, at the Opera, that silver diadem already crowned her. Now, looking more closely, I saw that the face beneath was still untouched; what then had so altered her? Perhaps it was the faint line of anxiety between her dark strongly-drawn eyebrows; or the setting of the eyes themselves, those sombre starlit eyes which seemed to have sunk deeper into their lids, and showed like glimpses of night through the arch of a cavern. But what a gloomy image to apply to eyes as tender as Catherine Glenn’s! Yet it was immediately suggested by the look of the lady in deep mourning who had settled herself beside me, and now turned to say: “So you don’t know me, Mr. Norcutt—Catherine Glenn?”

            The fact was flagrant. I acknowledged it, and added: “But why didn’t I? I can’t imagine. Do you mind my saying that I believe it’s because you’re even more beautiful now than when I last saw you?”

            She replied with perfect simplicity: “No; I don’t mind—because I ought to be; that is, if there’s any meaning in anything.”

            “Any meaning—?”

            She seemed to hesitate; she had never been a woman who found words easily. “Any meaning in life. You see, since we’ve met I’ve lost everything: my son, my husband.” She bent her head slightly, as though the words she pronounced were holy.

            Then she added, with the air of striving for more scrupulous accuracy: “Or, at least, almost everything.”

            The “almost” puzzled me. Mrs. Glenn, as far as I knew, had had no child but the son she had lost in the war; and the old uncle who had brought her up had died years earlier. I wondered if, in thus qualifying her loneliness, she alluded to the consolations of religion.

            I murmured that I knew of her double mourning; and she surprised me still farther by saying: “Yes; I saw you at my husband’s funeral. I’ve always wanted to thank you for being there.”

            “But of course I was there.”

            She continued: “I noticed all of Stephen’s friends who came. I was very grateful to them, and especially to the younger ones.” (This was meant for me.) “You see,” she added, “a funeral is—is a very great comfort.”

            Again I looked my surprise.

            “My son—my son Philip—” (why should she think it necessary to mention his name, since he was her only child?)—“my son Philip’s funeral took place just where his aeroplane fell. A little village in the Somme; his father and I went there immediately after the Armistice. One of our army chaplains read the service. The people from the village were there—they were so kind to us. But there was no one else—no personal friends; at that time only the nearest relations could get passes. Our boy would have wished it … he would have wanted to stay where he fell. But it’s not the same as feeling one’s friends about one, as I did at my husband’s funeral.”

            While she spoke she kept her eyes intently, almost embarrassingly, on mine. It had never occurred to me that Mrs. Stephen Glenn was the kind of woman who would attach any particular importance to the list of names at her husband’s funeral. She had always seemed aloof and abstracted, shut off from the world behind the high walls of a happy domesticity. But on adding this new indication of character to the fragments of information I had gathered concerning her first appearance in New York, and to the vague impression she used to produce on me when we met, I began to see that lists of names were probably just what she would care about. And then I asked myself what I really knew of her. Very little, I perceived; but no doubt just as much as she wished me to. For, as I sat there, listening to her voice, and catching unguarded glimpses of her crape-shadowed profile, I began to suspect that what had seemed in her a rather dull simplicity might be the vigilance of a secretive person; or perhaps of a person who had a secret. There is a world of difference between them, for the secretive person is seldom interesting and seldom has a secret; but I felt inclined—though nothing I knew of her justified it—to put her in the other class.

            I began to think over the years of our intermittent acquaintance—it had never been more, for I had never known the Glenns well. She had appeared in New York when I was a very young man, in the ‘nineties, as a beautiful girl—from Kentucky or Alabama—a niece of old Colonel Reamer’s.