The Thinking Reed (6 page)

“Tomato juice,” she said. She could have wished that he was not taking the approaching moment quite so seriously, for his voice was harsh, his pallor was ghastly.

“I’ll not have that,” he said. “Waiter, waiter, what have you got that’s nearly all gin? A dry Martini, I suppose, is the nearest thing. Well, make it strong.” He looked after the waiter with an intensity of gaze that served no purpose, and drummed on the table with his fingertips. He did it so silently that she could make no complaint on the score of her nerves, but she found it odd that he should do it at all. It was incredible that he should be so schoolboyish, so uninitiate. After all, Nancy must at some time or other have received some sort of attacking proposition.

She said lightly, “Well, what have you been doing this morning?”

“Paying a visit,” he answered, and added in a tone that was level yet gave the effect of a rebuke, “a visit that would not have interested you. It was far too placid. To Madame Dupont-Gaillard.” He fixed her suddenly with eyes full of vehement emotion, that were at once hard and imploring. “You know that name, don’t you?”

“I’ve heard it somewhere,” she reflected.

“Heard it? Haven’t you seen it?” he insisted precisely.

She shook her head.

“Ah, you don’t remember,” he continued. “She’s a teacher of languages, of one language only, really. Her own. She takes in young men who are getting up their French for the diplomatic service; she helps foreign students who are struggling with their University courses. I lodged with her the two years I was at the Sorbonne.” He broke his bread and angrily swallowed a crumb or two. “I don’t know why, we all got very fond of her. She’s a stupid old woman, really, but she’s got an absurd bronze wig, and she quotes La Fontaine, and if anyone got sick or homesick she was extraordinarily kind. We all go up and see her quite often when we happen to be in Paris. I went up and called on her this morning. Waiter, waiter, where’s that dry Martini?”

“Coming, coming, Monsieur.”

“Why, you’ve just ordered it,” Isabelle chided him. He was really very nervous. For the last few minutes he had been talking of Madame Dupont-Gaillard as if he were reproachfully confronting her with an exemplar, though she felt she could hardly be blamed for not wearing a bronze wig, or not quoting La Fontaine, and she knew that he was in no position to judge how she behaved to the sick and the homesick. “Well, what’s the matter?”

His gaze, that had been fever-bright, went leaden. “Oh, nothing,” he said courteously. “But that’s where I was, and I’m sorry I was late and kept you waiting. Nothing’s the matter, really …” His voice trailed away, he became still paler, he raked the terrace with his leaden gaze, and suddenly galvanized himself into a show of exclaiming interest. “Why, surely that’s Michael Baker over there.”

“So it is,” said Isabelle.

“And that’s his new wife, that used to be Claudia Greenway Green, of Nashville, Tennessee.” He stood up and looked across the terrace at his friends with an expression oddly fatigued and calculating; and then he looked down at Isabelle’s uplifted face. “Shall I ask them to come over and have lunch with us?” he said, very slowly, as if he wanted to show that he understood fully all the implications of what he was saying.

She smiled. At least she could do this sort of thing quite well. Her smile was probably quite convincing. “Why not?”

“Yes,” he agreed, “why not?” He held her eyes with his, he would not let them go. “We had nothing we wanted to talk about alone, had we?”

She shook her head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”

He bowed gravely and turned his back on her to go to his friends. The tears rushed into her eyes; his tall stiff back, the white cloths on the tables, the striped black and yellow awning, the gay blue dress of a woman lunching happily with her lover, and the green hedge ran into shining confusion like molten glass. She remembered the infamies she had heard of that men practised on the dignity of women, and with a shout of surprise from her nerves realized for the first time that they might be practised on her. A story came back to her which she had been told by an indignant Frenchwoman, a young widow, whom she had met on board ship during her last voyage. This girl had been a vendeuse with a great French couturier, who had lent her for six months to a Fifth Avenue store; and while she was there she had excited the admiration of a Jewish broker, who whirling her round in night clubs, holding her hand at the Opera, had told her that he was just crazy about her, and could hardly wait to take her down to City Hall. He was repulsively fat and ugly, but he was kind, and she longed for a home and children; so one night she had told him that she was willing to go down with him to City Hall any morning that he chose. At that his jaw had dropped, and he had stammered that he hadn’t thought she was a girl to misunderstand a fellow that was just giving her a rush and take it that he was playing the heavy lover. The girl’s pride had been broken, and at some loss she had thrown up her post, terrified of staying longer in a country where the code of manners did not preserve the decencies between the sexes. Isabelle had listened to her story sympathetically, but had privately felt that the girl must have been guilty of some indiscretion, even of vulgarity, which had invited this humiliation. Well, she had been wrong. For this same humiliation had befallen herself to the fullest extent. She realized that the tone of every word she had addressed to Laurence since he had arrived in Europe, the quality of every movement she had made in his presence, had been determined by the silent assurances he had given her regarding his intention of asking her to marry him; and that now that he had sharply withdrawn these assurances, there was not one of those words and movements but was ridiculous and shameful.

Now the Bakers were standing over her, offering handshakes, exploding amiably in greetings and professions of surprise. She found herself thinking grimly that Michael’s face had grown looser with happiness, that he had been a great deal handsomer when he was married to the first, the notoriously scourge-like Mrs. Baker. Then her heart sank. So it was thus that life forced on one unawares the characteristics that earlier had seemed most pernicious and most easily avoidable. Till then she had thought of the hatred felt by the unhappy for the happy as sheer gratuitous vice. The thing that Laurence was doing to her. She would never, she saw, feel free to be honestly friendly with any man again or, as it appeared, with any woman either. She was aware that thousands of women, when asked what they wished to order for a meal, thought fit to announce with a little laugh that they were dieting. It was nothing to their discredit, they might be as useful and agreeable as the many women who wore corsets or sang to their friends after dinner, or did any of those things which, though they were not illegal, she would not do herself. Yet she found herself counting this heavily to Mrs. Baker’s discredit, and doubting the debit when, after all, she ordered a rich and schoolgirlish repast; and the reason for this injustice was simply that the little bride’s face, which was round and wholesome as a cup custard, had plainly never been flushed by any sort of shameful withdrawal of the conventional value attached to her sex. Isabelle understood at last why women are supposed to hate each other. Such an experience as hers was bound to engender a hundred kinds of enmity. Henceforward she would feel abashed before any woman who had not been rejected like herself; she would be cagy in her dealings with any woman who, having suffered such a rejection, would be likely to guess her own disgrace. This was a poisoning of the very springs of sincerity. Even now she was grinning too much, prolonging throughout the meal an affectation of palpitating interest in the honeymooning couple which it would have been natural to have dropped after the first five minutes. But at least Laurence was doing that too. For whatever reason he had decided to hurt her, he was hurting himself too. She was not too sorry about that. So she had grown cruel too.

But suddenly she found herself sincere again. “What, must you really go?” she exclaimed when Michael rose at an incredibly early moment, when some compote had just been put down before her, and said that he and his wife must return to their hotel to be picked up by some friends who were making an early start for the country. Nothing indeed could have been more real than her distress, for it meant that, unless the honeymooners were to suspect how things were, she must stay and finish her meal alone with Laurence. Fortunately he went right out to the pavement with them, and by the time he got back she had only a greengage or two to swallow. But when he was sitting opposite her again, the fineness of his hands, which were all of him her downcast eyes could see, as they lay folded in front of him on the tablecloth, brought a lump to her throat because they were so typical of his general fineness, such evidence that he had been really what she wanted.

“Well, Laurence, this has been very nice,” she said, as she put down her spoon and prepared to pick up her bag and gloves. Her dislike of soiled things was so strong that even at this moment, even after there had opened this breach between them, she had to cry out, “Why, what has happened to my gloves! I thought they were clean, and look at all those little brown marks.”

“That is blood,” said Laurence; “there must have been sharp thorns on those roses.”

He raised a half-finished glass of wine to his lips, though a smear of rouge on the rim showed that the little bride had drunk from it.

She looked past him into the distance, at the emerald-green chestnut, the gold-green planes, tossing and writhing together. She felt herself back in the courtyard, her body forcing itself into the unfamiliar and detestable hieroglyphic of rage; she saw Michel’s old eyes sagging forward in astonishment; she heard, high up in the sunlit air above her, a metallic clash. She said, “So it was you who threw open the window?”

“Yes,” he answered. “That’s where Madame Dupont-Gaillard lives, in one of those flats.”

She found herself resorting to the pitiful expedient of a little laugh. “Did I look very dreadful?”

“Well, I gathered you were not feeling very pleased with Monsieur de Verviers,” he said, resorting to the same expedient. He drank some more of the little bride’s wine. “I had no idea,” he told her as he set down the glass, “that you were such a maenad.”

“I am not,” she told him.

He gave a good-humoured smile, as if to tell her she need not keep up pretences with him any longer and could be assured that, now he knew her temperamental peculiarities, he would watch her career with amused and not unkindly interest.

“I have never done such a thing before in my life,” she insisted. But he continued to smile, and she became aware that she had raised her voice a tone higher than she had meant. Biting her lips, she began to pull on her gloves, making every movement as calm as she could.

Laurence gesticulated to the waiter for the bill, sat back in his chair, and passed his handkerchief over his lips. Impulsively, as if he were so sorry for having mismanaged their scene together that he must apologize even if this destroyed the pretence that they had had no scene, he said, “I thought you would understand when I told you that I had been calling on Madame Dupont-Gaillard. She has a plate up in the hallway.”

“Yes,” said Isabelle, “but it is very old, the letters are quite level with the brass, you cannot see what they are.”

For now she had remembered how it was that she had heard the name, though she had never seen it. She and André had come in very late, and while he fumbled for his keys under a light, she had stopped by the plate and run her fingers over the hardly perceptible ups and downs of the vanishing letters. “Tell me whose name has time licked off, like a cat cleaning a saucer?” she had whispered, and André had whispered back, “It is an institutrice, Madame Dupont-Gaillard, who like Château Gaillard is in ruins.” His whisper had ended on her lips, his arm had clasped her waist more tightly, and they had moved, mouth to mouth, towards his home. With quiet fierceness, with an assumed smile, she turned to Laurence, meaning to tell him of that midnight conversation so that he would guess the parts she would be mum about, meaning to hurt him. Jealousy she knew not to be so strong in his sex as it was in hers; women objected to marrying widowers far more than men objected to marrying widows. But in its lesser quantity it was there, and could be roused and tortured; and if it were tortured enough, her mind sprang on to say, it would go mad and try to prove itself as good as the other male, claiming its own. She had only to speak her story in the right way, with certain hesitancies, and she would end that afternoon in Laurence’s arms, and she knew well that, if he were once her lover, she would never lose him.

She shuddered with distaste. She was being swept away into the horrible world of violence that she feared, where one soul delighted in inflicting pain on another, where force and fraud were used to compel victories which were valueless unless they were ceded freely to an honest victor. It would be far better to resign herself to losing all she wanted. She looked across at him as a farewell to what she had wanted, and at the sight of his fine, grave face, on which even this crisis had failed to mark the lines of any expression that was not noble and reasonable, a storm of refusal raged in her. Why should she lose him? And had she tried all ways of keeping him? She had rejected dishonesty, but she had not made full trial of honesty. It was a difficult thing for a woman to be honest; it required from her the full organization of courage. She found that as she coughed to clear her dry throat and leaned forward to make the attempt.

“Laurence,” she said, “I want to tell you why I threw down those roses outside André de Verviers’s door.”

With that detestably distant smile he answered, “I am sure it is a most romantic story.”

Lowering her eyelids she spoke it out. “No, not romantic! One would have to be starved of all pleasantness, a tired, homely stenographer or an old hospital nurse, to think it romantic. It is a very silly story, Laurence. When I came over here after Roy’s death, I was desperately unhappy and lonely. I wanted a companion with whom I could build up a new life; I have no family to fall back on.”