The Thinking Reed (12 page)

Suddenly she dropped her arms by her sides. A man was sitting on the marble edge of the conduit on her left, only a few yards ahead of her. She had not seen him before because he was wearing a white linen suit that at even a little distance made him invisible against the marble and, furthermore, he was perfectly still. He held on his knees a folded newspaper, but he was not reading it. He was staring up at her so intently that when at last she saw him he could not alter his pose for a minute to rise and greet her. Plainly he expected her to know him, and, indeed, after a second, she did. It was the old-fashioned pointed beard that first reminded her, but confirmation came from the cut of his suit, which was very different from the austere and elastic attire that Isabelle’s contemporaries wore in the south; it recalled rather one of Pierre Loti’s colonial heroes.

“Ah, Monsieur Campofiore!” she exclaimed. “How do you do?”

“You are wonderful,” he said, “but of course all ladies in your position are trained to recognize the obscure.”

“Not the obscure but the energetic,” she replied gaily. “We have few such early visitors as you!”

“Well, as I do not have to remind you,” he said, “I come from a level of society that is too busy earning its bread to lie in bed late in the morning. And today I had need to see your husband immediately, so I came down at the first possible moment and paid no regard to ceremony.”

“You have not just come off the train?” asked Isabelle anxiously, thinking she would offer him coffee.

“Oh, no,” said Monsieur Campofiore. “I am staying in the neighbourhood.”

She remembered the transparent amber Italian mountains she had seen from the lighthouse. “Ah, at Origno!”

“No, not at Origno!” exclaimed Monsieur Campofiore, with the appearance of fury. “I am staying at Cannes! At the Miramar! I have a bedroom, a sitting room, a bathroom!” On the last word he choked and grew scarlet, as if he felt that he had been guilty of an absurdity. “I mean I have a suite!” But that statement, too, afflicted him with a sense of gaucherie, and he continued to be scarlet and to stammer.

“Ah, you are very wise,” said Isabelle. “Everyone says it is a very comfortable hotel.”

She was annoyed by the destruction of her cool, still morning by the intrusion of this hot misery, which she could not remedy, which she did not believe she would respect if she knew its cause. For a minute she stood, smiling vaguely up at the light, trying to find something more to say; then to recover the freshness the hour had lost, she went over to the conduit and thrust her hands into the stream, then raised them, dripping, to sluice her face.

She raised her head and stood with her wet hands in front of her, staring at Monsieur Campofiore; for she had heard him utter a cry of rage and atrocious suffering. He looked, indeed, as if her action had convulsed him with pain. He had crushed his newspaper against his chest in a dented cylinder, and his face was contorted with what was very like a sexual grimace, though utterly gleeless. Her eye caught the dark core of this grimace, and she shuddered in her understanding of it. In a desire to depreciate everything belonging to Marc, his ox, his ass, and his wife, Monsieur Campofiore had told himself that her beauty was artificial, her perfect skin a matter of paint and powder; and when she had sluiced her face with water, she had not only deprived his hatred of its food, she had also made him discontented with some faded woman that he had taken because there were great names in her past. She had made Monsieur Campofiore feel that, try as he could, it was his lot to enjoy only the second-rate, and leave the best to his masters.

Resolutely she smiled, though she was trembling. She wished her jacket was not lifted by her breasts, she wished that more than thin silk covered her nakedness. “Well, I will go in now,” she said, speaking very slowly, “and I will tell my husband that he must not keep you waiting any longer.” From his bow, which was deep and too humble, she knew that he was ashamed of his outburst, and that his shame would make him still more full of hate. It was hard not to hurry, and not to look back at him as she walked to the house.

In the salon she met Marc, and she threw herself into his arms.

“My poor little one, what is the matter?” he said, and though he spoke tenderly, Isabelle could see that she was only adding one more to worries that had found him earlier in the morning.

She pulled herself together, but she said, “Marc, need you go out and see that man? He hates us so.”

“My darling,” he answered mildly, “you exaggerate. I don’t think that he hates us. I have always found him very friendly. He is only doing his duty.”

“I can’t think what his duty can be,” she said impatiently, “but don’t see him.”

He lifted her hands from his shoulders, kissed them, and put them down at her sides. “That, however,” he said with a sigh, “is just what I must do.”

She watched him go from her with alarm, and a sort of aggrieved indignation because he would not take her warning that immediately struck her as absurd. “After all, he is not going to fight a duel!” she reminded herself. “This man Campofiore is not going to take out a pistol and shoot at him!” Very quickly she ran upstairs and rang for her maid, and began to take her bath and dress. When she was sitting before her mirror and the maid was brushing her hair, she suddenly cried, “Stop!” and rose, and went into one of the bedrooms that overlooked the gardens. Marc and Campofiore were now side by side on a bench that faced the window, and the newspaper now lay on Marc’s knees. He sat looking down at it, while the other leaned towards him and sometimes tapped on it to emphasize a climax in his argument, a denunciation, or whatever it might be. From the unnecessary thrust of his beard, from something at once cowering and aggressive in his attitude, which made her think of a shabby menagerie wolf that through an accident has its keeper at its mercy and tries to revive its long beaten and suppressed ferocity, she knew that he was speaking to Marc with intolerable insolence. But what horrified her in the scene was that Marc made not one movement of protest against the steady rain of insult. Sometimes he put his elbows on his knees and rested his head in his hands, but that was plainly in order to gain self-control. It could not be doubted that he felt himself entirely in the power of this twisted and malignant man, even to such an extent that his impulsiveness, his manliness, his dignity, were for the moment wholly paralysed.

“Why,” thought Isabelle, “it must be that he’s being blackmailed.” There crept over her skin like vermin the realization that she was no more exempt than any other human being from being touched by squalor. But she reflected that, if this affair were bad for her, it must be far worse for Marc. She went back to her bedroom and finished dressing herself, taking a long time over it, partly because she was sure that the interview would go on for some time, and partly because she wished to appear before Marc as aware of his plight and completely unshaken by it. Then she went and saw the chef, who was just back from market, and told him how many there would be for meals, and praised his way of cooking aubergines. The old man was not very pleased. He said that when he was a boy and had started cooking in the kitchens of the Countess Greffuhle, the fine world had liked to eat delicately, but now all that was changed; one got no praise unless one served food that might have come out of a peasant’s pot, and if it reeked of saffron or garlic, so much the better. Isabelle smiled and made apologies for her grossness, but her mind flashed back to the scene in the garden and its threat, and she thought, “You are right, people of our sort are different now, they are not delicate creatures set apart, vulnerable as we used not to be.” She shuddered and left the kitchen, and cautiously peered round a column of the loggia to see if the detestable interview had come to an end. It had indeed. Marc was sitting alone on the bench, drumming with his hands on his knees, the newspaper lying between his feet.

She hurried out and sat down beside him. There was a gardener working in a flower-bed a few yards away, so she could not throw her arms round him, but she took his right hand and held it to her breast.

“My dear,” she said, “has he been very horrible to you?”

Marc nodded. “Pretty horrible. I think now that you are right. That man hates me.” He took his hand away from her breast, and stroked her fingers tenderly, looking down into her palm. Then, when his breath had grown calmer, he said mildly, “But, my dear, I must be fair. Considering what he was here for, he was not so horrible.”

She said fiercely, “But he can’t do anything to you! Why do you see him, why do you bother to talk to him? Why do you not hand him over to the police?”

“My darling,” asked Marc, “who do you think Monsieur Campofiore is?”

Isabelle looked straight into his eyes and flung back her head, to show she did not care. “A blackmailer,” she said.

“Ah, my darling,” he said, “who could blackmail me? I have never done anything to be ashamed of. I have never been able to understand how people put themselves within range of this blackmailing business. If a thing is so disgraceful that one would not like it published, one simply does not do it, that is all. With people who have special morals, poor things, that is different, of course. But you ought to know that I am not among them. Monsieur Campofiore is something quite different. He is a government official, my dear. He is the head of the state department that deals with such matters as my factory.”

“He is a government official?” she repeated stupidly.

“Yes, my darling.”

“Of course, so he is!” she exclaimed. “Sam Soutar told me so.” It was an even greater shock to her to remember that this disordered and passionate creature was a government official than it had been to fancy him a blackmailer preying on her husband. She had always thought of the state as manned by people eternally equable in their good sense and patience, and she felt now as if she had found herself a passenger on a ship where one of the chief officers was blatantly lunatic. But her mind quickly recapitulated all her past relations with the state, and assured her that, though as a tax collector it certainly suffered from an exorbitant greed for her money, it showed no other ill-will. It seemed, indeed, to exist for her protection. Monsieur Campofiore must be a rebel in his own camp. Again flinging her head back, she said, “But what can a government official do against you?”

“Ah, it is such a long story,” said Marc, “but the long and short of it is that he can do almost anything to me.”

Her knowledge that she was shrewder and quicker than he was about to make her say, “Nonsense! What can he possibly do to you!” But she realized that they were treading now on his territory and not on hers; it had not seemed extraordinary to him that this demented being should belong to the government. “Please tell me all about it,” she asked.

“I suppose you might as well hear all about it now,” Marc said. “I had hoped you need never know anything about it, and I am glad that it is not quite my fault that I must tell you. You see, my dear, I am not quite a free agent. I think I told you once that at the end of the war I did not ask the Reparations Fund to rebuild my father’s iron works. I had a kind of a notion that those silly fellows across the Rhine had done worse than most people imagined at the time, and that maybe the old key industries were not going to be the source of unending wealth they used to be. But toys, that is different. When men are fearful about the future, they will not put their pennies together to build railways and bridges; they will keep their pennies for themselves and buy toys. That is what the little automobiles my father had been trying to make before the war were, the best toys you can imagine for a mechanically minded age.

“So I got them to give the money I might have had to rebuild my father’s works and I put it all into the place you saw at Lorinet. I wanted it very soon, so that nobody else would get in first. And I got all the money I needed, and I got it almost immediately. But I had to pay through the nose; in the way of terms I had, of course, to make my factory capable of being put at the service of the state. We would need only a week to switch over to the manufacture of guns and ambulances, you know.”

“What nonsense that all is!” exclaimed Isabelle.

“How innocent all you Americans and English are about war!” said Marc gently. “You are like little children, who think it cannot rain tomorrow because you are going to the Zoo with your papa. And there were other strings to the money, too. I must be a good little boy. The factory must go on and on, so that Frenchmen shall buy only French cars, and people abroad do that too. If I am incompetent, I have to go. That is as it should be. If I am not good enough, it is only right that I should be kicked out. I thought that might happen quite soon, since I am not clever. But somehow I got on all right so far as ability went.”

“But of course you are wonderful!” Isabelle said. “Everybody says so. And what right has the government to demand anything more?”

“The government has a right to ask anything of anybody,” he told her mildly, “and here they are reasonable in exercising their rights. We must not have strikes, you know. There is no sense in strikes at all. They destroy the business, they cause discontent everywhere, and if the Germans attacked us while there were big strikes going on, there would be great disorder, and anyway the poor workmen do not want them. It is only because agitators get among them and talk them over that they ever come out.”

“Perhaps there is more to it than that,” said Isabelle.

“Ah, no, my love, you do not understand. The people are so happy in my factories, they are just like my children, and they are quite grateful. You saw for yourself how they all adored me. But about four years ago it began to be very unpleasant. There was a lot of money going about then, from Moscow. They came out again and again, on one pretext after another. And two years ago, there was a very grave strike, very long and very bitter. I have not liked to talk to you about it, though it meant so much in my life, because it was so painful. Just think of it, they had to bring down soldiers to fire on my poor deluded children. It was terrible.”