The Thinking Reed (24 page)
They might, of course, be living a simple and sincere life in the midst of these misconceptions. That was what Isabelle had heard their friends say of them, and in the course of the family gossip by the fireside the three women had constantly remarked of their relatives that they were so natural, so unaffected, so unspoiled. But she knew well, because her own circumstances had often tempted her very near their mode of living, that nothing could be more fatal to singleness of heart than wealth. At that very moment she could hear Lady Barron, while she explained to Luba how she longed to be back in her home in England, saying, “You know, I am never so happy as when I put on my old rush hat and go out to potter in my garden.” It could be heard in her tone that she had no clear vision of the delight of wearing easy clothes and moving in loved surroundings, but was in part standing outside herself, rapt in admiration of her own simplicity, which could find satisfaction in a pleasure so much less pompous than the special recreations within the reach of the Lauristons. Such a disposition reduced every thought and action to a gesticulation made in a mirror; it made life an incoherent succession of self-gratulatory moments, in which no real moral habit could be formed. One lived solely according to the dictates of vanity, without the discipline of obedience to fixed external standards. One was kind, out of a bounty that could hardly be exhausted, to old governesses and gardeners, who could be relied upon to give thanks with proper abjection; one performed public duties, for which one was paid in full by deference; one was chaste, refusing to run away from one’s husband with other men who for the most part did not ask one to do so, and who in any case had nothing to offer better than one’s own home. Knowing no difficulties one was without fortitude; knowing no criteria but one’s own achievements one was without taste. So, if one’s economic support was ripped away, and one was left with no inexhaustible bounty, nor governesses, nor gardeners, nor the same inducements to chastity, one was disclosed as Poots.
Isabelle felt intolerably constrained and indeed guilty, sitting in this room full of fatuous women, of doggedly perverse girls, who exhaled an infection to which she had recently felt susceptible. Only the other day she had congratulated herself on the promptitude with which she paid her bills, although it could only have been by the most perversely extravagant purchase of commodities for which one has but a limited appetite, such as furs and jewels, that she could have come near to straining the ample funds of her own income and Marc’s allowance. She could see how even Marc’s sweetness could degenerate, through the influences of their money state, into dangerous smugness, for his unconsciousness that people were influenced in their attitude towards him by the thought of his great wealth necessarily meant that he thought people liked him more than they did most people, and it would be hardly natural for a popular person not to ascribe his popularity to deep and self-flattering causes. The same situation meant that he had been exempt from criticism nearly all his adult life, and though this had not made him morally null like the Lauristons, thanks to his sounder instincts, it had made him undisciplined and uncontrolled. But since Marc was certainly superior to herself in every way, she knew that she must possess these faults or worse. She was aware that she had a tendency to be priggish and censorious, and now she wondered in panic just how far it had gone. She looked round at the clutch of painted girls whispering together on the sofa, the frieze of explanatory women who had separated Luba from the moonlight and were telling her about their family with an air of doing mission work among foreigners, and she detested them all because they had nothing sensible and comminatory to say against her. It would have pleased her to be rebuked caustically for some grave fault till the tears ran down her cheeks, so that a regenerative process could begin at once.
Hastily she rose and went to the mantelpiece and looked in the mirror while she powdered herself. “There is a lot in what you are saying,” she told her image in the glass, “but the way you are taking it is due to the fact that you are going to have a baby quite soon.”
She was confounded at realizing for the first time as a matter of experience that her body and her mind were not welded together into immutable amity, that her body could wage a war on her mind and overpower it into acting in a mode altogether out of its taste. She paused as she was lifting the puff to her face and stared at the blue veins on her wrist. They were her, they were not her, they were part of a system that might develop a profound hostility to her, that might even abolish her altogether. Regret possessed her that she had not been born on some other planet where the arrangements were less paradoxical, and she would have liked to run out of this room, where the paradoxical quality of this earth seemed to exist in a highly concentrated form. At that very moment she saw in the mirror the men coming through the door behind her, and turned about to go to Marc, in a flutter of relief that a tender, older woman in herself marked as girlish. For a second she was distressed because the purplish shadows of Marc’s face showed that to drag himself through the evening he had taken more than might have been expected of the wine he had recognized as from Gloucestershire. But he turned a kind eye on her, he held his fingers crooked against his trouser-braid as he did when he wanted to give her a sign that if she stood close beside him she could hold his hand without people noticing.
“Darling,” she murmured to him, “I feel so miserable. Take me home.”
“At once, at once,” he said. “We will make our apologies as soon as these ordures of the second rank have taken their departure.”
For Ferdy Monck had gone to his aunts and was saying, with a large, proconsular gesture, directed towards the moonlight, “Sorry, I’ve got to get back. Got to see. A man.” His tone suggested there were thousands of sexes from which might have been drawn suitable subjects for this stately conference; but he happened to have chosen a man. Nothing could, however, have been clearer than that it was not a man he was going to meet. And, indeed, behind him, Bridget jumped up from the sofa and said, “Ferdy, dear, could you give me a lift? I have to be back to see a tiresome woman,” with a weary detachment that would have been unnatural between casual acquaintances, much less friends and relatives, though not more so than the weary detachment of his answer. A desert, cold and broad as the face of the moon, seemed to divide them. It could not be doubted by any person of experience that presently they would be divided by nothing at all.
“Look, how the girls on the sofa give her a little businesslike nod, and go on talking,” said Marc. “I tell you, it is just what you will see in a very low café, at two or three in the morning, when one of the girls has a bit of luck and goes on, leaving the others sitting round an iron table. Come now, we ought to be able to get away in a minute.”
But just then the door was thrown open, and a woman like an eagle came in, crying, “Would you believe it, those other Americans didn’t shoot either.”
“More and more ordures,” said Marc.
“Hush,” said Isabelle.
“We are only their guests, they are not listening,” said Marc.
In accents of adoration Lady McKentrie said to them, “This is my sister, Lady Barnaclouth. For some reason her dinner seems to have broken up early. Come, you must meet her. Eva, my dear.”
“Charmed to meet you,” said the aquiline woman to Marc and Isabelle. “So sorry I couldn’t be here for dinner. But who did you say you were?”
Lady McKentrie said, “This is Monsieur and Madame Sallafranque.”
“Yes, yes,” said the aquiline woman. “But why are you talking such nonsense, Katherine? I don’t know why you call them Monsieur and Madame. They are Americans. These are the first Americans who didn’t shoot. Now, let’s talk this thing out, Mr. Sallafranque. I’m a great believer in talking things out. That’s how I’ve gone through life, and learned what I have learned. By talking things out, straight from the shoulder. I’ve always found that if you talk to really great men they don’t mind how straight you are, and I know, I’ve talked to all the greatest men in Europe ever since I was a girl. I’m paying you a compliment by treating you as I treated them. Now, Mr. Sallafranque, why don’t you shoot?”
“I do shoot,” said Marc. “For four years I did nothing but shoot. But I shot only Germans. How foolish it seems now that I shot only Germans.”
“Oh, I don’t mean that kind of shooting,” said the aquiline woman. “Though of course I feel as you do about the war. It was a great mistake. If people had listened to my husband, it never would have happened. But we always pamper the French, who are the meanest, most imperialist people on earth. I am a Liberal. But to get back to the point, why don’t you shoot? As a sport, I mean. It trains eye and hand, and it takes one into the healthy open air. You Americans need more of that sort of thing. You sit in those great ugly skyscrapers all day, thinking of nothing but making money, and drink ice water and get baked by that horrid central heating. It’s no wonder you all get ill and quarrel with your wives.”
“How perfectly you know my life,” said Marc.
Isabelle turned away, for she had remembered the existence of Luba. If they were leaving, and it seemed advisable that they should do so as soon as possible, they must take her with them, and Mr. Pillans also, if that could be done. She caught Luba’s eye at once, but Mr. Pillans had seated himself in the moonlight by the window and was gazing at Poots. To reach him she had to make an apologetic gesture to the painter, Alan Fielding, who was coming towards her with that gay, dark fire of eye that she knew would be all she would recall of him when they left the room. He evidently meant to talk, and she had to excuse herself for evading him by giving a glance which, she knew immediately, suggested too emphatically that she would like to talk to him some other time. That was a pity, for she wanted not one more person in her life. But she forgot the annoyance at this mistake in the pleasure of executing an ingenious idea that had occurred to her.
“Come,” she murmured into Mr. Pillans’s ear, “it is time that we were going.”
He lifted his head in surprise. “What, already?” he exclaimed.
She affected a blank stare, which after a moment she allowed to be brightened by pity and comprehension. “Did you not know,” she asked kindly, “when one dines with the English aristocracy one leaves immediately after the meal? It is the rule. Did you not see that Mr. Monck and his young cousins have left already?”
“Why, so they have,” said Mr. Pillans.
“And watch Lady Barnaclouth. Does she not show signs of irritation as she talks to my husband?”
“She sure does,” said Mr. Pillans.
“It is because she thinks we ought already to be making our farewells,” said Isabelle. “Come, let us go.”
As Mr. Pillans followed her across the room, he said, “I see how lucky I am in having friends like you to pilot me round. We have no such rule as this in St. Louis, and I would just have stayed awn and awn, getting myself in wrong. I am very grateful to you.”
“Do not thank me,” said Isabelle. But her amusement waned when she brought Luba and Mr. Pillans up to the group of their hostesses, for Marc did not turn to her at once, but preferred to remain under the spell of his fury with Lady Barnaclouth.
“No exercise, that’s what’s wrong with you Americans,” she was saying. “Not enough fresh air. Did you ever read what St. Francis said about the air? My girl Clare, who’s going to be a great artist, copied it out when she was only fifteen in India ink on vellum and we had it framed and hung in the gunroom at Harthing. Everybody’s moved by it, even Prime Ministers. Everybody except Lord Curzon. But he had no heart. Well, that’s what you need. It’s for lack of fresh air and sport that you Americans have no virility. That, and being taught by women teachers.”
“Madame, you are making an extraordinary complaint against me,” said Marc.
Isabelle jerked his arm. She thought he was being silly in getting so angry with this woman, in not seeing that she was in her way a prodigy. She looked like an eagle, she had an air of soaring like an eagle; and though the name of the empyrean in which she soared was stupidity, there was power in the spread wings, beating higher and higher from folly to folly. Moreover, Isabelle thought, Marc was being unkind. He was not taking her away when she wanted to go. There rushed upon her a sense of desolation that would have been extreme if he had driven off in his automobile and left her to find her own way back to the hotel. Remembering her state, she held up her hand and looked at the blue veins in her wrist.
“SHALL WE leave this infected place and go home?” Marc had asked Isabelle as he was dressing next morning. But she had shaken her head. She felt too tired to face the drive back at once; indeed she found herself more ill at ease in her body than ever before, and she had had bad dreams. Even if they did go, they would only let themselves in for two days of discomfort, as she had sent both the chef and the maître d’hôtel off on a holiday. Still, she was sorry for her decision several times that day, and on the afternoon of the next day it seemed to her that she had been monstrously imprudent. They were sitting in the lounge of the Guillaume-le-Conquérant while lashes of rain striped the great windows almost horizontally, and they were obliged to converse about unpleasant subjects, since so many unpleasant things, and those vitally affecting their friends, had happened to them during the last forty-eight hours.
“I suppose you will insist on our child being taught English,” said Marc.
“Do not be absurd, my love,” said Isabelle. “Poots is not the entire English-speaking world.”
“No, but with the Lauristons she makes up the majority,” said Marc. “My God, my God, how I pray that she has got separated from the party, and that the rain will drench her to the skin, and that she will catch pneumonia, and die like an animal.”
“She has perfect health,” said Isabelle, “she will outlive us all.”
“There you are both right and wrong,” said Marc. “She has superb health, I know. When I prayed that she should be stricken with sudden death, I had no real hope that this would occur, I was merely expressing a desire that for once destiny might act exquisitely and directly instead of clumsily and circuitously, as is its habit. But though she is so marvellously healthy, she will not outlive us. One day she will be found dead in a small hotel near the Gare du Nord, either strangled or with her throat cut from ear to ear. Later it will be proved that a garcon de café left the hotel between three and four that morning, carrying a suitcase. That will happen a long time before we are dead, in ten or twelve years. Though, my God, my God, that is a long time to wait.”
