The Thinking Reed (31 page)

It was impossible to see what satisfaction the scene offered to either the higher or the lower nature of man, yet the room was crowded, simply because there was here the exploitation by powerful and professional minds of that resort to number by people pledged to break down life to nothingness, which she had first noticed among Marc’s friends on the Riviera. These master intelligences had banished beauty from the Casino because the lust of the eye may lead either to love or to thought, to coherent processes, ultimately to civilization, to the preservation of life. Within these walls those who hated life should be able to take refuge from it in number, pure number, its intricate and insignificant whims. They could bend heavy brows over the game which, with its circulation of the shoe, the drawing of the cards, the sharp, spasmodic cries of the players, the rattling pounce and withdrawal of the croupier’s rake, the sudden dropping of the cards through the trap in the table, and the solemnity of all the spectators, had the air of an elaborate ritual of divination. So indeed it was, for all gambling is the telling of a fortune, but of a monstrously depleted fortune, empty of everything save one numerical circumstance, shorn of all such richness as a voyage across the water, a fair man that loves you, a dark woman that means you harm. So the present was wiped out and the future robbed of its content, moment by moment; and since there were no clocks in the room, these nihilists could enjoy the delusion that this harshly lit night of complete and stately waste would continue for ever, as if they were safe and underground, where there is no time. Isabelle began to laugh because, though she was talking to Alan Fielding, she was also listening to Lady Barnaclouth and Madame d’Alperoussa, and the budding friendship between the two ladies had just been threatened by a profound misunderstanding. A young woman passed by who seemed to be exhausted by the weight of her diamonds, and Lady Barnaclouth had asked who she might be. Madame d’Alperoussa had replied that it was the celebrated Noémie Aveline, whose name she found herself able to pronounce much more easily now than during dinner when she imagined herself to be addressing a French bourgeois family, and further, having been brought up in the Continental belief that the unsensuous appearance of English ladies was a cloak to cover every kind of natural and unnatural vice, and having heard stories that Lady Barnaclouth had had several children by a chauffeur and was given to Lesbian practices, she permitted herself knowing and facetious references to Mademoiselle Aveline’s means of livelihood and distractions. These stories of Lady Barnaclouth’s vices were, however, grotesquely false. She had in all her life never stopped talking long enough to give anyone time to approach her with any proposition regarding sexual irregularity; and the general tendency to be censorious of the vices to which one has not been tempted was present in her in a specially rank form. As her conceit was far too great to be restrained by her self-interest, she scolded Madame d’Alperoussa for mentioning such a person and such distractions in her presence, very much as if she would have scolded an impertinent housemaid. To listen to the tirade was not amusing for more than a moment, for it showed a real lack of consideration for the feelings of the person to whom it was addressed; but it was impossible to be sorry for Madame d’Alperoussa, for as she sat watching her castigator with her eyes rolling slowly round and round and her hands plucking at her diamond bracelets, she recalled a hurt cobra rather than a hurt child. In search of some more pleasant sight Isabelle looked away, and saw Poots take up her stand beside Mr. Pillans, catch his attention with a remark, open her handbag, affect astonishment at its emptiness, and accept with reluctance the thousand-franc notes he pressed upon her. Isabelle could not complain of her ill-luck in witnessing this scene, for she knew that these were fair samples of the type of human transaction to be observed in a Casino.

“How quickly you change,” said Alan Fielding. “Now you look as if you were going to cry, and a minute ago you looked as if you were going to burst out laughing.”

“It was because those women are so stupid,” she said.

“I do not expect they are any more stupid than you are,” he said.

It would have seemed too rude not to ask, “Why do you say that?”

“Because you look anxious and alarmed, and you must be very stupid not to recognize that you are too triumphant a person to need fear anything in the world.”

It was not of the slightest importance what he meant, and she was feeling very ill. “I wonder what Marc is doing?” she said. “Let us go and look for him.”

“Will he be playing?” he asked.

“No.”

They crossed the room slowly towards the tables where the stakes were highest. At one they saw Ferdy Monck and Bridget and Poots sitting in a row bending heavy brows over the game, grave as Buddhas in the earth-touching position, with Mr. Pillans at their side, adoring them as if he were a child and they were glorious grown-ups. At the next table, where the stakes were highest of all, Monsieur d’Alperoussa had fallen in with a few friends, grey and close-clipped and bodily ignoble like himself, who although they were all bound to be rich and were manifestly gross, had a curiously negative air of enjoyment, as if no indulgence they could buy compared with the luxury of no longer being wanted by the police. They looked extremely insipid compared with the relatively innocent people who were gambling beside them, the English duke who, doubtless enacting some symbolic drama of self-repudiation, hunted the wild boar all over France, and smelt even here of fresh air, and the party of soaped and flushed Americans. Yet Monsieur d’Alperoussa and his friends looked more potent, and had the air of principals. It seemed fitting that the table should be hedged off by rails to prevent the crowd from pressing in to watch them; and it seemed fitting too that leaning on these rails should be Philippe and Luba, standing with bowed shoulders side by side, but not speaking, as if they knew both alike were supers and could be of no help to each other. Everything that happened in this room arranged itself according to a consistent and sordid scale of values, which could not be dismissed as merely objectionable, since it could not have been able to impose itself so successfully unless it appealed to something fundamental in human nature. The place had its power.

“But I was sure that Marc would be with Luba!” exclaimed Isabelle.

“So that is what is worrying you,” said Alan. “I told you you were stupid.” She met the adoring impertinence in his eyes with the despair a mother feels when she comes in after some hours’ absence and finds her little boy still playing with his tin trumpet. But he continued, “If by some miracle of bad taste your husband were to prefer the loosely picturesque to the austerely beautiful, it couldn’t last twenty-four hours.”

“What’s that?” asked Isabelle. “What’s that?”

“The first-rate spoils the palate for the second-rate,” said Alan, and jerked his head at Luba.

“But no!” exclaimed Isabelle, and she would have explained to him that what he was imagining did not happen between well-bred women of today, had her eyes not been caught by a movement she recognized, in the distance behind his shoulder. Marc was standing just inside the bar with a glass in his hand, talking to Gustave and Sarah Bourges. It was impossible that he should drink one drop more alcohol without becoming noticeably drunk, and the mean amusement expressed in the poses of Gustave and Sarah showed that this had happened. She took a step forward. But she could see that she was running near a classic risk of making herself ridiculous, and indeed she was possibly alarming herself without reason. For Marc was huddled into a shape which told of complete surrender to self-dramatization, which recalled the favourite pose, never convincing to women, of Napoleon; and that must mean that the kind of drunkenness into which he had fallen was pompous and opinionative. He was less likely to misbehave than to inform people who did not want to listen that the next time Germany invaded France it would be victorious because of the moral decay of the French.

“Let us go back and see how Madame d’Alperoussa and Lady Barnaclouth are getting on,” she said, blinking back her tears.

“Anything you say,” said Alan Fielding. “I wish I could help.”

The two ladies were not getting on very well. Lady Barnaclouth had continued her tirade against immorality, simply because no other subject had come up into her mind and she was under a necessity to keep on talking; but to Madame d’Alperoussa it appeared that she was not only being rebuked, and that as an inferior, but at inordinate length. Plainly she would have liked to start one of the grand, satisfying rows she used to enjoy in the old days, usually conducted with a colleague on a staircase, and attaining a climax when all the doors on the landings above and below were thrown open and her other colleagues rushed out in pink chemises ready to take sides. Finally her jaws opened and shut in silence several times, while all the stories she had heard about Lady Barnaclouth seethed in her mind; and suddenly the words spurted between her teeth, “At least no one has ever said that she has had children by her chauffeur.” “What’s that?” asked Lady Barnaclouth. Her large body trembling violently, Madame d’Alperoussa repeated the words. Lady Barnaclouth, in honest perplexity, demanded, “What, are times so degraded that a woman’s reckoned decent till she’s done that?” To this Madame d’Alperoussa could find no reply, for she interpreted it as magnificent bravado, of a sort that she would not herself have been able to command, had she been taunted with her early Balkan days. She sat with bowed head, meekly acknowledging herself to be an inferior; and in order to fall in with Lady Barnaclouth’s mood, she began to speak in a peculiar muted voice, resembling the tone of a cornet player who is aware that he is performing sacred music, describing the work of her Committee for the Assistance of Unmarried Mothers.

Again she suffered a reverse, for Lady Barnaclouth bluffly announced that she saw no sense in helping such disgustingly weak-minded creatures. “What I always ask,” she said, “is why they didn’t think of all that at the time?” But that reverse was soon over, for before Lady Barnaclouth had finished this inquiry, her voice had become inspissated with speculation. Did Madame d’Alperoussa not think that the best thing for such women was to be wholly cut off from all their former surroundings? Because her sister owned a house with fifty bedrooms, built in the nineteenth-century Gothic style on the banks of the Thames, which would be the very thing for such women, “and,” she added with belated and insincere benevolence, “their babies.” Madame d’Alperoussa paused before she said tentatively, “I would have to see the place,” and Lady Barnaclouth hardly paused at all before she said desperately, “Come and stay with me for a week and we can go over and have a look at it.” The two ladies exchanged a glance solid with the sense of possible barter of favours. It appeared extremely probable that because of this meeting between a Balkan criminal and an English clown a large number of young women, already bitterly disappointed with the results of unlicensed revelry at Lille and Nantes and Rouen, would know a new and lower level of despair in staring out through misted windows at Thames floods. These women, unreal in everything, had through their position the faculty of creating real pain.

“Let us go back and see what Monsieur d’Alperoussa is doing,” said Isabelle.

“Yes, but steady on, steady on,” said Alan Fielding.

“Why do you say that?” she asked angrily.

“Your eyes are blazing,” he answered.

“It must be something to do with my …” Her voice died as she remembered that she must not speak to him of her pregnancy, that he was a man, although he meant so little to her that he might as well have been a woman. “Let us go back to Monsieur d’Alperoussa’s table. Look how the people are gathering round, somebody must be winning a lot.”

Monsieur d’Alperoussa had, indeed, won about four hundred and fifty thousand francs. The croupier was shovelling piles of chips over to him, and he was gathering them to him with the grey, limited geniality of a gratified tortoise. His wrist became rigid in mid-air, it wavered, it flicked some chips back to the croupier with a fluency that was neither casual nor enthusiastic; the gesture revealed that he was without the instinct for generosity, that it had been as difficult for him to learn to give as it is for a bear to walk the tight-rope. The game went on, the shoe began to circulate. Alan made comments on the play, which she was careful not to answer, lest he should find out she knew nothing about the game, and should begin to explain to her whether they were playing baccara or chemin de fer, and what the differences between the two were, which were complicated items of knowledge she passionately did not want to acquire. People about them began to breathe as if there were fireworks, the shoe at last came to a stop, it appeared that Monsieur d’Alperoussa had done it again. This time he seemed to be irked by his own inexpressiveness. As he stroked the chips towards him, he turned his head from side to side, smiling towards the excited crowd, while drooping his lids so that he could not see it, and it could be guessed from a strained and creaking quality about his smile that he would have liked to gain the crowd’s favour as well as its interest, that he would have liked to find the word or gesture to establish himself in the popular mind as a “character.” The game began again, and the shoe travelled round to him; and it was apparent that inspiration had visited him.

His face softened and even exalted by satisfaction at what he was doing, he turned and held out some chips to a woman who was leaning on the rail immediately behind him, crying in a howling, grinning, wolf-like exaggeration of his usual barbaric accent, “Twenty thousand francs for you, Madame, if you’ll stop breathing on my neck and go away.” There was a moment’s silence. The woman straightened herself. She was middle-aged and vulgar in physique, with a freckled skin, prominent eyes, and heavy hips, but there were many signs in her appearance that she was aware of the necessities of elegance, though she had not the means to procure them. She could safely be put down as one of those unhappy women who by some only temporarily fortunate circumstance, such as the possession of a beautiful complexion in youth, or the awakening of an unreasonable passion in some rich man, are committed to a mode of existence for which they have inadequate physical capital, and spend all their years in a desperate struggle to live beyond their looks. At first she smiled foolishly, then she looked at the chips with a growing earnestness. Monsieur d’Alperoussa did not give them to her, he held them some distance away, so that she would have to make a positive and grasping movement to get them. Continuing to watch them, she ran her tongue over her lips. Suddenly she put her hand out to take them. Monsieur d’Alperoussa, made vivacious by the titters of the crowd, affected to withdraw them just as her fingers closed on them, but at that she became pale and her eyes closed, and he gaped at her in fear that she was about to fall forward in a faint. Then she recovered herself, took the chips, and walked away, looking very vulgar, smiling foolishly again, and flushed like a cook who has been bending over her range. She stopped at the desk as if she were going to change her chips into francs, but then drew her shoulder blades together sharply and went out. Monsieur d’Alperoussa, relaxed and warmed, continued the game.