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THE REEF
the unlit room to the instrument. She held it to her ear, and
heard Darrow’s voice pronounce her name.
“Will you let me see you? I’ve come back – I had to come.
Miss Painter told me you were here.”
She began to tremble, and feared that he would guess it
from her voice. She did not know what she answered: she heard
him say: “I can’t hear.” She called “Yes!” and laid the telephone
down, and caught it up again – but he was gone. She wondered if her “Yes” had reached him.
She sat in her chair and listened. Why had she said that
she would see him? What did she mean to say to him when
he came? Now and then, as she sat there, the sense of his
presence enveloped her as in her dream, and she shut her
eyes and felt his arms about her. Then she woke to reality
and shivered. A long time elapsed, and at length she said to
herself: “He isn’t coming.”
The door-bell rang as she said it, and she stood up, cold and
trembling. She thought: “Can he imagine there’s any use in
coming?” and moved forward to bid the servant say she could
not see him.
The door opened and she saw him standing in the drawing-room. The room was cold and fi reless, and a hard glare fell
from the wall-lights on the shrouded furniture and the white
slips covering the curtains. He looked pale and stern, with
a frown of fatigue between his eyes; and she remembered
that in three days he had travelled from Givre to London and
back. It seemed incredible that all that had befallen her should
have been compressed within the space of three days!
“Thank you,” he said as she came in.
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EDITH WHARTON
She answered: “It’s better, I suppose — ”
He came toward her and took her in his arms. She struggled
a little, afraid of yielding, but he pressed her to him, not bending to her but holding her fast, as though he had found her after a long search: she heard his hurried breathing. It seemed to
come from her own breast, so close he held her; and it was she
who, at last, lifted up her face and drew down his.
She freed herself and went and sat on a sofa at the other
end of the room. A mirror between the shrouded window-curtains showed her crumpled travelling dress and the white face
under her disordered hair.
She found her voice, and asked him how he had been able to
leave London. He answered that he had managed – he’d arranged it; and she saw he hardly heard what she was saying.
“I had to see you,” he went on, and moved nearer, sitting
down at her side.
“Yes; we must think of Owen — ”
“Oh, Owen – !”
Her mind had fl own back to Sophy Viner’s plea that she
should let Darrow return to Givre in order that Owen might
be persuaded of the folly of his suspicions. The suggestion was
absurd, of course. She could not ask Darrow to lend himself to
such a fraud, even had she had the inhuman courage to play
her part in it. She was suddenly overwhelmed by the futility of
every attempt to reconstruct her ruined world. No, it was useless; and since it was useless, every moment with Darrow was
pure pain . . .
“I’ve come to talk of myself, not of Owen,” she heard him
saying. “When you sent me away the other day I understood
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THE REEF
that it couldn’t be otherwise – then. But it’s not possible that
you and I should part like that. If I’m to lose you, it must be for
a better reason.”
“A better reason?”
“Yes: a deeper one. One that means a fundamental disaccord between us. This one doesn’t – in spite of everything it
doesn’t. That’s what I want you to see, and have the courage to
acknowledge.”
“If I saw it I should have the courage!”
“Yes: courage was the wrong word. You have that. That’s
why I’m here.”
“But I don’t see it,” she continued sadly. “So it’s useless, isn’t
it? – and so cruel . . . ” He was about to speak, but she went on:
“I shall never understand it – never!”
He looked at her. “You will some day: you were made to
feel everything”
“I should have thought this was a case of not feeling — ”
“On my part, you mean?” He faced her resolutely. “Yes, it
was: to my shame . . . What I meant was that when you’ve lived
a little longer you’ll see what complex blunderers we all are:
how we’re struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes – and
then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have to
set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit, the precious
things we’d smashed to atoms without knowing it. Life’s just
a perpetual piecing together of broken bits.”
She looked up quickly. “That’s what I feel: that you
ought to — ”
He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. “Oh,
don’t – don’t say what you’re going to! Men don’t give their
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EDITH WHARTON
lives away like that. If you won’t have mine, it’s at least my
own, to do the best I can with.”
“The best you can – that’s what I mean! How can there be
a ‘best’ for you that’s made of some one else’s worst?”
He sat down again with a groan. “I don’t know! It seemed
such a slight thing – all on the surface – and I’ve gone
aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the horror of
it just as you do. But I see, a little more clearly, the extent, and
the limits, of my wrong. It’s not as black as you imagine.”
She lowered her voice to say: “I suppose I shall never understand; but she seems to love you . . . ”
“There’s my shame! That I didn’t guess it, didn’t fl y from it.
You say you’ll never understand: but why shouldn’t you? Is it
anything to be proud of, to know so little of the strings that
pull us? If you knew a little more, I could tell you how such
things happen without offending you; and perhaps you’d listen without condemning me.”
“I don’t condemn you.” She was dizzy with struggling impulses. She longed to cry out: “I DO understand! I’ve understood
ever since you’ve been here!” For she was aware, in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her romantic thoughts of
him that she saw her body and soul divided against themselves. She recalled having read somewhere that in ancient
Rome the slaves were not allowed to wear a distinctive dress
lest they should recognize each other and learn their numbers
and their power. So, in herself, she discerned for the fi rst time
instincts and desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to
and fro in the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each
other with a cry of mutiny.
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THE REEF
“Oh, I don’t know what to think!” she broke out. “You say
you didn’t know she loved you. But you know it now. Doesn’t
that show you how you can put the broken bits together?”
“Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one
woman while I care for another?”
“Oh, I don’t know . . . I don’t know . . . ” The sense of
her weakness made her try to harden herself against his
arguments.
“You do know! We’ve often talked of such things: of
the monstrousness of useless sacrifi ces. If I’m to expiate, it’s
not in that way.” He added abruptly: “It’s in having to say
this to you now . . . ”
She found no answer.
Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden
peal of the door-bell, and she rose to her feet. “Owen!” she instantly exclaimed.
“Is Owen in Paris?”
She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned
from Sophy Viner.
“Shall I leave you?” Darrow asked.
“Yes . . . no . . . ” She moved to the dining-room door, with
the half-formed purpose of making him pass out, and then
turned back. “It may be Adelaide.”
They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen
walked into the room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as they
fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a slight
sign of recognition, and then went up to his step-mother with
an air of exaggerated gaiety.
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EDITH WHARTON
“You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide
and heard from her that you’d rushed up suddenly and secretly.” He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained, questioning, dangerously on edge.
“I came up to meet Mr. Darrow,” Anna answered.
“His leave’s been prolonged – he’s going back with me.”
The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her
will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke them.
The hard tension of Owen’s face changed to incredulous
surprise. He looked at Darrow. “The merest luck . . . a colleague
whose wife was ill . . . I came straight back,” she heard the latter
tranquilly explaining. His self-command helped to steady her,
and she smiled at Owen.
“We’ll all go back together tomorrow morning,” she said as
she slipped her arm through his.
CHAPTER XXXIII
Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre.
In reply to her suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or two longer in Paris.
Anna left alone by the fi rst train the next morning. Darrow was to follow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them
the evening before, Darrow waited a moment for her to speak;
then, as she said nothing, he asked her if she really wished
him to return to Givre. She made a mute sign of assent, and he
added: “For you know that, much as I’m ready to do for Owen,
I can’t do that for him – I can’t go back to be sent away again.”
“No – no!”
He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him.
All her fears seemed to fall from her as he held her. It was
a different feeling from any she had known before: confused
and turbid, as if secret shames and rancours stirred in it, yet
richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leaned her head back and
shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now that she could
never give him up.
Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her
go back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was
convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she
and Darrow belonged to each other, and that he was right in
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EDITH WHARTON
saying no past folly could ever put them asunder. If there
was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was that of
an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight:
she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence,
that was somehow at variance with her own conception of
her character.
It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself
that made her want to be alone. The solitude of her inner life
had given her the habit of these hours of self-examination,
and she needed them as she needed her morning plunge into
cold water.
During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the light of her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed to herself to have passed through
some fi ery initiation from which she had emerged seared and
quivering, but clutching to her breast a magic talisman. Sophy
Viner had cried out to her: “Some day you’ll know!” and Darrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that
when she had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her
own heart her judgment of others would be less absolute. Well,
she knew now – knew weaknesses and strengths she had not
dreamed of, and the deep discord and still deeper complicities
between what thought in her and what blindly wanted . . .
Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that
was to fall on him would not seem to have been infl icted by her
hand. He would be left with the impression that his breach
with Sophy Viner was due to one of the ordinary causes of
such disruptions: though he must lose her, his memory of her
would not be poisoned. Anna never for a moment permit-
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THE REEF
ted herself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to
Darrow in order to spare her step-son this last refi nement of
misery. She knew she had been prompted by the irresistible
impulse to hold fast to what was most precious to her, and
that Owen’s arrival on the scene had been the pretext for
her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herself fortifi ed
by the thought of what she had spared him. It was as though
a star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on
ways unknown to her.
All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of
an absolute trust in Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl with
a mingling of antipathy and confi dence. It was humiliating to
her pride to recognize kindred impulses in a character which
she would have liked to feel completely alien to her. But what
indeed was the girl really like? She seemed to have no scruples
and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself to Darrow,
and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more
apparent sense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she had instantly obeyed the voice of her heart when
it bade her part from the one and serve the other.
Anna tried to picture what the girl’s life must have been:
what experiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her
own training had been too different: there were veils she could
not lift. She looked back at her married life, and its colourless
uniformity took on an air of high restraint and order. Was it
because she had been so incurious that it had worn that look to
her? It struck her with amazement that she had never given
a thought to her husband’s past, or wondered what he did and
where he went when he was away from her. If she had been
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EDITH WHARTON
asked what she supposed he thought about when they were
apart, she would instantly have answered: his snuff-boxes.
It had never occurred to her that he might have passions, interests, preoccupations of which she was absolutely ignorant.
Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attend
sales and exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors.
She tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed
and varnished, walking furtively down a quiet street, and
looking about him before he slipped into a doorway. She understood now that she had been cold to him: what more likely
than that he had sought compensations? All men were like
that, she supposed – no doubt her simplicity had amused him.
In the act of transposing Fraser Leath into a Don Juan she
was pulled up by the ironic perception that she was simply trying to justify Darrow. She wanted to think that all men were
“like that” because Darrow was “like that”: she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact by persuading herself that only
through such concessions could women like herself hope to
keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she was fi lled
with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attempt to see. Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow?
If only she had held her tongue nothing need ever have been
known. Sophy Viner would have broken her engagement,
Owen would have been sent around the world, and her own
dream would have been unshattered. But she had probed, insisted, cross-examined, not rested till she had dragged the secret to the light. She was one of the luckless women who always have the wrong audacities, and who always know it . . .
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