The Reef

by Edith Wharton

  XI

  "This is the south terrace," Anna said. "Should you like to walk down tothe river?"

  She seemed to listen to herself speaking from a far-off airy height, andyet to be wholly gathered into the circle of consciousness which drewits glowing ring about herself and Darrow. To the aerial listener herwords sounded flat and colourless, but to the self within the ring eachone beat with a separate heart.

  It was the day after Darrow's arrival, and he had come down early, drawnby 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 thestone-flagged hall, his voice as he asked a servant where to find her.She was at the end of the house, in the brown-panelled sitting-roomwhich she frequented at that season because it caught the sunlight firstand kept it longest. She stood near the window, in the pale band ofbrightness, arranging some salmon-pink geraniums in a shallow porcelainbowl. Every sensation of touch and sight was thrice-alive in her. Thegrey-green fur of the geranium leaves caressed her fingers and thesunlight wavering across the irregular surface of the old parquet floormade it seem as bright and shifting as the brown bed of a stream.

  Darrow stood framed in the door-way of the farthest drawing-room, alight-grey figure against the black and white flagging of the hall; thenhe began to move toward her down the empty pale-panelled vista, crossingone after another the long reflections which a projecting cabinet orscreen cast here and there upon the shining floors.

  As he drew nearer, his figure was suddenly displaced by that of herhusband, whom, from the same point, she had so often seen advancing downthe same perspective. Straight, spare, erect, looking to right andleft with quick precise turns of the head, and stopping now and then tostraighten a chair or alter the position of a vase, Fraser Leath usedto march toward her through the double file of furniture like a generalreviewing a regiment drawn up for his inspection. At a certain point,midway across the second room, he always stopped before the mantel-pieceof pinkish-yellow marble and looked at himself in the tall garlandedglass that surmounted it. She could not remember that he had ever foundanything to straighten or alter in his own studied attire, but she hadnever known him to omit the inspection when he passed that particularmirror.

  When it was over he continued more briskly on his way, and the resultingexpression of satisfaction was still on his face when he entered the oaksitting-room to greet his wife...

  The spectral projection of this little daily scene hung but for a momentbefore Anna, but in that moment she had time to fling a wondering glanceacross the distance between her past and present. Then the footsteps ofthe present came close, and she had to drop the geraniums to give herhand to Darrow...

  "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 theevening they had had between them Owen Leath and their own thoughts. Nowthey were alone for the first time and the fact was enough in itself.Yet Anna was intensely aware that as soon as they began to talk moreintimately they would feel that they knew each other less well.

  They passed out onto the terrace and down the steps to the gravel walkbelow. The delicate frosting of dew gave the grass a bluish shimmer, andthe sunlight, sliding in emerald streaks along the tree-boles, gathereditself into great luminous blurs at the end of the wood-walks, and hungabove the fields 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 atthe long pink house-front, plainer, friendlier, less adorned than on theside toward the court. So prolonged yet delicate had been the frictionof time upon its bricks that certain expanses had the bloom and textureof old red velvet, and the patches of gold lichen spreading over themlooked 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 aconical pigeon-house, above which the birds were flying, lustrous andslatey, their breasts merged in the blue of the roof when they droppeddown on it.

  "And this is where you've been all these years."

  They turned away and began to walk down a long tunnel of yellowingtrees. Benches with mossy feet stood against the mossy edges of thepath, and at its farther end it widened into a circle about a basinrimmed with stone, in which the opaque water strewn with leaves lookedlike a slab of gold-flecked agate. The path, growing narrower, wound oncircuitously through the woods, between slender serried trunks twinedwith ivy. Patches of blue appeared above them through the dwindlingleaves, and presently the trees drew back and showed the open fieldsalong the river.

  They walked on across the fields to the tow-path. In a curve of the wallsome steps led up to a crumbling pavilion with openings choked with ivy.Anna and Darrow seated themselves on the bench projecting from the innerwall of the pavilion and looked across the river at the slopes dividedinto blocks of green and fawn-colour, and at the chalk-tinted villagelifting its squat church-tower and grey roofs against the preciselydrawn lines of the landscape. Anna sat silent, so intensely aware ofDarrow's nearness that there was no surprise in the touch he laid on herhand. They looked at each other, and he smiled and said: "There are tobe no more obstacles now."

  "Obstacles?" The word startled her. "What obstacles?"

  "Don't you remember the wording of the telegram that turned me backlast May? 'Unforeseen obstacle': that was it. What was the earth-shakingproblem, by the way? Finding a governess for Effie, wasn't it?"

  "But I gave you my reason: the reason why it was an obstacle. I wroteyou fully about it."

  "Yes, I know you did." He lifted her hand and kissed it. "How far off itall seems, and how little it all matters today!"

  She looked at him quickly. "Do you feel that? I suppose I'm different. Iwant to draw all those wasted months into today--to make them a part ofit."

  "But they are, to me. You reach back and take everything--back to thefirst days of all."

  She frowned a little, as if struggling with an inarticulate perplexity."It's curious how, in those first days, too, something that I didn'tunderstand came between us."

  "Oh, in those days we neither of us understood, did we? It's part ofwhat's called the bliss of being young."

  "Yes, I thought that, too: thought it, I mean, in looking back. But itcouldn'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 heretogether."

  He dismissed the rest with a lightness that might have seemed conclusiveevidence 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 somuch for herself as for their mutual love, and that in treating lightlyany past phase of their relation he took something from its presentbeauty. The colour rose to her face.

  "Between you and me everything matters."

  "Of course!" She felt the unperceiving sweetness of his smile. "That'swhy," 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; wecan't get away from it."

  "Get away from it? Do you want to? AGAIN?"

  Her heart was beating unsteadily. Something in her, fitfully and withreluctance, struggled to free itself, but the warmth of his nearnesspenetrated every sense as the sunlight steeped the landscape. Then,suddenly, she felt that she wanted no less than the whole of herhappiness.

  "'Again'? But wasn't it YOU, the last time----?"

  She paused, the tremor in her of Psyche holding up the lamp. But in theinterrogative light of her pause her companion's features underwent nochange.

  "The last time? Last spring? But it was you who--for the best ofreasons, as you've told me--turned me back from your very door lastspring!"

  She saw that he was good-humouredly ready to "thresh out," for hersentimental satisfaction, a question which, for his own, Time had socon
clusively dealt with; and the sense of his readiness reassured her.

  "I wrote as soon as I could," she rejoined. "I explained the delay andasked 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. Ihad some excuse for thinking, when it came, that you were in no greathurry 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?"

  He turned on her with a quick look of wonder. "God knows--if you can askme that!"

  "You see I was right to say I didn't understand."

  He stood up abruptly and stood facing her, blocking the view over theriver 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 lightsbefore we show ourselves to each other. I want you to see me just as Iam, with all my irrational doubts and scruples; the old ones and the newones too."

  He came back to his seat beside her. "Never mind the old ones. They werejustified--I'm willing to admit it. With the governess having suddenlyto be packed off, and Effie on your hands, and your mother-in-law ill,I see the impossibility of your letting me come. I even see that, at themoment, it was difficult to write and explain. But what does all thatmatter now? The new scruples are the ones I want to tackle."

  Again her heart trembled. She felt her happiness so near, so sure, thatto strain it closer might be like a child's crushing a pet bird in itscaress. But her very security urged her on. For so long her doubts hadbeen knife-edged: now they had turned into bright harmless toys that shecould toss and catch without peril!

  "You didn't come, and you didn't answer my letter; and after waitingfour 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 whatI'd said in the first--the one I wrote you last June. I told you thenthat I was ready to give you the answer to what you'd asked me inLondon; 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 nowis, that you should frankly tell me why."

  "I can only repeat what I've just said. I was hurt and unhappy andI doubted you. I suppose if I'd cared less I should have been moreconfident. I cared so much that I couldn't risk another failure. Foryou'd made me feel that I'd miserably failed. So I shut my eyes and setmy teeth and turned my back. There's the whole pusillanimous truth ofit!"

  "Oh, if it's the WHOLE truth!----" She let him clasp her. "There's mytorment, you see. I thought that was what your silence meant till I madeyou 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 first." She drew away, but withouttaking 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 hispleasantly-browned face, his grey eyes, his frank white forehead. Shenoticed for the first time a seal-ring in a setting of twisted silver onthe 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 atheatre. I asked if you'd spoken of my having put you off--or if you'dsent me any message. He didn't remember that you had."

  "In a crush--in a Paris foyer? My dear!"

  "It was absurd of me! But Owen and I have always been on odd kind ofbrother-and-sister terms. I think he guessed about us when he saw youwith me in London. So he teased me a little and tried to make me curiousabout you; and when he saw he'd succeeded he told me he hadn't had timeto say much to you because you were in such a hurry to get back to thelady you were with."

  He still held her hands, but she felt no tremor in his, and the blooddid not stir in his brown cheek. He seemed to be honestly turning overhis memories. "Yes: and what else did he tell you?"

  "Oh, not much, except that she was awfully pretty. When I asked himto describe her he said you had her tucked away in a baignoire and hehadn't actually seen her; but he saw the tail of her cloak, and somehowknew from that that she was pretty. One DOES, you know...I think he saidthe cloak was pink."

  Darrow broke into a laugh. "Of course it was--they always are! So thatwas at the bottom of your doubts?"

  "Not at first. I only laughed. But afterward, when I wrote you and youdidn't answer----Oh, you DO see?" she appealed to him.

  He was looking at her gently. "Yes: I see."

  "It's not as if this were a light thing between us. I want you to knowme as I am. If I thought that at that moment...when you were on your wayhere, almost----"

  He dropped her hand and stood up. "Yes, yes--I understand."

  "But do you?" Her look followed him. "I'm not a goose of a girl. Iknow...of course I KNOW...but there are things a woman feels...whenwhat she knows doesn't make any difference. It's not that I want you toexplain--I mean about that particular evening. It's only that I want youto have the whole of my feeling. I didn't know what it was till I sawyou again. I never dreamed I should say such things to you!"

  "I never dreamed I should be here to hear you say them!" He turned backand lifting a floating end of her scarf put his lips to it. "But nowthat you have, I know--I know," he smiled down at her.

  "You know?"

  "That this is no light thing between us. Now you may ask me anything youplease! That was all I wanted to ask YOU."

  For a long moment they looked at each other without speaking. She sawthe dancing spirit in his eyes turn grave and darken to a passionatesternness. He stooped and kissed her, and she sat as if folded in wings.