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THE REEF
side by side. At the end of the gallery, a lamp brought out turbid gleams in the smoky battle-piece above it.
On the landing Darrow stopped; his room was the nearest to the stairs. “Good night,” he said, holding out his hand.
As Anna gave him hers the springs of grief broke loose in
her. She struggled with her sobs, and subdued them; but her
breath came unevenly, and to hide her agitation she leaned on
him and pressed her face against his arm.
“Don’t – don’t,” he whispered, soothing her.
Her troubled breathing sounded loudly in the silence of
the sleeping house. She pressed her lips tight, but could not
stop the nervous pulsations in her throat, and he put an arm
about her and, opening his door, drew her across the threshold of his room. The door shut behind her and she sat
down on the lounge at the foot of the bed. The pulsations in
her throat had ceased, but she knew they would begin again
if she tried to speak.
Darrow walked away and leaned against the mantelpiece.
The red-veiled lamp shone on his books and papers, on
the arm-chair by the fi re, and the scattered objects on his
dressing-table. A log glimmered on the hearth, and the room
was warm and faintly smoke-scented. It was the fi rst time she
had ever been in a room he lived in, among his personal possessions and the traces of his daily usage. Every object about
her seemed to contain a particle of himself: the whole air
breathed of him, steeping her in the sense of his intimate
presence.
Suddenly she thought: “This is what Sophy Viner knew” . . .
and with a torturing precision she pictured them alone in
351
EDITH WHARTON
such a scene . . . Had he taken the girl to an hotel . . . where did
people go in such cases? Wherever they were, the silence of
night had been around them, and the things he used had
been strewn about the room . . . Anna, ashamed of dwelling on
the detested vision, stood up with a confused impulse of fl ight;
then a wave of contrary feeling arrested her and she paused
with lowered head.
Darrow had come forward as she rose, and she perceived
that he was waiting for her to bid him good night. It was clear
that no other possibility had even brushed his mind; and
the fact, for some dim reason, humiliated her. “Why not . . .
why not?” something whispered in her, as though his forbearance, his tacit recognition of her pride, were a slight on other
qualities she wanted him to feel in her.
“In the morning, then?” she heard him say.
“Yes, in the morning,” she repeated.
She continued to stand in the same place, looking vaguely
about the room. For once before they parted – since part they
must – she longed to be to him all that Sophy Viner had been;
but she remained rooted to the fl oor, unable to fi nd a word or
imagine a gesture that should express her meaning. Exasperated by her helplessness, she thought: “Don’t I feel things as
other women do?”
Her eye fell on a note-case she had given him. It was
worn at the corners with the friction of his pocket and distended with thickly packed papers. She wondered if he carried
her letters in it, and she put her hand out and touched it.
All that he and she had ever felt or seen, their close encounters of word and look, and the closer contact of their si-
352
THE REEF
lences, trembled through her at the touch. She remembered
things he had said that had been like new skies above her
head: ways he had that seemed a part of the air she breathed.
The faint warmth of her girlish love came back to her, gathering heat as it passed through her thoughts; and her heart
rocked like a boat on the surge of its long long memories. “It’s
because I love him in too many ways,” she thought; and slowly
she turned to the door.
She was aware that Darrow was still silently watching
her, but he neither stirred nor spoke till she had reached
the threshold. Then he met her there and caught her in
his arms.
“Not to-night – don’t tell me to-night!” he whispered; and
she leaned away from him, closing her eyes for an instant, and
then slowly opening them to the fl ood of light in his.
CHAPTER XXXVII
Anna and Darrow, the next day, sat alone in a compartment of the Paris train.
Anna, when they entered it, had put herself in the farthest
corner and placed her bag on the adjoining seat. She had decided suddenly to accompany Darrow to Paris, had even persuaded him to wait for a later train in order that they might
travel together. She had an intense longing to be with him,
an almost morbid terror of losing sight of him for a moment:
when he jumped out of the train and ran back along the platform to buy a newspaper for her she felt as though she should
never see him again, and shivered with the cold misery of her
last journey to Paris, when she had thought herself parted
from him forever. Yet she wanted to keep him at a distance, on
the other side of the compartment, and as the train moved
out of the station she drew from her bag the letters she had
thrust in it as she left the house, and began to glance over
them so that her lowered lids should hide her eyes from him.
She was his now, his for life: there could never again be
any question of sacrifi cing herself to Effi e’s welfare, or to any
other abstract conception of duty. Effi e of course would not
suffer; Anna would pay for her bliss as a wife by redoubled
devotion as a mother. Her scruples were not overcome; but
354
THE REEF
for the time their voices were drowned in the tumultuous rumour of her happiness.
As she opened her letters she was conscious that Darrow’s
gaze was fi xed on her, and gradually it drew her eyes upward,
and she drank deep of the passionate tenderness in his. Then
the blood rose to her face and she felt again the desire to shield
herself. She turned back to her letters and her glance lit on
an envelope inscribed in Owen’s hand.
Her heart began to beat oppressively: she was in a mood
when the simplest things seemed ominous. What could Owen
have to say to her? Only the fi rst page was covered, and it
contained simply the announcement that, in the company of
a young compatriot who was studying at the Beaux Arts, he
had planned to leave for Spain the following evening.
“He hasn’t seen her, then!” was Anna’s instant thought;
and her feeling was a strange compound of humiliation and
relief. The girl had kept her word, lived up to the line of conduct she had set herself; and Anna had failed in the same attempt. She did not reproach herself with her failure; but she
would have been happier if there had been less discrepancy
between her words to Sophy Viner and the act which had followed them. It irritated her obscurely that the girl should have
been so much surer of her power to carry out her purpose . . .
Anna looked up and saw that Darrow’s eyes were on
the newspaper. He seemed calm and secure, almost indifferent to her presence. “Will it become a matter of course to
him so soon?” she wondered with a twinge of jealousy.
She sat motionless, her eyes fi xed on him, trying to make
him feel the attraction of her gaze as she felt his. It surprised
355
EDITH WHARTON
and shamed her to detect a new element in her love for him:
a sort of suspicious tyrannical tenderness that seemed to deprive it of all serenity. Finally he looked up, his smile enveloped her, and she felt herself his in every fi bre, his so completely and inseparably that she saw the vanity of imagining
any other fate for herself.
To give herself a countenance she held out Owen’s letter.
He took it and glanced down the page, his face grown grave.
She waited nervously till he looked up.
“That’s a good plan; the best thing that could happen,” he
said, a just perceptible shade of constraint in his tone.
“Oh, yes,” she hastily assented. She was aware of a faint
current of relief silently circulating between them. They were
both glad that Owen was going, that for a while he would
be out of their way; and it seemed to her horrible that so
much of the stuff of their happiness should be made of such
unavowed feelings . . .
“I shall see him this evening,” she said, wishing Darrow to
feel that she was not afraid of meeting her step-son.
“Yes, of course; perhaps he might dine with you.”
The words struck her as strangely obtuse. Darrow was to
meet his Ambassador at the station on the latter’s arrival, and
would in all probability have to spend the evening with him,
and Anna knew he had been concerned at the thought of having to leave her alone. But how could he speak in that careless
tone of her dining with Owen? She lowered her voice to say:
“I’m afraid he’s desperately unhappy.”
He answered, with a tinge of impatience: “It’s much the best
thing that he should travel.”
356
THE REEF
“Yes – but don’t you feel . . . ” She broke off. She knew
how he disliked these idle returns on the irrevocable, and
her fear of doing or saying what he disliked was tinged
by a new instinct of subserviency against which her pride
revolted. She thought to herself: “He will see the change, and
grow indifferent to me as he did to HER . . . ” and for a moment it seemed to her that she was reliving the experience of
Sophy Viner.
Darrow made no attempt to learn the end of her unfi nished sentence. He handed back Owen’s letter and returned to
his newspaper; and when he looked up from it a few minutes
later it was with a clear brow and a smile that irresistibly drew
her back to happier thoughts.
The train was just entering a station, and a moment later
their compartment was invaded by a commonplace couple
preoccupied with the bestowal of bulging packages. Anna, at
their approach, felt the possessive pride of the woman in love
when strangers are between herself and the man she loves.
She asked Darrow to open the window, to place her bag in
the net, to roll her rug into a cushion for her feet; and while
he was thus busied with her she was conscious of a new devotion in his tone, in his way of bending over her and meeting
her eyes. He went back to his seat, and they looked at each
other like lovers smiling at a happy secret.
Anna, before going back to Givre, had suggested Owen’s
moving into her apartment, but he had preferred to remain at
the hotel to which he had sent his luggage, and on arriving in Paris she decided to drive there at once. She was impatient to have the meeting over, and glad that Darrow was
357
EDITH WHARTON
obliged to leave her at the station in order to look up a colleague at the Embassy. She dreaded his seeing Owen again, and
yet dared not tell him so, and to ensure his remaining away
she mentioned an urgent engagement with her dress-maker
and a long list of commissions to be executed for Madame de
Chantelle.
“I shall see you to-morrow morning,” she said; but he replied with a smile that he would certainly fi nd time to come to
her for a moment on his way back from meeting the Ambassador; and when he had put her in a cab he leaned through
the window to press his lips to hers.
She blushed like a girl, thinking, half vexed, half happy: “Yesterday he would not have done it . . . ” and a dozen scarcely defi nable differences in his look and manner
seemed all at once to be summed up in the boyish act. “After
all, I’m engaged to him,” she refl ected, and then smiled at
the absurdity of the word. The next instant, with a pang of
self-reproach, she remembered Sophy Viner’s cry: “I knew
all the while he didn’t care . . . ” “Poor thing, oh poor thing!”
Anna murmured . . .
At Owen’s hotel she waited in a tremor while the porter
went in search of him. Word was presently brought back that
he was in his room and begged her to come up, and as she
crossed the hall she caught sight of his portmanteaux lying on
the fl oor, already labelled for departure.
Owen sat at a table writing, his back to the door; and when
he stood up the window was behind him, so that, in the rainy
afternoon light, his features were barely discernible.
358
THE REEF
“Dearest – so you’re really off?” she said, hesitating a moment on the threshold.
He pushed a chair forward, and they sat down, each waiting for the other to speak. Finally she put some random question about his travelling-companion, a slow shy meditative
youth whom he had once or twice brought down to Givre.
She refl ected that it was natural he should have given this
uncommunicative comrade the preference over his livelier
acquaintances, and aloud she said: “I’m so glad Fred Rempson
can go with you.”
Owen answered in the same tone, and for a few minutes
their talk dragged itself on over a dry waste of common-places.
Anna noticed that, though ready enough to impart his own
plans, Owen studiously abstained from putting any questions
about hers. It was evident from his allusions that he meant to
be away for some time, and he presently asked her if she would
give instructions about packing and sending after him some
winter clothes he had left at Givre. This gave her the opportunity to say that she expected to go back within a day or two and
would attend to the matter as soon as she returned. She added:
“I came up this morning with George, who is going on to London to-morrow,” intending, by the use of Darrow’s Christian
name, to give Owen the chance to speak of her marriage. But
he made no comment, and she continued to hear the name
sounding on unfamiliarly between them.
The room was almost dark, and she fi nally stood up
and glanced about for the light-switch, saying: “I can’t see
you, dear.”
359
EDITH WHARTON
“Oh, don’t – I hate the light!” Owen exclaimed, catching
her by the wrist and pushing her back into her seat. He gave
a nervous laugh and added: “I’m half-blind with neuralgia.
I suppose it’s this beastly rain.”
“Yes; it will do you good to get down to Spain.”
She asked if he had the remedies the doctor had given him
for a previous attack, and on his replying that he didn’t know
what he’d done with the stuff, she sprang up, offering to go to
the chemist’s. It was a relief to have something to do for him,
and she knew from his “Oh, thanks – would you?” that it was
a relief to him to have a pretext for not detaining her. His natural impulse would have been to declare that he didn’t want
any drugs, and would be all right in no time; and his acquiescence showed her how profoundly he felt the uselessness of
their trying to prolong their talk. His face was now no more
than a white blur in the dusk, but she felt its indistinctness as
a veil drawn over aching intensities of expression. “He knows
. . . he knows . . . ” she said to herself, and wondered whether
the truth had been revealed to him by some corroborative fact
or by the sheer force of divination.
He had risen also, and was clearly waiting for her to go, and
she turned to the door, saying: “I’ll be back in a moment.”
“Oh, don’t come up again, please!” He paused, embarrassed.
“I mean – I may not be here. I’ve got to go and pick up Rempson, and see about some fi nal things with him.” She stopped on
the threshold with a sinking heart. He meant this to be their
leave-taking, then – and he had not even asked her when she
was to be married, or spoken of seeing her again before she set
out for the other side of the world.
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