The Reef

by Edith Wharton

  XXXIII

  Owen Leath did not go back with his step-mother to Givre. In reply toher suggestion he announced his intention of staying on a day or twolonger in Paris.

  Anna left alone by the first train the next morning. Darrow was tofollow in the afternoon. When Owen had left them the evening before,Darrow waited a moment for her to speak; then, as she said nothing, heasked her if she really wished him to return to Givre. She made a mutesign of assent, and he added: "For you know that, much as I'm ready todo for Owen, I can't do that for him--I can't go back to be sent awayagain."

  "No--no!"

  He came nearer, and looked at her, and she went to him. All her fearsseemed to fall from her as he held her. It was a different feeling fromany she had known before: confused and turbid, as if secret shames andrancours stirred in it, yet richer, deeper, more enslaving. She leanedher head back and shut her eyes beneath his kisses. She knew now thatshe could never give him up.

  Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go back aloneto Givre. She wanted time to think. She was convinced that what hadhappened was inevitable, that she and Darrow belonged to each other, andthat he was right in saying no past folly could ever put them asunder.If there was a shade of difference in her feeling for him it was thatof an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of his sight:she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate dependence, that wassomehow at variance with her own conception of her character.

  It was partly the consciousness of this change in herself that made herwant to be alone. The solitude of her inner life had given her the habitof these hours of self-examination, and she needed them as she neededher morning plunge into cold water.

  During the journey she tried to review what had happened in the lightof her new decision and of her sudden relief from pain. She seemed toherself to have passed through some fiery initiation from which shehad emerged seared and quivering, but clutching to her breast a magictalisman. Sophy Viner had cried out to her: "Some day you'll know!" andDarrow had used the same words. They meant, she supposed, that whenshe had explored the intricacies and darknesses of her own heart herjudgment of others would be less absolute. Well, she knew now--knewweaknesses and strengths she had not dreamed of, and the deep discordand still deeper complicities between what thought in her and whatblindly wanted...

  Her mind turned anxiously to Owen. At least the blow that was to fall onhim would not seem to have been inflicted by her hand. He would be leftwith the impression that his breach with Sophy Viner was due to one ofthe ordinary causes of such disruptions: though he must lose her, hismemory of her would not be poisoned. Anna never for a moment permittedherself the delusion that she had renewed her promise to Darrow in orderto spare her step-son this last refinement of misery. She knew she hadbeen prompted by the irresistible impulse to hold fast to what wasmost precious to her, and that Owen's arrival on the scene had beenthe pretext for her decision, and not its cause; yet she felt herselffortified by the thought of what she had spared him. It was as thougha star she had been used to follow had shed its familiar ray on waysunknown to her.

  All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of an absolute trustin Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl with a mingling of antipathyand confidence. It was humiliating to her pride to recognize kindredimpulses in a character which she would have liked to feel completelyalien to her. But what indeed was the girl really like? She seemed tohave no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given herself toDarrow, and concealed the episode from Owen Leath, with no more apparentsense of debasement than the vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she hadinstantly obeyed the voice of her heart when it bade her part from theone and serve the other.

  Anna tried to picture what the girl's life must have been: whatexperiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her own training hadbeen too different: there were veils she could not lift. She looked backat her married life, and its colourless uniformity took on an air ofhigh restraint and order. Was it because she had been so incurious thatit had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that she hadnever given a thought to her husband's past, or wondered what he did andwhere he went when he was away from her. If she had been asked what shesupposed he thought about when they were apart, she would instantly haveanswered: his snuff-boxes. It had never occurred to her that he mighthave passions, interests, preoccupations of which she was absolutelyignorant. Yet he went up to Paris rather regularly: ostensibly to attendsales and exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. Shetried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed and varnished,walking furtively down a quiet street, and looking about him before heslipped into a doorway. She understood now that she had been cold tohim: what more likely than that he had sought compensations? All menwere 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 upby the ironic perception that she was simply trying to justify Darrow.She wanted to think that all men were "like that" because Darrowwas "like that": she wanted to justify her acceptance of the fact bypersuading herself that only through such concessions could women likeherself hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she wasfilled with anger at her blindness, and then at her disastrous attemptto see. Why had she forced the truth out of Darrow? If only she had heldher tongue nothing need ever have been known. Sophy Viner would havebroken her engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, andher 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...

  Was it she, Anna Leath, who was picturing herself to herself in thatway? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a sense of demoniacpossession, and there flashed through her the longing to return to herold state of fearless ignorance. If at that moment she could have keptDarrow from following her to Givre she would have done so...

  But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and she feltherself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived toward dusk, and shemotored to Francheuil to meet him. She wanted to see him as soon aspossible, for she had divined, through the new insight that was in her,that only his presence could restore her to a normal view of things.In the motor, as they left the town and turned into the high-road, helifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned against him, and feltthe currents flow between them. She was grateful to him for not sayinganything, and for not expecting her to speak. She said to herself: "Henever makes a mistake--he always knows what to do"; and then she thoughtwith a start that it was doubtless because he had so often been in suchsituations. The idea that his tact was a kind of professional expertnessfilled her with repugnance, and insensibly she drew away from him. Hemade no motion to bring her nearer, and she instantly thought thatthat was calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery, wonderingwhether, henceforth, she would measure in this way his every look andgesture. Neither of them spoke again till the motor turned under thedark arch of the avenue, and they saw the lights of Givre twinkling atits end. Then Darrow laid his hand on hers and said: "I know, dear--"and the hardness in her melted. "He's suffering as I am," she thought;and for a moment the baleful fact between them seemed to draw themcloser instead of walling them up in their separate wretchedness.

  It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of Givre withhim, and as the old house received them into its mellow silence she hadagain the sense of passing out of a dreadful dream into the reassuranceof kindly and familiar things. It did not seem possible that these quietrooms, so full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidioustaste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions. The memory ofthem seemed to be shut out into the night with the closing and barringof its doors.

  At the tea-table in the oak-room they found Madame de Chantelle andEffie. The little girl, catching sight of Darrow, raced down thedrawing-rooms to meet him, and returned in triumph on his
shoulder. Annalooked at them with a smile. Effie, for all her graces, was chary ofsuch favours, and her mother knew that in according them to Darrow shehad admitted him to the circle where Owen had hitherto ruled.

  Over the tea-table Darrow gave Madame de Chantelle the explanation ofhis sudden return from England. On reaching London, he told her, he hadfound that the secretary he was to have replaced was detained there bythe illness of his wife. The Ambassador, knowing Darrow's urgent reasonsfor wishing to be in France, had immediately proposed his going back,and awaiting at Givre the summons to relieve his colleague; and he hadjumped into the first train, without even waiting to telegraph the newsof his release. He spoke naturally, easily, in his usual quiet voice,taking his tea from Effie, helping himself to the toast she handed, andstooping now and then to stroke the dozing terrier. And suddenly, asAnna listened to his explanation, she asked herself if it were true.

  The question, of course, was absurd. There was no possible reason why heshould invent a false account of his return, and every probability thatthe version he gave was the real one. But he had looked and spoken inthe same way when he had answered her probing questions about SophyViner, and she reflected with a chill of fear that she would never againknow if he were speaking the truth or not. She was sure he loved her,and she did not fear his insincerity as much as her own distrust of him.For a moment it seemed to her that this must corrupt the very source oflove; then she said to herself: "By and bye, when I am altogether his,we shall be so near each other that there will be no room for anydoubts between us." But the doubts were there now, one moment lulled toquiescence, the next more torturingly alert. When the nurse appeared tosummon Effie, the little girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenchedherself on Darrow's knee with the imperious demand to be carried up tobed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to herself with apang: "Can I give her a father about whom I think such things?"

  The thought of Effie, and of what she owed to Effie, had been thefundamental reason for her delays and hesitations when she and Darrowhad come together again in England. Her own feeling was so clear thatbut for that scruple she would have put her hand in his at once. Buttill she had seen him again she had never considered the possibilityof re-marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for themoment, to disorganize the life she had planned for herself and herchild. She had not spoken of this to Darrow because it appeared to her asubject to be debated within her own conscience. The question, then, wasnot as to his fitness to become the guide and guardian of her child;nor did she fear that her love for him would deprive Effie of the leastfraction of her tenderness, since she did not think of love as somethingmeasured and exhaustible but as a treasure perpetually renewed. What shequestioned was her right to introduce into her life any interestsand duties which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen thecloseness of their daily intercourse.

  She had decided this question as it was inevitable that she should; butnow another was before her. Assuredly, at her age, there was no possiblereason why she should cloister herself to bring up her daughter; butthere was every reason for not marrying a man in whom her own faith wasnot complete...