Stories of Ourselves: "The Moving Finger" by Edith Wharton

This news of Mrs Grancy’s death came to me with the shock of an immense blunder – one of fate’s most irretrievable acts of vandalism.

So many people are like badly-composed statues, over-lapping their niches at one point and leaving them vacant at another. Mrs Grancy’s niche was her husband’s life; and if it be argued that the space was not large enough for its vacancy to leave a very big gap, I can only say that, at the last resort, such dimensions must be determined by finer instruments than any ready-made standard of utility.

If, to carry on the metaphor, Grancy’s life was a sedulously-cultivated enclosure, his wife was the flower he had planted in its midst – the embowering tree, rather, which gave him rest and shade at its foot and the wind of dreams in its upper branches.

We had watched him pitted against one stupid obstacle after another – ill-health, poverty, misunderstanding and, worst of all for a man of his texture, his first wife’s soft insidious egotism.

We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome.

We shuffled our defeated omniscience out of sight and gave it hasty burial under a prodigality of welcome.

‘He’ll do something great now!’ the least sanguine of us prophesied; and our sentimentalist emended: ‘He has done it – in marrying her!’

We were all – even Claydon – ready to concede that Mrs Grancy’s unwontedness was in some degree a matter of environment.

Her graces were complementary and it needed the mate’s call to reveal the flash of color beneath her neutral-tinted wings.

Claydon professionally described her as the right frame for him; but if she defined she also enlarged, if she threw the whole into perspective she also cleared new ground, opened fresh vistas, reclaimed whole areas of activity that had run to waste under the harsh husbandry of privation.

Claydon professionally described her as the right frame for him; but if she defined she also enlarged, if she threw the whole into perspective she also cleared new ground, opened fresh vistas, reclaimed whole areas of activity that had run to waste under the harsh husbandry of privation.

It was as though a light were shifted, a curtain drawn back, as though, to borrow another of Claydon’s metaphors, Love the indefatigable artist were perpetually seeking a happier ‘pose’ for his model.

It seemed a pity that such an influence should be withdrawn, but we all felt that his long arrears of happiness should be paid in whatever coin he chose.

Some human happiness is a landlocked lake; but the Grancys’ was an open sea, stretching a buoyant and illimitable surface to the voyaging interests of life.

I was glad too – basely perhaps – to be away from Grancy at a time when silence must have seemed obtuse and speech derisive.

I was glad too – basely perhaps – to be away from Grancy at a time when silence must have seemed obtuse and speech derisive.

Grancy, by nature musing and retrospective, had chosen the role of the man of action, who answers blow for blow and opposes a mailed front to the thrusts of destiny; and the completeness of the equipment testified to his inner weakness.

International diplomacy kept its promise of giving him work to do, and during the year in which he acted as chargé d’affaires he acquitted himself, under trying conditions, with conspicuous zeal and discretion.

International diplomacy kept its promise of giving him work to do, and during the year in which he acted as chargé d’affaires he acquitted himself, under trying conditions, with conspicuous zeal and discretion.

Perhaps we are apt to feel that our friends’ sorrows should be kept like those historic monuments from which the encroaching ivy is periodically removed.

The feeling grew as we neared the house and I found how inextricably his wife was interwoven with my remembrance of the place: how the whole scene was but an extension of that vivid presence.

Had some desecrating hand effaced the traces of her presence?

Well, I swear to you (though I suppose the sense of all that was latent in me) that what I used to think of on my way home at the end of the day, was simply that when I opened this door she’d be sitting over there, with the lamp-light falling in a particular way on one little curl in her neck...

I’m not talking any psychical jargon – I’m simply trying to express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers couldn’t pass like a spring shower.

I’m not talking any psychical jargon – I’m simply trying to express the sense I had that an influence so full, so abounding as hers couldn’t pass like a spring shower.

At first she used to come back shyly, tentatively, as though not sure of finding me; then she stayed longer and longer, till at last she became again the very air I breathed...

There were bad moments, of course, when her nearness mocked me with the loss of the real woman; but gradually the distinction between the two was effaced and the mere thought of her grew warm as flesh and blood.

We were irrevocably separated by the five years of life that lay between us.

As this feeling grew on me the portrait became like a beautiful mausoleum in which she had been buried alive: I could hear her beating against the painted walls and crying to me faintly for help...

His invincible spirit belied and disguised the signs of weakness that afterward asserted themselves in my remembrance of him.

He seemed to have an inexhaustible fund of life to draw on, and more than one of us was a pensioner on his superfluity.

I hastened down to the country and found him midway in a slow convalescence.

‘His wife’s prognostications were mistaken.’

They had the baffled manner of empirics who have been superseded by the great Healer; and I lingered only long enough to hear that Grancy was not suffering and that my presence could do him no harm.

‘For God’s sake don’t believe it now!’ I adjured him.

Grancy’s will named me as one of his executors; and my associate, having other duties on his hands, begged me to assume the task of carrying out our friend’s wishes.

This placed me under the necessity of informing Claydon that the portrait of Mrs Grancy had been bequeathed to him; and he replied by the next post that he would send for the picture at once.

I had no definable grievance against the man and I tried to remember that he had done a fine thing in sacrificing his best picture to a friend; but my resentment had all the tenacity of unreason.

I felt in an instant that the whole room was tributary to it: that Claydon had heaped his treasures at the feet of the woman he loved.

He threw himself on the ottoman beside me and sat gazing up at the picture, with his hands clasped about his knee.