“A
Cup of Cold Water” is a lovely short story by Edith Wharton centered on a man
named Woburn. The story divides into two
halves, which frankly I’m not convinced is aesthetically whole. By that I mean that there is a first half
which is a story in itself and a second half that seems like a separate story,
though the central character of Woburn is in both halves. You can read the entire story at the
Literature Network, here, from which I will use as a source for the quotes.
The
story is set in New York City in the late 19th century. Woburn is a
poor young man who has this infatuation with a rich young lady, Miss Talcott. Here is a one sentence paragraph of why
Woburn is charmed with Miss Talcott.
Her supreme charm was the
simplicity that comes of taking it for granted that people are born with
carriages and country-places: it never occurred to her that such congenital
attributes could be matter for self-consciousness, and she had none of the nouveau riche prudery which classes
poverty with the nude in art and is not sure how to behave in the presence of
either.
In
other words, she didn’t realize other people weren’t born with her financial advantages,
which meant she did not look down on the lower classes, or it didn’t dawn on
her to look down on them. She’s natural
and not snobby.
So
Woburn—which I think is so named because it nearly sounds like “woe born”—realizes
he has to be rich to marry Miss Talcott, and so starts investing in stocks with
borrowed money, and then starts using money from the bank at which he
worked. Here are two wonderful
paragraphs on his subsequent crash.
He had invested the few
thousand dollars which had been his portion of his father's shrunken estate:
when his debts began to pile up, he took a flyer in stocks and after a few months
of varying luck his little patrimony disappeared. Meanwhile his courtship was proceeding
at an inverse ratio to his financial ventures. Miss Talcott was growing tender
and he began to feel that the game was in his hands. The nearness of the goal
exasperated him. She was not the girl to wait and he knew that it must be now
or never. A friend lent him five thousand dollars on his personal note and he bought
railway stocks on margin. They went up
and he held them for a higher rise: they fluctuated, dragged, dropped below the
level at which he had bought, and slowly continued their uninterrupted descent.
His broker called for more margin; he could not respond and was sold out.
What followed came about
quite naturally. For several years he had been cashier in a well-known
banking-house. When the note he had given his friend became due it was obviously
necessary to pay it and he used the firm's money for the purpose. To repay the
money thus taken, he increased his debt to his employers and bought more stocks;
and on these operations he made a profit of ten thousand dollars. Miss Talcott
rode in the Park, and he bought a smart hack for seven hundred, paid off his
tradesmen, and went on speculating with the remainder of his profits. He made a
little more, but failed to take advantage of the market and lost all that he
had staked, including the amount taken from the firm. He increased his over-draft
by another ten thousand and lost that; he over-drew a farther sum and lost
again. Suddenly he woke to the fact that he owed his employers fifty thousand
dollars and that the partners were to make their semi-annual inspection in two
days. He realized then that within forty-eight hours what he had called
borrowing would become theft.
And
so he realizes he has lost everything including Miss Talcott and needs to leave
town before he will be arrested. On the
night before he will skip town there is a ball where Miss Talcott was to attend
and had invited him. He decides to go
and have one last moment with her before he will never see her again. Here is that last moment.
Presently Woburn was
aware that she had forgotten young Boylston and was glancing absently about the
room. She was looking for someone, and
meant the someone to know it: he knew that Lost-Chord
look in her eyes.
A new figure was being
formed. The partners circled about the room and Miss Talcott's flying tulle
drifted close to him as she passed. Then the favors were distributed; white
skirts wavered across the floor like thistle-down on summer air; men rose from
their seats and fresh couples filled the shining parquet.
Miss Talcott, after
taking from the basket a Legion of Honor in red enamel, surveyed the room for a
moment; then she made her way through the dancers and held out the favor to
Woburn. He fastened it in his coat, and emerging from the crowd of men about
the doorway, slipped his arm about her. Their eyes met; hers were serious and a
little sad. How fine and slender she was! He noticed the little tendrils of
hair about the pink convolution of her ear. Her waist was firm and yet elastic;
she breathed calmly and regularly, as though dancing were her natural motion.
She did not look at him again and neither of them spoke.
When the music ceased
they paused near her chair. Her partner was waiting for her and Woburn left her
with a bow. He made his way down-stairs
and out of the house. He was glad that he had not spoken to Miss Talcott. There
had been a healing power in their silence. All bitterness had gone from him and
he thought of her now quite simply, as the girl he loved.
What
a lovely but melancholy moment. And that
was the ending of the first half of the story.
The second half begins with Woburn spending the night at a hotel since
he still had a number of hours before the steamer on which he will escape the
city departs. In the adjoining room he
hears a woman crying.
There was no mistaking
the nature of the noise; it was that of a woman's sobs. The sobs were not loud,
but the sound reached him distinctly through the frail door between the two
rooms; it expressed an utter abandonment to grief; not the cloud-burst of some passing
emotion, but the slow down-pour of a whole heaven of sorrow.
Woburn sat listening.
There was nothing else to be done; and at least his listening was a mute
tribute to the trouble he was powerless to relieve. It roused, too, the drugged pulses of his own
grief: he was touched by the chance propinquity of two alien sorrows in a great
city throbbing with multifarious passions. It would have been more in keeping
with the irony of life had he found himself next to a mother singing her child
to sleep: there seemed a mute commiseration in the hand that had led him to
such neighborhood.
In
that second paragraph is the theme of the story: “the drugged pulses” of grief
and “alien sorrows in a great city throbbing with multifarious passions.” What a great sentence. This is a story of a big city, of people
saddened by unrequited passions. Through
the keyhole Woburn spies that the woman has a gun and intends to kill
herself. He breaks through the door and
comforts the woman, who feels she has no other recourse but suicide. Woburn tells her he will figure out a
solution to whatever problem she has that has brought her to this point.
Ruby
Glenn, the sobbing woman, tells him the story of how she was bored living in a small
town named Hinksville, “a poky little place,” which sounds a lot like
Hicksville, an emblematic name of a town in the middle of nowhere. There she lived a mundane life with an unexciting
husband, Joe, who is away a lot for his work and his mother, an austere woman
whose only guest was a Baptist minister.
When her husband was away for an extended time, a colorful journalist “bewitches”
her and they run off together. After
five months traveling about he abandons her, and wants
to get back to her husband but has no money. She’s
confident he will take her back but believes his mother has stymied her
letters. Ruby, in contrast to Miss
Talcott, is quite class conscious, and understands the limitations of want, and, through
her bad decision to run off, desired to live a fantasy life outside of her means.
What
we have is a story within a story where Woburn resolves Ruby’s problems by using
his remaining pocket money to pay for her back bills and her train fare back to
Hinksville. You can now see how aesthetically
the overall story is bifurcated. By this
point the reader has lost sight of Miss Talcott and the events that led him to
the hotel.
So
what holds the story together? Certainly
the sorrows of those in a big city throbbing with passions. What I think holds the story together is the
suffering that Woburn experiences in the first half leads him to help the poor
woman out in the second half. In paying
the woman’s bills, Woburn has sacrificed his means of escaping debtors. At the end of the story he has to go back to the
bank where he worked to face his misconduct.
But
before he puts the Ruby on the train, there is a final scene where Ruby thanks
him.
Ruby Glenn had obediently
prepared herself for departure and was standing before the mirror, patting her
curls into place. Her eyes were still red, but she had the happy look of a
child that has outslept its grief. On the floor he noticed the tattered
fragments of the letter which, a few hours earlier, he had seen her place
before the mirror.
"Shall we go down
now?" he asked.
"Very well,"
she assented; then, with a quick movement, she stepped close to him, and
putting her hands on his shoulders lifted her face to his.
"I believe you're
the best man I ever knew," she said, "the very best-- except
Joe."
She drew back blushing
deeply, and unlocked the door which led into the passage-way. Woburn picked up
her bag, which she had forgotten, and followed her out of the room. They passed
a frowzy chambermaid, who stared at them with a yawn. Before the doors the row
of boots still waited; there was a faint new aroma of coffee mingling with the
smell of vanished dinners, and a fresh blast of heat had begun to tingle
through the radiators.
“I
believe you’re the best man I ever knew.”
This was Woburn’s heroic moment. Her sincere statement of his character is his reward. He may never have Miss Talcott as a wife, he may be poor for the rest of
his life, he may even face prosecution and jail for embezzlement, but he saved a
poor woman from killing herself and got her back to her husband to save her marriage.
Finally
there is the odd title of the story.
There is no cup of water in the entire story. As it turns out, the title comes from Matthew
10:42. It’s one of those sayings of
Jesus: “And whoever gives only a cup of cold water to one of these little ones
to drink because he is a disciple—amen, I say to you, he will surely not lose
his reward.” His sacrifice has been his
reward, which has made him a hero.
Though awkwardly structured, it is a wonderful story.
