The Thinking Reed (4 page)

There had followed a whole month of peace, during which they had progressed with their love and had done much towards changing it into permanent kindness. But even then she had been disquieted, and had sometimes raised her fingers between his lips and hers, and shuddered with a lightning flash of enmity as she lay in his arms. For he had cried out, “You were going to leave me, just because I made you jealous!” although she had never told him that he had made her jealous. She felt it as their common misfortune that a sentence which was wrung from him in what was perhaps the sincerest moment of his life should be damnable and unforgettable evidence of his insincerity. She felt the sham hope, the real despair, of a woman whose husband has just come out of a clinic after the last of a series of cures for morphinism, and is doing very well, just as he always has done during the first few weeks after treatment. Not in the slightest degree was she surprised when he began to wriggle through the one loophole she had left him. She had dismissed all her admirers, except Marc Sallafranque. Marc had to stay. He had to stay, for one thing, because to dismiss him would have conceded that André and she were two insane persons gibbering at one another, since it was perfectly obvious that she could not possibly entertain Marc as a husband or a lover. He was too grossly, too comically successful as an industrialist, his very name had passed from him to the article he manufactured. A Sallafranque was no longer a man, but a cheap car. A woman might as well ally herself with Monsieur Eau de Cologne or Monsieur Pâté de Foie Gras. Moreover, though he was not unlovable, he was grotesque. He was tall enough but he looked short, because his body was overweighted with the cylindrical fatness of a robust little boy, and his square jaw went straight down into a bull neck almost the same size round as his head, so that he seemed made all of one thick, rubbery piece. In the midst of this podginess his melting brown eyes, his snub, dilating nostrils, and his wide mouth made a muzzle like a terrier’s, expressing a purely sensuous gaiety and melancholy so candidly that one would no more deal with him by cold reason than if he were a terrier, and one felt at no time that one was dealing with a man. It was a terrier that did funny tricks, too. He was comically violent; when he wanted to go upstairs in a hurry, he would put his feet together and hop up several steps at a time, with great springs of his strong legs, and once, when he had grown impatient in a restaurant, he had rushed on a waiter carrying in a pile of plates and had dealt them like cards on the floor around him. It was impossible to think of him without laughing, but the laughter was always kind, for he was so good, so generous, so guileless, so bravely humble in his subservience. It would have been as absurd and insulting and heartless to count him among the admirers who must be dismissed as if he had been a trusty footman. But not doing so had given André his chance. They happened almost every third day now, these revolting scenes, when he pretended to believe her capable of being unfaithful to him with this grotesque, when his voice pattered out accusations against her on one persistent note till she swayed and had to clap her hands over her ears, when his arms would sweep out in menace, not against her, but against the order of the room, so that a vase would be hurled from the mantelpiece and crash on the hearth, until he drew her to him in a reconciliation which would have been shameful to both of them if he had believed half of what he had been saying, which was an irrelevant climax to an evening of slapstick idiocy if he had not.

And she could not get rid of him. It had earlier been the intention of both of them to be married in June, and that was still his intention. She was grimly conscious of his power to carry it into effect. He would see to it, by such technical devices as he had employed that very evening at Madame Vuillaume’s party, that they should constantly be alone together, and that the generic woman in her who loved the generic man in him should have endless opportunities to betray the individual woman in her who loathed the individual man in him. He might even draw so much public attention to their continuing relationship, that she would find it socially necessary to marry him. What he would make of marriage she would not let her mind run forward to discover fully; if she had been threatened with cancer, she would shrink from precise foreknowledge of her ultimate torture. Marriage with André would not be torture, but it would be tomfoolery. In spite of herself, infuriating visions passed before her. At the very best, he would practise private fidelity to her and public flirtation with innumerable conspicuous women, so that she would be ridiculed by the world as a complaisant wife, and yet would have no reason to complain. Nothing sane could proceed out of their marriage, because it would have to be based on André’s assumptions about love, which had the madhouse trick of cutting up the mind into inconsistent parts. He was himself two people in his attitude to passion. When he was her lover, he was grave and reverent, but too often there was afterwards this solemn clowning about sex, this midwife chatter about the bringing to birth of pleasure. Don Juan, it seemed, was a case of split personality; his other half was Mr. Gamp. And he did what he could to draw her with him into the madhouse, for he tried to split her personality into two. It was suggested to her that her beauty and her capacity for passion were a separate entity, a kind of queen within her, and that it was to this that his loyalty was given, and that the rest of her was a humbler being, who ought to feel grateful that this superior part had caused her to be associated with such a grand gesture of chivalry. She, Isabelle, was supposed to be possessed by
la femme
as by a devil. Such an hypothesis made her feel as if she had been plucked back to the dark ages, to find her way among the cobwebby delusions of alchemists.

But in Laurence Vernon’s mind she would find unity. He would have but one image of her there and that distinct as the figure on a Greek coin. He would have but one clean-cut image of their marriage, as simple as the year in the mind of a farmer. In the spring he would lay the foundation of his plans for public things and she would have her children, in the summer they would admire to see how their work fared in the heat of the day, in the autumn there would be harvest, and since the days grow shorter and they would have so much to talk over, no doubt winter also would not hang on their hands. Men grow weary of many things, but not of the seasons of the year. The thought of how she was being cheated of a profitable simplicity for a complexity that was sheer loss made her have tears to wipe from her face as her automobile stopped at her hotel. It made her mutter miserably as she fell asleep. It had made dawn look colder than its own greyness when she woke, as it looks to those who have been roused by recollection of their bankruptcy. It made her sit up in bed and stare when there came a knock on the door, as if that must mean sudden danger, and pull on her dressing gown and rush to turn the key as if the world were so full of such dangers that precaution was worn out, and there was nothing to do but put down the head and charge them.

There stood in the corridor outside nothing more terrible than two women, their arms full of flowers; but at that their arms were full of importunities, of threats to her peace. For even if some of the flowers they carried were from Laurence, the others must come from undesired intruders. Crossly she told them, “You have knocked at the wrong door, you will find my maid in the salon along to the left,” but they bowed their heads before her sharp tone so meekly that she repented. She was always susceptible to the pathos of the army of plain women in drab gowns who moved about Paris, carrying to their more fortunate sisters their flowers and dresses and hats, serving the central purpose of the place but not partaking of its full glory, like lay sisters in a sternly governed convent. She ran back to the table by her bed, found a few francs for them, and came back, holding out her arms for their flowers.

“Ah!” she sighed, as she took the first sheaf, and knew it was from André, since it was made of the red and white roses which he always sent her, as symbols of something or other. “These I don’t want, not at all. Will you not take them away with you, Madame, to use in your own home?”

The women exchanged glances of embarrassment. It was as if a visitor to the convent should from kindly ignorance propose to a lay sister that she should avail herself of some privilege strictly reserved for the nuns.

“But no, Madame,” one of them murmured hesitantly, “that’s not really possible. Why, Monsieur de Verviers might get to hear of it, and he’s one of our best customers. It would never do to annoy him.”

“Life is difficult,” said Isabelle, and they agreed, pleased as French people always are when they are offered an established truth to rest on, as it were, in the course of their day’s work among unresolved experience; and she said goodbye and shut the door. First she put André’s flowers in the waste-paper basket, and then looked at the card to be quite sure they had come from him. “Darling, last night you were more wonderful than ever,” he had written, and she groaned aloud. It was evident that, early though it was, he had already been out and about for some time, feeling marvellously well. She saw herself successfully pursued by him through life, as one is by the income-tax authorities.

Shuddering, she turned to the other flowers. She knew at once that Sallafranque had sent the immense and aerie sheaf of cattleyas, so fragile that they seemed not like flowers at all but like assemblies of tiny winged creatures which might decide at any moment to swarm in other shapes, or to disperse into a rising cloud. It was odd that this human barrel should choose always the most delicate and exotic flowers as the ambassadors of his so simple feelings. Since his puberty, gardens the size of a department must have lost their blossoms in the service of his desires. His card was sealed in its envelope, and was scrawled with yet another request that she should marry him at once, so honestly and humbly put that tears came to her eyes, and she put it by to slip into a pocket of her dressing-case, where she kept valuable papers. There remained the pale gold roses, which she hoped Laurence had sent her. He had indeed, and on his card he reminded her that she had promised to lunch with him that day at Laurent’s, and begged her not to fail him, since he wanted to discuss what he thought the most important matter in the whole world.

Her heart beat so strongly that, had she not preferred restraint to all things, she would have run about the room, crying aloud, so nearly all was well. Being as she was, she lay down on the bed and kept quite still. She looked at the flowers to quieten herself with their beauty, and her thoughts went to the two plain women in their drab gowns who had so gently borne with her harshness in the corridor. Her conscience smote her that she should have so much and they should have so little. But her feeling of remorse was lessened by the suspicion that the difference in their states was in its practical effects not altogether to their disadvantage. If she had been poor like them, she would have had to eat her heart out in widowhood among her familiar and vigilant surroundings until the proper and valid distraction was offered; she would not have been able to run about the world making experiments in oblivion, and she would not have experimented so rashly. The high degree of security she enjoyed thanks to her money had persuaded her that practically nothing she could do could bring her into serious difficulties.

André, too, she thought, would have been in some ways the better without his wealth. Had he been a poor man, he would not have been free to spend his whole life proving a silly point about his power by leaving women who wanted him to stay with them and staying with women who wanted him to leave them. Really, she reflected, he was not a fool, for he knew that perfectly well. In realizing exactly what he owed to the
status quo
he was cleverer than the more intellectually active Laurence or the more practically effective Marc Sallafranque, who both regarded their lives as purely individual achievements, which they could have made the same in any world. André was well aware that anything that threatened the existing conditions of society threatened him with extinction. He spoke with equally personal dread of the growth of Communism, of the rearming of Germany, of the imprudence of anyone belonging to his own class who, by adoption of an extreme religious or political faith, or by a gratuitous divorce, or by clamant bad manners, became the subject of adverse public comment. The structure must not even be shaken.

At that Isabelle sat up in bed and stared at the opposite wall. That, of course, was the secret of her attraction for André. He had recognized her fundamental temperance, her inaptitude for any kind of violence; he knew that in her company he could play with danger to his heart’s content, that no matter how he challenged her to misbehaviour, she would perpetually be moderate. He loved what he feared, as spirits sapped with luxury always do. The thought of screaming and shouting men made his heart stop with terror; it gave him therefore an immense pleasure to raise his voice and hear what a scream and a shout sounded like; and he knew that in the stillness of her atmosphere all such violent noises were at once annulled. Suddenly she realized the true nature of the problem before her. All she had to do was to convince him that his impression of her character was false: that she had within her a maenad, who might some day break loose, answer his raised voice by her own screams and shouts, and invoke the forces of disorder. A single uncontrolled gesture would bring about this change of view, for the first hint of this hidden self of hers would make him so nervous that he would lose his usual critical faculty. But control was obstinately a part of all her nature, even including her imagination. She murmured, “But what can I do, what can I do?” and slid her feet out of bed, feeling for her slippers, as if moving her body would make her mind move too. She rose and pulled on her peignoir, and then became suddenly motionless, staring again at the wall; and indeed she saw what she had to do as if it were written there. Shuddering with distaste, she said, “That would do! Yes, that would do!” and went to the waste-paper basket and took out André’s flowers.