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BOOK I: CHAPTER III
Almost as soon as the train left Calais her head had dropped
back into the corner, and she had fallen asleep.
Sitting opposite, in the compartment from which he had
contrived to have other travellers excluded, Darrow looked
at her curiously. He had never seen a face that changed so
quickly. A moment since it had danced like a field of
daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid
oscillating light of the lamp overhead, it wore the hard
stamp of experience, as of a soft thing chilled into shape
before its curves had rounded: and it moved him to see that
care already stole upon her when she slept.
The story she had imparted to him in the wheezing shaking
cabin, and at the Calais buffet--where he had insisted on
offering her the dinner she had missed at Mrs. Murrett's--
had given a distincter outline to her figure. From the
moment of entering the New York boarding-school to which a
preoccupied guardian had hastily consigned her after the
death of her parents, she had found herself alone in a busy
and indifferent world. Her youthful history might, in fact,
have been summed up in the statement that everybody had been
too busy to look after her. Her guardian, a drudge in a big
banking house, was absorbed by "the office"; the guardian's
wife, by her health and her religion; and an elder sister,
Laura, married, unmarried, remarried, and pursuing, through
all these alternating phases, some vaguely "artistic" ideal
on which the guardian and his wife looked askance, had (as
Darrow conjectured) taken their disapproval as a pretext for
not troubling herself about poor Sophy, to whom--perhaps for
this reason--she had remained the incarnation of remote
romantic possibilities.
In the course of time a sudden "stroke" of the guardian's
had thrown his personal affairs into a state of confusion
from which--after his widely lamented death--it became
evident that it would not be possible to extricate his
ward's inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerely
than his widow, who saw in it one more proof of her
husband's life having been sacrificed to the innumerable
duties imposed on him, and who could hardly--but for the
counsels of religion--have brought herself to pardon the
young girl for her indirect share in hastening his end.
Sophy did not resent this point of view. She was really
much sorrier for her guardian's death than for the loss of
her insignificant fortune. The latter had represented only
the means of holding her in bondage, and its disappearance
was the occasion of her immediate plunge into the wide
bright sea of life surrounding the island-of her captivity.
She had first landed--thanks to the intervention of the
ladies who had directed her education--in a Fifth Avenue
school-room where, for a few months, she acted as a buffer
between three autocratic infants and their bodyguard of
nurses and teachers. The too-pressing attentions of their
father's valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot,
against the express advice of her educational superiors, who
implied that, in their own case, refinement and self-respect
had always sufficed to keep the most ungovernable passions
at bay. The experience of the guardian's widow having been
precisely similar, and the deplorable precedent of Laura's
career being present to all their minds, none of these
ladies felt any obligation to intervene farther in Sophy's
affairs; and she was accordingly left to her own resources.
A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her
father and mother to Europe, had suggested Sophy's
accompanying them, and "going round" with her while her
progenitors, in the care of the courier, nursed their
ailments at a fashionable bath. Darrow gathered that the
"going round" with Mamie Hoke was a varied and diverting
process; but this relatively brilliant phase of Sophy's
career was cut short by the elopement of the inconsiderate
Mamie with a "matinee idol" who had followed her from New
York, and by the precipitate return of her parents to
negotiate for the repurchase of their child.
It was then--after an interval of repose with compassionate
but impecunious American friends in Paris--that Miss Viner
had been drawn into the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's
career. The impecunious compatriots had found Mrs. Murrett
for her, and it was partly on their account (because they
were such dears, and so unconscious, poor confiding things,
of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy had stuck
it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The
Farlows, she explained to Darrow, were the best friends she
had ever had (and the only ones who had ever "been decent"
about Laura, whom they had seen once, and intensely
admired); but even after twenty years of Paris they were the
most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuaded
that Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual
eminence, and the house at Chelsea "the last of the salons"
--Darrow knew what she meant? And she hadn't liked to
undeceive them, knowing that to do so would be virtually to
throw herself back on their hands, and feeling, moreover,
after her previous experiences, the urgent need of gaining,
at any cost, a name for stability; besides which--she threw
it off with a slight laugh--no other chance, in all these
years, had happened to come to her.
She had brushed in this outline of her career with light
rapid strokes, and in a tone of fatalism oddly untinged by
bitterness. Darrow perceived that she classified people
according to their greater or less "luck" in life, but she
appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefined
power which dispensed the gift in such unequal measure.
Things came one's way or they didn't; and meanwhile one
could only look on, and make the most of small
compensations, such as watching "the show" at Mrs.
Murrett's, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and other
footlight figures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of
the kaleidoscope might suddenly toss a bright spangle into
the grey pattern of one's days.
This light-hearted philosophy was not without charm to a
young man accustomed to more traditional views. George
Darrow had had a fairly varied experience of feminine types,
but the women he had frequented had either been pronouncedly
"ladies" or they had not. Grateful to both for ministering
to the more complex masculine nature, and disposed to assume
that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, he
had instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind,
avoiding that intermediate society which attempts to
conciliate both theories of life. "Bohemianism" seemed to
him a cheaper convention than the other two, and he liked,
above all, people who went as far as they could in their own
line--liked his "ladies" and their rivals to be equally
unashamed of showing for exactly what they were. He had not
indeed--the fact of Lady Ulrica was there to remind him--
been without his experience of a third type; but that
experience had left him with a contemptuous distaste for the
woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the
customs of another.
As to young girls, he had never thought much about them
since his early love for the girl who had become Mrs. Leath.
That episode seemed, as he looked back on it, to bear no
more relation to reality than a pale decorative design to
the confused richness of a summer landscape. He no longer
understood the violent impulses and dreamy pauses of his own
young heart, or the inscrutable abandonments and reluctances
of hers. He had known a moment of anguish at losing her--the
mad plunge of youthful instincts against the barrier of
fate; but the first wave of stronger sensation had swept
away all but the outline of their story, and the memory of
Anna Summers had made the image of the young girl sacred,
but the class uninteresting.
Such generalisations belonged, however, to an earlier stage
of his experience. The more he saw of life the more
incalculable he found it; and he had learned to yield to his
impressions without feeling the youthful need of relating
them to others. It was the girl in the opposite seat who
had roused in him the dormant habit of comparison. She was
distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowed
acquaintance with the real business of living, a familiarity
as different as possible from their theoretical proficiency;
yet it seemed to Darrow that her experience had made her
free without hardness and self-assured without
assertiveness.
The rush into Amiens, and the flash of the station lights
into their compartment, broke Miss Viner's sleep, and
without changing her position she lifted her lids and looked
at Darrow. There was neither surprise nor bewilderment in
the look. She seemed instantly conscious, not so much of
where she was, as of the fact that she was with him; and
that fact seemed enough to reassure her. She did not even
turn her head to look out; her eyes continued to rest on him
with a vague smile which appeared to light her face from
within, while her lips kept their sleepy droop.
Shouts and the hurried tread of travellers came to them
through the confusing cross-lights of the platform. A head
appeared at the window, and Darrow threw himself forward to
defend their solitude; but the intruder was only a train
hand going his round of inspection. He passed on, and the
lights and cries of the station dropped away, merged in a
wider haze and a hollower resonance, as the train gathered
itself up with a long shake and rolled out again into the
darkness.
Miss Viner's head sank back against the cushion, pushing out
a dusky wave of hair above her forehead. The swaying of the
train loosened a lock over her ear, and she shook it back
with a movement like a boy's, while her gaze still rested on
her companion.
"You're not too tired?"
She shook her head with a smile.
"We shall be in before midnight. We're very nearly on
time." He verified the statement by holding up his watch to
the lamp.
She nodded dreamily. "It's all right. I telegraphed Mrs.
Farlow that they mustn't think of coming to the station; but
they'll have told the concierge to look out for me."
"You'll let me drive you there?"
She nodded again, and her eyes closed. It was very pleasant
to Darrow that she made no effort to talk or to dissemble
her sleepiness. He sat watching her till the upper lashes
met and mingled with the lower, and their blent shadow lay
on her cheek; then he stood up and drew the curtain over the
lamp, drowning the compartment in a bluish twilight.
As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently
Anna Summers--or even Anna Leath--would have behaved. She
would not have talked too much; she would not have been
either restless or embarrassed; but her adaptability, her
appropriateness, would not have been nature but "tact." The
oddness of the situation would have made sleep impossible,
or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she would
have waked with a start, wondering where she was, and how
she had come there, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing
short of hairpins and a glass would have restored her self-
possession...
The reflection set him wondering whether the "sheltered"
girl's bringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent
contact with life. How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath
been brought by marriage and motherhood, and the passage of
fourteen years? What were all her reticences and evasions
but the result of the deadening process of forming a "lady"?
The freshness he had marvelled at was like the unnatural
whiteness of flowers forced in the dark.
As he looked back at their few days together he saw that
their intercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same
hesitations and reserves which had chilled their earlier
intimacy. Once more they had had their hour together and
she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, her eyes had made
promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was still
afraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery.
She was still the petted little girl who cannot be left
alone in the dark...His memory flew back to their youthful
story, and long-forgotten details took shape before him.
How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed, he and
she, like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever
pursuing without ever clasping each other. To this day he
did not quite know what had parted them: the break had been
as fortuitous as the fluttering apart of two seed-vessels on
a wave of summer air...
The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an
added poignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the parent for
a child which has just breathed and died. Why had it
happened thus, when the least shifting of influences might
have made it all so different? If she had been given to him
then he would have put warmth in her veins and light in her
eyes: would have made her a woman through and through.
Musing thus, he had the sense of waste that is the bitterest
harvest of experience. A love like his might have given her
the divine gift of self-renewal; and now he saw her fated to
wane into old age repeating the same gestures, echoing the
words she had always heard, and perhaps never guessing that,
just outside her glazed and curtained consciousness, life
rolled away, a vast blackness starred with lights, like the
night landscape beyond the windows of the train.
The engine lowered its speed for the passage through a
sleeping station. In the light of the platform lamp Darrow
looked across at his companion. Her head had dropped toward
one shoulder, and her lips were just far enough apart for
the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colour of the
other. The jolting of the train had again shaken loose the
lock above her ear. It danced on her cheek like the flit of
a brown wing over flowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire
to lean forward and put it back behind her ear.
Content of BOOK I: CHAPTER III [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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Read next: BOOK I: CHAPTER IV
Read previous: BOOK I: CHAPTER II
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