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THE REEF
Miss Viner would receive her. There was a long delay before
the maid returned, and when at last she appeared it was with
a slip of paper on which an address was written, and a verbal
message to the effect that Miss Viner had left some days previously, and was staying with her sister in a hotel near the Place
de l’Etoile. The maid added that Mrs. Farlow, on the plea that
Miss Viner’s plans were uncertain, had at fi rst made some diffi culty about giving this information; and Anna guessed that
the girl had left her friends’ roof, and instructed them to withhold her address, with the object of avoiding Owen. “She’s kept
faith with herself and I haven’t,” Anna mused; and the thought
was a fresh incentive to action.
Darrow had announced his intention of coming soon after luncheon, and the morning was already so far advanced
that Anna, still mistrustful of her strength, decided to drive
immediately to the address Mrs. Farlow had given. On
the way there she tried to recall what she had heard of Sophy Viner’s sister, but beyond the girl’s enthusiastic report of
the absent Laura’s loveliness she could remember only certain vague allusions of Mrs. Farlow’s to her artistic endowments and matrimonial vicissitudes. Darrow had mentioned
her but once, and in the briefest terms, as having apparently
very little concern for Sophy’s welfare, and being, at any rate,
too geographically remote to give her any practical support;
and Anna wondered what chance had brought her to her sister’s side at this conjunction. Mrs. Farlow had spoken of her
as a celebrity (in what line Anna failed to recall); but Mrs.
Farlow’s celebrities were legion, and the name on the slip of
371
EDITH WHARTON
paper – Mrs. McTarvie–Birch – did not seem to have any
defi nite association with fame.
While Anna waited in the dingy vestibule of the Hotel
Chicago she had so distinct a vision of what she meant to say to
Sophy Viner that the girl seemed already to be before her; and
her heart dropped from all the height of its courage when
the porter, after a long delay, returned with the announcement that Miss Viner was no longer in the hotel. Anna, doubtful if she understood, asked if he merely meant that the young
lady was out at the moment; but he replied that she had gone
away the day before. Beyond this he had no information to impart, and after a moment’s hesitation Anna sent him back to
enquire if Mrs. McTarvie–Birch would receive her. She refl ected that Sophy had probably pledged her sister to the same
secrecy as Mrs. Farlow, and that a personal appeal to Mrs. Birch
might lead to less negative results.
There was another long interval of suspense before the porter reappeared with an affi rmative answer; and a third while
an exiguous and hesitating lift bore her up past a succession of
shabby landings.
When the last was reached, and her guide had directed her down a winding passage that smelt of sea-going
luggage, she found herself before a door through which
a strong odour of tobacco reached her simultaneously with
the sounds of a suppressed altercation. Her knock was followed by a silence, and after a minute or two the door was
opened by a handsome young man whose ruffl ed hair and
general air of creased disorder led her to conclude that he
had just risen from a long-limbed sprawl on a sofa strewn
372
THE REEF
with tumbled cushions. This sofa, and a grand piano bearing
a basket of faded roses, a biscuit-tin and a devastated breakfast tray, almost fi lled the narrow sitting-room, in the remaining corner of which another man, short, swarthy and
humble, sat examining the lining of his hat.
Anna paused in doubt; but on her naming Mrs. Birch
the young man politely invited her to enter, at the same
time casting an impatient glance at the mute spectator in
the background.
The latter, raising his eyes, which were round and bulging, fi xed them, not on the young man but on Anna, whom,
for a moment, he scrutinized as searchingly as the interior of
his hat. Under his gaze she had the sense of being minutely
catalogued and valued; and the impression, when he fi nally
rose and moved toward the door, of having been accepted as
a better guarantee than he had had any reason to hope for.
On the threshold his glance crossed that of the young man in
an exchange of intelligence as full as it was rapid; and this brief
scene left Anna so oddly enlightened that she felt no surprise
when her companion, pushing an arm-chair forward, sociably
asked her if she wouldn’t have a cigarette. Her polite refusal
provoked the remark that he would, if she’d no objection; and
while he groped for matches in his loose pockets, and behind
the photographs and letters crowding the narrow mantelshelf, she ventured another enquiry for Mrs. Birch.
“Just a minute,” he smiled; “I think the masseur’s with
her.” He spoke in a smooth denationalized English, which,
like the look in his long-lashed eyes and the promptness of his
charming smile, suggested a long training in all the arts of ex-
373
EDITH WHARTON
pediency. Having fi nally discovered a match-box on the fl oor
beside the sofa, he lit his cigarette and dropped back among
the cushions; and on Anna’s remarking that she was sorry to
disturb Mrs. Birch he replied that that was all right, and that
she always kept everybody waiting.
After this, through the haze of his perpetually renewed
cigarettes, they continued to chat for some time of indifferent
topics; but when at last Anna again suggested the possibility of
her seeing Mrs. Birch he rose from his corner with a slight
shrug, and murmuring: “She’s perfectly hopeless,” lounged off
through an inner door.
Anna was still wondering when and in what conjunction of
circumstances the much-married Laura had acquired a partner so conspicuous for his personal charms, when the young
man returned to announce: “She says it’s all right, if you don’t
mind seeing her in bed.”
He drew aside to let Anna pass, and she found herself in
a dim untidy scented room, with a pink curtain pinned across
its single window, and a lady with a great deal of fair hair and
uncovered neck smiling at her from a pink bed on which
an immense powder-puff trailed.
“You don’t mind, do you? He costs such a frightful lot that
I can’t afford to send him off,” Mrs. Birch explained, extending a thickly-ringed hand to Anna, and leaving her in doubt
as to whether the person alluded to were her masseur or her
husband. Before a reply was possible there was a convulsive
stir beneath the pink expanse, and something that resembled
another powder-puff hurled itself at Anna with a volley of
sounds like the popping of Lilliputian champagne corks. Mrs.
374
THE REEF
Birch, fl inging herself forward, gasped out: “If you’d just give
him a caramel . . . there, in that box on the dressing-table . . .
it’s the only earthly thing to stop him . . . ” and when Anna had
proffered this sop to her assailant, and he had withdrawn with
it beneath the bedspread, his mistress sank back with a laugh.
“Isn’t he a beauty? The Prince gave him to me down at
Nice the other day – but he’s perfectly awful,” she confessed,
beaming intimately on her visitor. In the roseate penumbra of
the bed-curtains she presented to Anna’s startled gaze an odd
chromo-like resemblance to Sophy Viner, or a suggestion, rather, of what Sophy Viner might, with the years and in spite of
the powder-puff, become. Larger, blonder, heavier-featured,
she yet had glances and movements that disturbingly suggested what was freshest and most engaging in the girl; and as she
stretched her bare plump arm across the bed she seemed to be
pulling back the veil from dingy distances of family history.
“Do sit down, if there’s a place to sit on,” she cordially
advised; adding, as Anna took the edge of a chair hung with
miscellaneous raiment: “My singing takes so much time that
I don’t get a chance to walk the fat off – that’s the worst of being an artist.”
Anna murmured an assent. “I hope it hasn’t inconvenienced you to see me; I told Mr. Birch – ”
“Mr. WHO?” the recumbent beauty asked; and then: “Oh,
JIMMY!” she faintly laughed, as if more for her own enlightenment than Anna’s.
The latter continued eagerly: “I understand from Mrs. Farlow that your sister was with you, and I ventured to come up
375
EDITH WHARTON
because I wanted to ask you when I should have a chance of
fi nding her.”
Mrs. McTarvie–Birch threw back her head with a long
stare. “Do you mean to say the idiot at the door didn’t tell you?
Sophy went away last night.”
“Last night?” Anna echoed. A sudden terror had possessed
her. Could it be that the girl had tricked them all and gone
with Owen? The idea was incredible, yet it took such hold of
her that she could hardly steady her lips to say: “The porter did
tell me, but I thought perhaps he was mistaken. Mrs. Farlow
seemed to think that I should fi nd her here.”
“It was all so sudden that I don’t suppose she had time to
let the Farlows know. She didn’t get Mrs. Murrett’s wire till
yesterday, and she just pitched her things into a trunk and
rushed — ”
“Mrs. Murrett?”
“Why, yes. Sophy’s gone to India with Mrs. Murrett; they’re to meet at Brindisi,” Sophy’s sister said with
a calm smile.
Anna sat motionless, gazing at the disordered room,
the pink bed, the trivial face among the pillows.
Mrs. McTarvie–Birch pursued: “They had a fearful kick-up
last spring – I daresay you knew about it – but I told Sophy
she’d better lump it, as long as the old woman was willing to . . .
As an artist, of course, it’s perfectly impossible for me to have
her with me . . . ”
“Of course,” Anna mechanically assented.
Through the confused pain of her thoughts she was hardly aware that Mrs. Birch’s explanations were still continuing.
376
THE REEF
“Naturally I didn’t altogether approve of her going back to that
beast of a woman. I said all I could . . . I told her she was a fool to
chuck up such a place as yours. But Sophy’s restless – always
was – and she’s taken it into her head she’d rather travel . . . ”
Anna rose from her seat, groping for some formula of
leave-taking. The pushing back of her chair roused the white
dog’s smouldering animosity, and he drowned his mistress’s
further confi dences in another outburst of hysterics. Through
the tumult Anna signed an inaudible farewell, and Mrs. Birch,
having momentarily succeeded in suppressing her pet under
a pillow, called out: “Do come again! I’d love to sing to you.”
Anna murmured a word of thanks and turned to the door.
As she opened it she heard her hostess crying after her: “Jimmy! Do you hear me? Jimmy BRANCE!” and then, there being no response from the person summoned: “DO tell him he
must go and call the lift for you!”
Литературно-художественное издание
Original
Edith Wharton
The Reef
Выпускающий редактор: И. Краснова
Компьютерная верстка: А. Дятлов
Художественное оформление: М. Соколова
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Проект осуществлён с помощью технологий
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