The Thinking Reed (23 page)

There was a moment’s silence, and Isabelle turned a brilliant smile on the whole room, because her resentment that she was here and not eating bread-and-milk in bed at home became suddenly so strong that she felt it must be visible. Her smile vanished, as the tail of her eye showed her that Poots and Bridget and Lettice were all staring in a disagreeable way at Luba, who was standing incandescent with her own beauty. They were using their queer trick of seeming to have authority to impose their own meagre and garish looks as a standard, and were condemning her as large and clumsy and unaccented. Poots put up her blood-tipped forefinger and beckoned to Mr. Pillans with an insincere, tooth-baring smile. He obeyed nimbly, and Luba was left alone until Isabelle went to her. But almost immediately they went in to dinner, and Mr. Pillans was put between Poots and Lady Barron, where he sat looking pleased, and Luba was put between Philippe, who gazed like a devoted terrier at his wife and his English relatives all the time, and one of the young Englishmen, who apparently felt that he had contributed sufficiently to life without making conversation. Isabelle sighed, and the painter, who was sitting on her right, asked her the reason, and she was faintly exasperated because she had to answer him so evasively that there arose opportunities for coquetry, which he did not neglect. She could not turn away from him, as the silver-haired man, Sir John Lauriston, was sitting on her left and proved to be suffering from some kind of mental disorder which compelled him to say everything three times. So she talked to the painter with amiable indifference till suddenly she found herself staring silently into his face, her mouth a little open, because she had overheard a passage between Marc and Lady McKentrie.

“You see,” Lady McKentrie had been inspired to say, “we take no chances when we go abroad, we bring our own cook from Gloucestershire.”

“
Tiens,
” Marc had answered, looking at the food on his plate. “And your wine, too, I can taste, was grown in Gloucestershire.” She could hear from his voice that he was savagely angry, far angrier than she had ever seen him before. It amazed her that he should have so little sense of proportion, for in the worst attack that she had ever seen made on his pride and dignity, when Monsieur Campofiore had come to him full of insolence and malignity and had inflicted on him a humiliation threatening his life-work, he had kept his temper and had been able to talk with sweetness of his tormentor. But now, simply because this imbecile woman had made a remark so comically stupid that had they been malicious they could have dined out on it for a fortnight, his face was dark with rage, his hand was playing so nervously with the stem of his glass that in an effort to regain his self-control he lifted it to his lips and drained in one draught the wine he had condemned. His mouth twitched in distaste, and she expected him to laugh at having inflicted on himself this unnecessary punishment, but he continued to stare in front of him, stiffly solemn in fury. She realized that the remark had offended his nationalism, that he was feeling in little over the implied insult to French cooking what he must have felt in large over the bombing of Rheims Cathedral by the Germans, but she still could not understand how anybody who had usually such a strong sense of humour could let himself feel like that. An exclamation of wonder fell from her, and when the painter asked her its cause, she was not sufficiently organized to invent an evasive reply, so that she found herself murmuring, “It is strange that one cannot understand anybody else completely, even if one is married to them, that there is always a mystery …” But she immediately perceived that she was interesting him too much, and she recovered herself by asking whether he did not as an artist think Luba immensely beautiful. He gave her pleasure by agreeing, but Isabelle did not enjoy contemplating Luba as she sat with her eyes on her plate, between her two silent neighbours. Poots was having a better time. She was still not eating, she was pushing her food about with a fork, or thrusting away her plate, but she was looking up under drooping lids into Mr. Pillans’s face, and talking to him in a gabbling undertone. He looked like a country boy who for the first time has had a spare penny to spend on a peep-show. It was incredible that he should now be so inferior to himself as he had been at lunchtime.

Isabelle was glad when the time came for the women to leave the table, though it was not very pleasant in the drawing room. Nobody took any notice of her and Luba. Poots and Bridget and Lettice sat down on the sofa again, putting their heads together and whispering like ill-mannered schoolgirls. It was evident that Poots felt so confident in her new triumph that she could not be bothered keeping up appearances with people who were simply friends of her husband’s family. Lady Barron and Lady McKentrie and the third plain woman gathered together in front of the hearth, where a wood fire was smoking, and talked among themselves, each putting one boat-shaped foot in a low-heeled slipper on the fender and wagging it backwards and forwards. Luba strolled over to a seat by the window, and pulled apart the curtains so that she could look on the garden, which was frosted by the light from the full moon that rode among the treetops of the wood beyond. All the others paused while she did this, and stared, as if she were showing signs of eccentricity. Isabelle sat down by the group at the fireside, because she wanted to know what such women as these talked about, and as she did not intend to see them again this would be her last opportunity; and they seemed so completely unaware of her that she could hardly be considered to be intruding. They were talking, she learned, about members of their own family. One had had a note from Guy, another had heard from Stephen, the third had had a line from Janet. The famous names of great houses were mentioned as being moved from or into by these and many other of their tribe, as being opened or shut by them, inherited or sold. There were reported also comings and goings between the Embassies of the earth, of visits, always agreeable, to the Colonies and Protectorates, of a constant kind and wise attention to both by the home Legislatures, but Isabelle noticed that these reports were made modestly, as indeed was logical, for it was evidently felt that such contacts did not add lustre to the family, but were specimens of the rays which, taken in mass, composed that lustre. There was, in fact, an astonishing vanity implicit in this conversation, very quietly and moderately expressed. A listening simpleton would have seen England as a vinery where there was being fostered only one bunch of grapes, and that the Lauriston family, but where this paucity of production was never regretted, since each Lauriston grape was so enormous, so velvety with bloom, so bursting with sweetness, that the single bunch far exceeded in value what could have been hoped for from letting the vine bear its full crop; and he would have believed that he was hearing this from sober and reliable vine-growers, repeating the common talk of their trade.

Isabelle had not come to this dinner party to give her lower nature an opportunity to rejoice in the oddity of her fellow creatures; but now she was there it seemed ridiculous not to listen. So she heard that Lionel was head of Pop and promised to be as fine a classical scholar as his grandfather, and that Clare had profited by her visit to her aunt’s villa at Settignano to do some really remarkable water-colours, and she greatly enjoyed the overtones of the conversation, which implied that, if scholarship should pass beyond the limits accessible to Lionel and his grandfather, it became pedantry, and incompatible with the ready response to the call for action which was required of the great, and that, if the art of painting followed more ambitious ends than Clare’s water-colours, it had forgotten its place. She heard, too, the third plain woman, who always spoke with an air of pleasure at her own downrightness, ask why Jack had got into this tiresome habit of saying everything three times over and, on receiving the hushed answer that he had been like that ever since he had had a stroke last Christmas, express a fear that that must have meant his leaving the service, only to be reassured. For the two others owned that this had been suggested by tiresome people, who had somehow intruded into positions of importance while remaining spiritually outside, but that of course he had been begged to remain.

“After all,” said Lady Barron, “he still has the Lauriston charm.”

“Yes, indeed,” said the third plain woman. “And it’s a very wonderful thing, the Lauriston charm.”

They all uttered deep, assenting sounds, and looked reflectively into the fire, waggling their broad, low-heeled black satin shoes on the fender.

“I’ve often wondered how one could analyse the Lauriston charm,” said Lady Barron.

“I remember we talked that over once, one Sunday at Harthing, in the old days when Gilbert was still alive,” said Lady McKentrie. “Eva said something that got very close to it, I thought.”

“Yes?” said the other two.

“She said that we were always true to our principles and our sense of duty, but at the same time we never ceased to be gay and carefree and unaffected, and the combination was irresistible.”

Lady Barron shook her head. “There’s more in it than that,” she said.

“Yes,” said the third plain woman, “that isn’t all there is to it.”

They looked down again into the fire and waggled their shoes. Isabelle, while still hoping not to be ill-natured, wished that the conversation might continue, and when Luba rose from her seat at the window and came towards her, she raised a finger to her lips. But Luba’s movement had already reminded the three women that they had guests, and they turned about, smiling graciously.

“We were talking,” said Lady McKentrie, “of the Lauriston charm. We were trying to define it.”

“You should talk that over with my husband,” said Isabelle, “he has sometimes a very nice sense of language.”

“Who is this that has charm?” asked Luba.

“The Lauristons,” answered Lady Barron.

“Who are the Lauristons?” asked Luba.

“We are the Lauristons,” answered the third plain woman.

“Ah,” said Luba, her face filling with kind laughter, “you are the Lauristons and you are asking yourselves why you have charm? Why, you have given yourselves the answer. You have charm because you are like little children, because only little children would be simple enough to ask themselves that question. But come to the window, I have something important to show you.” She linked one arm about Isabelle’s shoulders and the other about the waist of the third plain woman, who assumed an unamused expression of amused indulgence. “Look, look!” she said.

The lawn was sanded over with moonlight, and in this strong, diffused brightness the trees that pressed in on the garden seemed to be covered with a bloom like the velvet on a young stag’s antlers. A clearing within the wood caught the full force of the downpouring light and shone silver between the black trunks, suddenly definite among the vagueness.

“Ah, beautiful!” sighed Isabelle. She remembered Roy, who had been young and strong, who was now dead; she was aware of the warmth and tenderness of Marc; she admitted to herself that childbirth had its dangers; it appeared possible to her that her child might live, and be adorable, while she lay cheated and forgotten in her grave. Tears stood in her eyes because things were so sweet, and so unguaranteed by fate. The moment ached, as if music were being played somewhere on an instrument whose strings had some connexion with her heart.

“How I would like to walk in that wood,” said Luba, “if only one could be sure that the path led nowhere! Would it not be enchanting?”

“Oh, no,” said the plain woman. “One might meet a man.”

They stood looking out into the moonlight, until a telephone whirred at a table beside them. Lady Barron went to it, beaming at them and saying, with an air of one promising the people good news, “It might be George, to tell us that Violet’s baby has come.” But Isabelle, feeling no pleasure, expressed none; and Lady Barron gave her a sharp look, that to anyone who had been socially dependent on her would have carried an alarming rebuke. Isabelle understood how it was that Virgil, writing of the expected birth of a child to some Roman Lauristons, had been thought by later generations to have prophesied the birth of a Messiah. It was, however, not George who was on the telephone, but Bonzo, ringing up from Frinton-on-Sea. Poots hurried up, with an air of solving an emergency by her common sense which would hardly have been justified if she had come to stop a gas escape, and Bonzo and she had a jabbered conversation such as monkeys might have on the telephone, could monkeys telephone.

Isabelle went and sat apart, her melancholy deepening. These women were fatuous with a fatuity which had threatened her all her life, as it threatened all people of means, and which was of mournful significance for humanity in general, since it proved the emptiness of one of man’s most reasonable expectations. No more sensible form of government could be imagined than aristocracy. If certain able stocks in the community were able to amass enough wealth to give their descendants beautiful houses to grow up in, the widest opportunities of education, complete economic security, so that they need never be influenced by mercenary considerations, and easy access to any form of public work they chose to undertake—why, then, the community had a race of perfect governors ready made. Only, as the Lauristons showed, the process worked out wholly different in practice. There came to these selected stocks a deadly, ungrateful complacence, which made them count these opportunities as their achievements, and belittle everybody else’s achievements unless these were similarly confused with opportunities; and which did worse than this, by abolishing all standards from their minds except what they themselves were and did. That these women were plain was of no importance; she knew many very pleasing women who were that. But the lack of bashfulness with which they carried their plainness, and their failure to mitigate it in any way by the cultivation of grace or the niceties of dress, showed that they had dismissed the ideal of beauty from their world. They were conscious that the female appearance sometimes offered gratifications that theirs did not, but this recognition did not make them humble or put them under any obligation to admire people outside their clan. Simply they identified the appearance which offered these gratifications with that presented by female Lauristons under thirty. When Janet and Clare and the pregnant Violet had been mentioned, time had been spared to comment on their attractiveness, which was so great that it even recalled the attractiveness which their mothers, aunts, and elder female cousins had possessed at the same age. Indeed, beauty was to them merely a photograph in a family album, just as scholarship in their language was not an abstract noun, but the name of something won, with almost unfair ease, by Lionel and his grandfather. There could be no end to the things which to them seemed far less complicated than they were. A prolonged sojourn with them would make one see England itself as a wormcast of the Lauristons.