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BOOK I: CHAPTER VIII
All day, since the late reluctant dawn, the rain had come
down in torrents. It streamed against Darrow's high-perched
windows, reduced their vast prospect of roofs and chimneys
to a black oily huddle, and filled the room with the drab
twilight of an underground aquarium.
The streams descended with the regularity of a third day's
rain, when trimming and shuffling are over, and the weather
has settled down to do its worst. There were no variations
of rhythm, no lyrical ups and downs: the grey lines
streaking the panes were as dense and uniform as a page of
unparagraphed narrative.
George Darrow had drawn his armchair to the fire. The time-
table he had been studying lay on the floor, and he sat
staring with dull acquiescence into the boundless blur of
rain, which affected him like a vast projection of his own
state of mind. Then his eyes travelled slowly about the
room.
It was exactly ten days since his hurried unpacking had
strewn it with the contents of his portmanteaux. His
brushes and razors were spread out on the blotched marble of
the chest of drawers. A stack of newspapers had accumulated
on the centre table under the "electrolier", and half a
dozen paper novels lay on the mantelpiece among cigar-cases
and toilet bottles; but these traces of his passage had made
no mark on the featureless dulness of the room, its look of
being the makeshift setting of innumerable transient
collocations. There was something sardonic, almost
sinister, in its appearance of having deliberately "made up"
for its anonymous part, all in noncommittal drabs and
browns, with a carpet and paper that nobody would remember,
and chairs and tables as impersonal as railway porters.
Darrow picked up the time-table and tossed it on to the
table. Then he rose to his feet, lit a cigar and went to
the window. Through the rain he could just discover the
face of a clock in a tall building beyond the railway roofs.
He pulled out his watch, compared the two time-pieces, and
started the hands of his with such a rush that they flew
past the hour and he had to make them repeat the circuit
more deliberately. He felt a quite disproportionate
irritation at the trifling blunder. When he had corrected
it he went back to his chair and threw himself down, leaning
back his head against his hands. Presently his cigar went
out, and he got up, hunted for the matches, lit it again and
returned to his seat.
The room was getting on his nerves. During the first few
days, while the skies were clear, he had not noticed it, or
had felt for it only the contemptuous indifference of the
traveller toward a provisional shelter. But now that he was
leaving it, was looking at it for the last time, it seemed
to have taken complete possession of his mind, to be soaking
itself into him like an ugly indelible blot. Every detail
pressed itself on his notice with the familiarity of an
accidental confidant: whichever way he turned, he felt the
nudge of a transient intimacy...
The one fixed point in his immediate future was that his
leave was over and that he must be back at his post in
London the next morning. Within twenty-four hours he would
again be in a daylight world of recognized activities,
himself a busy, responsible, relatively necessary factor in
the big whirring social and official machine. That fixed
obligation was the fact he could think of with the least
discomfort, yet for some unaccountable reason it was the one
on which he found it most difficult to fix his thoughts.
Whenever he did so, the room jerked him back into the circle
of its insistent associations. It was extraordinary with
what a microscopic minuteness of loathing he hated it all:
the grimy carpet and wallpaper, the black marble mantel-
piece, the clock with a gilt allegory under a dusty bell,
the high-bolstered brown-counterpaned bed, the framed card
of printed rules under the electric light switch, and the
door of communication with the next room. He hated the door
most of all...
At the outset, he had felt no special sense of
responsibility. He was satisfied that he had struck the
right note, and convinced of his power of sustaining it.
The whole incident had somehow seemed, in spite of its
vulgar setting and its inevitable prosaic propinquities, to
be enacting itself in some unmapped region outside the pale
of the usual. It was not like anything that had ever
happened to him before, or in which he had ever pictured
himself as likely to be involved; but that, at first, had
seemed no argument against his fitness to deal with it.
Perhaps but for the three days' rain he might have got away
without a doubt as to his adequacy. The rain had made all
the difference. It had thrown the whole picture out of
perspective, blotted out the mystery of the remoter planes
and the enchantment of the middle distance, and thrust into
prominence every commonplace fact of the foreground. It was
the kind of situation that was not helped by being thought
over; and by the perversity of circumstance he had been
forced into the unwilling contemplation of its every
aspect...
His cigar had gone out again, and he threw it into the fire
and vaguely meditated getting up to find another. But the
mere act of leaving his chair seemed to call for a greater
exertion of the will than he was capable of, and he leaned
his head back with closed eyes and listened to the drumming
of the rain.
A different noise aroused him. It was the opening and
closing of the door leading from the corridor into the
adjoining room. He sat motionless, without opening his
eyes; but now another sight forced itself under his lowered
lids. It was the precise photographic picture of that other
room. Everything in it rose before him and pressed itself
upon his vision with the same acuity of distinctness as the
objects surrounding him. A step sounded on the floor, and
he knew which way the step was directed, what pieces of
furniture it had to skirt, where it would probably pause,
and what was likely to arrest it. He heard another sound,
and recognized it as that of a wet umbrella placed in the
black marble jamb of the chimney-piece, against the hearth.
He caught the creak of a hinge, and instantly differentiated
it as that of the wardrobe against the opposite wall. Then
he heard the mouse-like squeal of a reluctant drawer, and
knew it was the upper one in the chest of drawers beside the
bed: the clatter which followed was caused by the mahogany
toilet-glass jumping on its loosened pivots...
The step crossed the floor again. It was strange how much
better he knew it than the person to whom it belonged! Now
it was drawing near the door of communication between the
two rooms. He opened his eyes and looked. The step had
ceased and for a moment there was silence. Then he heard a
low knock. He made no response, and after an interval he
saw that the door handle was being tentatively turned. He
closed his eyes once more...
The door opened, and the step was in the room, coming
cautiously toward him. He kept his eyes shut, relaxing his
body to feign sleep. There was another pause, then a
wavering soft advance, the rustle of a dress behind his
chair, the warmth of two hands pressed for a moment on his
lids. The palms of the hands had the lingering scent of some
stuff that he had bought on the Boulevard...He looked up and
saw a letter falling over his shoulder to his knee...
"Did I disturb you? I'm so sorry! They gave me this just now
when I came in."
The letter, before he could catch it, had slipped between
his knees to the floor. It lay there, address upward, at
his feet, and while he sat staring down at the strong
slender characters on the blue-gray envelope an arm reached
out from behind to pick it up.
"Oh, don't--DON'T" broke from him, and he bent over and
caught the arm. The face above it was close to his.
"Don't what?"
----"take the trouble," he stammered.
He dropped the arm and stooped down. His grasp closed over
the letter, he fingered its thickness and weight and
calculated the number of sheets it must contain.
Suddenly he felt the pressure of the hand on his shoulder,
and became aware that the face was still leaning over him,
and that in a moment he would have to look up and kiss it...
He bent forward first and threw the unopened letter into the
middle of the fire.
Content of BOOK I: CHAPTER VIII [Edith Wharton's novel: The Reef]
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