The Thinking Reed (3 page)

She had treated her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished. A week after she had landed in Europe, she went to a ball in one of those houses which are in the heart of Paris yet have an ivied cryptic woodland looking in at all the windows that do not give on the streets. She had thought as she went through the shabby-gorgeous rooms, among the plain and unperturbed people, “This is utterly unlike America.” America then seemed to her a lying continent that by a gloss of comfort and luxury disguised itself from what it was, a desert stretching fifteen hundred miles to the field where Roy lay among the ashes of his plane, and fifteen hundred useless miles beyond. “This was the place where my forebears lived; it is more truly my country than America. Perhaps it will be kinder to me.” It was then that for the first time she caught sight of André de Verviers. He would have been easy to see in any case. His square but not broad shoulders, his long waist and narrow hips, gave him the tense, shaped appearance of a figure on a mediaeval church carving, and his head, though decently and masculinely moderate in its beauty, was so definitely cut that it at once impressed the mind as deeply as if long years had made it familiar. But he was specially easy for her to see because he had already turned on her a look of brilliant and candid interest. It had the same meaning as the first look Roy had ever given her. It said, “You are beautiful. Your beauty is so far over the boundary line of argument that I am sure I do not need any more time for deliberation before I commit myself to that opinion. So here and now I claim that you and I are the same sort of person, and that we could be happy companions.” A storm of grief ran through her because for nearly a year now Roy had been unable to prove that claim. She preferred him to everyone else, alive or dead. Then she swung about, feeling dogged about this unknown man, bobbing her head up and down under the tide of an adjacent bore’s conversation, saying, “Yes, yes,” “Yes, yes,” waiting till she should find him at her elbow with an introducing friend.

It had seemed certain that their meeting was fortunate. Isabelle had felt no misgiving that day when they were riding in the forest, under the fine black bones of the winter trees, and there suddenly fell from the dark purple sky raindrops like spinning pennies. She and André both transferred to the rainstorm the excitement they felt about the storm of feeling that was gathering within them, and while she exclaimed in fear, he cried out that they must hurry, they must gallop, to come in time to a hunting-box he knew near by. The trees grew thinner before them; they found themselves crossing a tongue of open country, which now looked livid and fantastic because it was suffused by a peculiar grey-green light like the colour of water in a chalk-pit. The dull emerald of the winter grass had become sharp and acid, the few houses looked like painted paper; and on the white road a black string of orphans, and the two bunchy nuns at their tail, seemed stricken with madness as they bent and gesticulated under the invisible missiles of the rain. “Oh, it all looks so strange,” she gasped. “It looks as if the end of the world was happening. I want to see this,” and she tried to stop her horse. But André was beside her, his hand on her reins. “Hurry, hurry!” he cried. “We must make haste!” They were over the road, they were thundering up a hill, they passed through iron gates and were in a wide avenue in the forest, the smell of a wood fire came to their nostrils. They were in front of an old grey house, soft with the stone embroideries of the Renaissance, which were softer here with moss and fern, flanked on each side by new stables and cottages. When they jumped down from their horses, they were both pale and were breathing deeply, as if they had escaped some real danger.

An old groom came out of one of the cottages, and André hailed him by his name, but Isabelle turned aside abruptly, because she could not bear to feel anybody’s eyes on hers. In the centre of the courtyard was the statue of a lion, and though the rain was still falling, she went to stand in front of it. A few dead leaves were rustling in the trap of its open jaws. Presently she heard André’s step on the gravel and felt his hand on her arm. He told her that he had telephoned for his car and his groom and that, though the lodge was closed and fireless, they could take shelter in the groom’s cottage while they were waiting. She murmured acquiescently, and then he said, in a lower tone, and with some stumbling, “There is a woman watching us from behind the curtains in one of those upper windows. You cannot think how shy that makes me feel. I am young and awkward again, as if I were a boy. But I must say what that woman guesses I am saying, even though the thought of her guessing makes me want to die of confusion. I love you, I love you, I love you.” She went on smiling at the dry leaves that turned about in the vault of the beast’s jaws. A little rivulet ran down from the brim of her hat to her shoulder. After a silence he told her, “But you must say you love me. Say it, say it. You do not understand how naked and unarmed I shall feel until I hear you say it.” She tried to say it, but no sound came. Then she forced her voice, and only achieved a cracked whisper that she stopped out of shame. He laughed, saying, “My little one, my dear one, you need not tell me any more, now I know that you are feeling helpless and childish as I am.”

Yet their meeting had not been fortunate. Worse than that, it had confused Isabelle’s ideas of what might be reckoned as good fortune. She had been stunned at finding that a passionate love affair was not, as her marriage had led her to believe, a prescription for general happiness. It was an indisputable fact that both André and herself found a great joy in each other’s company, that as soon as the one came into the room the other felt an electric invigoration of the whole body, a saturation of every movement of the mind by pleasure. It was an indisputable fact that when André took her in his arms, there began for both of them a period of intense delight which softened and broadened down into contentment. To her the logical consequence of these facts was a pervasive mutual kindness, which would give them an armour against the world, so that they could go about calmly, laying out their lives to the best advantage. Hurry and panic, it seemed to her, should have been eliminated from their experience as soon as they recognized the nature of their feelings. And for about a week after they had been like children dazed by sudden passage to fairyland, he had been simple and kind, they had lunched at little places in the country, they had lunched at big places in town and felt invisible, they had met at night at parties where everybody else was invisible. Then life had unfolded in exquisite order, though following no plan. But suddenly he became no longer at all simple, and often not kind, and their life was full of plans but empty of order.

First Isabelle began to notice that whatever they arranged André wished to alter so soon as she had fallen in with it. If she told him that one day soon she must go and spend a day with Blanche Yates at her château in the valley of the Chevreuse, and it was agreed that Thursday was the day they best could spare, the memory of the agreement went from him before their next meeting. By that time Thursday had come to mean to him the one possible day for taking her to see his cousin Berthe, who had such a charming house near Meaux. To begin with, she dealt with such situations by reminding him of their agreement, and then, when he denied it on one ground or another, by trying to find out what these powerful reasons were which made it imperative they should go to Meaux on that particular day and made him ready to put her to the vexation of writing apologetic letters. There were always none; but at that she only fell silent. If he had this queer streak of eccentricity in him, to suffer it was a small price to pay for the exorcism he had performed over her loneliness and despair. She wrote to Blanche, she went to Meaux. But that did not give them peace. She had said to herself, when she had first made these concessions, “I shall hate it if I see that because I am giving in to him he feels triumphant,” but she hated it still worse when she saw that what he was feeling was disappointment. After a time she had to admit that he had made his unreasonable demands only in the hope that she would resist them, and that hope made him screw up his demands to a higher and higher pitch of unreason, with the horrid furtive avidity of a drug addict who manoeuvres towards the gratification that he dare not name. She had told herself again, but a little wearily, that this was not too great a price to pay. But she was relieved when, very soon, the amount of change and whim he was imposing on their common affairs became so great that it began to make his own life quite uncomfortable. In shifting backwards and forwards the date of a visit to a village on the Seine, which was said to be very beautiful in the springtime, he forgot an engagement to dine with a Bourbon duke, which greatly upset him. At once he abandoned that form of sport with her.

But still that did not mean peace. For it was then that André began not to feel but to make use of jealousy. One afternoon, when she went to visit him, he greeted her with bitter reproaches about certain men whom she liked and who liked her. Smiling, she offered him her promise never to see any of them alone again. She had every sympathy with the jealous. To lose her lover to another woman would, she knew, cover her with shame. If in a contest where she had wanted to be first she came in second, she knew that her flayed pride would turn round and round trying to argue away the fact of her defeat, and that her mind would flay it again by coldly asserting the flaws in all such arguments. Of course she would not expose André to the fear of such a hurt. Nor was the sacrifice entailed anything but trivial, since none of these men gave her anything like the happiness she received from André. The cry of exultation with which André heard her promise and caught her in his arms shocked her by its excessiveness. She felt an uneasy suspicion that she had been given a part to act in a play which had seemed innocent only because she had seen just her own lines and cues, but which offended all her sense of values once she heard the other actor’s words. That suspicion vexed her again when during the next week or so he made some sudden raids on her hotel sitting room. She saw that when he always found her alone or in the company of women, he was pleased, and even touched, to a degree that struck her as false in taste. An expression of almost maudlin pity used to pass over his face, as if he were a gambler who, in passing through the heated rooms of a gaming house, had found the strayed child of some officer of the place quietly playing marbles in a corner. She wished he would take it more simply, as her performance of a sensible and not very difficult promise. But she liked even that expression better than the one she saw on his face when he rose to go. He looked wistfully round the room as if to visualize a delight he had hoped it might have offered him, and she knew that he would have liked to find her with a lover, so that he could make a scene. Or, rather, his desire took a form less brutal and perverse, more purely silly. What he really wanted was to find her with a friend whom he could have pretended to believe her lover, so that he could make a scene.

Nevertheless she had kept to her cloistral ways, though she was conscious that there had crept into her attitude more of the ramrod stiffness of a sentinel rather than the shy recession of a votary of love taking the veil. She would not let this brawl enter her gates, and that was all. But she was to lose her resolute calm, and the force that sustained it, during the time he led her to think he was deceiving her with Princess Natalie Avitzkin. He said he had not done this, that it was she who had misread inevitable movements, which meant no more than that he was doing his social duty, and built fantastic dreams on them; but she knew he spoke falsely. It could not be by accident that he had so perfectly forged the appearance of surfeited ardour hankering after change. Perhaps they might speak of Natalie and how she had looked at the Opera, her fairness giving out rays as she sat in front of the blackness of a box, though Isabelle would not say that it had struck her that he had bowed a little too long and too low before that box. A little later he would talk of the paramount beauty of golden hair, and then would break off in embarrassment, and lay a kind hand on her dark hair, as if he were caressing a child about whose future he knew a sad story. At meals he would become absent-minded and stare into the distance, and then come to himself with a start and be uneasily cheerful and affectionate. He became hesitant and distracted about appointments, and at last presented himself with a melancholy air of bearing up nobly under his own penitence. That evening she dismissed him quickly and coldly, contriving that they should be interrupted, and telephoned to the American Express Company to reserve a compartment for herself and her maid Adrienne on the train for Berlin the next night. She had read that her old Professor of Archaeology was staying there till he went on an expedition to Siberia, and she knew that he would probably be glad of her as a bottle-washer and a financial aid.

When André rang up the next morning, Isabelle would not speak to him; and she heard a sound as if her coldness had been so pleasing that the air had been forced out of his lungs in a spasm of delight. She turned away from the telephone, foolish with misery. It appeared to her proven that he had divined her plan of departure and was so eager to be rid of her that he rejoiced. To be able to answer any of the other people who rang her up that day, she had to affect an air of maenad joy, as if it were with an impulse to hysterical laughter that she was struggling. “Yes, I am going to Berlin, and then to Russia!” she cried, as if she were going there to be whirled up in the vortex of some orgy so riotous that already it was pulling her off her balance. She never knew who among them told him; but an hour before she had to leave the hotel for the station there was a knock on the door. Her maid opened and then turned round to her, silently asking what she was to do. André leaned against the doorpost, so white that she forgot the trouble that was between them, and asked herself what frightful physical cause, what sudden malady or overdose of drug, could have changed him to this. But in a croaking cry he asked, “You are going to Russia?” and she remembered everything, and stiffened. “Of course,” she said. Adrienne went. He flung himself forward on Isabelle; they collapsed together in trembling entanglement on the top of a shoe box. “But—but—” he stammered, and had to begin again in French, for he had forgotten all his English, though normally he spoke it almost as fluently as his own tongue. “You were really going to Russia?” She whispered, “Yes.” He took possession of her again in a long kiss, which was honest, which gave himself to her, so that she was not ashamed of her return. From this embrace he broke away to gloat on the look of her and cry out, “You were going to Russia! You were going to leave me, just because I made you jealous!” He was trembling and running with sweat, he looked like a man who has escaped by a hairbreadth from a great danger, who has stepped aside just as the propeller begins to whirl and has felt its breath on his brow, who has arrived so late that the gates of the elevator are clanged in his face and he sees it drop like a stone down the shaft. “You were going to do that to me! But I tell you we belong to each other!”