The Reef

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"Thank you," he said as she came in.

She answered: "It's better, I suppose----"

He came toward her and took her in his arms. She struggled
a little, afraid of yielding, but he pressed her to him, not
bending to her but holding her fast, as though he had found
her after a long search: she heard his hurried breathing.
It seemed to come from her own breast, so close he held her;
and it was she who, at last, lifted up her face and drew
down his.

She freed herself and went and sat on a sofa at the other
end of the room. A mirror between the shrouded window-
curtains showed her crumpled travelling dress and the white
face under her disordered hair

She found her voice, and asked him how he had been able to
leave London. He answered that he had managed--he'd
arranged it; and she saw he hardly heard what she was
saying.

"I had to see you," he went on, and moved nearer, sitting
down at her side.

"Yes; we must think of Owen----"

"Oh, Owen--!"

Her mind had flown back to Sophy Viner's plea that she
should let Darrow return to Givre in order that Owen might
be persuaded of the folly of his suspicions. The suggestion
was absurd, of course. She could not ask Darrow to lend
himself to such a fraud, even had she had the inhuman
courage to play her part in it. She was suddenly
overwhelmed by the futility of every attempt to reconstruct
her ruined world. No, it was useless; and since it was
useless, every moment with Darrow was pure pain...

"I've come to talk of myself, not of Owen," she heard him
saying. "When you sent me away the other day I understood
that it couldn't be otherwise--then. But it's not possible
that you and I should part like that. If I'm to lose you, it
must be for a better reason."

"A better reason?"

"Yes: a deeper one. One that means a fundamental disaccord
between us. This one doesn't--in spite of everything it
doesn't. That's what I want you to see, and have the
courage to acknowledge."

"If I saw it I should have the courage!"

"Yes: courage was the wrong word. You have that. That's why
I'm here."

"But I don't see it," she continued sadly. "So it's
useless, isn't it?--and so cruel..." He was about to speak,
but she went on: "I shall never understand it--never!"

He looked at her. "You will some day: you were made to feel
everything"

"I should have thought this was a case of not feeling----"

"On my part, you mean?" He faced her resolutely. "Yes, it
was: to my shame...What I meant was that when you've lived a
little longer you'll see what complex blunderers we all are:
how we're struck blind sometimes, and mad sometimes--and
then, when our sight and our senses come back, how we have
to set to work, and build up, little by little, bit by bit,
the precious things we'd smashed to atoms without knowing
it. Life's just a perpetual piecing together of broken
bits."

She looked up quickly. "That's what I feel: that you ought
to----"

He stood up, interrupting her with a gesture. "Oh, don't--
don't say what you're going to! Men don't give their lives
away like that. If you won't have mine, it's at least my
own, to do the best I can with."

"The best you can--that's what I mean! How can there be a
'best' for you that's made of some one else's worst?"

He sat down again with a groan. "I don't know! It seemed
such a slight thing--all on the surface--and I've gone
aground on it because it was on the surface. I see the
horror of it just as you do. But I see, a little more
clearly, the extent, and the limits, of my wrong. It's not
as black as you imagine."

She lowered her voice to say: "I suppose I shall never
understand; but she seems to love you..."

"There's my shame! That I didn't guess it, didn't fly from
it. You say you'll never understand: but why shouldn't you?
Is it anything to be proud of, to know so little of the
strings that pull us? If you knew a little more, I could
tell you how such things happen without offending you; and
perhaps you'd listen without condemning me."

"I don't condemn you." She was dizzy with struggling
impulses. She longed to cry out: "I DO understand! I've
understood ever since you've been here!" For she was aware,
in her own bosom, of sensations so separate from her
romantic thoughts of him that she saw her body and soul
divided against themselves. She recalled having read
somewhere that in ancient Rome the slaves were not allowed
to wear a distinctive dress lest they should recognize each
other and learn their numbers and their power. So, in
herself, she discerned for the first time instincts and
desires, which, mute and unmarked, had gone to and fro in
the dim passages of her mind, and now hailed each other with
a cry of mutiny.

"Oh, I don't know what to think!" she broke out. "You say
you didn't know she loved you. But you know it now.
Doesn't that show you how you can put the broken bits
together?"

"Can you seriously think it would be doing so to marry one
woman while I care for another?"

"Oh, I don't know...I don't know..." The sense of her
weakness made her try to harden herself against his
arguments.

"You do know! We've often talked of such things: of the
monstrousness of useless sacrifices. If I'm to expiate,
it's not in that way." He added abruptly: "It's in having to
say this to you now..."

She found no answer.

Through the silent apartment they heard the sudden peal of
the door-bell, and she rose to her feet. "Owen!" she
instantly exclaimed.

"Is Owen in Paris?"

She explained in a rapid undertone what she had learned from
Sophy Viner.

"Shall I leave you?" Darrow asked.

"Yes...no..." She moved to the dining-room door, with the
half-formed purpose of making him pass out, and then turned
back. "It may be Adelaide."

They heard the outer door open, and a moment later Owen
walked into the room. He was pale, with excited eyes: as
they fell on Darrow, Anna saw his start of wonder. He made a
slight sign of recognition, and then went up to his step-
mother with an air of exaggerated gaiety.

"You furtive person! I ran across the omniscient Adelaide
and heard from her that you'd rushed up suddenly and
secretly " He stood between Anna and Darrow, strained,
questioning, dangerously on edge.

"I came up to meet Mr. Darrow," Anna answered. "His leave's
been prolonged--he's going back with me."

The words seemed to have uttered themselves without her
will, yet she felt a great sense of freedom as she spoke
them.

The hard tension of Owen's face changed to incredulous
surprise. He looked at Darrow.
"The merest luck...a colleague whose wife was ill...I came
straight back," she heard the latter tranquilly explaining.
His self-command helped to steady her, and she smiled at
Owen.

"We'll all go back together tomorrow morning," she said as
she slipped her arm through his.

XXXIII

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

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

"No--no!"

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

Nevertheless she asked him, the next morning, to let her go
back alone to Givre. She wanted time to think. She was
convinced that what had happened was inevitable, that she
and Darrow belonged to each other, and that 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 that
of an added intensity. She felt restless, insecure out of
his sight: she had a sense of incompleteness, of passionate
dependence, that was somehow at variance with her own
conception of her character.

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

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

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

All through these meditations ran the undercurrent of an
absolute trust in Sophy Viner. She thought of the girl with
a mingling of antipathy and confidence. It was humiliating
to her pride to recognize kindred impulses in a character
which she would have liked to feel completely alien to her.
But what indeed was the girl really like? She seemed to have
no scruples and a thousand delicacies. She had given
herself to Darrow, and concealed the episode from Owen
Leath, with no more apparent sense of debasement than the
vulgarest of adventuresses; yet she had instantly obeyed the
voice of her heart when it bade her part from the one and
serve the other.

Anna tried to picture what the girl's life must have been:
what experiences, what initiations, had formed her. But her
own training had been too different: there were veils she
could not lift. She looked back at her married life, and
its colourless uniformity took on an air of high restraint
and order. Was it because she had been so incurious that it
had worn that look to her? It struck her with amazement that
she had never given a thought to her husband's past, or
wondered what he did and where he went when he was away from
her. If she had been asked what she supposed he thought
about when they were apart, she would instantly have
answered: his snuff-boxes. It had never occurred to her
that he might have passions, interests, preoccupations of
which she was absolutely ignorant. Yet he went up to Paris
rather regularly: ostensibly to attend sales and
exhibitions, or to confer with dealers and collectors. She
tried to picture him, straight, trim, beautifully brushed
and varnished, walking furtively down a quiet street, and
looking about him before he slipped into a doorway. She
understood now that she had been cold to him: what more
likely than that he had sought compensations? All men were
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 up by the ironic perception that she was simply
trying to justify Darrow. She wanted to think that all men
were "like that" because Darrow was "like that": she wanted
to justify her acceptance of the fact by persuading herself
that only through such concessions could women like herself
hope to keep what they could not give up. And suddenly she
was filled with anger at her blindness, and then at her
disastrous attempt to see. Why had she forced the truth out
of Darrow? If only she had held her tongue nothing need ever
have been known. Sophy Viner would have broken her
engagement, Owen would have been sent around the world, and
her 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 that way? She recoiled from her thoughts as if with a
sense of demoniac possession, and there flashed through her
the longing to return to her old state of fearless
ignorance. If at that moment she could have kept Darrow
from following her to Givre she would have done so...

But he came; and with the sight of him the turmoil fell and
she felt herself reassured, rehabilitated. He arrived
toward dusk, and she motored to Francheuil to meet him. She
wanted to see him as soon as possible, 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, he lifted her hand and kissed it, and she leaned
against him, and felt the currents flow between them. She
was grateful to him for not saying anything, and for not
expecting her to speak. She said to herself: "He never
makes a mistake--he always knows what to do"; and then she
thought with a start that it was doubtless because he had so
often been in such situations. The idea that his tact was a
kind of professional expertness filled her with repugnance,
and insensibly she drew away from him. He made no motion to
bring her nearer, and she instantly thought that that was
calculated too. She sat beside him in frozen misery,
wondering whether, henceforth, she would measure in this way
his every look and gesture. Neither of them spoke again
till the motor turned under the dark arch of the avenue, and
they saw the lights of Givre twinkling at its 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 them closer instead of walling them up in
their separate wretchedness.

It was wonderful to be once more re-entering the doors of
Givre with him, and as the old house received them into its
mellow silence she had again the sense of passing out of a
dreadful dream into the reassurance of kindly and familiar
things. It did not seem possible that these quiet rooms, so
full of the slowly-distilled accumulations of a fastidious
taste, should have been the scene of tragic dissensions.
The memory of them seemed to be shut out into the night with
the closing and barring of its doors.

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

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

The question, of course, was absurd. There was no possible
reason why he should invent a false account of his return,
and every probability that the version he gave was the real
one. But he had looked and spoken in the same way when he
had answered her probing questions about Sophy Viner, and
she reflected with a chill of fear that she would never
again know 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 of love; 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
any doubts between us." But the doubts were there now, one
moment lulled to quiescence, the next more torturingly
alert. When the nurse appeared to summon Effie, the little
girl, after kissing her grandmother, entrenched herself on
Darrow's knee with the imperious demand to be carried up to
bed; and Anna, while she laughingly protested, said to
herself with a pang: "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 the fundamental reason for her delays and hesitations
when she and Darrow had come together again in England. Her
own feeling was so clear that but for that scruple she would
have put her hand in his at once. But till she had seen him
again she had never considered the possibility of re-
marriage, and when it suddenly confronted her it seemed, for
the moment, to disorganize the life she had planned for
herself and her child. She had not spoken of this to Darrow
because it appeared to her a subject to be debated within
her own conscience. The question, then, was not 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 least fraction of her tenderness, since she did not
think of love as something measured and exhaustible but as a
treasure perpetually renewed. What she questioned was her
right to introduce into her life any interests and duties
which might rob Effie of a part of her time, or lessen the
closeness of their daily intercourse.

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

XXXIV

When she woke the next morning she felt a great lightness of
heart. She recalled her last awakening at Givre, three days
before, when it had seemed as though all her life had gone
down in darkness. Now Darrow was once more under the same
roof with her, and once more his nearness sufficed to make
the looming horror drop away. She could almost have smiled
at her scruples of the night before: as she looked back on
them they seemed to belong to the old ignorant timorous time
when she had feared to look life in the face, and had been
blind to the mysteries and contradictions of the human heart
because her own had not been revealed to her. Darrow had
said: "You were made to feel everything"; and to feel was
surely better than to judge.

When she came downstairs he was already in the oak-room with
Effie and Madame de Chantelle, and the sense of reassurance
which his presence gave her was merged in the relief of not
being able to speak of what was between them. But there it
was, inevitably, and whenever they looked at each other they
saw it. In her dread of giving it a more tangible shape she
tried to devise means of keeping the little girl with her,
and, when the latter had been called away by the nurse,
found an excuse for following Madame de Chantelle upstairs
to the purple sitting-room. But a confidential talk with
Madame de Chantelle implied the detailed discussion of plans
of which Anna could hardly yet bear to consider the vaguest
outline: the date of her marriage, the relative advantages
of sailing from London or Lisbon, the possibility of hiring
a habitable house at their new post; and, when these
problems were exhausted, the application of the same method
to the subject of Owen's future.

His grandmother, having no suspicion of the real reason of
Sophy Viner's departure, had thought it "extremely suitable"
of the young girl to withdraw to the shelter of her old
friends' roof in the hour of bridal preparation. This
maidenly retreat had in fact impressed Madame de Chantelle
so favourably that she was disposed for the first time to
talk over Owen's projects; and as every human event
translated itself for her into terms of social and domestic
detail, Anna had perforce to travel the same round again.
She felt a momentary relief when Darrow presently joined
them; but his coming served only to draw the conversation
back to the question of their own future, and Anna felt a
new pang as she heard him calmly and lucidly discussing it.
Did such self-possession imply indifference or insincerity?
In that problem her mind perpetually revolved; and she
dreaded the one answer as much as the other.

She was resolved to keep on her course as though nothing had
happened: to marry Darrow and never let the consciousness of
the past intrude itself between them; but she was beginning
to feel that the only way of attaining to this state of
detachment from the irreparable was once for all to turn
back with him to its contemplation. As soon as this desire
had germinated it became so strong in her that she regretted
having promised Effie to take her out for the afternoon.
But she could think of no pretext for disappointing the
little girl, and soon after luncheon the three set forth in
the motor to show Darrow a chateau famous in the annals of
the region. During their excursion Anna found it impossible
to guess from his demeanour if Effie's presence between them
was as much of a strain to his composure as to hers. He
remained imperturbably good-humoured and appreciative while
they went the round of the monument, and she remarked only
that when he thought himself unnoticed his face grew grave
and his answers came less promptly.

On the way back, two or three miles from Givre, she suddenly
proposed that they should walk home through the forest which
skirted that side of the park. Darrow acquiesced, and they
got out and sent Effie on in the motor. Their way led
through a bit of sober French woodland, flat as a faded
tapestry, but with gleams of live emerald lingering here and
there among its browns and ochres. The luminous grey air
gave vividness to its dying colours, and veiled the distant
glimpses of the landscape in soft uncertainty. In such a
solitude Anna had fancied it would be easier to speak; but
as she walked beside Darrow over the deep soundless flooring
of brown moss the words on her lips took flight again. It
seemed impossible to break the spell of quiet joy which his
presence laid on her, and when he began to talk of the place
they had just visited she answered his questions and then
waited for what he should say next...No, decidedly she could
not speak; she no longer even knew what she had meant to
say...

The same experience repeated itself several times that day
and the next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted
herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with a
fervent lucidity every point in her imaginary argument. But
as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than
reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch
upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim
disquietude, through which his looks, his words, his touch,
reached her as through a mist of bodily pain. Yet this
inertia was torn by wild flashes of resistance, and when
they were apart she began to prepare again what she meant to
say to him.

She knew he could not be with her without being aware of
this inner turmoil, and she hoped he would break the spell
by some releasing word. But she presently understood that
he recognized the futility of words, and was resolutely bent
on holding her to her own purpose of behaving as if nothing
had happened. Once more she inwardly accused him of
insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting
visions of his past...Had such things happened to him
before? If the episode had been an isolated accident--"a
moment of folly and madness", as he had called it--she could
understand, or at least begin to understand (for at a
certain point her imagination always turned back); but if it
were a mere link in a chain of similar experiments, the
thought of it dishonoured her whole past...

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