The Reef Page 3

  III

  Almost as soon as the train left Calais her head had dropped back intothe corner, and she had fallen asleep.

  Sitting opposite, in the compartment from which he had contrived to haveother travellers excluded, Darrow looked at her curiously. He had neverseen a face that changed so quickly. A moment since it had danced likea field of daisies in a summer breeze; now, under the pallid oscillatinglight of the lamp overhead, it wore the hard stamp of experience, as ofa soft thing chilled into shape before its curves had rounded: and itmoved 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 atthe Calais buffet--where he had insisted on offering her the dinnershe had missed at Mrs. Murrett's--had given a distincter outline toher figure. From the moment of entering the New York boarding-school towhich a preoccupied guardian had hastily consigned her after the deathof her parents, she had found herself alone in a busy and indifferentworld. Her youthful history might, in fact, have been summed up inthe statement that everybody had been too busy to look after her. Herguardian, a drudge in a big banking house, was absorbed by "the office";the guardian's wife, by her health and her religion; and an eldersister, Laura, married, unmarried, remarried, and pursuing, through allthese alternating phases, some vaguely "artistic" ideal on which theguardian and his wife looked askance, had (as Darrow conjectured) takentheir disapproval as a pretext for not troubling herself aboutpoor Sophy, to whom--perhaps for this reason--she had remained theincarnation of remote romantic possibilities.

  In the course of time a sudden "stroke" of the guardian's had thrown hispersonal affairs into a state of confusion from which--after his widelylamented death--it became evident that it would not be possible toextricate his ward's inheritance. No one deplored this more sincerelythan his widow, who saw in it one more proof of her husband's lifehaving been sacrificed to the innumerable duties imposed on him, and whocould hardly--but for the counsels of religion--have brought herself topardon the young girl for her indirect share in hastening his end. Sophydid not resent this point of view. She was really much sorrier for herguardian's death than for the loss of her insignificant fortune. Thelatter had represented only the means of holding her in bondage, andits disappearance was the occasion of her immediate plunge into thewide bright sea of life surrounding the island-of her captivity. She hadfirst landed--thanks to the intervention of the ladies who had directedher education--in a Fifth Avenue school-room where, for a few months,she acted as a buffer between three autocratic infants and theirbodyguard of nurses and teachers. The too-pressing attentions of theirfather's valet had caused her to fly this sheltered spot, against theexpress advice of her educational superiors, who implied that, in theirown case, refinement and self-respect had always sufficed to keep themost ungovernable passions at bay. The experience of the guardian'swidow having been precisely similar, and the deplorable precedent ofLaura's career being present to all their minds, none of these ladiesfelt any obligation to intervene farther in Sophy's affairs; and she wasaccordingly left to her own resources.

  A schoolmate from the Rocky Mountains, who was taking her father andmother to Europe, had suggested Sophy's accompanying them, and "goinground" 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; butthis relatively brilliant phase of Sophy's career was cut short bythe elopement of the inconsiderate Mamie with a "matinee idol" who hadfollowed her from New York, and by the precipitate return of her parentsto negotiate for the repurchase of their child.

  It was then--after an interval of repose with compassionate butimpecunious American friends in Paris--that Miss Viner had been drawninto the turbid current of Mrs. Murrett's career. The impecuniouscompatriots had found Mrs. Murrett for her, and it was partly ontheir account (because they were such dears, and so unconscious, poorconfiding things, of what they were letting her in for) that Sophy hadstuck it out so long in the dreadful house in Chelsea. The Farlows, sheexplained to Darrow, were the best friends she had ever had (and theonly ones who had ever "been decent" about Laura, whom they had seenonce, and intensely admired); but even after twenty years of Paris theywere the most incorrigibly inexperienced angels, and quite persuadedthat Mrs. Murrett was a woman of great intellectual eminence, and thehouse 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 bevirtually 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 slightlaugh--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 perceivedthat she classified people according to their greater or less "luck" inlife, but she appeared to harbour no resentment against the undefinedpower which dispensed the gift in such unequal measure. Things cameone's way or they didn't; and meanwhile one could only look on, and makethe most of small compensations, such as watching "the show" at Mrs.Murrett's, and talking over the Lady Ulricas and other footlightfigures. And at any moment, of course, a turn of the kaleidoscope mightsuddenly toss a bright spangle into the grey pattern of one's days.

  This light-hearted philosophy was not without charm to a young manaccustomed to more traditional views. George Darrow had had a fairlyvaried experience of feminine types, but the women he had frequented hadeither been pronouncedly "ladies" or they had not. Grateful to both forministering to the more complex masculine nature, and disposed toassume that they had been evolved, if not designed, to that end, hehad instinctively kept the two groups apart in his mind, avoiding thatintermediate society which attempts to conciliate both theories of life."Bohemianism" seemed to him a cheaper convention than the other two, andhe liked, above all, people who went as far as they could in their ownline--liked his "ladies" and their rivals to be equally unashamed ofshowing for exactly what they were. He had not indeed--the fact of LadyUlrica was there to remind him--been without his experience of a thirdtype; but that experience had left him with a contemptuous distaste forthe woman who uses the privileges of one class to shelter the customs ofanother.

  As to young girls, he had never thought much about them since his earlylove for the girl who had become Mrs. Leath. That episode seemed, ashe looked back on it, to bear no more relation to reality than a paledecorative design to the confused richness of a summer landscape. Heno longer understood the violent impulses and dreamy pauses of his ownyoung heart, or the inscrutable abandonments and reluctances of hers. Hehad known a moment of anguish at losing her--the mad plunge of youthfulinstincts against the barrier of fate; but the first wave of strongersensation had swept away all but the outline of their story, and thememory of Anna Summers had made the image of the young girl sacred, butthe class uninteresting.

  Such generalisations belonged, however, to an earlier stage of hisexperience. The more he saw of life the more incalculable he foundit; and he had learned to yield to his impressions without feelingthe youthful need of relating them to others. It was the girl in theopposite seat who had roused in him the dormant habit of comparison.She was distinguished from the daughters of wealth by her avowedacquaintance with the real business of living, a familiarity asdifferent as possible from their theoretical proficiency; yet it seemedto Darrow that her experience had made her free without hardness andself-assured without assertiveness.

  The rush into Amiens, and the flash of the station lights into theircompartment, broke Miss Viner's sleep, and without changing her positionshe lifted her lids and looked at Darrow. There was neither surprise norbewilderment in the look. She seemed instantly conscious, not so muchof where she was, as of the fact that she was with him; and that factseemed enough to reassure her. She did not even turn her head to lookout; her eyes continued to rest on h
im with a vague smile which appearedto light her face from within, while her lips kept their sleepy droop.

  Shouts and the hurried tread of travellers came to them through theconfusing cross-lights of the platform. A head appeared at the window,and Darrow threw himself forward to defend their solitude; but theintruder was only a train hand going his round of inspection. He passedon, and the lights and cries of the station dropped away, merged in awider haze and a hollower resonance, as the train gathered itself upwith a long shake and rolled out again into the darkness.

  Miss Viner's head sank back against the cushion, pushing out a duskywave of hair above her forehead. The swaying of the train loosened alock 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 verifiedthe statement by holding up his watch to the lamp.

  She nodded dreamily. "It's all right. I telegraphed Mrs. Farlow thatthey mustn't think of coming to the station; but they'll have told theconcierge to look out for me."

  "You'll let me drive you there?"

  She nodded again, and her eyes closed. It was very pleasant to Darrowthat she made no effort to talk or to dissemble her sleepiness. He satwatching 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 thecurtain over the lamp, drowning the compartment in a bluish twilight.

  As he sank back into his seat he thought how differently AnnaSummers--or even Anna Leath--would have behaved. She would not havetalked too much; she would not have been either restless or embarrassed;but her adaptability, her appropriateness, would not have beennature but "tact." The oddness of the situation would have made sleepimpossible, or, if weariness had overcome her for a moment, she wouldhave waked with a start, wondering where she was, and how she had comethere, and if her hair were tidy; and nothing short of hairpins and aglass would have restored her self-possession...

  The reflection set him wondering whether the "sheltered" girl'sbringing-up might not unfit her for all subsequent contact with life.How much nearer to it had Mrs. Leath been brought by marriage andmotherhood, and the passage of fourteen years? What were all herreticences and evasions but the result of the deadening process offorming a "lady"? The freshness he had marvelled at was like theunnatural whiteness of flowers forced in the dark.

  As he looked back at their few days together he saw that theirintercourse had been marked, on her part, by the same hesitations andreserves which had chilled their earlier intimacy. Once more they hadhad their hour together and she had wasted it. As in her girlhood, hereyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep. She was stillafraid of life, of its ruthlessness, its danger and mystery. She wasstill the petted little girl who cannot be left alone in the dark...Hismemory flew back to their youthful story, and long-forgotten detailstook shape before him. How frail and faint the picture was! They seemed,he and she, like the ghostly lovers of the Grecian Urn, forever pursuingwithout ever clasping each other. To this day he did not quite knowwhat had parted them: the break had been as fortuitous as the flutteringapart of two seed-vessels on a wave of summer air...

  The very slightness, vagueness, of the memory gave it an addedpoignancy. He felt the mystic pang of the parent for a child whichhas just breathed and died. Why had it happened thus, when the leastshifting of influences might have made it all so different? If she hadbeen given to him then he would have put warmth in her veins and lightin her eyes: would have made her a woman through and through. Musingthus, he had the sense of waste that is the bitterest harvest ofexperience. A love like his might have given her the divine gift ofself-renewal; and now he saw her fated to wane into old age repeatingthe same gestures, echoing the words she had always heard, andperhaps never guessing that, just outside her glazed and curtainedconsciousness, 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 farenough apart for the reflection of the upper one to deepen the colourof the other. The jolting of the train had again shaken loose the lockabove her ear. It danced on her cheek like the flit of a brown wing overflowers, and Darrow felt an intense desire to lean forward and put itback behind her ear.