The Thinking Reed (20 page)
That shrewdness and stupidity should exist side by side in Poots was, however, thoroughly characteristic of her type, which, so far as it was ruled by anything, was ruled by a preference for disorder. When they had sat down to dinner, she destroyed the ritual of the meal by saying petulantly to her husband, “Darling, I’ve got such a pain.” Isabelle reflected in wonder that she had never known an Englishwoman of this sort who was not constantly making this complaint, but she civilly asked what special dishes Poots would like in these circumstances and saw that Marc ordered them. It seemed to her that these dishes were not particularly suitable for indigestion, but she was relieved from any apprehension on this score, since Poots only pecked at them with a fork and then thrust the plate away from her, so near the centre of the table that it lost its look of order. She destroyed the conversation, too, for though it was her almost too obvious intention to listen respectfully to the Saltafranques and regard them amiably over the rim of her champagne glass, her gaze kept sliding past them to explore the vistas of the restaurant, and she made to her husband some such remark as, “Darling, Juliet’s sitting over there. Isn’t she exquisite!” or “Who’s that with Ferdy Monck? Hattie’ll be furious.” In this way she informed them that they were not to be alone for Easter, that there were also present at Le Touquet Gladys and Serge, Iris and Nikolai, Gordon Lloyd, Annette and Laura, Gustave and Sarah Bourges, Dan Creed, Mrs. Postleham, and Prince Ostrogin. The manner in which she conveyed the information usually obliged Marc and Isabelle to look round and scrutinize the room when they would rather have kept their attention fixed on their plates, to make gestures of recognition which they would rather have withheld. It frustrated any possibility that at the end of this dinner party the five people at table might have found some common ground on which they might get to know each other better. This of course was part performance of the intention to which Poots’s world was dedicated. Life was again prevented from becoming coherent.
Poots ran a hat shop, her husband proudly told them, in partnership with the Duke of Norwich’s eldest girl. In the course of Isabelle’s visits to London she had learned what such hat shops are like. One was forced to go there by an aunt of one of the noble milliners, met at lunch, who insisted on taking one with a pertinacity which would have seemed vulgar, had one not reflected that in her youth there must have seemed so little need for her to push and cadge that her preceptors might well have omitted to warn her against such practices. There were usually good models lying about on the shelves, one was taken by the pretty skins, the victorious health, the completely unchastened youth and vigour of the saleswomen. One ordered a hat or two, but though one made a definite appointment for the fitting, one had to go back several times, because no note had been taken of it, and then the hats were never delivered when they had been promised. One went down on a Saturday morning to see what had happened, because foolishly one had wanted to wear them during the weekend, and was faced peevishly by the noble milliner who had served one, as if one were being unsporting in taking the business so literally as actually to expect to have the hats. The beautiful child’s face would go white with sullenness, her eyes would go blank as Poots’s eyes did when she looked at Luba, she would say obstinately, insolently, absurdly, “I really can’t tell you why they aren’t ready”; and the interview would be made difficult to prosecute because another beautiful child, partner or assistant in the business, dressed in entrancing sports clothes for the weekend, was looking for something all over the shop, tumbling a mess of patterns out of a desk, running into an inner room and out again, repeating in that curious gabbling head-voice, “But, darling, someone must have taken them, I can’t find them, I know I left them here,” while outside someone waiting in an automobile hit the hooter again and again.
It was a fatuous world to which Poots belonged. Perhaps it was worse. Benny d’Alperoussa paused by Marc’s chair and greeted him. Marc forced his head up, forced a smile. There was no sense in making an enemy of a man who, if he got far enough from the base of civilization, would flay one before he murdered one. When he had gone, Poots asked huskily, “Isn’t that Benny d’Alperoussa?” Marc nodded. “Isn’t he one of the richest men in Europe?” she pursued. “One of the richest in the world,” answered Marc. “He got his business training fighting with pariah dogs for food round the garbage heaps of Constantinople.” Poots laughed out of politeness, but her eyes followed the old man as he walked away among the tables. Isabelle realized that she was avid as well as fatuous, and that she had married Philippe for some insufficient reason, to get away from home or to gratify some taste not more urgent than one might feel for chocolate fudge, which, if it had ever had the power to deflect her avidity from its normal course, had already lost it. That certain women were ready to sell themselves caused no excessive disgust in Isabelle. It was inevitable that a number of both men and women should compromise the institution of marriage by marrying for money, and once that happened there could be no question of impressing on the toughly logical female mind the unique vileness of prostitution. She had sometimes wondered, too, whether the contempt men felt for women who market their favours did not in part proceed from the sense of grievance eternally felt by buyers against vendors. But however natural and explicable Poots’s proceedings were, Isabelle could not see that they constituted any reason why she herself should spend any of her limited lifetime with her. When they rose from dinner and went into the lounge, and were surrounded by the people who had interrupted their honeymoon at Antibes and accompanied them on their holiday to St. Moritz, Isabelle had the same guilty sense of frittering away mortality that they had previously provoked. But she had been into that before, there was nothing to be done.
They went to their room early, tired with their first day of sea air, and though Luba’s Russian form of conscience made her try to rebut it when they told her she was yawning because she wanted to go to bed, she left them early. With their arms about each other’s shoulders they sat side by side on the sofa, too lazy to undress.
“I arranged to golf with Philippe tomorrow morning,” said Marc. “Dear Philippe. It is a pity he has tied himself up with that slut of a wife.”
“She has a pretty figure,” said Isabelle.
“Nonsense, lots of girls with just as pretty figures have to earn their livings doing acrobatics with sergeants de ville,” said Marc. A grimace brought down the corners of his mouth, he began to rub his stomach. “Oh, my God, my God, waiting for that hen I drank too many cocktails, and that champagne on top of it has given me indigestion. I shall not sleep as I would have done if she hadn’t been there, that hen, that crane.”
THOUGH IN the early part of the night Isabelle had woken up several times to find Marc threshing about and grumbling, he was so strong that when the morning came he felt very well. He jumped out of bed and bounded to the window, and put his head out to snuff the air, and when he found it almost as warm as summer, and full of the smells of the sea and the reviving earth, he cried out in pleasure and called her to join him. But she shook her head and pressed her face into the pillow, feeling less healthy, more jangled in nerves, than she had done since she had begun to have a child, though that was not to say that she felt really ill. Marc tenderly exclaimed in pity and came back to stroke her cheek, and tell her that she would be better when she had had her coffee, that it was all the fault of that Poots for keeping them up so late, and that they would not let the little ordure spoil another day of their holiday. When their breakfast had come and he had buttered her brioche for her, he went over to the window and stood there reporting on what was happening below. He was amused by the brisk cosmetic preparation to which a pleasure resort is subjected before its patrons have risen: the pulling down of coloured awnings, the sprinkling of the roads with a hose pipe, the work in the garden that was not so much gardening as maquillage of the flowerbeds, performed by men in sacking aprons whose appearance was more rudely suggestive of labour than any figures which would be seen about the town in half an hour’s time.
“How artificial it all is,” said Marc, “really too artificial! Now, that shocks me! Will you believe it, my dear, those hyacinths we liked so much are not growing in the earth at all! They are all in little pots. A boy has brought along a wheelbarrow full of them, and an old man is on his knees adding them one by one to make another row in the flower-bed and banking up the earth so that one does not see the pots. Now that I really think is going too far.”
“I thought it might be so,” said Isabelle. “Gardeners always want to do that, it helps them to make a good show. I have constant trouble in stopping them from doing it at home. But I do not know whether one is right in one’s objection to it. Probably the gardeners are not shocked by the artificiality of the idea because, living a more simple life than we do, they realize how artificial it is to have a garden at all.”
“You are perfectly right,” said Marc. “But how difficult it is for us human beings to make up our minds whether we want to be natural or not! While I have been standing here, I have been watching the ladies’ maids bringing down their mistresses’ pets for their morning excursions. What repressed lives we insist on those poor women leading! They must wear black, they must be neat and nimble, they must never notice their employers’ indiscretions, they must never have any of their own. How human beings must love order and discipline, one would think, to have such mercilessly ordered and disciplined creatures around them! Yet, look, they carry in their arms those who are far dearer to their employers than themselves, and see how these little creatures behave when they are set down on the earth! It is plainly the charm of their disorder and indiscipline which makes such little dogs precious to their owners—I am watching one little Pekinese now who is scratching on the ground with such spirit, such bravura in the abandon of her white tail, as she behaves in a way no ladies’ maid would dream of behaving in public. There is a human preference for the natural too.”
“But is not some gardener making it plain that on the whole the human preference for the artificial is stronger?” asked Isabelle.
“You are right,” said Marc. “A gardener is hurrying to her this very moment, to tell her to take the little beast away. Ah—but the natural is winning again. The maid is quite a pretty girl, a smile is coming over the gardener’s face, they are beginning a pleasant conversation, the dog is going on doing just what it pleases. What a lot one loses by being artificial! How delightful are these sudden encounters, almost as simple and sudden as that the Pekinese will have with that pug-dog if its guardians are not more observant—”
“I had no idea that the life we lead was so artificial that you and your friends no longer had sudden encounters with the opposite sex,” said Isabelle.
“Well, perhaps the men of my kind have not sacrificed that,” owned Marc, “but, believe me, we have made our sacrifices. Why, I can see an example before me now, for, do you know, this landscape is covered with Cupids shooting their bows, just as if it were a Boucher wall-painting. The man spraying the road with a hose pipe has just seen a female friend approaching him, a female friend who is sufficiently pleasing. He has taken off his cap, he has uttered a polite cry, but he wishes to do something more, she is so very pleasing. So he is waving his hose pipe towards her, carefully, so that the water does not reach her, in a cross between a courtly flourish and what would be considered in our world an obscene gesture. But he is doing it very nicely, it is well over the borderline towards the courtly flourish, though its other aspect is quite apparent. And his friend is responding so nicely, too, she is quickening her step and wrapping her shawl tighter round her and casting her eyes down so modestly, and smiling so prettily. Ah, why cannot we make such gestures in our world? For example, as a man I find Madame Ortega immensely attractive, but I have no way of showing her that it is so. If I were to use words, I might find myself drifting into a declaration, which would be awkward, for she would either have to rebuff me or encourage me, neither of which do I want. But what a charming, warm friendliness there would be established between us if I could make some public, playful, yet fully masculine gesture like this.”
“Darling, you do very well with the resources that you have,” said Isabelle, “and there is something I must tell you. The little friend on the sidewalk when she quickens her step and draws her shawl round her and smiles downwards, is not obeying her own impulse, she is simply doing it because she knows it is a pattern that pleases men. Within herself she feels contempt for the man because, when he is watering the road, he is thinking of something else than watering the road. Women hate people to do more than one thing at a time.”
“Yes, there is in women an extraordinary lack of poetry,” said Marc. “They dislike the uncontrollable excess in us, which produces the incalculable in life, which strikes out its pattern. But I cannot go into that now, I must have my bath. I promised to meet Philippe and his wife at the Golf House for a round at half past eleven. But that camel Poots is certain to be unpunctual.”
“Yes, but she is so perverse that that will make her certain to be on time once one has adjusted oneself to her habits,” said Isabelle.
But because of one thing and another that passed beneath the window, Marc stayed where he was, and they talked very comfortably until Luba came in, holding a telegram which announced that Mr. Pillans was arriving that morning at one o’clock and hoped that she and the Sallafranques would lunch with him. They greeted the announcement with pleasure, which they were careful not to make too emphatic, lest they should betray to her how desperate they thought her need for help, or rather suggest it to her, for in so far as her plight resulted from the heartlessness of human beings, and the freedom of destiny from any bias towards harmony, her nature had as yet remained half incredulous of it. She was already dressed, but her suit was on awry and her hair looked like a clumsy yellow cap. Isabelle rang for her maid and told her to straighten Luba’s dress and brush out her hair; and Luba was so purely amiable that there was no need to soften this indictment of her feminine competence by rallying her about it. She took her seat at the window and let the maid unpin her braids with the meekness of a little girl who accepts absolutely that her elders know better and mean well. But Isabelle, watching her from amongst the pillows, was sad to see that her vagueness no longer gave the impression of drifting serenity. Across her face there was passing a constant stream of infinitesimally delicate changes of expression, the most minute possible contraction of the brows or pursing of the lips, which gave an indication of restlessness that, if at any moment these movements became more marked, would shift into a complete picture of misery.
