The Reef

by Edith Wharton

  VI

  At the Theatre Francais, the next afternoon, Darrow yawned and fidgetedin his seat.

  The day was warm, the theatre crowded and airless, and the performance,it seemed to him, intolerably bad. He stole a glance at his companion,wondering if she shared his feelings. Her rapt profile betrayed nounrest, but politeness might have caused her to feign an interest thatshe did not feel. He leaned back impatiently, stifling another yawn,and trying to fix his attention on the stage. Great things were goingforward there, and he was not insensible to the stern beauties of theancient drama. But the interpretation of the play seemed to him asairless and lifeless as the atmosphere of the theatre. The players werethe same whom he had often applauded in those very parts, and perhapsthat fact added to the impression of staleness and conventionalityproduced by their performance. Surely it was time to infuse new bloodinto the veins of the moribund art. He had the impression that theghosts of actors were giving a spectral performance on the shores ofStyx.

  Certainly it was not the most profitable way for a young man with apretty companion to pass the golden hours of a spring afternoon. Thefreshness of the face at his side, reflecting the freshness of theseason, suggested dapplings of sunlight through new leaves, the sound ofa brook in the grass, the ripple of tree-shadows over breezy meadows...

  When at length the fateful march of the cothurns was stayed by thesingle pause in the play, and Darrow had led Miss Viner out on thebalcony overhanging the square before the theatre, he turned to see ifshe shared his feelings. But the rapturous look she gave him checked thedepreciation on his lips.

  "Oh, why did you bring me out here? One ought to creep away and sit inthe dark till it begins again!"

  "Is THAT the way they made you feel?"

  "Didn't they _YOU?_...As if the gods were there all the while, just behindthem, pulling the strings?" Her hands were pressed against the railing,her face shining and darkening under the wing-beats of successiveimpressions.

  Darrow smiled in enjoyment of her pleasure. After all, he had felt allthat, long ago; perhaps it was his own fault, rather than that of theactors, that the poetry of the play seemed to have evaporated...But no,he had been right in judging the performance to be dull and stale:it was simply his companion's inexperience, her lack of occasions tocompare and estimate, that made her think it brilliant.

  "I was afraid you were bored and wanted to come away."

  "BORED?" She made a little aggrieved grimace. "You mean you thought metoo ignorant and stupid to appreciate it?"

  "No; not that." The hand nearest him still lay on the railing of thebalcony, and he covered it for a moment with his. As he did so he sawthe colour rise and tremble in her cheek.

  "Tell me just what you think," he said, bending his head a little, andonly half-aware of his words.

  She did not turn her face to his, but began to talk rapidly, tryingto convey something of what she felt. But she was evidently unused toanalyzing her aesthetic emotions, and the tumultuous rush of the dramaseemed to have left her in a state of panting wonder, as though it hadbeen a storm or some other natural cataclysm. She had no literary orhistoric associations to which to attach her impressions: her educationhad evidently not comprised a course in Greek literature. But she feltwhat would probably have been unperceived by many a young lady who hadtaken a first in classics: the ineluctable fatality of the tale, thedread sway in it of the same mysterious "luck" which pulled the threadsof her own small destiny. It was not literature to her, it was fact: asactual, as near by, as what was happening to her at the moment and whatthe next hour held in store. Seen in this light, the play regained forDarrow its supreme and poignant reality. He pierced to the heart ofits significance through all the artificial accretions with which histheories of art and the conventions of the stage had clothed it, and sawit as he had never seen it: as life.

  After this there could be no question of flight, and he took her back tothe theatre, content to receive his own sensations through the medium ofhers. But with the continuation of the play, and the oppression of theheavy air, his attention again began to wander, straying back over theincidents of the morning.

  He had been with Sophy Viner all day, and he was surprised to findhow quickly the time had gone. She had hardly attempted, as the hourspassed, to conceal her satisfaction on finding that no telegram camefrom the Farlows. "They'll have written," she had simply said; and hermind had at once flown on to the golden prospect of an afternoon at thetheatre. The intervening hours had been disposed of in a stroll throughthe lively streets, and a repast, luxuriously lingered over, underthe chestnut-boughs of a restaurant in the Champs Elysees. Everythingentertained and interested her, and Darrow remarked, with an amuseddetachment, that she was not insensible to the impression her charmsproduced. Yet there was no hard edge of vanity in her sense of herprettiness: she seemed simply to be aware of it as a note in the generalharmony, and to enjoy sounding the note as a singer enjoys singing.

  After luncheon, as they sat over their coffee, she had again askedan immense number of questions and delivered herself of a remarkablevariety of opinions. Her questions testified to a wholesome andcomprehensive human curiosity, and her comments showed, like herface and her whole attitude, an odd mingling of precocious wisdom anddisarming ignorance. When she talked to him about "life"--the word wasoften on her lips--she seemed to him like a child playing with a tiger'scub; and he said to himself that some day the child would grow up--andso would the tiger. Meanwhile, such expertness qualified by such candourmade it impossible to guess the extent of her personal experience, orto estimate its effect on her character. She might be any one of a dozendefinable types, or she might--more disconcertingly to her companion andmore perilously to herself--be a shifting and uncrystallized mixture ofthem all.

  Her talk, as usual, had promptly reverted to the stage. She was eagerto learn about every form of dramatic expression which the metropolisof things theatrical had to offer, and her curiosity ranged from theofficial temples of the art to its less hallowed haunts. Her searchingenquiries about a play whose production, on one of the latter scenes,had provoked a considerable amount of scandal, led Darrow to throw outlaughingly: "To see THAT you'll have to wait till you're married!" andhis answer had sent her off at a tangent.

  "Oh, I never mean to marry," she had rejoined in a tone of youthfulfinality.

  "I seem to have heard that before!"

  "Yes; from girls who've only got to choose!" Her eyes had grown suddenlyalmost old. "I'd like you to see the only men who've ever wanted tomarry me! One was the doctor on the steamer, when I came abroad with theHokes: he'd been cashiered from the navy for drunkenness. The other wasa deaf widower with three grown-up daughters, who kept a clock-shop inBayswater!--Besides," she rambled on, "I'm not so sure that I believein marriage. You see I'm all for self-development and the chance to liveone's life. I'm awfully modern, you know."

  It was just when she proclaimed herself most awfully modern that shestruck him as most helplessly backward; yet the moment after, withoutany bravado, or apparent desire to assume an attitude, she wouldpropound some social axiom which could have been gathered only in thebitter soil of experience.

  All these things came back to him as he sat beside her in the theatreand watched her ingenuous absorption. It was on "the story" that hermind was fixed, and in life also, he suspected, it would always be "thestory", rather than its remoter imaginative issues, that would hold her.He did not believe there were ever any echoes in her soul...

  There was no question, however, that what she felt was felt withintensity: to the actual, the immediate, she spread vibrating strings.When the play was over, and they came out once more into the sunlight,Darrow looked down at her with a smile.

  "Well?" he asked.

  She made no answer. Her dark gaze seemed to rest on him without seeinghim. Her cheeks and lips were pale, and the loose hair under herhat-brim clung to her forehead in damp rings. She looked like a youngpriestess still dazed by the fumes of the cavern.

>   "You poor child--it's been almost too much for you!"

  She shook her head with a vague smile.

  "Come," he went on, putting his hand on her arm, "let's jump into a taxiand get some air and sunshine. Look, there are hours of daylight left;and see what a night it's going to be!"

  He pointed over their heads, to where a white moon hung in the mistyblue above the roofs of the rue de Rivoli.

  She made no answer, and he signed to a motor-cab, calling out to thedriver: "To the Bois!"

  As the carriage turned toward the Tuileries she roused herself. "I mustgo first to the hotel. There may be a message--at any rate I must decideon something."

  Darrow saw that the reality of the situation had suddenly forced itselfupon her. "I MUST decide on something," she repeated.

  He would have liked to postpone the return, to persuade her to drivedirectly to the Bois for dinner. It would have been easy enough toremind her that she could not start for Joigny that evening, and thattherefore it was of no moment whether she received the Farlows' answerthen or a few hours later; but for some reason he hesitated to use thisargument, which had come so naturally to him the day before. After all,he knew she would find nothing at the hotel--so what did it matter ifthey went there?

  The porter, interrogated, was not sure. He himself had received nothingfor the lady, but in his absence his subordinate might have sent aletter upstairs.

  Darrow and Sophy mounted together in the lift, and the young man, whileshe went into her room, unlocked his own door and glanced at the emptytable. For him at least no message had come; and on her threshold, amoment later, she met him with the expected: "No--there's nothing!"

  He feigned an unregretful surprise. "So much the better! And now, shallwe drive out somewhere? Or would you rather take a boat to Bellevue?Have you ever dined there, on the terrace, by moonlight? It's not at allbad. And there's no earthly use in sitting here waiting."

  She stood before him in perplexity.

  "But when I wrote yesterday I asked them to telegraph. I suppose they'rehorribly hard up, the poor dears, and they thought a letter would doas well as a telegram." The colour had risen to her face. "That's why Iwrote instead of telegraphing; I haven't a penny to spare myself!"

  Nothing she could have said could have filled her listener with a deepercontrition. He felt the red in his own face as he recalled the motivewith which he had credited her in his midnight musings. But that motive,after all, had simply been trumped up to justify his own disloyalty: hehad never really believed in it. The reflection deepened his confusion,and he would have liked to take her hand in his and confess theinjustice he had done her.

  She may have interpreted his change of colour as an involuntary protestat being initiated into such shabby details, for she went on with alaugh: "I suppose you can hardly understand what it means to have tostop and think whether one can afford a telegram? But I've always had toconsider such things. And I mustn't stay here any longer now--I must tryto get a night train for Joigny. Even if the Farlows can't take me in,I can go to the hotel: it will cost less than staying here." She pausedagain and then exclaimed: "I ought to have thought of that sooner; Iought to have telegraphed yesterday! But I was sure I should hear fromthem today; and I wanted--oh, I DID so awfully want to stay!" She threwa troubled look at Darrow. "Do you happen to remember," she asked, "whattime it was when you posted my letter?"