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BOOK I: CHAPTER I
"Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth.
Anna."
All the way from Charing Cross to Dover the train had
hammered the words of the telegram into George Darrow's
ears, ringing every change of irony on its commonplace
syllables: rattling them out like a discharge of musketry,
letting them, one by one, drip slowly and coldly into his
brain, or shaking, tossing, transposing them like the dice
in some game of the gods of malice; and now, as he emerged
from his compartment at the pier, and stood facing the wind-
swept platform and the angry sea beyond, they leapt out at
him as if from the crest of the waves, stung and blinded him
with a fresh fury of derision.
"Unexpected obstacle. Please don't come till thirtieth.
Anna."
She had put him off at the very last moment, and for the
second time: put him off with all her sweet reasonableness,
and for one of her usual "good" reasons--he was certain that
this reason, like the other, (the visit of her husband's
uncle's widow) would be "good"! But it was that very
certainty which chilled him. The fact of her dealing so
reasonably with their case shed an ironic light on the idea
that there had been any exceptional warmth in the greeting
she had given him after their twelve years apart.
They had found each other again, in London, some three
months previously, at a dinner at the American Embassy, and
when she had caught sight of him her smile had been like a
red rose pinned on her widow's mourning. He still felt the
throb of surprise with which, among the stereotyped faces of
the season's diners, he had come upon her unexpected face,
with the dark hair banded above grave eyes; eyes in which he
had recognized every little curve and shadow as he would
have recognized, after half a life-time, the details of a
room he had played in as a child. And as, in the plumed
starred crowd, she had stood out for him, slender, secluded
and different, so he had felt, the instant their glances
met, that he as sharply detached himself for her. All that
and more her smile had said; had said not merely "I
remember," but "I remember just what you remember"; almost,
indeed, as though her memory had aided his, her glance flung
back on their recaptured moment its morning brightness.
Certainly, when their distracted Ambassadress--with the cry:
"Oh, you know Mrs. Leath? That's perfect, for General
Farnham has failed me"--had waved them together for the
march to the diningroom, Darrow had felt a slight pressure
of the arm on his, a pressure faintly but unmistakably
emphasizing the exclamation: "Isn't it wonderful?--In
London--in the season--in a mob?"
Little enough, on the part of most women; but it was a sign
of Mrs. Leath's quality that every movement, every syllable,
told with her. Even in the old days, as an intent grave-
eyed girl, she had seldom misplaced her light strokes; and
Darrow, on meeting her again, had immediately felt how much
finer and surer an instrument of expression she had become.
Their evening together had been a long confirmation of this
feeling. She had talked to him, shyly yet frankly, of what
had happened to her during the years when they had so
strangely failed to meet. She had told him of her marriage
to Fraser Leath, and of her subsequent life in France, where
her husband's mother, left a widow in his youth, had been
re-married to the Marquis de Chantelle, and where, partly in
consequence of this second union, the son had permanently
settled himself. She had spoken also, with an intense
eagerness of affection, of her little girl Effie, who was
now nine years old, and, in a strain hardly less tender, of
Owen Leath, the charming clever young stepson whom her
husband's death had left to her care...
A porter, stumbling against Darrow's bags, roused him to the
fact that he still obstructed the platform, inert and
encumbering as his luggage.
"Crossing, sir?"
Was he crossing? He really didn't know; but for lack of any
more compelling impulse he followed the porter to the
luggage van, singled out his property, and turned to march
behind it down the gang-way. As the fierce wind shouldered
him, building up a crystal wall against his efforts, he felt
anew the derision of his case.
"Nasty weather to cross, sir," the porter threw back at him
as they beat their way down the narrow walk to the pier.
Nasty weather, indeed; but luckily, as it had turned out,
there was no earthly reason why Darrow should cross.
While he pushed on in the wake of his luggage his thoughts
slipped back into the old groove. He had once or twice run
across the man whom Anna Summers had preferred to him, and
since he had met her again he had been exercising his
imagination on the picture of what her married life must
have been. Her husband had struck him as a characteristic
specimen of the kind of American as to whom one is not quite
clear whether he lives in Europe in order to cultivate an
art, or cultivates an art as a pretext for living in Europe.
Mr. Leath's art was water-colour painting, but he practised
it furtively, almost clandestinely, with the disdain of a
man of the world for anything bordering on the professional,
while he devoted himself more openly, and with religious
seriousness, to the collection of enamelled snuff-boxes. He
was blond and well-dressed, with the physical distinction
that comes from having a straight figure, a thin nose, and
the habit of looking slightly disgusted--as who should not,
in a world where authentic snuff-boxes were growing daily
harder to find, and the market was flooded with flagrant
forgeries?
Darrow had often wondered what possibilities of communion
there could have been between Mr. Leath and his wife. Now
he concluded that there had probably been none. Mrs.
Leath's words gave no hint of her husband's having failed to
justify her choice; but her very reticence betrayed her.
She spoke of him with a kind of impersonal seriousness, as
if he had been a character in a novel or a figure in
history; and what she said sounded as though it had been
learned by heart and slightly dulled by repetition. This
fact immensely increased Darrow's impression that his
meeting with her had annihilated the intervening years.
She, who was always so elusive and inaccessible, had grown
suddenly communicative and kind: had opened the doors of her
past, and tacitly left him to draw his own conclusions. As
a result, he had taken leave of her with the sense that he
was a being singled out and privileged, to whom she had
entrusted something precious to keep. It was her happiness
in their meeting that she had given him, had frankly left
him to do with as he willed; and the frankness of the
gesture doubled the beauty of the gift.
Their next meeting had prolonged and deepened the
impression. They had found each other again, a few days
later, in an old country house full of books and pictures,
in the soft landscape of southern England. The presence of a
large party, with all its aimless and agitated
displacements, had served only to isolate the pair and give
them (at least to the young man's fancy) a deeper feeling of
communion, and their days there had been like some musical
prelude, where the instruments, breathing low, seem to hold
back the waves of sound that press against them.
Mrs. Leath, on this occasion, was no less kind than before;
but she contrived to make him understand that what was so
inevitably coming was not to come too soon. It was not that
she showed any hesitation as to the issue, but rather that
she seemed to wish not to miss any stage in the gradual
reflowering of their intimacy.
Darrow, for his part, was content to wait if she wished it.
He remembered that once, in America, when she was a girl,
and he had gone to stay with her family in the country, she
had been out when he arrived, and her mother had told him to
look for her in the garden. She was not in the garden, but
beyond it he had seen her approaching down a long shady
path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed
to him to wait; and charmed by the lights and shadows that
played upon her as she moved, and by the pleasure of
watching her slow advance toward him, he had obeyed her and
stood still. And so she seemed now to be walking to him down
the years, the light and shade of old memories and new hopes
playing variously on her, and each step giving him the
vision of a different grace. She did not waver or turn
aside; he knew she would come straight to where he stood;
but something in her eyes said "Wait", and again he obeyed
and waited.
On the fourth day an unexpected event threw out his
calculations. Summoned to town by the arrival in England of
her husband's mother, she left without giving Darrow the
chance he had counted on, and he cursed himself for a
dilatory blunderer. Still, his disappointment was tempered
by the certainty of being with her again before she left for
France; and they did in fact see each other in London.
There, however, the atmosphere had changed with the
conditions. He could not say that she avoided him, or even
that she was a shade less glad to see him; but she was beset
by family duties and, as he thought, a little too readily
resigned to them.
The Marquise de Chantelle, as Darrow soon perceived, had the
same mild formidableness as the late Mr. Leath: a sort of
insistent self-effacement before which every one about her
gave way. It was perhaps the shadow of this lady's
presence--pervasive even during her actual brief eclipses--
that subdued and silenced Mrs. Leath. The latter was,
moreover, preoccupied about her stepson, who, soon after
receiving his degree at Harvard, had been rescued from a
stormy love-affair, and finally, after some months of
troubled drifting, had yielded to his step-mother's counsel
and gone up to Oxford for a year of supplementary study.
Thither Mrs. Leath went once or twice to visit him, and her
remaining days were packed with family obligations: getting,
as she phrased it, "frocks and governesses" for her little
girl, who had been left in France, and having to devote the
remaining hours to long shopping expeditions with her
mother-in-law. Nevertheless, during her brief escapes from
duty, Darrow had had time to feel her safe in the custody of
his devotion, set apart for some inevitable hour; and the
last evening, at the theatre, between the overshadowing
Marquise and the unsuspicious Owen, they had had an almost
decisive exchange of words.
Now, in the rattle of the wind about his ears, Darrow
continued to hear the mocking echo of her message:
"Unexpected obstacle." In such an existence as Mrs. Leath's,
at once so ordered and so exposed, he knew how small a
complication might assume the magnitude of an "obstacle;"
yet, even allowing as impartially as his state of mind
permitted for the fact that, with her mother-in-law always,
and her stepson intermittently, under her roof, her lot
involved a hundred small accommodations generally foreign to
the freedom of widowhood--even so, he could not but think
that the very ingenuity bred of such conditions might have
helped her to find a way out of them. No, her "reason",
whatever it was, could, in this case, be nothing but a
pretext; unless he leaned to the less flattering alternative
that any reason seemed good enough for postponing him!
Certainly, if her welcome had meant what he imagined, she
could not, for the second time within a few weeks, have
submitted so tamely to the disarrangement of their plans; a
disarrangement which--his official duties considered--might,
for all she knew, result in his not being able to go to her
for months.
"Please don't come till thirtieth." The thirtieth--and it
was now the fifteenth! She flung back the fortnight on his
hands as if he had been an idler indifferent to dates,
instead of an active young diplomatist who, to respond to
her call, had had to hew his way through a very jungle of
engagements! "Please don't come till thirtieth." That was
all. Not the shadow of an excuse or a regret; not even the
perfunctory "have written" with which it is usual to soften
such blows. She didn't want him, and had taken the shortest
way to tell him so. Even in his first moment of
exasperation it struck him as characteristic that she should
not have padded her postponement with a fib. Certainly her
moral angles were not draped!
"If I asked her to marry me, she'd have refused in the same
language. But thank heaven I haven't!" he reflected.
These considerations, which had been with him every yard of
the way from London, reached a climax of irony as he was
drawn into the crowd on the pier. It did not soften his
feelings to remember that, but for her lack of forethought,
he might, at this harsh end of the stormy May day, have been
sitting before his club fire in London instead of shivering
in the damp human herd on the pier. Admitting the sex's
traditional right to change, she might at least have advised
him of hers by telegraphing directly to his rooms. But in
spite of their exchange of letters she had apparently failed
to note his address, and a breathless emissary had rushed
from the Embassy to pitch her telegram into his compartment
as the train was moving from the station.
Yes, he had given her chance enough to learn where he lived;
and this minor proof of her indifference became, as he
jammed his way through the crowd, the main point of his
grievance against her and of his derision of himself. Half
way down the pier the prod of an umbrella increased his
exasperation by rousing him to the fact that it was raining.
Instantly the narrow ledge became a battle-ground of
thrusting, slanting, parrying domes. The wind rose with the
rain, and the harried wretches exposed to this double
assault wreaked on their neighbours the vengeance they could
not take on the elements.
Darrow, whose healthy enjoyment of life made him in general
a good traveller, tolerant of agglutinated humanity, felt
himself obscurely outraged by these promiscuous contacts.
It was as though all the people about him had taken his
measure and known his plight; as though they were
contemptuously bumping and shoving him like the
inconsiderable thing he had become. "She doesn't want you,
doesn't want you, doesn't want you," their umbrellas and
their elbows seemed to say.
He had rashly vowed, when the telegram was flung into his
window: "At any rate I won't turn back"--as though it might
cause the sender a malicious joy to have him retrace his
steps rather than keep on to Paris! Now he perceived the
absurdity of the vow, and thanked his stars that he need not
plunge, to no purpose, into the fury of waves outside the
harbour.
With this thought in his mind he turned back to look for his
porter; but the contiguity of dripping umbrellas made
signalling impossible and, perceiving that he had lost sight
of the man, he scrambled up again to the platform. As he
reached it, a descending umbrella caught him in the collar-
bone; and the next moment, bent sideways by the wind, it
turned inside out and soared up, kite-wise, at the end of a
helpless female arm.
Darrow caught the umbrella, lowered its inverted ribs, and
looked up at the face it exposed to him.
"Wait a minute," he said; "you can't stay here."
As he spoke, a surge of the crowd drove the owner of the
umbrella abruptly down on him. Darrow steadied her with
extended arms, and regaining her footing she cried out: "Oh,
dear, oh, dear! It's in ribbons!"
Her lifted face, fresh and flushed in the driving rain, woke
in him a memory of having seen it at a distant time and in a
vaguely unsympathetic setting; but it was no moment to
follow up such clues, and the face was obviously one to make
its way on its own merits.
Its possessor had dropped her bag and bundles to clutch at
the tattered umbrella. "I bought it only yesterday at the
Stores; and--yes--it's utterly done for!" she lamented.
Darrow smiled at the intensity of her distress. It was food
for the moralist that, side by side with such catastrophes
as his, human nature was still agitating itself over its
microscopic woes!
"Here's mine if you want it!" he shouted back at her through
the shouting of the gale.
The offer caused the young lady to look at him more
intently. "Why, it's Mr. Darrow!" she exclaimed; and then,
all radiant recognition: "Oh, thank you! We'll share it, if
you will."
She knew him, then; and he knew her; but how and where had
they met? He put aside the problem for subsequent solution,
and drawing her into a more sheltered corner, bade her wait
till he could find his porter.
When, a few minutes later, he came back with his recovered
property, and the news that the boat would not leave till
the tide had turned, she showed no concern.
"Not for two hours? How lucky--then I can find my trunk!"
Ordinarily Darrow would have felt little disposed to involve
himself in the adventure of a young female who had lost her
trunk; but at the moment he was glad of any pretext for
activity. Even should he decide to take the next up train
from Dover he still had a yawning hour to fill; and the
obvious remedy was to devote it to the loveliness in
distress under his umbrella.
"You've lost a trunk? Let me see if I can find it."
It pleased him that she did not return the conventional "Oh,
WOULD you?" Instead, she corrected him with a laugh--Not
a trunk, but my trunk; I've no other--" and then added
briskly: "You'd better first see to getting your own things
on the boat."
This made him answer, as if to give substance to his plans
by discussing them: "I don't actually know that I'm going
over."
"Not going over?"
"Well...perhaps not by this boat." Again he felt a stealing
indecision. "I may probably have to go back to London.
I'm--I'm waiting...expecting a letter...(She'll think me a
defaulter," he reflected.) "But meanwhile there's plenty of
time to find your trunk."
He picked up his companion's bundles, and offered her an arm
which enabled her to press her slight person more closely
under his umbrella; and as, thus linked, they beat their way
back to the platform, pulled together and apart like
marionettes on the wires of the wind, he continued to wonder
where he could have seen her. He had immediately classed
her as a compatriot; her small nose, her clear tints, a kind
of sketchy delicacy in her face, as though she had been
brightly but lightly washed in with water-colour, all
confirmed the evidence of her high sweet voice and of her
quick incessant gestures.She was clearly an American, but
with the loose native quality strained through a closer woof
of manners: the composite product of an enquiring and
adaptable race. All this, however, did not help him to fit
a name to her, for just such instances were perpetually
pouring through the London Embassy, and the etched and
angular American was becoming rarer than the fluid type.
More puzzling than the fact of his being unable to identify
her was the persistent sense connecting her with something
uncomfortable and distasteful. So pleasant a vision as that
gleaming up at him between wet brown hair and wet brown boa
should have evoked only associations as pleasing; but each
effort to fit her image into his past resulted in the same
memories of boredom and a vague discomfort...
Content of BOOK I: CHAPTER I [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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