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THE REEF
“Poor empty Givre! With so many rooms full and yet not
a soul in it – except of course my grandmother, who is its soul!”
They had reached the gateway of the court and stood looking with a common accord at the long soft-hued facade on
which the autumn light was dying. “It looks so made to be
happy in — ” she murmured.
“Yes – today, today!” He pressed her arm a little. “Oh, you
darling – to have given it that look for me!” He paused, and
then went on in a lower voice: “Don’t you feel we owe it to
the poor old place to do what we can to give it that look? You,
too, I mean? Come, let’s make it grin from wing to wing! I’ve
such a mad desire to say outrageous things to it – haven’t you?
After all, in old times there must have been living people here!”
Loosening her arm from his she continued to gaze up at
the house-front, which seemed, in the plaintive decline of
light, to send her back the mute appeal of something doomed.
“It IS beautiful,” she said.
“A beautiful memory! Quite perfect to take out and turn
over when I’m grinding at the law in New York, and you’re — ”
He broke off and looked at her with a questioning smile.
“Come! Tell me. You and I don’t have to say things to talk to
each other. When you turn suddenly absentminded and mysterious I always feel like saying: ‘Come back. All is discovered’.”
She returned his smile. “You know as much as I know.
I promise you that.”
He wavered, as if for the fi rst time uncertain how far he
might go. “I don’t know Darrow as much as you know him,” he
presently risked.
111
EDITH WHARTON
She frowned a little. “You said just now we didn’t need to
say things”
“Was I speaking? I thought it was your eyes — ” He caught
her by both elbows and spun her halfway round, so that
the late sun shed a betraying gleam on her face. “They’re such
awfully conversational eyes! Don’t you suppose they told me
long ago why it’s just today you’ve made up your mind that
people have got to live their own lives – even at Givre?”
CHAPTER XI
“This is the south terrace,” Anna said. “Should you like to
walk down to the river?”
She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off
airy height, and yet to be wholly gathered into the circle of
consciousness which drew its glowing ring about herself and
Darrow. To the aerial listener her words sounded fl at and colourless, but to the self within the ring each one beat with
a separate heart.
It was the day after Darrow’s arrival, and he had come down
early, drawn by the sweetness of the light on the lawns and
gardens below his window. Anna had heard the echo of his
step on the stairs, his pause in the stone-fl agged hall, his voice
as he asked a servant where to fi nd her. She was at the end of
the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-room which she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight fi rst and
kept it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale band of
brightness, arranging some salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelain bowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was
thrice-alive in her. The grey-green fur of the geranium leaves
caressed her fi ngers and the sunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old parquet fl oor made it seem as bright
and shifting as the brown bed of a stream.
113
EDITH WHARTON
Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest
drawing-room, a light-grey fi gure against the black and white
fl agging of the hall; then he began to move toward her down
the empty pale-panelled vista, crossing one after another
the long refl ections which a projecting cabinet or screen cast
here and there upon the shining fl oors.
As he drew nearer, his fi gure was suddenly displaced
by that of her husband, whom, from the same point, she had
so often seen advancing down the same perspective. Straight,
spare, erect, looking to right and left with quick precise
turns of the head, and stopping now and then to straighten
a chair or alter the position of a vase, Fraser Leath used to
march toward her through the double fi le of furniture like
a general reviewing a regiment drawn up for his inspection.
At a certain point, midway across the second room, he always
stopped before the mantel-piece of pinkish-yellow marble and
looked at himself in the tall garlanded glass that surmounted
it. She could not remember that he had ever found anything to
straighten or alter in his own studied attire, but she had never
known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particular mirror.
When it was over he continued more briskly on his way,
and the resulting expression of satisfaction was still on his face
when he entered the oak sitting-room to greet his wife . . .
The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung but
for a moment before Anna, but in that moment she had time to
fl ing a wondering glance across the distance between her past
and present. Then the footsteps of the present came close, and
she had to drop the geraniums to give her hand to Darrow . . .
114
THE REEF
“Yes, let us walk down to the river.”
They had neither of them, as yet, found much to say to each
other. Darrow had arrived late on the previous afternoon, and
during the evening they had had between them Owen Leath
and their own thoughts. Now they were alone for the fi rst
time and the fact was enough in itself. Yet Anna was intensely
aware that as soon as they began to talk more intimately they
would feel that they knew each other less well.
They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to
the gravel walk below. The delicate frosting of dew gave
the grass a bluish shimmer, and the sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-boles, gathered itself into great
luminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hung above
the fi elds a watery glory like the ring about an autumn moon.
“It’s good to be here,” Darrow said.
They took a turn to the left and stopped for a moment to
look back at the long pink house-front, plainer, friendlier,
less adorned than on the side toward the court. So prolonged
yet delicate had been the friction of time upon its bricks that
certain expanses had the bloom and texture of old red velvet,
and the patches of gold lichen spreading over them looked
like the last traces of a dim embroidery. The dome of the chapel, with its gilded cross, rose above one wing, and the other
ended in a conical pigeon-house, above which the birds were
fl ying, lustrous and slatey, their breasts merged in the blue of
the roof when they dropped down on it.
“And this is where you’ve been all these years.”
They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowing trees. Benches with mossy feet stood against
115
EDITH WHARTON
the mossy edges of the path, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basin rimmed with stone, in which
the opaque water strewn with leaves looked like a slab of goldfl ecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound on circuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks
twined with ivy. Patches of blue appeared above them through
the dwindling leaves, and presently the trees drew back and
showed the open fi elds along the river.
They walked on across the fi elds to the tow-path.
In a curve of the wall some steps led up to a crumbling pavilion with openings choked with ivy. Anna and Darrow seated
themselves on the bench projecting from the inner wall of
the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes divided
into blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at the chalk-tinted
village lifting its squat church-tower and grey roofs against
the precisely drawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent,
so intensely aware of Darrow’s nearness that there was no
surprise in the touch he laid on her hand. They looked at
each other, and he smiled and said: “There are to be no more
obstacles now.”
“Obstacles?” The word startled her. “What obstacles?”
“Don’t you remember the wording of the telegram that
turned me back last May? ‘Unforeseen obstacle’: that was it.
What was the earth-shaking problem, by the way? Finding
a governess for Effi e, wasn’t it?”
“But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was an obstacle. I wrote you fully about it.”
“Yes, I know you did.” He lifted her hand and kissed it.
“How far off it all seems, and how little it all matters today!”
116
THE REEF
She looked at him quickly. “Do you feel that? I suppose
I’m different. I want to draw all those wasted months into today – to make them a part of it.”
“But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything – back to the fi rst days of all.”
She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate
perplexity. “It’s curious how, in those fi rst days, too, something
that I didn’t understand came between us.”
“Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It’s
part of what’s called the bliss of being young.”
“Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking
back. But it couldn’t, even then, have been as true of you as of
me; and now — ”
“Now,” he said, “the only thing that matters is that we’re
sitting here together.”
He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have
seemed conclusive evidence of her power over him. But she
took no pride in such triumphs. It seemed to her that she
wanted his allegiance and his adoration not so much for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightly any
past phase of their relation he took something from its present
beauty. The colour rose to her face.
“Between you and me everything matters.”
“Of course!” She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his
smile. “That’s why,” he went on, “‘everything,’ for me, is here
and now: on this bench, between you and me.”
She caught at the phrase. “That’s what I meant: it’s here and
now; we can’t get away from it.”
“Get away from it? Do you want to? AGAIN?”
117
EDITH WHARTON
Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fi tfully
and with reluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of
his nearness penetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped
the landscape. Then, suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less
than the whole of her happiness.
“‘Again’? But wasn’t it YOU, the last time — ?”
She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up
the lamp. But in the interrogative light of her pause her companion’s features underwent no change.
“The last time? Last spring? But it was you who – for
the best of reasons, as you’ve told me – turned me back from
your very door last spring!”
She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to “thresh
out,” for her sentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his
own, Time had so conclusively dealt with; and the sense of his
readiness reassured her.
“I wrote as soon as I could,” she rejoined. “I explained
the delay and asked you to come. And you never even answered my letter.”
“It was impossible to come then. I had to go back to
my post.”
“And impossible to write and tell me so?”
“Your letter was a long time coming. I had waited
a week – ten days. I had some excuse for thinking, when it
came, that you were in no great hurry for an answer.”
“You thought that – really – after reading it?”
“I thought it.”
Her heart leaped up to her throat. “Then why are you
here today?”
118
THE REEF
He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. “God
knows – if you can ask me that!”
“You see I was right to say I didn’t understand.”
He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking
the view over the river and the checkered slopes. “Perhaps
I might say so too.”
“No, no: we must neither of us have any reason for saying it
again.” She looked at him gravely. “Surely you and I needn’t arrange the lights before we show ourselves to each other. I want
you to see me just as I am, with all my irrational doubts and
scruples; the old ones and the new ones too.”
He came back to his seat beside her. “Never mind the old
ones. They were justifi ed – I’m willing to admit it. With
the governess having suddenly to be packed off, and Effi e on
your hands, and your mother-in-law ill, I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at the moment, it
was diffi cult to write and explain. But what does all that matter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle.”
Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near,
so sure, that to strain it closer might be like a child’s crushing a pet bird in its caress. But her very security urged her on.
For so long her doubts had been knife-edged: now they had
turned into bright harmless toys that she could toss and catch
without peril!
“You didn’t come, and you didn’t answer my letter; and
after waiting four months I wrote another.” “And I answered
that one; and I’m here.”
“Yes.” She held his eyes. “But in my last letter I repeated
exactly what I’d said in the fi rst – the one I wrote you last June.
119
EDITH WHARTON
I told you then that I was ready to give you the answer to what
you’d asked me in London; and in telling you that, I told you
what the answer was.”
“My dearest! My dearest!” Darrow murmured.
“You ignored that letter. All summer you made no sign.
And all I ask now is, that you should frankly tell me why.”
“I can only repeat what I’ve just said. I was hurt and unhappy and I doubted you. I suppose if I’d cared less I should have
been more confi dent. I cared so much that I couldn’t risk another failure. For you’d made me feel that I’d miserably failed.
So I shut my eyes and set my teeth and turned my back. There’s
the whole pusillanimous truth of it!”
“Oh, if it’s the WHOLE truth! — ” She let him clasp her.
“There’s my torment, you see. I thought that was what your
silence meant till I made you break it. Now I want to be sure
that I was right.”
“What can I tell you to make you sure?”
“You can let me tell YOU everything fi rst.” She drew away,
but without taking her hands from him. “Owen saw you in
Paris,” she began.
She looked at him and he faced her steadily. The light was
full on his pleasantly-browned face, his grey eyes, his frank
white forehead. She noticed for the fi rst time a seal-ring in
a setting of twisted silver on the hand he had kept on hers.
“In Paris? Oh, yes . . . So he did.”
“He came back and told me. I think you talked to him
a moment in a theatre. I asked if you’d spoken of my having
put you off – or if you’d sent me any message. He didn’t remember that you had.”
120
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