The Thinking Reed (21 page)

Isabelle realized that she was watching something like the aimless twitchings of the hands of an enthusiastic knitter, who finds herself, by accident and not by design, without her accustomed work. Luba had had the habit of thinking lovingly of her lover all the time, even when she was talking and listening to the people about her with quite lively interest. Now she could not think of him with pleasure, or even with regret, for Leclerc had conveyed to her that he found it embarrassing to feel that she was suffering on his account; and she had accepted this final and supreme ejaculation of his egotism as a demand that he had no doubt some right to make, and she was acceding as far as she could. Except under the irresistible compulsion to suffering which is exercised by the night, she tried not to think of him; she averted her mind from him, as a dog averts his head from the master who has beaten it. But this prohibited her from exercising the tenderness which was her most essential function; it was thus an interference with the process of her nature that must in the end be fatal. Sitting there at the window, with her head bowed before the sunshine, she had something of the immobile and submissive air of a woman in whom one of the vital organs has begun to wither. “Oh, if only Alexander Pillans will marry her!” Isabelle exclaimed to herself. She reflected with surprise that innumerable people would fail to see that poor Luba, the lover who was denied the opportunity to love, was as dignified in her piteousness as a nun who, after spending her whole life performing pious offices in her convent, is suddenly flung out into the world by an abrupt dissolution of the order, and wanders lost and helpless, unless some devout household opens its door to her and permits her to remain within it, following the rule which is the only way of living that she knows. She shuddered in apprehension regarding the quality of life, an apprehension which was for some reason not allayed by the robust sound of Marc singing in the bathroom, by the spectacle of Luba sitting in the sunlight, her flesh glowing, yet still as alabaster.

At last they were all ready; but though they had taken their own time, and were indeed some twenty minutes late for their appointment at the Golf House, Philippe and Poots were not there. This immediately put Marc out of his good humour, and Isabelle too was vexed, since it meant that, instead of leaving him to take a walk with Luba, she had to sit down beside him on the veranda, where she immediately found herself to be surrounded by those who were inevitably her friends and naturally her enemies. But if she did not relish being told again and again that she was looking marvellous, and having to tell people again and again that they were looking marvellous, Marc was sociable by instinct and enjoyed meeting his kind just for the sake of meeting them, as dogs do, and the day placated her. It is as impossible for land on which there is a golf-course to be beautiful as it is for a woman who wears spectacles and has gold-crowned teeth, but the colours of the indefinite long grasses and the definite close-cropped greens, the frivolous larches and the graver pines, only temperately gay with spring, and the more interesting superior countryside of high-sailing clouds, were scoured to a crystal purity of tone by the salt air. Ferdy Monck was sitting beside them, reading the
Continental Daily Mail,
and sometimes calling out an item of news that he thought might interest Marc; and he paused, after telling them what amazing things were happening to aviation stock in the United States, to say in his thick, wine-tasting voice, “Your wife’s looking very pretty today, Sallafranque.” She was pleased at that, with the nervous humility of a pregnant woman, and anyway Ferdy always amused her by the contrast between his loose spirit and the physical envelope it had inherited from a great English family of the governing classes. The deep lines on his face had in fact been engraved by nothing whatsoever but his ability to satisfy women and his inability to satisfy creditors, but the family habit of his flesh organized these lines into the heavy mask of a statesman who has spent years pondering on the laws his firm hand must impose on his people. His appearance lent to their hour of idling on the veranda the spaciousness and moral dignity of leisure enjoyed between sessions of Parliament. She closed her eyes and drowsed, sometimes smiling to herself.

Suddenly Renart and Poots were with them. They were exactly seventy minutes late for the appointment. Renart was apologetic but not really perturbed. It was as if he had taken a job with some organization such as a circus, which was bound to cause a great deal of traffic disorganization, and while his natural politeness always made him apologize to the people who were thereby inconvenienced, he wore the steady serenity of one who knows that nothing is happening which is not inevitable and provided against by plan. Poots, however, was wholly without serenity as in her timbreless, worried gabble she said things which either meant that since early that morning a vast concourse of persons had surrounded the hotel while a horde of other individuals rang her up on the telephone, in a fatuous and malicious attempt to prevent her from keeping the appointment, or meant nothing at all except that she knew she was late. Marc briskly set about shepherding Philippe towards the game which they had so nearly missed, and Isabelle realized that Poots had not arranged for a partner and intended not to play golf but to pass the morning in her company. But as the girl still showed no disposition to be civil to Luba, and as she seemed even more objectionable by day than by night, since she looked even more healthy and likely to survive to old age, Isabelle backed away from her, borrowing her own technique, gabbling that a vast concourse of persons were even now waiting for her at the hotel, that a horde of individuals intended to ring her up there during the morning. Since this manner of speaking was so little Poots’s invention, so much the fashion of her group, it did not strike her that Isabelle was being malicious in using it. But Isabelle laughed as she met Marc’s eyes, and she laughed more loudly because just then an Englishman, strolling by with his clubs, had looked up and seen Ferdy Monck reading the paper, and had called out, “What, not golfin’ today, Ferdy?” at which Ferdy had shaken his head and answered, “No, not golfin’ today.” There was in the inquirer’s tone such solemnity, such innocence of any scale of values by which it could be a matter of unimportance whether Ferdy golfed or not; there was in Ferdy’s tone so rich a sense of judicial deliberation in a high court dealing with cases of luxury, the unhurried exercise of a sage preference among pleasures by an epicurean so complacent and pompous that it might well have assumed wig and gown. It was odd that she and Marc should find themselves among such ridiculous people.

She and Luba walked for a time among the woods and avenues, which were still parti-coloured, the tall trees being black as a funeral, and the bushes and the slighter, more precocious kinds of tree as gay as a wedding with sticky silver buds and new green leaves bright like wet paint. Rain had fallen during the night and in the road there were pools full of blue sky and white clouds, dispersed every now and then by the bathing of draggled little birds; and a rich yet light and clean smell rose from the earth. But the gross unpunctuality of Poots had left them only a short space for their promenade, since they had to be back at the hotel to lunch with Mr. Pillans. Isabelle took Luba upstairs and bade the maid carefully repowder her and recoiffe her hair, and then went down alone so that she could have a few words with Mr. Pillans by herself and decide in what direction she should most profitably steer the conversation during lunch. When the page pointed him out, he was using one of the most common expedients of the shy man left in a public place: he was patting a dog while having himself the air of a dog who would like to be patted. There was, Isabelle suspected, further evidence of a profound lack of self-confidence in the unsuitably thick and rustic suit he was wearing. He was probably one of those, men and women, who outwit the most careful personal servants by going into a tantrum of disgust when they see themselves finally dressed in the mirror, and insisting at the last minute on changing into other clothes, any other clothes. Beyond these he offered few hints of salient characteristics. His Scotch father had given him sandy hair and restrained lips. He greeted her with an agreeable voice, though with a Middle West accent much stronger than one would expect in the son of a very rich man; he looked younger than his forty-one years, and he was one of those men who, though not much under average height, would always be called little men, because of some patent but indefinable deficiency. When first he stood up, his face was stiff with shyness, and she noted that very deep lines, lines as deep as any on Ferdy’s mask, could be graved on a man’s face by his inability to satisfy women and his ability to satisfy creditors.

“He has suffered enormously,” she thought to herself, “and Luba will be able to comfort him. She has probably never grasped what the physical act of passion is about, I am almost sure that the only satisfaction she really requires is permission to love someone. And she will annul his wealth, not by the amount of it she will spend, but by the way she will spend it, as if dollars were the chestnut conkers children use in their games, and by the way it will never cross her mind that people will ever alter their attitude to her just because she is rich. She is like Marc in that. Ah, Marc, Marc.” For a second she was transfixed by the thought of his extraordinary candour and simplicity, of her amazing good fortune in marrying him; then went on aloud, “We are so pleased that you have come here, because you are a friend of Luba, and we adore Luba. As, of course, everybody does.”

“I should think everybody would,” said Mr. Pillans, “the Princess is so very, very beautiful.”

“Ah, isn’t she!” exclaimed Isabelle. She was aware that he would place her own good looks far below beauty, that her regularity and pallor must fail to please one whose simplicity demanded a golden, Eve-like abundance, so she went on confidentially, “You know, it is almost embarrassing to go about with someone who attracts such attention. Wherever we go, people stare at her.”

“I would think folks would stare at you, too, Madame Sallafranque,” he said, politely. “But yes, I know that’s true, I stared at her pretty hard myself once, in a theatre in Paris three years ago. I thought then I’d be mighty pleased to meet her, but I was kind of busy.” He sighed. “I dare say you know I’ve been married three times before,” he said, and Isabelle did not find it indecent of him to mention it so soon. He spoke with the innocent wonder of a farmer in whose byre a two-headed cow has been born. In any case, had his manner been far less innocent, Isabelle would have forgiven him, so pleased was she at the implications contained in his use of the word “before.” She murmured sympathetically, and he went on, crinkling up his eyes in pleased reminiscence, “She was with a big, tall chap they said was a very rich man who was crazy about her.”

“Ah, there have been many such,” smiled Isabelle.

“I expect the Princess wouldn’t even remember his name if you told it to her,” said Mr. Pillans, with the air of one turning over an enjoyable thought on his palate. “Beautiful women are very cruel. But here she is.” He rose to his feet, but did not go forward to meet Luba as she walked down the hall to them. Instead he stood still, watching her and nodding his head as if in appreciation of a performance. Isabelle realized that she had grounds for her hopes, that there was a constant force in this man which would make him marry Luba as it had made him marry Liane Mardi and Margherita Stravazzi. It had been his unhappy lot to be born with a craving for the picturesque into a community and a countryside the least in the world capable of gratifying it. If he had wanted beauty, the Middle West might have given it to him with its prairies and its strong people; but he wanted crowned kings, cardinals in their purple, Venetian courtesans, and a whole rich phase of life that had long disappeared from almost every part of the globe where his nervousness would trust itself. When he had first seen stage women descending painted wooden staircases in spectacular nudity topped to twice its height with plumes, while cuirassed Negroes blew on trumpets, he must have come nearer his dream than ever before. But his dream had been better than that. He had a gentle kind of taste. He had taken the counterfeit only because he could not find the real; when a fragment of reality was presented to him, he recognized it and stretched towards it a reverent hand. The stateliness which Luba had derived from her education for the Imperial Court had for long not been properly seen by those who saw it, because it was associated in their minds with the impossible task of trying to find work for émigrées who could not work; but Mr. Pillans was seeing it as the superb achievement that it was.

“I hope,” he murmured anxiously, “that they have given us a really good table in the restaurant.”

It was a pity, Isabelle thought, that when the head waiter confessed that the table he had reserved for them had been pirated by an American oil magnate, who could not be crossed, Luba should have said so happily, “Ah, well, let us sit at the little table behind the pillar. What does it matter? We are friends, we want to talk, we want to eat, the table cannot be of importance!” She crossed the room without picking up the eyes of any of her important friends, smiling vaguely at the sunshine, and at waiters whom she probably quite wrongly believed to have waited on her at other hotels, and to have then shown her exceptional kindness. “I do not believe this affair will go, not at all,” fretted Isabelle, and she became more doubtful still when Mr. Pillans bent deferentially towards Luba, asking what she had done the day before, and plainly expecting an answer like a crowded paragraph in the social column of the Paris
New York Herald,
for Luba replied that Marc had bought them a rubber ball painted with flowers and they had played with it on the sands. But as she remembered how pleasant that morning had been, her face became filled with visionary power, and she described just how pleasant it had been for the three of them who liked each other, down there on the clean yellow sands, with the grey sea swinging down its gentle, steady blows of tonic coolness and the ball bouncing from hand to hand, and presently Mr. Pillans began to nod his head and say, “It must have been fine. I’d have liked to be there.” Of course he would like to have been there, thought Isabelle; he is one of us who prefer the occasions where human beings lay down their arms, who find battle disgusting. She knew then that all must go well. He could not fail to notice that it was Luba’s distinguishing characteristic to have thrown away all arms, to be defenceless because she had so absolutely renounced battle. She smiled benevolently when Luba cried, “And I had forgotten! Down on the sands there was a dog! Such a beautiful dog, I cannot think how the people who owned him could let him run loose!” This caused Mr. Pillans to remember a dog he had owned when he was a boy back in St. Louis, that had long since fallen off a footbridge over a river and got swept away by the current, and another dog that he had seen in Brussels when he was there between trains, and had nearly bought, it was so cute, though goodness knows what he would have done with it if he had. Isabelle felt placidly that she need no longer listen, and retired into comfortable speculations as to what her child would be like.