The Thinking Reed (13 page)

“It may have been terrible, but all the other employers have strikes in their factories too. It’s part of the system, it’s bound to happen. How absurd of them to blame you for it. They must be very unfair.”

“Nobody has been unfair to me at all,” said Marc. “Not even Campofiore. I am sorry if I gave you a wrong impression when I said that now I knew he hated me. I did not mean that I had found him out doing anything malicious. I only meant that as he spoke I could see that he felt ill-will against me. And heaven knows why I should complain of that, there is no law forcing people to love me. Neither he, nor anybody else in his department, has ever been anything but just to me. For, you see, I was very foolish.”

“We have all been that in our time,” said Isabelle, thinking of André de Verviers.

“You will never believe it because I have never said one word about it—not out of any desire to deceive you, my love, but out of sickness and weariness at the whole thing. I was for a short time very fond of gambling. I liked roulette, I liked baccara.”

“But you don’t seem to like them now!” she exclaimed. “There isn’t a trace of it, you can’t have been so very bad.”

“Well, I never cared for the game in itself very much,” he said. “It was all part of the life I was leading at the time. You see, I had had no time to take a holiday and kick up my heels when I came back from the war, I got right down to work. Then suddenly, just about five years ago, I found I could afford to slack off for a little, and that I had loads of money to throw about, more money than I had ever dreamed about. So I ran about with some people that were very gay and very chic, and it was wonderful to find that they did not mind me being with them, and they all gambled. You have seen how it is, my dear, here. The day is planned so that one must end up in the Casino.” He sighed. “Well, I was not very discreet, that is all.” His lower lip protruded piteously.

“When you had just been let loose from all those cares, who could blame you? And what did it matter to the government? It can’t have affected your work at the factory.”

“Ah, but it did. You see, I was about with a great many people, particularly women, who were not at all serious. They were people the whole of France knows about; they are written about in all the papers. I felt very fortunate that these people who were so bright and amusing would go about with a dull fellow like myself, who hadn’t put his nose outside his factory for years, and was so funny to look at, and I got into the way of acting like a clown and throwing my money about, because it made them laugh, and I felt I was giving them some return. And, you know, I had a prodigious lot of money. I found I could throw it away in handfuls if I wanted to, and I did. I did it in all sorts of ways, and often in the baccara room, or at the roulette table, if I was at Monte Carlo, and because I was with these people I was under the limelight. Why, you are laughing at me? Oh, yes, I know I was very stupid.”

“I was not thinking you were stupid at all,” said Isabelle. “I was thinking how humble you were, and how charming it was.”

“You think only nice things about me, I have noticed,” he said. “I feel that in future, whenever I make a fool of myself, I will only have to think, ‘Ah, I will go home and tell Isabelle about it, and she will prove to me I am quite wrong, and that I have shown myself a very fine fellow.’ ” He circled her waist with his arm and dropped his lips gravely to her shoulder. “I like my marriage,” he said, and went on. “Well, my darling, the news of all this got back to the factory, and the agitators made use of it in the strikes. I can tell you, it was not very agreeable.”

Isabelle had begun to understand that there was no part of this story that she would enjoy, but she was aware that she had to know more of it. “How did they make use of it?”

“Oh, they kept on saying that they ought to get more than a thousand francs a week if I could take enough money out of the business to lose fifty thousand francs in a single night at a Casino. It’s nonsense, of course. A thousand francs is an enormous wage, far bigger than they ever had before, and a master must take more than his men, otherwise there wouldn’t be any masters, and the industries would never get anywhere. But it was so cleverly cooked up by the agitators that my poor children took it seriously, and we had a lot of trouble getting them to see reason. Then, two years ago, there was this strike I told you about, this very bad one. And then they made terrific play with an incident that had happened just before at Deauville.” He looked straight at her, blinked, and then looked away at the horizon. If he had been a dog, he would have put his head down on his paws and pretended to go to sleep.

“What was that?”

“Well, there was a lady I was quite intimate with at that time, who is very well known.”

“Who was it?”

“Ah, my dear, if I do not tell you, lots of other people will,” he sighed. “It was Tourangelle.”

“Tourangelle!” exclaimed Isabelle. “But is she not very old?”

“Well, the town of Cannes has been there for quite a time, and yet people still visit it,” said Marc.

“Ah, yes,” replied Isabelle, “and I suppose that if it lost all its attractions, people would still go on visiting it, because of the wonderful time that the earlier visitors used to have.”

“I am glad, my dear, that you are still human,” said Marc. “Well, I went with her one evening to the Casino at Deauville, and I lost rather a lot of money. Oh, an absurd amount. I know you will be cross with me when I tell you how much. It was that which made Grandaunt Berenice so furious with me. Good women don’t like one to throw away money, that’s why one has to go to the other sort when one feels the need to behave like a clown.”

“How much was it?”

“Four million francs,” Marc said, and in the silence that followed he began to whistle unhappily.

“Well, it all happened long ago,” she murmured at last, reminding herself again that nothing in all this story was more foolish than her life with André de Verviers.

“It was a lot, I know,” admitted Marc, “but I didn’t kill myself losing it. I don’t remember having had to go without anything to make up, the money kept on pouring in, and as you know, lots of people lose more. But it went very badly at the factory. For one thing, the papers exaggerated it wildly. Why, they said I’d lost five million francs.”

“Which is quite a different thing from four million francs,” said Isabelle.

“Different by a whole twenty-five per cent more,” Marc told her seriously, “but you are a woman, figures mean nothing to you. And some of the papers exaggerated still more and said I had lost ten million. That I wouldn’t have done, I can assure you, that I see would have been really foolish. But that’s beside the point. The important thing is that all these exaggerated reports got back to the factory, and these agitators made my poor people take it in the most extraordinary way. Why, do you know they talked as if it were not my money but theirs that I had spent? There was one young fellow that they had got hold of, a very sad case because four generations of his family had worked for us—who got specially enraged about it. I sneaked in with glasses on and a false beard to one of his meetings—it was quite fun—and I tell you I never heard anything more impressive. The poor lad’s face was quite white, he shook all over as he said that it destroyed all the dignity of a workman’s life if all his labour did was to pile up funds for a libertine to dissipate. Poor lad, he meant so well.”

“What happened to him?”

“Alas, the part he played in this strike drew the police’s attention to him, and they found he was in correspondence with Moscow, so he was tried and sent to Guiana. Ah, my dear, there are tears in your eyes, you are not listening to what I say. I know, you are worrying about Tourangelle! Ah, my dear, I never see her now, and anyhow she was just a good old sergeant-major.”

“You are wrong, I am not thinking of Tourangelle at this moment. I am listening to what you say,” said Isabelle. “Please go on. What happened next?”

“What happened was that they got very cross with me up at Paris, and they told me that it was all my own fault, and that I was a perfect nuisance to them. It was just then that Campofiore, who had long been second man on the permanent staff of that section in the Ministry, was made head man. He came down and gave me a tremendous talking to. But I did not then see that he hated me, for I was feeling so guilty that I thought the best I deserved was to be sworn at like a trooper. Then I had to go up to the Ministry and I saw the minister himself, and they told me that if I went on behaving in a way that gave the union men a handle, I’d be thrown out, and they made most fuss about the gambling. They said that I must never play high again, and so I promised them—I signed things, I wrote it down—that I would never lose more than thirty thousand francs. That is what all the trouble is about now.”

“How? What do you mean? Oh, Marc!” She put her hands to her mouth and spoke through her stiff fingers. “It’s nothing to do with that idiotic night at Monte Carlo?”

He nodded.

“But you surely did not break your promise for the sake of those imbecile hours at the table?”

“No, I did not. I lost just nine thousand francs and not a sou more,” he said. “I would never make a promise if I did not know I could keep it. I tell you, there is just a little of the child in me that likes to see the ball dancing on the wheel, and to watch for the card in the shoe to turn up, knowing that tremendous things hang on it. But I would be nothing at all without my factory. Think of me, darling, what could I do if I were cut off from my work? They could not take away all my money, but that would not help me much, I would soon be like all the men here.”

She shuddered. He spoke solemnly, like one who knows his doom. “But go on, go on,” she said. “If you have kept your promise, what have they got against you?”

Marc stopped and picked up the crumpled newspaper. “Why, they have not yet learned to speak the truth about me, the gentlemen of the press,” he said, and showed her for a minute the headlines. “You see, they are not very polite to me; all the South is very Red, you know. And they are quite sure it was a hundred thousand francs. Ah, you need not read any more, dear. It will only worry you.” He gently twitched the paper away from her, and folded it up and laid it on the bench beside him. “But it is unfortunate, is it not, that Campofiore should have been staying at Cannes just now and should have seen this rag?”

Isabelle took his hand and held it for a minute, then asked, “Did you tell him that you had lost only nine thousand?” But before he had answered, she made a grimace which Marc understood.

“Yes, my dear, you guess right,” he said. “I told him, and he informed me that he did not believe me. And I have such a bad temper, you cannot think. It has been a difficult morning, this. However, I was able to point to a witness, for it happened that when I was buying the chips, Florentin, who is the Minister of the Marine, came up to me and said, ‘What, Sallafranque, you’re off again?’ and I said, ‘No, not really. Look, I’ve only bought twenty thousand worth.’ I told him I knew Florentin would be pleased to come forward and bear my story out. But that didn’t settle the business.”

“Why? What are they going to do?”

“Nothing so dreadful,” he answered, but broke off his explanation to ask, “Why did you suddenly smile just then? You looked so concerned—and then, all at once, a lovely smile.”

She had smiled with joy because she had realized that she could not possibly feel more concerned for him than she did, and that her progress to perfect satisfaction with him was now complete. “I will tell you some other day,” she said, nodding and smiling to tell him that what she had felt was nothing disagreeable to him. “But now I want to hear what that hateful man has done.”

“All he has done is to treat me like a naughty baby,” said Marc. “He has been on the telephone to the minister, and they have agreed that I must promise never to sit down at any public gambling table. Oh, I can go into a Casino, I can have my dinner there, I can stroll with my friends in the baccara room and wait till midnight to see the Tiller girls. But I mustn’t risk fifty francs at boule. It will be a little humiliating. But I have signed. He brought the typewritten form.”

Isabelle drew a deep breath and leaned back, looking up at the pale and dazzling meridian. There was now nothing virginal left in the day, and its excess of light was well away with its murderous assault on form and colour. The flowers on the oleanders were crumpled coloured rosettes; the gladioli were pale brownish rags gummed on their stems, with a threat of slime; and though the dahlias were still fiery, they made no more impression on the eye than the spurt of a match in sunshine. But the light was giving more than it had taken away, for it was travelling down through this air that was saturated with salt and the breath of pines, and reaching earth as a fierce and vital Promethean beneficence. She shook back her loose sleeve and pulled down the opening in her blouse, so that her flesh, which was now like bronze satin, should be further burnished by this blessing.

“How strange you are,” said Marc after a time. “A minute ago I thought you were so painfully concerned about this business that I blamed myself for not having hidden the whole thing from you. But now that is all over, you seem calm and happy as you are any morning when we sit in the sun. Are you sure you are not being uncomfortably brave and pretending?”

“Of course I am not,” replied Isabelle. “I am really quite happy. Indeed, at the very moment you spoke, I was thinking how fortunate we would be if we never had any worse troubles than this.”

“It is charming of you to take it all so lightly,” said Marc. “But I know I have made a fool of myself in a very dangerous way, and I deserve to eat humble pie.”

“Yes, but the wonderful thing is that it is all over, that plainly it is the grand folly of your life and yet it need have no consequences,” she proclaimed lightly. “Gambling is so unnatural and artificial that it will cost us nothing to root it out of our lives.” She laughed aloud. “Now, if our future depended on your never kissing me except on quarter days, I should feel much more doubtful.”