The Thinking Reed (28 page)
She watched him hopefully. He bade Annette sit down but she refused. For the moment, it was apparent, she felt herself purely a messenger. They had seen her moving from group to group before she came to them, and she had evidently taken no time to dress, for her hennaed hair hung in uncombed wisps round her ears, and her gown was neither new enough nor elaborate enough for the night. She bent forward, fixing them with fine eyes dilated by earnestness, and said in a hushed voice, “Did you hear what I said to Laura at the Golf House this morning?” Isabelle uttered an exclamation of dismay. The sense of waste she had had in the afternoon, when Ferdy Monck had laughed at the quarrel between the two fading women as if he had been legitimately amused by some interplay of wit, was now intensified. These fine eyes should have rolled only under the stimulus of some grandiose antagonism, arising from the love of children or country. Isabelle was aware that the point at issue probably concerned backgammon. The degree of incredulity which she would have felt, had she been informed that their quarrel related to anything so important as the love of children or country, made her admit that Ferdy had spoken part of the truth when he had said that women ought to die at forty. There was an immense number of her sex whose relationship with importance ceased absolutely some years even before their menstrual functions. Annette bent lower and continued in this solemn, self-impressed voice, “Well, let me tell you. I thought it was time somebody told her the truth, so I just let her have it.” She was taking breath, in order to start on some proliferating story, when Marc interrupted her. “But are you not Laura?” he asked, sleepily but not stupidly. Annette drew back her head sharply. “What are you talking about, Marc?” she asked. Her voice dragged into a whine. “I’m Annette Lexington. You know me!” Her expression became charged with an infantile meanness. “You’ve been to my house often enough. At Antibes.” “Was it your house?” asked Marc, still speaking in the same drowsy yet penetrating tone, “I thought it was Laura’s.” “Well, you have been to Laura’s house as well,” said Annette with a grudging air; “she has a house at Antibes too.” “That is what I am complaining about,” Marc continued. “You both have houses at Antibes, you both have the same colour of hair, you have both had several husbands. There are really not sufficient points of difference between you. Naturally I cannot tell you apart. I met Laura and Annette, how was I to tell which was which? If you disagree with her, you should be silent about it. It is in the nature of a personal business within yourself, like the engenderment of gas in one’s intestines, which should not be shared with the rest of the world.” Annette stared at him, looked at Isabelle, and shrugged her shoulders. “Well, Marc, you’ve begun early this evening,” she said, with an acid air of good sense refraining from rebuke only because it would certainly be wasted.
“Did you really make that mistake?” asked Isabelle, though she knew he had not. As Marc continued to stare in front of him, she laid her hand on his arm and persisted, “Did you really think Annette was Laura?” She wanted to be certain that Annette was wrong and that he was at least more sober than drunk, though she was not really anxious or displeased at what had passed. She knew that she was glad again that she had married him, that what he had felt about the quarrelling women was sane and just, even before he turned on her his veiled and sulky gaze and said, “This damned life, it makes us all the same. There is no difference between us all. It wipes out the gifts God gave us. They are all pooled, like the pourboires one gives to the waiters in a restaurant. Only it is not a question of pourboires, it is a question of all that one is ever going to have …” He stared at the ground and repeated softly and bitterly, “D’Alperoussa, d’Alperoussa.” She saw that he treasured within himself, as a woman who has been ceaselessly tempted to sexual union on undignified terms has a right to treasure the virginity she has defended, an obstinate honesty, an untarnished financial fastidiousness; and to him this dinner meant that the society of which he was a part was about to steal that treasure and waste it. He had not followed up his resentment at his personal misadventures by such deductions from the situation as had filled her day, but he had derived a sudden poetic vision of the nullity with which it threatened the human race, from the spectacle of these two women, between whom there could be no differences, since there was no difference. She had noticed often before that he knew no intermediate process between the passing of common-sense judgment on practical problems and this profound, intuitive poetic vision, which was now making his face darker than his slight drunkenness, his eyes more desperate than his knowledge of his plight. Hardly ever did he move in the sphere of logic and analysis which was her natural home; and she looked with infatuation at him, recognizing that in all this long lighted room of well-made and glittering men and women, he alone had the dark bloom of romantic and passionate things. She marvelled at the dynamic power, far beyond the reach of her own type, emanated by those who think without the use of thought, and she asked herself what critic of social conditions, moved by an intellectual conviction that the capitalist system was a source of suffering, burned with such visible fires as Monsieur Campofiore, to whom the rich and the poor were simply persons in an intuitively apprehended poem. The reflection had not passed from her mind when she laid her hand on her waist, in agony. She was uncertain whether the bearded man who was standing, awkwardly alone, against the wall at the very end of the lounge, almost at the entrance to the restaurant, was or was not Monsieur Campofiore. She did not know if the idea that it might be Monsieur Campofiore had occurred to her because she had just been thinking of him, or if she had thought of him because she had already recognized him.
“Isabelle,” said Marc, to tell her that one of their guests had come; and her attention was free, for she had seen that it was not Monsieur Campofiore. It was an older man, much less provincial in appearance. She turned and greeted Alan Fielding with a happy, abstracted smile, and found that his answering smile was not less dazzling than her own, but was not at all abstracted. It would have been fatuous for her to ignore that he was smiling because he was about to spend an evening with her, and it had already begun. She felt the complacency which every woman feels when, perfectly contented with the path she is following through the universe, she finds that a new acquaintance is anxious to indicate an alternative route, on which he is anxious to accompany her. “Does he not notice that I am going to have a child?” she asked herself; but plainly he was so determined to be content in his meeting with her that he would either refuse to notice it or pretend that it was a circumstance of no particular importance. “Yes, you are right, Madame Sallafranque is expecting a baby,” she could hear him saying, in the same tender, admiring tone in which he would have said, “Yes, she was wearing emeralds last night at dinner, and carrying a small gold tissue bag.” Isabelle recognized that she had made one of those instantaneous killings which are, alas, most often involuntary. Of course it was all of no consequence, but it gave her an agreeable assurance that she had preserved her elegance in the most inelegant situation to which the body can be subjected. There were, after all, many advantages in the life of luxury. She was aware, as Poots and Bridget and Philippe and Luba and Mr. Pillans gathered around her, that they were not only her guests but excellent raw material for a masque representing the more horrible and tragic elements in human nature; but their carefully cleansed skins glowed, their seemly bodies were straight inside good clothes and silks, they extended to her hands that were delicate beyond any possible intention of nature. It all made for a certain degree of ceremonious pleasantness which usually engendered good humour. Already the need to respond to it civilly had driven the prophetic sullenness from Marc’s face, and he was behaving like any other good host in the world of appearances, the safe world that in spite of all its incidents persisted and survived. Everything would go well tonight, particularly when they had eaten the good dinner Marc and she had ordered. She threw back her head and laughed, prolonged her laughter when she perceived that Alan Fielding was watching her with delight.
“Isabelle,” said Marc again; and she found that Poots was presenting their unwelcome guests to them. But they were nothing to be afraid of, an old man like a grey tortoise, and a cliff of a woman such as short, rich men are apt to marry. Indeed, as soon as the introductions had all been made, she heard Marc saying, “Not at all, we are charmed that you and Madame could dine with us tonight,” while she herself said, “Oh, but we were delighted that you and your husband could honour us at such short notice.” They found themselves actually inclining protectively, like adults in charge of a children’s party who have found two little ones too shy to play, towards these beings whom they had loathed and dreaded.
But the face of Monsieur d’Alperoussa suddenly clouded again. “Pardon me, Monsieur Sallafranque,” he said, “and you, Madame. But …” Keeping his eyes on Marc’s shirt front he shifted his position so that he faced only the wall of the lounge.
“What is happening?” asked Marc apprehensively, for Monsieur d’Alperoussa had the air of one of those old men who suffer from the more audible type of digestive malady.
“It is only Michelaides,” muttered the other. “He wants me to recognize him, and I will not. The man is not honest, and I will have nothing to do with him, and he knows it. So always when there is a public occasion like this, he hangs about. But I have my principles. I will not let my hand be forced. No, no.”
“It is very tiresome when such things happen,” said Marc.
“Are you neither of you having cocktails?” asked Isabelle.
“No, thank you, we do not drink cocktails!” exclaimed the d’Alperoussas in unison and very quickly, as if combining to rebut some proposal as monstrous as that they should sniff cocaine.
“Shall we go in to dinner, then?” said Marc.
“A minute, a minute,” said Benny urgently. “Let us give Michelaides time to lose hope and go away. You do not know how important this is for me.” He shook his head gravely, and maintained the strict chastity of his glance by staring under contracted brows at the wall.
To break what was beginning to resemble the two minutes’ silence in solemnity and duration Isabelle murmured to Madame d’Alperoussa, “That is the great drawback about staying at hotels; one is exposed to these disagreeable encounters that offend one’s business principles.”
Madame d’Alperoussa’s magnificent eyes rolled under her arched eyebrows. “And if those were the only disagreeable encounters to which one was exposed!” she said darkly.
Isabelle gazed at her in question. It was impossible to imagine what she could mean, save that in a hotel one was more liable to meet one’s former lovers than anywhere else. This was indeed the case, and on this woman it might draw down certain humiliations, even certain perils. She might recognize in some bartender a companion with whom in her early days she had wrestled in some Balkan brothel; and, far worse, one of the rogues who hang about any resort of the wealthy might recognize her as a companion not in a vice but in a crime. That this woman should choose to confide to a stranger the nature of the disgrace overshadowing her life could only be because there had been vouchsafed to them one of those strange Pentecostal moments when mouths use the unknown tongue of confession to acknowledge their true experience of reality. “Yes?” Isabelle said tenderly.
“These women,” said Madame d’Alperoussa. “These cocottes. Everywhere.” She shuddered.
“Ah, yes, yes! Everywhere,” cried Isabelle. “Even,” she added to herself, for she was well aware that her past life did not satisfy the immensely exigent standards implied in the shudder, “inside your dress and mine.” She looked round sharply to see what Poots was doing, hoping that she was leaving Mr. Pillans alone, now that she had had her own way over Benny d’Alperoussa, but though she was relieved to see that Mr. Pillans was talking to Luba, she was puzzled because Poots was talking to a young man who bowed to her, and whom she thought she remembered having seen before, but who was staring about him at her other guests with a curious, professional, ungentlemanly air. He might have been the man from the wigmaker who comes to make up the players before an amateur dramatic performance.
“Who is that young man?” she murmured to Marc.
“It is the friend who took Poots to play poker this afternoon,” he answered quietly. “The English earl who writes gossip notes for a Sunday paper.”
As they watched the young man, they saw him turn to Poots with a question and heard her answer, “The Benny d’Alperoussas, of course.”
Isabelle felt for Marc’s hand and pressed it. “Do you think we can get them in to dinner now?”
“I will try.”
On the way to the restaurant Isabelle overheard the man whom she had thought to be Monsieur Campofiore speaking savagely to a waiter. He was beside himself with anger, it appeared, because he had mistaken either the time or the place of a rendezvous with some friends. She trembled to think of the intensity of the rage that burned in Monsieur Campofiore, which was so absolute that any exhibition of lost temper seen even from a long way off evoked his presence. There was too much hatred in the world; it was manifestly as dangerous as gunpowder, yet people let it lie about, in the way of ignition. At the table next to theirs there sat a party which she judged from the long, yellowish, and petulantly fastidious faces of the men, and the dull hair and rusty clothes of all the women save one, who was voluntarily blonde and sleekly clad, to be a decayed aristocratic family bidden to Le Touquet by an American heiress who had recently married one of their titles. They looked at Marc and his party with an impertinent and officious hostility which, had he been in certain moods she knew, would have provoked him to some outburst of fury, to the overturning of chairs, to a blow on the face and a challenge. As it was, he averted his darkened face, moving with the slowness and resignation of a punished dog, and set himself to cope with the torpid failure of his dinner party. For that it was a failure for everybody except Alan Fielding was evident before the middle of the meal; and what he was enjoying was so plainly a fiction private to himself that his enjoyment was almost a condemnation of the reality. Out of Isabelle’s disciplined smiles and pack-drill remarks he was creating such a masterpiece of gaiety and wit and intelligence that, when she turned from him to talk to Monsieur d’Alperoussa, he could not get on with the business of eating and drinking, but had from time to time to lay down his knife and fork and push away his glass so that he could smile at the empty air in front of him. He made no effort to talk to Bridget, who was on his other side; and she spent most of her time communicating by raised eyebrows and shrugged shoulders with Poots, whose dissatisfaction with the party was manifest.
