The Thinking Reed (38 page)

Isabelle asked herself, “Why should I mind this? I am not a brawling virago. This woman is almost certainly inferior to me. She is more in love with André de Verviers than I ever was, and her clothes are stupid. Why should I care if she thinks me a brawling virago?” But she was obliged to answer herself, “You care because on the facts she is right. You struck a woman in the baccara room at Le Touquet and screamed accusations at her and your husband. That was an ugly thing to do. If she has not done that, or anything as ugly as that, she has a perfect right to despise you. Most of the hundreds, or it might be thousands, of people who saw or heard of what you did are well within their rights in despising you. The only person who was not within his rights was your husband, who, out of pure idiocy, forced you to make that scene.” Pride failed in her like a physical nerve; it was as if humiliation were a kind of stroke. The farewell words she spoke to André were muddled, the movement with which she pushed open the swing door was clumsy.

Marc halted and stared up at her from his umbrella. “But, my God!” he muttered.

“It is only that I am tired,” she said. “I am so tired that I feel faint. After all I should not have come out so soon.”

“Come, come, my love,” he said, and hurried her to the car. When it had started, he put his arms round her, and she did not try to evade them. She had need for shelter, and if she had so arranged her life that the only arms which offered it to her were those which had brought on the calamity from which she required to be shielded, there was no help for it. In resignation she stared into the darkness of his sleeve, and presently felt she might be in a worse place. Marc was very kind. She must not let herself think of what had happened at Le Touquet. It could be done. She had hardly ever let it cross her mind since she had returned to Paris. But she kept on saying again and again, “I am so tired. I am so tired. I want to go to bed. I want to sleep.” And Marc answered, “Yes, yes, you need a great deal more rest. I shall go on sleeping in the dressing room so as not to disturb you.”

One evening about a week later she said to Marc, looking up at him from her chaise-longue, “I am sick of cook’s cooking, aren’t you?”

“It is indeed a little Comédie Française when there are just two of us,” agreed Marc.

“Then let us go out for dinner,” said Isabelle.

“Nothing would please me more,” said Marc. “Is there any particular place you are thinking of?”

“Laurent’s,” said Isabelle. “It is a place I regard with some affection, since something of importance happened to me there, though at this moment I cannot remember exactly what it was.”

“You are the most charming woman in the world,” said Marc, “and I will hope to find some way of assisting your memory.”

At Laurent’s they dined in the open under an orange awning, beside the trellis wall which hid the sooted tree-trunks and the parched public gardens where they grew, and showed only the eternally, undiscourageably sylvan treetops. The distant traffic sounded as rhythmic and as soothing as the waters that fell back into some little pond near by. They ate beef in jelly, flavoured strongly with some country herb, and drank a Rhone wine that tasted of blackberries. Dusk fell, and a green light flowed out of the trees and suffused the air and became darkness. Marc lit a cigar and began one of those conversations with the wine-waiter which Frenchmen enjoy as Englishmen enjoy talking about cricket. Nothing is learned thereby. Both parties know before they begin that 1914 and 1917 were good for red bordeaux and nothing remarkable for white, but 1920 was good for both, and that the last time Harrow beat Eton was in 1908. It is a refined and allusive way of satisfying the same need that is met by chewing gum, and it does no harm. Isabelle rested her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands, affecting to listen, but actually smiling into her fingers at the thought that here, on this spot, she had believed her heart was broken because Laurence Vernon did not wish to marry her.

“I wonder,” said Marc, when he had dismissed the wine-waiter, “how your friend Laurence Vernon is getting on?”

Her fingers crisped on the tablecloth, and she answered with an indifferent laugh, remembering his misconception of her relations with Laurence, “I wonder.”

“You never hear from him?” he asked.

“No, never,” she answered. “But then, I wouldn’t.”

“No, and in any case he would write terrible letters, full of news, full of information about the health of aunts, the condition of the canaries. Yes, I am not a vain man, but I must own I am not surprised that I got you for myself under his nose.”

She made an affectionate murmur.

“Though I have to remember that you have an odd liking for men who have no marked characteristics,” he went on. “Wasn’t Alan Fielding to tea with you again yesterday?”

“He was,” she said, “but do you mind? If you did, I would never have him to the house again.”

“No, no!” he assured her. “Of course, I do not mind. But it is a little odd that you should care to have him about you so much. It is like finding bottles all over a house, to an extent that would justify you in concluding that the owner was a drunkard, were it not that all the bottles were of mineral water.”

“Superb, superb!” cried Isabelle.

“You mean not so bad,” said Marc. “Yes, I feel like stretching myself and being the possessive male tonight, I could enjoy fighting somebody for your sake. But a man like myself, not like Alan Fielding.”

“It is a shame that I know nothing of your women,” she said. “I could say things about them too.”

“I am such a gentleman,” said Marc. “You will never know them. Also I should find considerable difficulty in telling you about them even if I were not, because you have made them all very vague in my mind.”

She said, “Crack me a green almond.”

He pressed it between his finger and thumb and dropped it open on her plate.

“Oh, I don’t want to eat it,” she said. “I only wanted to see you do it.”

“You will eat it,” he said. “You can’t do that sort of thing with me. And you will drink up that cherry brandy. If you make me order that sort of thing instead of a decent
fine
or Armagnac, you will stand by the consequences.”

She ate and drank, grumbling a little, while Marc went on with his cigar. It would be all right now, she felt, to be his wife again. She would not be afraid of those embraces which had so often reminded her, as she lay submerged in their tossing darkness, of the backgrounds of Delacroix’s vaster pictures, of crimson curtains hanging from huge marble pillars whose capitals were lost in rich opacity, of stacked lances and jewelled and hieratic helmets, of immense fruits and iridescent serpents.

He said, “How does it go?”

“Very well,” she said, sitting back. “I have never felt more contented than I am here. I feel like a cat in its basket. I could stay here all night.”

“Hein,” said Marc.

The dusk became night, and the world became blacker but less vague. The trees, which by day had been soft and inarticulated masses of foliage, were now defined by the starry radiance behind them as far more osseous in proportion than human beings, possessing a whole system of skeleton upon skeleton in trunks and branches and twigs. Fairy-lamps and floodlights put out their beams, and the restaurant building, which had been bland and featureless, projected into the electric glare jutting balconies and porches of an unsuspected architectural positiveness. Everything seen was raised to preternatural visibility by the surrounding frame of the unseen. The chestnut leaves that penetrated between the orange awning and the trellis wall into the sphere of the brightness cast by the lamp on their table, had apparently no support other than themselves, and they were green with the bright pigment, not of chlorophyll, but of wet paint, and looked not like anything calm and vegetable, but like the petitioning tongues of animals. A blackness and a whiteness that had been inclined towards each other at one of the tables deepest in shadow pushed back their chairs, stood up, and became a man and a woman, and stepped into the light, which illuminated the joy on their faces before their prudence had time to expunge it.

“They are lovers all right,” said Marc after the pair had gone past the table.

“And did you see?” said Isabelle. “They were quite old, they were middle-aged.”

“Yes, that was good,” said Marc.

They lifted their glasses and looked at each other gravely while they drank. “We will go now,” he said. “If you wish, that is. Tonight everything happens as you wish it. Tomorrow it will probably be all quite different. But that is how it goes tonight.”

“And if I said I wanted to sit here another hour or two, watching you cracking green almonds which I did not want to eat, and then to motor to Chartres to see it by moonlight?” asked Isabelle.

“I should smack your behind,” he said and clicked his fingers towards the light for the bill. “And some day you must tell me who it was that told the Americans about Chartres. I suppose it was Pierpont Morgan.”

When they were in the automobile, he brought down his mouth on hers, sharply, masterfully, as he had not done since she had come back to Paris, as she had longed for him to do. When he let her go, she sat quite still, steadying her head with her hand, astounded that she could be feeling sick. He brought down his mouth again, lower, on her throat; and she found herself on her knees on the floor of the car. A convulsion had passed through her body that was more violent than any opinion she could have conceived herself holding in regard to Marc, that was like a judgment passed on him by some person inside herself who had no affection for him, who condemned him utterly, who was wiser than she was.

He lifted her tenderly, saying, “What happened then, my dear?”

She stammered, “I hate it when you do that in here. I feel everybody can see us, there is so much glass.”

“No one can see in,” he said; “you are nervous.”

He did not touch her again until he followed her into the little library and found her reading a cable which had awaited her on the Canton enamel dish by the lamp on her desk. Then he put his hands on each side of her waist and asked, “Well, have they fixed the day when the world is coming to an end?”

“Uncle Honoré says that he is quite certain to be coming in September,” said Isabelle.

“I am so glad,” said Marc. “It will do you so much good to have one of your own people with you. Alas, you poor slaves, you women, who have to settle down in the countries of your masters! I would have gone mad if the way of the world had been the other way round and I had had to move myself to the United States when we were married. Now see what is in that telegram, and then we can go to bed.”

She told him, “It is from Blanche Yates. She wants me to go and stay with her in Scotland.”

“Why do you not go,” he said, “while I am tied here in Paris?”

“I do not want to,” she answered shortly.

“My dear, I am not sure that you are well yet,” he said. “It might do you good.”

“If I go away at all,” she said, “I would like to go to Provence, to some quiet place, and swim.” She covered her eyes and saw blue-green purifying waters.

“Sit down and we will smoke a cigarette, so that you can grow calmer,” he said, kindly. He led her to the biggest chair, stacked up the cushions for her, and sat himself down on the arm. “I know the kind of place you want. A farmhouse coloured red, with lots of grasshoppers, and lots of frogs croaking in the cisterns, and lots of garlic in the aubergines. I am so glad you love the simple things in France. I am so glad I did not marry the kind of American woman who likes only the big things of France, Versailles and Chartres, the châteaux on the Loire. Thank God, I married you, who are exquisite in everything but who like the good simple things. Ah, but I forgot to give you a cigarette.”

She said, closing her eyes and trying to smile, “No, I don’t want to smoke.”

“No, that is not what we want,” he said, and bent down and kissed her on the lips: and again that involuntary convulsion ran through her body, utterly rejecting him.

Marc jumped quickly to his feet, and went to sit on the other side of the room. He said, “Do you mind if I have one of those coarse cigarettes I smoke at the works? I know they smell.”

She shook her head.

After he had smoked for some moments, he said at last, “This is not what I had hoped earlier in the evening. I had thought from the way you looked that we were going to be close together again.”

He waited for an answer, but Isabelle found she could only shake her head.

“But, yes,” he persisted gently, “but, yes. You said nothing, you made no gesture, but you looked soft as a flower, and as if you were waiting. By this time I know a little what you look like at certain times. Pardon me for reminding you, but we used to know each other very well.”

The force that had convulsed her body with its rage against him said silently all through her blood, “Before you got drunk and shamed me before the world and killed my child.” But she could say none of these things aloud because they were violent.

He asked mildly, “Then you are not going to let me be your lover tonight?”

She muttered, “I am tired.”

It seemed as if he were listening to some sound outside the room. “What was that you said?” he asked.

“I am tired,” she repeated.

“Ah, forgive me,” he said. “I am not a fool, and I know that excuse is never true. A woman who loves a man does not refuse herself to him when she is tired. It is then, when there can be no pleasure for her body, that she finds a particular pleasure for her soul in submitting.” He watched her face for a long time, as if he longed to see something there which would disprove what she had said; but she now found herself as incapable of moving as she had been of speaking.

He went on, “When a woman says, ‘I am tired,’ she means, ‘I hate you, the whole thing is finished.’ In fact, Isabelle, you find that after all you cannot forgive me.”

Isabelle whispered, “That is so.”

“I suppose it is the child,” he said.

“Yes, my womb hates you,” she said. Tears began to flow down her cheeks, but after a moment’s effort she found that this did not prevent her from going on talking. “Forgive me for saying that, but it is true.”