The Thinking Reed (10 page)

But the morning after her wedding she woke up enjoying renewed confidence in Uncle Honoré’s wisdom. He must have divined, from what she had told him about Marc, that for the moment she would be in no need of his counsel. On waking she found herself alone, and leant from the window sill for a minute, humming, before she began to dress. They had started so late from Paris on their journey to the South that they had arrived at this little inn long after nightfall; and she found herself in a part of France that was quite new to her. It was the France one sees in tapestries. Over rolling country, very cool in colour, were scattered pastures and cornfields and tall woods standing on higher ground. A grey village lay like its own map on the side of a hill, and the flat square summit was a great church, visible far away not only as a building, but as a symbol of the faith in the land. Everywhere there was a spreading beneficence of mild light. At the end of the inn garden, which was so neatly cultivated that the hoe marks between the cabbages showed like fine stitching, was a stream that gave back some of this light, sliding quickly yet glassily by the willow trees. On the brink of it stood the innkeeper and Marc, looking into the water and wagging their heads, plainly exchanging platitudes, as Frenchmen do, for the pleasure of feeling their mouths full of the good meat of common sense. She turned away with tears in her eyes, remembering how the night before, in his arms, she had found herself in a country quite new to her, more full of gentleness and tenderness than any other she had known.

They lingered five days in Yonne; but after that they were obliged to make their way down to the villa at Cap d’Antibes, which was being lent them by Marc’s grandaunt Berenice, because the offer of it had been an olive branch. For the last two years, it seemed, Grandaunt Berenice had been very much displeased with Marc, for some reason or other, and this was the first movement she had made towards a reconciliation. There was really no hardship in accepting the offer, for the house was a kind of Moorish palace, full of hoarded coolness which the summer could not dissipate, and round it was a walled and terraced garden watered by its own springs, which slid perpetually along broad marble conduits. Marc and Isabelle used to sit there when they got up, looking across the milky bay of Cannes and the dark islands that seemed to be floating sometimes on the water and sometimes on the air, at the Esterel mountains, which were so like the morning mists in their ragged majesty that it was always surprising when the full light confirmed their fantasy and showed them solid rock. As the sea turned blue, they went down and swam or sailed their boat, and they lunched on a wire-screened veranda with half a dozen tropical birds making bright streaks under the shadowed eaves. In the afternoon they rested in a vast bedroom, where the darkness was reflected in old mirrors as amber and much lighter than it was, and in the evening they played tennis, or swam again, or walked up through the pines to the lighthouse and sat by the chapel, with the sun setting behind the Esterel on their right hand and on the left the Bay of Angels growing inky with night, though the pillars of rock behind Monte Carlo and the Italian mountains beyond still flushed like stone roses. They dined at home or at a little restaurant in the old port of Antibes, where an arch in the high wall showed masts black against blue and rigging with stars caught in it. At no time in such days was Isabelle not amazed by the infiniteness of Marc’s good will. Though all his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world.

But people began to find them out. When they dined by the port, the great cream-coloured automobile waited for them in the square at Antibes, and it was excessively recognizable. From that time their gardens might as well not have been walled. Their early mornings were still free, and they padlocked behind them the road down to the private beach, but when they came back for lunch, there were people all over the gardens, and sitting on the veranda, dressed like the Russian ballet and often beautiful in themselves, but not what they wanted. These people had to be given cocktails, they often had to be asked to stay to lunch, and though they left in the afternoon about three, they were back again in the early evening, not so different as they should have been considering that this time they were not the same people. Gladys and Nikolai had gone over to dine with Daisy at Monte Carlo, but they had been replaced in all essentials and in most superficialities by Iris and Serge. As Isabelle extended her hand to the apparent third and fourth of this actual pair, and realized that she and Marc would not be able to go up to the lighthouse this evening because their dusk was going to be overpopulated by Doppelgängers of the crowd that had camped all over their noon, she saw that her married life was going to be made as difficult by Marc’s wealth and position as if his work had compelled them to live in an unhealthy climate. She had thought that she had many friends, but hers were a handful compared with the army that insisted on its vague ties with Marc. Her friends represented the cast of a legitimate play, which hardly ever exceeds a moderate number, since a theme cannot be crisply expounded by too many mouths, but his friends represented the cast of a Follies show, which, debating no particular point, but stirring certain large loose fantasies of delight in the lower levels of the mind, can be as numerous as the hosts of a dream. The fault in the situation was that he, like her, had his true place in the legitimate drama. He was, as his mother had often told her, serious. His heart wanted to work out one simple theme, and his naïve and powerful mind was eager to grapple with ideas in its Douanier Rousseau way. He was in this world not because of anything in himself, but because he had become associated in its eyes with the most erethic of all its fantasies, wealth. Once there, he was not altogether unhappy, for he loved to play for recreation as these people loved to play out of idleness, and his good tough stretchable body gave him a pleasant pre-eminence among them. But he and she made the same effect here as actors from the legitimate drama when they are called upon to play specially exacting parts in a revue or a musical comedy; they might stand out for their competence and their subtlety, but they lacked the bloom; undisturbed by the touch of thought, which made others round them delectable as peaches.

Isabelle found her visitors not unlikeable people. It was true that they were catarrhal with affection; whether they were French, Russian, English, or American, endearments flowed from them as freely as rheum from an irritated mucous membrane. This was only in part due to mercenary motives, for a considerable proportion of them were so rich that they had no need to curry favour with their friends. It came rather from their intention, never formulated but governing all their actions, to treat life so that it would never form any pattern, to rub down each phenomenon till it became indistinguishable from all others of its kind. They hampered friendship by taking its special vocabulary and distributing it as largesse among all human beings, so that it could not perform its function of building up strong preferences. They themselves paid a price for this, for all their relationships were in a constant state of flux; inseparables of a fortnight ago would today speak only about and not to each other. But this they did not mind, for they were dedicated people who, the better to serve this intention, had taken vows of wealth, unchastity, and disobedience to all standards. No vows are easy to keep, since they demand a quality of persistence which the human race does not possess, and these votaries failed as frequently as any others. They all carried on so far as they were able a machine-gun-like succession of disbursements for goods which did not endure, such as food and drink and hotel accommodation and the attendance of world-famous and epicene hairdressers, or some hours at the baccara table, and thus did their part in reducing the monetary system to sheer nonsense; but a considerable proportion fell by the wayside, and found themselves in an impoverished condition that any Franciscan might have envied. These lapsed cases excited just such censoriousness among some of their fellow votaries, and in others just such a kindly determination to lift them up and restore them to the right path, as they would have found had they committed their faults as members of an ascetic organization.

They were perhaps happier in their campaign against chastity. It seemed to be much more successfully conducted. Isabelle was startled to find how many of the women had had Marc as a lover. He always betrayed it when he introduced them to her by the pensiveness of his terrier eyes, a penitent protrusion of his lower lip, and a disposition to smack them on the behind, a part of the body which, in the female, he regarded as symbolical of that which was urgent yet not important. But she was still more startled to find that, although all these people knew that she and Marc had been married only a few weeks, several of the women showed signs of desiring to renew or initiate relations with Marc, and several of the men offered to seduce her. This was not because they were wickedly perverse, but because they lived in a sexual universe in which all frontiers had been broken down, including those of time, and it was not less likely that people would commit adultery on their honeymoon than at any other time.

But here, too, there were lapses. Outbreaks of love paralysed free sexual exchange, and both satiety and age inexorably worked for abstinence. But there could be no question but that unchastity was a far easier discipline to follow than disobedience to all standards. That meant waging a constant battle with the flesh and the spirit, for man is an inveterately theorizing animal, who cannot look out of his eyes without basing opinions on what he sees, and basing on those opinions preferences and parties and flaming loyalties and steely repudiations, and, in fact, the formation of standards and obedience to them. These votaries did what they could to stop the trouble at the source by softening what their eyes showed them, through the constant self-administration of small doses of alcohol. Many of them never became actually drunk, and those that did were usually sober enough until evening, but nearly all made a practice of sitting down the minute they had finished their swimming or their motor-boat racing, or their surf-riding, and drinking enough cocktails to dilute the universe round them, to rob it of its power, and to prevent it taking advantage of their momentary disengagement from physical preoccupations. They practised, too, a resolute canalization towards personal ends of all their emotions, even of the sorts that one had thought inextricably associated with the intellect. The passion which men bring to debates regarding free will and determinism, or capitalism and communism, which never wearies of the controversy and longs to burn its opponents at the stake, was here directed to interminable arguments as to whether Gordon Lloyd had a right to do what he did on Ferdy Monck’s yacht at Saint-Tropez last week, and whether Laura had really said what Annette said she had at the bridge party at Super-Cannes just afterwards. To restrain their force within these channels they barred all others. Marc never read a book, but these people went further. They had no dealings with printed matter at all except in the morning when they looked at the headlines of the newspapers, and on journeys, when they read illustrated papers and detective stories.

It was there that the main difficulty in their lives began, that the problem arose which made them, on the whole, noticeably more driven and irritable than the people in the world outside. They had refused all succour offered to them by the mind, and there is simply not enough for the body to do unassisted during the whole twenty-four hours. They could sleep, but not for very many hours; they could not sit longer than a certain limited time over their meals; if they filled up one day with love-making to any considerable extent, they only had all the more time on their hands for the next day or so; and if they gossiped for more than a certain time, they felt either a kind of uncomfortable vacancy, like a neurotic who has been gulping air, or became involved in acrimony. There was always physical exercise, but that had a fatal way of coming after a time to raise more problems than it solved. What one does too well becomes not worth doing, unless in rivalry with equals—and it becomes a matter of increasing difficulty to find them—or with some honour or wager depending on the issue. It was then that they turned to number, and let it into their lives, keeping it abstract, dissociating it from any computation affecting human interests, at the bridge table or the backgammon board. But numbers, however they are treated, make the head spin after an hour or two. There was dinner, of course, and they could eat and drink a great deal then, and there were the hours afterwards. Of course there might be a party, which gave an opportunity for public submission to the vows, for further disbursements, and fresh sexual transpositions. But sometimes there was not, and then they had to have careful recourse to number again, as it was presented in the Casino, with due regard for post-prandial conditions, with croupiers doing most of the work, and plenty of gold and cocottes about to give the right lickerish atmosphere. However, the result of saying “Banco!” at the wrong time might be one of those painful involuntary lapses into Franciscan poverty, and the stale heat distressed the lungs which the physical exercise necessary to fill in other hours had made exigent of fresh air. They went to bed, most nights, feeling miserable. The invisible scourgings in this convent without walls had power to draw blood.

Marc and Isabelle found themselves constantly attacked by this world, and they fell under its total domination the day they spent with Gustave Bourges and his American wife at their villa on Cap Ferrat. They went over before lunch, taking their evening clothes, because they had all been invited to a party in Monte Carlo. The day began well, with a walk along a cypress avenue that ran its dark cool vista to a round swimming pool lined with blue tiles, where they bathed in fresh water and looked as they swam at the salty blue glint of the sea a hundred feet below, and the far range, vague now with distance but still sharply fantastic, of the Esterel mountains. Afterwards they lay on mattresses on a marble bench, a little Capuchin monkey skipping backwards and forwards over their bodies. They patted it tenderly, feeling pity for its animal folly. But it began to seem a very long time until lunch, and after they had discussed for some time whether Gordon Lloyd had had a right to do what he did on Ferdy Monck’s yacht at Saint-Tropez last week, and were unable to follow through by discussing whether Laura had said what Annette said she did at Super-Cannes, because Laura herself was present, the backgammon boards were brought out. Then the menservants came up with cocktails, which recalled a children’s party by their light and creamy appearance and sweetish taste, but which acted like a powerful brake on all discontented and aggressive movements of the mind. The party moved with calmer spirits through a vaguer world down to the house, where they dressed again, and sat down to lunch, and ate and drank, as happy as if they were in Eden.