The Reef Part 36

"I've told you I don't think uncharitably of her. I don't want to think of her at all!"

"That's why I tell you you're afraid."

"Afraid?"

"Yes. You've always said you wanted, above all, to look at life, at the human problem, as it is, without fear and without hypocrisy; and it's not always a pleasant thing to look at." He broke off, and then began again: "Don't think this a plea for myself! I don't want to say a word to lessen my offense. I don't want to talk of myself at all. Even if I did, I probably couldn't make you understand--I don't, myself, as I look back. Be just to me--it's your right; all I ask you is to be generous to Miss Viner..."

She stood up trembling. "You're free to be as generous to her as you please!"

"Yes: you've made it clear to me that I'm free. But there's nothing I can do for her that will help her half as much as your understanding her would."

"Nothing you can do for her? You can marry her!"

His face hardened. "You certainly couldn't wish her a worse fate!"

"It must have been what she expected...relied on..." He was silent, and she broke out: "Or what is she? What are you? It's too horrible! On your way here...to ME..." She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.

"That was it," he said bluntly. She stared at him.

"I was on my way to you--after repeated delays and postponements of your own making. At the very last you turned me back with a mere word--and without explanation. I waited for a letter; and none came. I'm not saying this to justify myself. I'm simply trying to make you understand.

I felt hurt and bitter and bewildered. I thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment's folly...a flash of madness...as such things are. We've never seen each other since..."

Anna was looking at him coldly. "You sufficiently describe her in saying that!"

"Yes, if you measure her by conventional standards--which is what you always declare you never do."

"Conventional standards? A girl who----" She was checked by a sudden rush of almost physical repugnance. Suddenly she broke out: "I always thought her an adventuress!"

"Always?"

"I don't mean always...but after you came..."

"She's not an adventuress."

"You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?"

"Oh, I don't think she pretended to have a theory----"

"She hadn't even that excuse?"

"She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness--of miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can't even guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindness--nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of it--she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger, but I didn't. There's no possible excuse for what I did."

Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience--come to her from this! If his security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgotten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What did he mean by "a moment's folly, a flash of madness"? How did people enter on such adventures, how pa.s.s out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure...

"I swear to you," she heard Darrow saying, "it was simply that, and nothing more."

She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart...A leaden la.s.situde descended on her. She pa.s.sed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For a moment she simply ceased to feel.

She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak, and she made an effort to represent to herself the meaning of what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred mirror. Finally she brought out: "I don't think I understand what you've told me."

"No; you don't understand," he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of incomprehension seemed an offense to her.

"I don't want to--about such things!"

He answered almost harshly: "Don't be afraid...you never will..."

and for an instant they faced each other like enemies. Then the tears swelled in her throat at his reproach.

"You mean I don't feel things--I'm too hard?"

"No: you're too high...too fine...such things are too far from you."

He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short s.p.a.ce, they confronted each other, no longer as enemies--so it seemed to her--but as beings of different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other's speech.

Darrow broke the silence. "It's best, on all accounts, that I should stay till tomorrow; but I needn't intrude on you; we needn't meet again alone. I only want to be sure I know your wishes." He spoke the short sentences in a level voice, as though he were summing up the results of a business conference.

Anna looked at him vaguely. "My wishes?"

"As to Owen----"

At that she started. "They must never meet again!"

"It's not likely they will. What I meant was, that it depends on you to spare him..."

She answered steadily: "He shall never know," and after another interval Darrow said: "This is good-bye, then."

At the word she seemed to understand for the first time whither the flying moments had been leading them. Resentment and indignation died down, and all her consciousness resolved itself into the mere visual sense that he was there before her, near enough for her to lift her hand and touch him, and that in another instant the place where he stood would be empty.

She felt a mortal weakness, a craven impulse to cry out to him to stay, a longing to throw herself into his arms, and take refuge there from the unendurable anguish he had caused her. Then the vision called up another thought: "I shall never know what that girl has known..." and the recoil of pride flung her back on the sharp edges of her anguish.

"Good-bye," she said, in dread lest he should read her face; and she stood motionless, her head high, while he walked to the door and went out.

BOOK V

x.x.x

Anna Leath, three days later, sat in Miss Painter's drawing-room in the rue de Matignon.

Coming up precipitately that morning from the country, she had reached Paris at one o'clock and Miss Painter's landing some ten minutes later.

Miss Painter's mouldy little man-servant, dissembling a napkin under his arm, had mildly attempted to oppose her entrance; but Anna, insisting, had gone straight to the dining-room and surprised her friend--who ate as furtively as certain animals--over a strange meal of cold mutton and lemonade. Ignoring the embarra.s.sment she caused, she had set forth the object of her journey, and Miss Painter, always hatted and booted for action, had immediately hastened out, leaving her to the solitude of the bare fireless drawing-room with its eternal slip-covers and "bowed"

shutters.

In this inhospitable obscurity Anna had sat alone for close upon two hours. Both obscurity and solitude were acceptable to her, and impatient as she was to hear the result of the errand on which she had despatched her hostess, she desired still more to be alone. During her long meditation in a white-swathed chair before the m.u.f.fled hearth she had been able for the first time to clear a way through the darkness and confusion of her thoughts. The way did not go far, and her attempt to trace it was as weak and spasmodic as a convalescent's first efforts to pick up the thread of living. She seemed to herself like some one struggling to rise from a long sickness of which it would have been so much easier to die. At Givre she had fallen into a kind of torpor, a deadness of soul traversed by wild flashes of pain; but whether she suffered or whether she was numb, she seemed equally remote from her real living and doing self.