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BOOK II: CHAPTER IX
The light of the October afternoon lay on an old high-roofed
house which enclosed in its long expanse of brick and
yellowish stone the breadth of a grassy court filled with
the shadow and sound of limes.
From the escutcheoned piers at the entrance of the court a
level drive, also shaded by limes, extended to a white-
barred gate beyond which an equally level avenue of grass,
cut through a wood, dwindled to a blue-green blur against a
sky banked with still white slopes of cloud.
In the court, half-way between house and drive, a lady
stood. She held a parasol above her head, and looked now at
the house-front, with its double flight of steps meeting
before a glazed door under sculptured trophies, now down the
drive toward the grassy cutting through the wood. Her air
was less of expectancy than of contemplation: she seemed not
so much to be watching for any one, or listening for an
approaching sound, as letting the whole aspect of the place
sink into her while she held herself open to its influence.
Yet it was no less apparent that the scene was not new to
her. There was no eagerness of investigation in her survey:
she seemed rather to be looking about her with eyes to
which, for some intimate inward reason, details long since
familiar had suddenly acquired an unwonted freshness.
This was in fact the exact sensation of which Mrs. Leath was
conscious as she came forth from the house and descended
into the sunlit court. She had come to meet her step-son,
who was likely to be returning at that hour from an
afternoon's shooting in one of the more distant plantations,
and she carried in her hand the letter which had sent her in
search of him; but with her first step out of the house all
thought of him had been effaced by another series of
impressions.
The scene about her was known to satiety. She had seen
Givre at all seasons of the year, and for the greater part
of every year, since the far-off day of her marriage; the
day when, ostensibly driving through its gates at her
husband's side, she had actually been carried there on a
cloud of iris-winged visions.
The possibilities which the place had then represented were
still vividly present to her. The mere phrase "a French
chateau" had called up to her youthful fancy a throng of
romantic associations, poetic, pictorial and emotional; and
the serene face of the old house seated in its park among
the poplar-bordered meadows of middle France, had seemed, on
her first sight of it, to hold out to her a fate as noble
and dignified as its own mien.
Though she could still call up that phase of feeling it had
long since passed, and the house had for a time become to
her the very symbol of narrowness and monotony. Then, with
the passing of years, it had gradually acquired a less
inimical character, had become, not again a castle of
dreams, evoker of fair images and romantic legend, but the
shell of a life slowly adjusted to its dwelling: the place
one came back to, the place where one had one's duties,
one's habits and one's books, the place one would naturally
live in till one died: a dull house, an inconvenient house,
of which one knew all the defects, the shabbinesses, the
discomforts, but to which one was so used that one could
hardly, after so long a time, think one's self away from it
without suffering a certain loss of identity.
Now, as it lay before her in the autumn mildness, its
mistress was surprised at her own insensibility. She had
been trying to see the house through the eyes of an old
friend who, the next morning, would be driving up to it for
the first time; and in so doing she seemed to be opening her
own eyes upon it after a long interval of blindness.
The court was very still, yet full of a latent life: the
wheeling and rustling of pigeons about the rectangular yews
and across the sunny gravel; the sweep of rooks above the
lustrous greyish-purple slates of the roof, and the stir of
the tree-tops as they met the breeze which every day, at
that hour, came punctually up from the river.
Just such a latent animation glowed in Anna Leath. In every
nerve and vein she was conscious of that equipoise of bliss
which the fearful human heart scarce dares acknowledge. She
was not used to strong or full emotions; but she had always
known that she should not be afraid of them. She was not
afraid now; but she felt a deep inward stillness.
The immediate effect of the feeling had been to send her
forth in quest of her step-son. She wanted to stroll back
with him and have a quiet talk before they re-entered the
house. It was always easy to talk to him, and at this
moment he was the one person to whom she could have spoken
without fear of disturbing her inner stillness. She was
glad, for all sorts of reasons, that Madame de Chantelle and
Effie were still at Ouchy with the governess, and that she
and Owen had the house to themselves. And she was glad that
even he was not yet in sight. She wanted to be alone a
little longer; not to think, but to let the long slow waves
of joy break over her one by one.
She walked out of the court and sat down on one of the
benches that bordered the drive. From her seat she had a
diagonal view of the long house-front and of the domed
chapel terminating one of the wings. Beyond a gate in the
court-yard wall the flower-garden drew its dark-green
squares and raised its statues against the yellowing
background of the park. In the borders only a few late
pinks and crimsons smouldered, but a peacock strutting in
the sun seemed to have gathered into his out-spread fan all
the summer glories of the place.
In Mrs. Leath's hand was the letter which had opened her
eyes to these things, and a smile rose to her lips at the
mere feeling of the paper between her fingers. The thrill it
sent through her gave a keener edge to every sense. She
felt, saw, breathed the shining world as though a thin
impenetrable veil had suddenly been removed from it.
Just such a veil, she now perceived, had always hung between
herself and life. It had been like the stage gauze which
gives an illusive air of reality to the painted scene behind
it, yet proves it, after all, to be no more than a painted
scene.
She had been hardly aware, in her girlhood, of differing
from others in this respect. In the well-regulated well-fed
Summers world the unusual was regarded as either immoral or
ill-bred, and people with emotions were not visited.
Sometimes, with a sense of groping in a topsy-turvy
universe, Anna had wondered why everybody about her seemed
to ignore all the passions and sensations which formed the
stuff of great poetry and memorable action. In a community
composed entirely of people like her parents and her
parents' friends she did not see how the magnificent things
one read about could ever have happened. She was sure that
if anything of the kind had occurred in her immediate circle
her mother would have consulted the family clergyman, and
her father perhaps even have rung up the police; and her
sense of humour compelled her to own that, in the given
conditions, these precautions might not have been
unjustified.
Little by little the conditions conquered her, and she
learned to regard the substance of life as a mere canvas for
the embroideries of poet and painter, and its little swept
and fenced and tended surface as its actual substance. It
was in the visioned region of action and emotion that her
fullest hours were spent; but it hardly occurred to her that
they might be translated into experience, or connected with
anything likely to happen to a young lady living in West
Fifty- fifth Street.
She perceived, indeed, that other girls, leading outwardly
the same life as herself, and seemingly unaware of her world
of hidden beauty, were yet possessed of some vital secret
which escaped her. There seemed to be a kind of freemasonry
between them; they were wider awake than she, more alert,
and surer of their wants if not of their opinions. She
supposed they were "cleverer", and accepted her inferiority
good-humouredly, half aware, within herself, of a reserve of
unused power which the others gave no sign of possessing.
This partly consoled her for missing so much of what made
their "good time"; but the resulting sense of exclusion, of
being somehow laughingly but firmly debarred from a share of
their privileges, threw her back on herself and deepened the
reserve which made envious mothers cite her as a model of
ladylike repression.
Love, she told herself, would one day release her from this
spell of unreality. She was persuaded that the sublime
passion was the key to the enigma; but it was difficult to
relate her conception of love to the forms it wore in her
experience. Two or three of the girls she had envied for
their superior acquaintance with the arts of life had
contracted, in the course of time, what were variously
described as "romantic" or "foolish" marriages; one even
made a runaway match, and languished for a while under a
cloud of social reprobation. Here, then, was passion in
action, romance converted to reality; yet the heroines of
these exploits returned from them untransfigured, and their
husbands were as dull as ever when one had to sit next to
them at dinner.
Her own case, of course, would be different. Some day she
would find the magic bridge between West Fifty-fifth Street
and life; once or twice she had even fancied that the clue
was in her hand. The first time was when she had met young
Darrow. She recalled even now the stir of the encounter.
But his passion swept over her like a wind that shakes the
roof of the forest without reaching its still glades or
rippling its hidden pools. He was extraordinarily
intelligent and agreeable, and her heart beat faster when he
was with her. He had a tall fair easy presence and a mind
in which the lights of irony played pleasantly through the
shades of feeling. She liked to hear his voice almost as
much as to listen to what he was saying, and to listen to
what he was saying almost as much as to feel that he was
looking at her; but he wanted to kiss her, and she wanted to
talk to him about books and pictures, and have him insinuate
the eternal theme of their love into every subject they
discussed.
Whenever they were apart a reaction set in. She wondered
how she could have been so cold, called herself a prude and
an idiot, questioned if any man could really care for her,
and got up in the dead of night to try new ways of doing her
hair. But as soon as he reappeared her head straightened
itself on her slim neck and she sped her little shafts of
irony, or flew her little kites of erudition, while hot and
cold waves swept over her, and the things she really wanted
to say choked in her throat and burned the palms of her
hands.
Often she told herself that any silly girl who had waltzed
through a season would know better than she how to attract a
man and hold him; but when she said "a man" she did not
really mean George Darrow.
Then one day, at a dinner, she saw him sitting next to one
of the silly girls in question: the heroine of the elopement
which had shaken West Fifty-fifth Street to its base. The
young lady had come back from her adventure no less silly
than when she went; and across the table the partner of her
flight, a fat young man with eye-glasses, sat stolidly
eating terrapin and talking about polo and investments.
The young woman was undoubtedly as silly as ever; yet after
watching her for a few minutes Miss Summers perceived that
she had somehow grown luminous, perilous, obscurely menacing
to nice girls and the young men they intended eventually to
accept. Suddenly, at the sight, a rage of possessorship
awoke in her. She must save Darrow, assert her right to him
at any price. Pride and reticence went down in a hurricane
of jealousy. She heard him laugh, and there was something
new in his laugh...She watched him talking, talking...He sat
slightly sideways, a faint smile beneath his lids, lowering
his voice as he lowered it when he talked to her. She
caught the same inflections, but his eyes were different.
It would have offended her once if he had looked at her like
that. Now her one thought was that none but she had a right
to be so looked at. And that girl of all others! What
illusions could he have about a girl who, hardly a year ago,
had made a fool of herself over the fat young man stolidly
eating terrapin across the table? If that was where romance
and passion ended, it was better to take to district
visiting or algebra!
All night she lay awake and wondered: "What was she saying
to him? How shall I learn to say such things?" and she
decided that her heart would tell her--that the next time
they were alone together the irresistible word would spring
to her lips. He came the next day, and they were alone, and
all she found was: "I didn't know that you and Kitty Mayne
were such friends."
He answered with indifference that he didn't know it either,
and in the reaction of relief she declared: "She's certainly
ever so much prettier than she was..."
"She's rather good fun," he admitted, as though he had not
noticed her other advantages; and suddenly Anna saw in his
eyes the look she had seen there the previous evening.
She felt as if he were leagues and leagues away from her.
All her hopes dissolved, and she was conscious of sitting
rigidly, with high head and straight lips, while the
irresistible word fled with a last wing-beat into the golden
mist of her illusions...
She was still quivering with the pain and bewilderment of
this adventure when Fraser Leath appeared. She met him
first in Italy, where she was travelling with her parents;
and the following winter he came to New York. In Italy he
had seemed interesting: in New York he became remarkable.
He seldom spoke of his life in Europe, and let drop but the
most incidental allusions to the friends, the tastes, the
pursuits which filled his cosmopolitan days; but in the
atmosphere of West Fifty-fifth Street he seemed the
embodiment of a storied past. He presented Miss Summers
with a prettily-bound anthology of the old French poets and,
when she showed a discriminating pleasure in the gift,
observed with his grave smile: "I didn't suppose I should
find any one here who would feel about these things as I
do." On another occasion he asked her acceptance of a half-
effaced eighteenth century pastel which he had surprisingly
picked up in a New York auction-room. "I know no one but you
who would really appreciate it," he explained.
He permitted himself no other comments, but these conveyed
with sufficient directness that he thought her worthy of a
different setting. That she should be so regarded by a man
living in an atmosphere of art and beauty, and esteeming
them the vital elements of life, made her feel for the first
time that she was understood. Here was some one whose scale
of values was the same as hers, and who thought her opinion
worth hearing on the very matters which they both considered
of supreme importance. The discovery restored her self-
confidence, and she revealed herself to Mr. Leath as she had
never known how to reveal herself to Darrow.
As the courtship progressed, and they grew more
confidential, her suitor surprised and delighted her by
little explosions of revolutionary sentiment. He said:
"Shall you mind, I wonder, if I tell you that you live in a
dread-fully conventional atmosphere?" and, seeing that she
manifestly did not mind: "Of course I shall say things now
and then that will horrify your dear delightful parents--I
shall shock them awfully, I warn you."
In confirmation of this warning he permitted himself an
occasional playful fling at the regular church-going of Mr.
and Mrs. Summers, at the innocuous character of the
literature in their library, and at their guileless
appreciations in art. He even ventured to banter Mrs.
Summers on her refusal to receive the irrepressible Kitty
Mayne who, after a rapid passage with George Darrow, was now
involved in another and more flagrant adventure.
"In Europe, you know, the husband is regarded as the only
judge in such matters. As long as he accepts the situation
--" Mr. Leath explained to Anna, who took his view the more
emphatically in order to convince herself that, personally,
she had none but the most tolerant sentiments toward the
lady.
The subversiveness of Mr. Leath's opinions was enhanced by
the distinction of his appearance and the reserve of his
manners. He was like the anarchist with a gardenia in his
buttonhole who figures in the higher melodrama. Every word,
every allusion, every note of his agreeably-modulated voice,
gave Anna a glimpse of a society at once freer and finer,
which observed the traditional forms but had discarded the
underlying prejudices; whereas the world she knew had
discarded many of the forms and kept almost all the
prejudices.
In such an atmosphere as his an eager young woman, curious
as to all the manifestations of life, yet instinctively
desiring that they should come to her in terms of beauty and
fine feeling, must surely find the largest scope for self-
expression. Study, travel, the contact of the world, the
comradeship of a polished and enlightened mind, would
combine to enrich her days and form her character; and it
was only in the rare moments when Mr. Leath's symmetrical
blond mask bent over hers, and his kiss dropped on her like
a cold smooth pebble, that she questioned the completeness
of the joys he offered.
There had been a time when the walls on which her gaze now
rested had shed a glare of irony on these early dreams. In
the first years of her marriage the sober symmetry of Givre
had suggested only her husband's neatly-balanced mind. It
was a mind, she soon learned, contentedly absorbed in
formulating the conventions of the unconventional. West
Fifty-fifth Street was no more conscientiously concerned
than Givre with the momentous question of "what people did";
it was only the type of deed investigated that was
different. Mr. Leath collected his social instances with
the same seriousness and patience as his snuff-boxes. He
exacted a rigid conformity to his rules of non-conformity
and his scepticism had the absolute accent of a dogma. He
even cherished certain exceptions to his rules as the book-
collector prizes a "defective" first edition. The
Protestant church-going of Anna's parents had provoked his
gentle sarcasm; but he prided himself on his mother's
devoutness, because Madame de Chantelle, in embracing her
second husband's creed, had become part of a society which
still observes the outward rites of piety.
Anna, in fact, had discovered in her amiable and elegant
mother-in-law an unexpected embodiment of the West Fifty-
fifth Street ideal. Mrs. Summers and Madame de Chantelle,
however strongly they would have disagreed as to the
authorized source of Christian dogma, would have found
themselves completely in accord on all the momentous
minutiae of drawing-room conduct; yet Mr. Leath treated his
mother's foibles with a respect which Anna's experience of
him forbade her to attribute wholly to filial affection.
In the early days, when she was still questioning the Sphinx
instead of trying to find an answer to it, she ventured to
tax her husband with his inconsistency.
"You say your mother won't like it if I call on that amusing
little woman who came here the other day, and was let in by
mistake; but Madame de Chantelle tells me she lives with her
husband, and when mother refused to visit Kitty Mayne you
said----"
Mr. Leath's smile arrested her. "My dear child, I don't
pretend to apply the principles of logic to my poor mother's
prejudices."
"But if you admit that they ARE prejudices----?"
"There are prejudices and prejudices. My mother, of course,
got hers from Monsieur de Chantelle, and they seem to me as
much in their place in this house as the pot-pourri in your
hawthorn jar. They preserve a social tradition of which I
should be sorry to lose the least perfume. Of course I
don't expect you, just at first, to feel the difference, to
see the nuance. In the case of little Madame de
Vireville, for instance: you point out that she's still
under her husband's roof. Very true; and if she were merely
a Paris acquaintance--especially if you had met her, as one
still might, in the RIGHT KIND of house in Paris--I
should be the last to object to your visiting her. But in
the country it's different. Even the best provincial
society is what you would call narrow: I don't deny it; and
if some of our friends met Madame de Vireville at Givre--
well, it would produce a bad impression. You're inclined to
ridicule such considerations, but gradually you'll come to
see their importance; and meanwhile, do trust me when I ask
you to be guided by my mother. It is always well for a
stranger in an old society to err a little on the side of
what you call its prejudices but I should rather describe as
its traditions."
After that she no longer tried to laugh or argue her husband
out of his convictions. They WERE convictions, and
therefore unassailable. Nor was any insincerity implied in
the fact that they sometimes seemed to coincide with hers.
There were occasions when he really did look at things as
she did; but for reasons so different as to make the
distance between them all the greater. Life, to Mr. Leath,
was like a walk through a carefully classified museum,
where, in moments of doubt, one had only to look at the
number and refer to one's catalogue; to his wife it was like
groping about in a huge dark lumber-room where the exploring
ray of curiosity lit up now some shape of breathing beauty
and now a mummy's grin.
In the first bewilderment of her new state these discoveries
had had the effect of dropping another layer of gauze
between herself and reality. She seemed farther than ever
removed from the strong joys and pangs for which she felt
herself made. She did not adopt her husband's views, but
insensibly she began to live his life. She tried to throw a
compensating ardour into the secret excursions of her
spirit, and thus the old vicious distinction between romance
and reality was re-established for her, and she resigned
herself again to the belief that "real life" was neither
real nor alive.
The birth of her little girl swept away this delusion. At
last she felt herself in contact with the actual business of
living: but even this impression was not enduring.
Everything but the irreducible crude fact of child-bearing
assumed, in the Leath household, the same ghostly tinge of
unreality. Her husband, at the time, was all that his own
ideal of a husband required. He was attentive, and even
suitably moved: but as he sat by her bedside, and
thoughtfully proffered to her the list of people who had
"called to enquire", she looked first at him, and then at
the child between them, and wondered at the blundering
alchemy of Nature...
With the exception of the little girl herself, everything
connected with that time had grown curiously remote and
unimportant. The days that had moved so slowly as they
passed seemed now to have plunged down head-long steeps of
time; and as she sat in the autumn sun, with Darrow's letter
in her hand, the history of Anna Leath appeared to its
heroine like some grey shadowy tale that she might have read
in an old book, one night as she was falling asleep...
Content of BOOK II: CHAPTER IX [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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