The Thinking Reed (17 page)
A sojourn at a less fashionable hotel was as impossible, for there they would have been awkwardly marked out from their fellow guests as strays from another world. The very name of Sallafranque spoke of great, even gross wealth; and their legitimate taste for beautiful things, combined with less worthy allies, with their human inability to break away from the standards of the groups surrounding them, and the resolution of tradesmen, had supplied them with clothes and accessories which made poorer people feel ill provided and resentful. Moreover, to keep in order these clothes and accessories, they had to take with them a valet and a maid; and in any smaller hotel these would complain of bad accommodation and lack of company, and spoil their employers’ holiday with their ill humour. So, though it would not have been impossible for Marc and Isabelle to dissever themselves from this world, they would have had to pay a price for the severance that would have struck everybody they knew as absurd. She therefore felt her desire to pay it to be as worthy of suppression as those desires some people have to run out of a room in panic as soon as the doors are closed, or to throw themselves from heights. Nobody likes feeling shut in or dizzy; but all the same one need not lose one’s self-control in such states. Nobody, it seemed to her, could possibly like sharing the existence of Gladys and Serge, Iris and Nikolai, Gordon Lloyd and Ferdy Monck, Annette and Laura, Gustave and Sarah Bourges, Dan Creed or Mrs. Postleham, or Prince Ostrogin. But one must exercise self-control.
Isabelle was therefore greatly pleased when it came to the last morning of their visit; and she felt even more so when Luba said to her on the last morning, as they followed Marc and Ferdy out of the hotel towards the ice-rink, “Did you not see that funny-looking man who was standing in the lounge? He was staring at you and Marc so very hard, such a funny-looking man. There was something odd about his clothes, they made one think of that old book one used to read with one’s governess,
Tartarin in the Alps.
Not so bad as that, of course, but they made one think of it.”
“Had he a beard?” asked Isabelle, but she hardly needed to wait for the answer. She shuddered. She did not imagine that Monsieur Campofiore had looked at them any more pleasantly because Marc’s conduct had been faultless, for in her school and college days she had noticed that those who rebuked her for a fault with more than a certain degree of intensity grew to like her still less if she failed to repeat it.
So it was truthfully that she said, “I am so glad to be home again,” the evening they came back to the house by the Parc Monceau. Not all the lights were on, but some; it was the family coming home, not a party. The butler and footman looked glad to see them, and when she inquired why the house was flooded with fragrance, she was told it proceeded from a crateful of mimosa, sent by Madame Sallafranque from Cannes. While Marc was speaking to his secretary, she went into the little library and turned over the pile of letters which were lying in the Canton enamel dish on her desk, in the small circle of light cast by her neat lamp. There was a thick letter from Uncle Honoré, which she laid aside; it was a pity that he was always offering her the use of his wisdom only at some future date, that in the present he gave her nothing but these impersonal communications regarding steel, oil, and public utilities. She saw a letter lower in the pile which bore an English stamp and drew it out, hoping that it might be from Blanche Yates, who was staying with her husband’s family in London. It came, however, from a press agency, enclosing a photograph of herself taken at St. Moritz and published in an illustrated weekly, and offering to send her any similar cuttings that might appear, for a small charge. The photographer had caught her as she leaned on the rails of the race-track. She seemed to be smiling rather foolishly. Her first desire was to call Marc with a loud cry and weep on his breast. But it was surely impossible that anything which worked through the acknowledged mechanism of ordinary life, and that at its most trivial, should be sinister enough to justify such distress. She reproached herself for having allowed fatigue to affect her judgment, and tore the letter and photograph into small pieces, resolving to think no more about them. But she could not rid herself for some days of the feeling that something extraordinarily disgusting had happened to her.
ISABELLE FOUND the next few months of her life much more delightful than she had been led to expect. She always felt well, but now she found her own good health a conscious exhilaration; her complexion became more brilliant than it had ever been, so that she was almost too theatrically beautiful; and she was amused and entertained by the company of her unborn child. She was able to claim indulgence to entertain no more than she enjoyed, she spent a good part of her day walking, and from Friday morning to Monday afternoon she stayed at the old mill that Marc had bought for her in the valley of the Chevreuse, close to the château where his sister Yolande lived. The winter countryside enchanted her. The soot-black coppices, the delicate monotones of the stubble and ploughed fields, the muted green of the pastures, the morning skies, which in their sunny emptiness were high as the crisp starry nights, surprised her daily as if they were uncommon things; and during this time she developed new and intense and innocent gourmandises. The taste of milk was more delicious to her than any wine, and she became infatuated with the smell of wood fires as she never had been with any perfume, drawing the smoke into her nostrils till she felt ashamed and apprehensive, as if drunkenness must necessarily follow such gluttonous indulgence of the senses. She liked arranging with Yolande which of them was to put up Madame Sallafranque or Natalie and her husband for the weekend and who was to come over to dine with whom during the visit; and she liked entertaining Yolande’s Marcel and Madeleine, and Natalie’s François and Nicole and baby Jacques, who had the serenity that French children seem to derive from the lack of surprise or resentment with which their parents regard their existence. She took great pleasure in her happy relations with Marc’s family, because she had hardly anything in common with them. If she had resembled these impulsive and expansive people, it would have been natural enough that they should get on well together; but as she was fundamentally different from them in almost every way, it seemed to her of the best possible augur for society that the practical considerations which make the family hold together should furnish as a by-product this pleasant comradeship.
Towards Easter, however, Isabelle felt less exhilarated than before. There had been a season of warm and foggy weather, of heat without light, which had overpowered her spirits. At night she dreamed of the sharper airs of America, of great waves dashing on the coast of Maine, of a lake, clear as air, which she had once swum across in New Hampshire. She told Marc, who said, “Of course you need some sea air. You have been living either here or in Paris since Christmas, and it is time you had a change. We will go to Le Touquet for Easter.”
“Am I fit to be seen?” asked Isabelle.
“I have seen mediaeval figures that stood as you stand now,” said Marc, “and I have always been told that the reason for it was that they were carved out of a tusk, and the carver had to follow the curve of the ivory. I will make the same excuse for you if anybody should make a comment. But nobody will. Your body is showing itself as discreet as your mind.”
They wired that day for rooms to the Hotel Guillaume-le-Conquérant, and told the family of it that night over dinner at Yolande’s. Madame Sallafranque’s eyes turned brilliantly in her head, and she remarked that nothing could be better since young Philippe Renart and his English wife were coming over from London to Le Touquet, and Madame Renart had been telling her how much she wished that there was someone there who could introduce them to French people, since Philippe had lost touch with his own country owing to the years he had spent in South America, and she herself was too much occupied with the care of her husband, who was too delicate to attend to anything but his business, to undertake her son’s social re-education. Madame Sallafranque reported the conversation in a sad and dignified tone, a little nobler than life, as if it had taken place between two matrons in a drama by Corneille, and the satisfaction she expressed at the prospect of Marc and Isabelle taking care of the young Renarts was such as a spectator of such a drama might feel at some turn in the action which lifted the destinies of these matrons to security, though it did not thereby take away their solemnity. To Isabelle, however, it appeared that the conversation might be related to a more contemporary drama; and she inquired, rather in the spirit of a white person trying to penetrate into the subtleties of the native mind, whether there was not some business connexion between the Renarts and the Sallafranques. It was odd that Madame Sallafranque should answer her rather in the manner of a white person who at last finds a native displaying signs of intelligence, as she replied that Madame Renart was the sister of Natalie’s husband’s uncle by marriage, and that since young Philippe Renart showed neither ambition nor competence to succeed his father, preferring to live abroad in agreeable countries but in subordinate positions, it was a matter of some importance that Monsieur Renart had expressed himself willing to take Natalie’s François into the firm.
As François was not yet ten years old, Isabelle wished to laugh, but she reflected how delightful it would be for the child to feel that from his earliest youth his family had done their best to make him honoured and secure, and how natural he would find it to do the same for his children. She answered therefore that she would be delighted to be of service to Philippe Renart and his English wife, though, she added, Englishwomen too often did not appear to wish to be served. Madame Sallafranque shrugged her shoulders and made a sympathetic grimace and gave a disgusted description of mint sauce, which she had met with during a visit to the Grand National with Marc’s father about thirty years before. But she admitted that the lamb it had accompanied had been excellent and went on to say that she had never seen a finer young man than the Duke of Westminster. Some of the women, too, were not so bad, in their way. This time she seemed to be speaking as one white person conversing with another on the subject of the natives, and trying to lay down the proper imperialist attitude towards them by conceding their good points while keeping a crisp air of firmness.
When Easter drew near, Isabelle felt a lazy disinclination for the trip; but it was amusing to find herself fit to go about like other women, at a time when she had imagined she would be sick and miserable. The balance was weighed down on the side of Le Touquet by remembrance of this conversation with Madame Sallafranque, with its overtones which were calls to battle on behalf of the family, on behalf of sensible bourgeois France, and, later on, by another mission. They had decided to make a long weekend of it and go down to the Guillaume-le-Conquérant on the Wednesday before Easter, and two days before that Marc came home with a face grave almost to blubbering point. After he had greeted her, he went over to the fire in her boudoir and rubbed his hands as if they were freezing, though it was not very cold.
“All women should be married,” he said, “and happily married too.”
“You are perfectly right,” Isabelle answered. “There is no other way of living for a woman. But what has just brought this truth to your mind?”
“On my way home I went into the Ritz bar with Raoul Moring for a cocktail,” said Marc, “and I met Luba.”
“Ah, poor Luba!” cried Isabelle. “Heaven forgive me, I have been too happy to think about her. I asked her once or twice, and she did not come, and then she slipped out of my mind. It is too bad of me!”
“No, my darling, it is not too bad of you,” said Marc, “you have had other things to think of these months. And if people keep on blowing away like waste paper, one cannot run after them. Luba is very tiresome. But she is pathetic. Oh, my God, how pathetic she is.”
“What has happened to her?” asked Isabelle. “Is it all over with Leclerc?”
“Yes, all,” said Marc. “Mind you, he has not behaved badly. He has given her quite a fair sum on which she would be able to live if she were not agitated by the knowledge that she owes the couturiers three times her future annual income.”
“But how did she find that out?” asked Isabelle. “She would never have noticed the bills if someone had not told her. Really, people are very malicious.”
“Alas, she noticed because the couturiers will give her no more credit. They know what to think because Leclerc is bringing them another little friend to dress. All that is what is so very disagreeable. You see, Luba is a great lady and she has put herself in the position of a
fille,
and now she realizes it. And it is very painful to her.”
Isabelle shuddered. “You mean she has taken the world’s view of what has happened to her. I suppose she would, now she is alone. Yet, of course, her own view of what had happened was just as valid.”
“What was that view?” asked Marc. “A man never knows.”
“Well, she was not in love with Leclerc, of course,” explained Isabelle; “she was in love with her husband, who was killed by the Bolsheviks. But Leclerc was somebody to cling to, and she liked doing little services for him, singing Russian songs to him in the evening after dinner at that dreary place near Provins. If he had been destitute and she had had money she would have given him all he wanted; so of course she took money from him. She was completely destitute—she had tried to work, you know, she was at Chanel’s for three months but she drove everybody mad—and he was grossly rich. She really had no reason to feel ashamed.”
“But now she feels ashamed,” said Marc.
“Nobody ought to feel ashamed about Luba’s situation,” Isabelle told him, “except perhaps the generals who lost the war for Russia. It isn’t fair to create a system in which a woman’s virtue hangs on a hair, and then go round cutting the hairs.”
“When one really talks to a woman, one always finds she believes in nothing,” said Marc, “provided she is the kind of woman who has faith in life. If she has no faith, she will tell you she believes in everything. I have noticed it in Maman. She has infinite faith, and she does not really believe in anything. It is very puzzling.”
