Blogging The Reef

(To read all posts about The Reef click here.)


This is based on the first three chapters.

We are introduced to two women: Anna Leath (formerly Anna Summers) and Sophy Viner. What we see comes through the eyes of George Darrow. And George is, in one sense anyway, a likely witness because he is a bit of a womanizer. We learn that he met Sophy Viner because she was working in some sort of assisting capacity to a woman who ran a bit of salon with a  decidedly bohemian bent. George apparently made a bit of a fool of himself pursuing one Lady Ulrica who was a member of this circle.

Anyway, George expects his women to match what they are advertised as:

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. 

Anna is unquestionably a lady. That is to say she is something of a work of art. She is not "natural", which is what Sophy is and our subject for Friday. Anna is something she has created of herself with great effort.  That is a very 18th century notion when, unlike today, to say something was artifice or artificial was a great complement.

It still is for George. George has a deep appreciation for Anna and I think we can safely say that he always has. Whether this deep appreciation is love or something akin to it is open for discussion.

Note, by the way, how well her maiden name is chosen. George and Anna knew one another many years ago and those years with Anna Summers are now his Anna summers. A blissful period he recalls with pleasure but also disappointment because it didn't work out.

He is, it is important to realize, more than wiling to wait for Anna.

Darrow, for his part, was content to wait if she wished it. He remembered that once, in America, when she was a girl, and he had gone to stay with her family in the country, she had been out when he arrived, and her mother had told him to look for her in the garden. She was not in the garden, but beyond it he had seen her approaching down a long shady path. Without hastening her step she had smiled and signed to him to wait; and charmed by the lights and shadows that played upon her as she moved, and by the pleasure of watching her slow advance toward him, he had obeyed her and stood still. And so she seemed now to be walking to him down the years, the light and shade of old memories and new hopes playing variously on her, and each step giving him the vision of a different grace. She did not waver or turn aside; he knew she would come straight to where he stood; but something in her eyes said "Wait", and again he obeyed and waited. 

The problem as he sees it is that the wait has to be for something. He loves the idea of a long and romantic build up but it has to be a build up to something. And the something he is exceited to wait for  is not just love but erotic love. This is a pretty common male attitude and, if you'll pardon my intruding, an entirely justifiable one.  Here is how he thinks it:

As in her girlhood, her eyes had made promises which her lips were afraid to keep.

So, is the problem with what she fails to say with those lips or is it that she doesn't manage to get kissed? It is the latter, of course, but that is obviously a more complex problem than Darrow grasps. How does a girl manage to get kissed? She could, of course, initiate the kiss but, even as liberated as we are, it doesn't work that way most of the time. It's a very old problem but not a trite one. How do you get a man to kiss you?

Just something to keep in the back of our minds as we go along.