The mother's recompense

by Edith Wharton

“Oh,” said Lilla, leaping upon her fan and vanity bag. She was out of the room before the butler had rounded off his sentence.

Mrs. Drover, her complacency restored, sank down on a plump Clephane sofa that corresponded in richness and ponderosity with her own person. “Lilla’s such a baby!” she sighed; then, with a freer breath, addressed herself to sympathetic enquiries as to Mrs. Clephane’s voyage. It was evident that, as far as the family were concerned, Anne’s mother had been born again, seven days earlier, on the gang-plank of the liner that had brought her home. On these terms they were all delighted to have her back; and Mrs. Drover declared herself particularly thankful that the voyage had been so smooth.

V.

SMOOTHNESS, Kate Clephane could see, was going to mark the first stage of her re-embarkation on the waters of life. The truth came to her, after that first evening, with the surprised discovery that the family had refrained from touching on her past not so much from prudery, or discretion even, as because such retrogressions were jolting uncomfortable affairs, and the line of least resistance flowed forward, not back. She had been right in guessing that her questions as to what people thought of her past were embarrassing to Landers, but wrong in the interpretation of his embarrassment. Like every one else about her, he was caught up in the irresistible flow of existence, which somehow reminded her less of a mighty river tending seaward than of a moving stairway revolving on itself. “Only they all think it’s a river....” she mused.

But such thoughts barely lit on her tired mind and were gone. In the first days, after she had grasped (without seeking its explanation) the fact that she need no longer be on her guard, that henceforth there would be nothing to conjure away, or explain, or disguise, her chief feeling was one of illimitable relief. The rapture with which she let herself sink into the sensation showed her for the first time how tired she was, and for how long she had been tired. It was almost as if this sense of relaxation were totally new to her, so far back did her memory have to travel to recover a time when she had not waked to apprehension, and fallen asleep rehearsing fresh precautions for the morrow. In the first years of her marriage there had been the continual vain effort to adapt herself to her husband’s point of view, to her mother-in-law’s standards, to all the unintelligible ritual with which they barricaded themselves against the alarming business of living. After that had come the bitterness of her first disenchantment, and the insatiable longing to be back on the nursery floor with Anne; then, through all the ensuing years, the many austere and lonely years, and the few consumed with her last passion, the ever-recurring need of one form of vigilance or another, the effort to keep hold of something that might at any moment slip from her, whether it were her painfully-regained “respectability” or the lover for whom she had forgone it. Yes; as she looked back, she saw herself always with taut muscles and the grimace of ease; always pretending that she felt herself free, and secretly knowing that the prison of her marriage had been liberty compared with what she had exchanged it for.

That was as far as her thoughts travelled in the first days. She abandoned herself with the others to the flood of material ease, the torrent of facilities on which they were all embarked. She had been scornful of luxury when it had symbolized the lack of everything else; now that it was an adjunct of her recovered peace she began to enjoy it with the rest, and to feel that the daily perfection of her breakfast-tray, the punctual renewal of the flowers in her sitting-room, the inexhaustible hot water in her bath, the swift gliding of Anne’s motor, and the attentions of her household of servants, were essential elements of this new life.

At last she was at rest. Even the nature of her sleep was changed. Waking one morning—not with a jerk, but slowly, voluntarily, as it were—out of a soundless, dreamless night, a miraculous draught of sleep, she understood that for years even her rest had been unrestful. She recalled the uncertainty and apprehension always woven through her dreams, the sudden nocturnal wakings to a blinding, inextinguishable sense of her fate, her future, her past; and the shallow turbid half-consciousness of her morning sleep, which would leave her, when she finally woke from it, emptied of all power of action, all hope and joy. Then every sound that broke the night-hush had been irritating, had pierced her rest like an insect’s nagging hum; now the noises that accompanied her falling asleep and awakening seemed to issue harmoniously out of the silence, and the late and early roar of Fifth Avenue to rock her like the great reiterations of the sea.

“This is peace ... this must be peace,” she repeated to herself, like a botanist arrested by an unknown flower, and at once guessing it to be the rare exquisite thing he has spent half his life in seeking.

Of course she would not have felt any of these things if Anne had not been the Anne she was. It was from Anne’s presence, her smile, her voice, the mystery of her eyes even, that the healing flowed. If Kate Clephane had an apprehension left, it was her awe—almost—of that completeness of Anne’s. Was it possible, humanly possible, that one could cast away one’s best treasure, and come back after nearly twenty years to find it there, not only as rare as one had remembered it, but ripened, enriched, as only beautiful things are enriched and ripened by time? It was as if one had set out some delicate plant under one’s window, so that it might be an object of constant vigilance, and then gone away, leaving it unwatched, unpruned, unwatered—how could one hope to find more than a dead stick in the dust when one returned? But Anne was real; she was not a mirage or a mockery; as the days passed, and her mother’s life and hers became adjusted to each other, Kate felt as if they were two parts of some delicate instrument which fitted together as perfectly as if they had never been disjoined—as if Anne were that other half of her life, the half she had dreamed of and never lived. To see Anne living it would be almost the same as if it were her own; would be better, almost; since she would be there, with her experience, and tenderness, to hold out a guiding hand, to help shape the perfection she had sought and missed.

These thoughts came back to her with particular force on the evening of Anne’s reappearance at the Opera. During the weeks since old Mrs. Clephane’s death the Clephane box had stood severely empty; even when the Opera House was hired for some charity entertainment, Anne sent a cheque but refused to give the box. It was awfully “archaic”, as Nollie Tresselton said; but somehow it suited Anne, was as much in her “style” as the close braids folded about her temples. “After all, it’s not so easy to be statuesque, and I like Anne’s memorial manner,” Nollie concluded.