The Thinking Reed (33 page)

“But, Marc,” she said, “I am ill now. I think I am going to faint.”

“Nonsense,” he said, “you are not the sort of woman who faints. I do not believe you have ever fainted in your life.”

Knowing herself, she muttered, “How could you say that? I shall never be able to forget it. You ought to know I will never be able to forget it. I will never say anything about it, of course, but it will always be there.” She laid her hand on his forearm and smiled, turning her face about so that the people round them could see it and think them enjoying some small family joke.

“If you please, Marc,” said Luba, “I do not want to play. I have no luck, you see.”

“You are afraid of Isabelle,” said Marc, roughly. “Come on, come on. Let us take our seats.”

Isabelle knew that in a second he would throw off her hand. Thoughtfully she looked round the hateful room. She and Luba stood for life, but they were in a minority in this place where life itself lay stretched on the tables as on mortuary slabs. Yet, though they were in a minority, they were not helpless, for she still possessed this new poetic power, to which the nature of all problems was immediately apparent, which plotted out their solutions in points bright as stars where there had been blankness before. It had not left her, though she had not been conscious of it while she had been pleading with Marc. She stood swaying, leaning on his arm, and let the power have its way with her, working through the painful darkness of her mind like a great iridescent snake, strong and flexible and strange.

“Ah!” she breathed. She perceived a plan by which she might save Marc, and save Luba too. It had presented itself to her instantaneously achieved and intricate, like one of those complex knots a snake can form with a single turn of its coils. By using the very same lie she had been telling Mr. Pillans, she could save them all.

“Let go,” said Marc. “Let go. I do not want to lose my place at the table.”

She shuddered, but not at his unkindness. She had realized that the plan demanded from her the kind of behaviour she found most repellent. Her body must become an instrument of violence and disorder. “Let go,” said Marc.

She opened her mouth and listened to the high scream that came out of it. It passed like a wind through the room, turning towards her all the people who had specially acute senses, or who had not been specially interested in what they were doing. The others remained, huddled over the cards or staring into the faces of those whom they loved, like bushes or trees too sturdy to be moved by a breeze.

“But, Isabelle!” said Marc.

It did not seem possible that she was sufficiently disciplined to carry out this undisciplined action. She felt as she had when she was grinding the roses into the mud outside André de Verviers’s door, but this time the brutality she was doing to her own nature amounted to torture. But the power within her had its strength, it lifted her arm and made her strike Luba loudly on the cheek.

She cried in a mad, clear voice, “Do you think I do not know, Luba? Do you think I do not know that you are my husband’s mistress?”

Her heart leapt up in her for she saw Marc’s face darken and change from the loose-fitting mask of a stupid, sodden man to the twitching muzzle of an anxious, faithful dog; and she also saw Mr. Pillans move to Luba’s side and slip his arm through hers.

“Look at her!” she cried. “Look at her innocent face! She will never admit it, never in her life. But it is true!” Her voice was almost a shriek.

“You are mad, Isabelle, you are mad!” breathed Marc.

“This is your own damn fault, Sallafranque,” said Alan Fielding. “I’ll take her home. I can look after her if you can’t.”

“That you will not do,” said Marc. “Will you let go of my wife’s arm? Come, Isabelle.”

“I will take care of the Princess,” announced Mr. Pillans.

The whole room had fallen silent. The people at the tables had all stopped playing and were standing up. Isabelle’s power had left her, she had let it go out of her like an exhaled breath after her last monstrous shrilling. She had now to manage the situation with her ordinary wits, and this she felt unable to do, because some new factor developed which she could not identify, though she knew it was appalling. There was something happening in this room worse than the awful action she had just been forced to commit, and it was outside her control. While Marc and Alan Fielding put their arms about her, urging her to move, she stood stock-still, wondering what it was. She imagined it might be her recognition that the turning of all these faces towards her meant that for the rest of her life she would be pointed out as a hysteric, if not an actual madwoman. Many people would be sure to say she had been drunk. Those who hated her in this vile world would despise her as she despised them, which she felt to be insolence, and those who liked her would extend her a greasy leering tolerance, such as Hell would show to one who had arrived there after being counted on earth as a saint. But she had no real hope that this was what appalled her, and a moment’s waiting made it plain that it was not. She was suffering from pain of the body as well as that of the mind. A dull grinding of the muscles in her back was sharpening to agony.

“I am destroyed,” she said, and her chin fell forward on her chest.

“Only come home, Isabelle,” said Marc, “I will do anything you want, always.”

“You’ll feel much better when you get back to the hotel,” said Alan.

But she could not go. They pulled her by the arms, but she only jerked a little way and then swung back again, with a thickset motion absurd for her fineness. Even as it had seemed to her when she first heard of Marc’s gambling that the room could be lifted up on a fishing-line and dropped into nothingness, so now it seemed to her that if she thought hard enough a trapdoor would open in the floor beneath her and she would drop straight down into death.

She whispered to herself, “Down, down, down.”

Marc dropped her arm and groaned to the nearest woman, “My God, what am I to do with her?”

Without being aware of it he was addressing Madame d’Alperoussa, who had been compelled to remain beside him by the appetite for life which made her invariably lean forward whenever her automobile passed any sort of commotion in the street and tell her chauffeur to find out what was happening. But when Marc made what she believed to be an appeal for her personal help, she turned her back and fled, recognizing the approach of her implacable enemy, scandal, which she rightly conceived as perpetually pursuing her, which she falsely imagined she had always, till then, escaped. As she ran, she caught her heel in the hem of her dress and fell full-length on the ground. She sat up immediately, but her jewels were awry, her sinewy legs stuck out in front of her at an obtuse angle, covered only at the vertex by her crumpled dress and the rose-coloured chiffon frills of her drawers, which looked as incongruous as if they had been decorating a mule or a pylon; and an unspoken oath was clearly visible between her firm, fluted lips. The people round her broke into nervous laughter, which spread all through the crowd behind, becoming fainter and yet more harsh and spiteful as it travelled. Isabelle, feeling the place as an insult to her unhappy child, at last was able to move and went to the door. Outside, even in the hot room with the glaring showcases, it was as if the air were fresh, because the people out there did not yet know what she had been doing. She grasped Marc’s sleeve with her right hand and Alan’s with her left, and stood still and rested, but it was no rest because the pain leaned more heavily on her than she on them. She had now no doubt of what was happening to her.

X

NOTHING PLEASED Isabelle for a long time afterwards. She found her greatest satisfaction in the company of Luba, who had failed to notice anything whatsoever unusual about the evening in the Casino, and who constantly took time off from the buying of her trousseau to come to Isabelle’s bedside, bringing presents which were so useless as to be almost unidentifiable, but which looked very pretty when she scattered them on the eiderdown and the carpet. It did not occur to Luba that Isabelle should be asked to furnish any explanation for the scene she had made, and this handsomeness was not due to any lack of self-respect. But having been able to forgive God for the miseries He had brought on her through the medium of history, she could scarcely be hard on her fellow creatures, who had so many more excuses for their misbehaviour. She wept bitterly when she came to say goodbye, the day before she sailed for New York with her husband; and Isabelle wept too, and passed into a phase of dejection. There had been two days when she had hoped to die; then there had been three days when she had feared she was dying; then there had been some weeks when she had lain in bed wishing to die, praying that she might sink through the mattress into the dark. The beam from the lighthouse, passing through her bedroom, reminded her that, had she been a sailor’s wife, rough nursing and an over-worked doctor might by now have lowered her into the black earth; and then she used to whimper into her pillow, as if she had thought of a withheld pleasure.

But now that Luba had gone, she wanted to get out of her bed and struggle to some place where she had never been before. This did not mean that she was content to live. It meant simply that even death, if it came to her here, would seem stale. She felt that most keenly when Marc came down from Paris to see her. He would sit huddled in an armchair, and presently talk would die down between them. Then she would roll over and stare at the other side of the room, though the light from the window tired her eyes; because she knew that before long tears would roll down his flushed and swollen cheeks, and follow the channels round his broad, flattened nostrils. His tears were too big, like the grapes he brought her. She realized that he was suffering, but that was not enough. Or rather it was too much, for she felt that by his sufferings he was piling up a claim on her and it seemed to her that there could never be anything but fatigue in any relationship between them. As she lay in bed, the suspicion frequently crossed her mind that the relationship between men and women could never be very satisfactory; she thought with exasperation of Roy’s excessive mechanical curiosity, which led him to prefer falling five thousand feet from the air to staying safely with her on earth, and of André’s lapidary fatuity. Then she would find herself living over again that imbecile and murderous evening at the Casino, and she would roll about in bed to break the direction of her thought, and ask in a harsh and desperate voice for something she did not want. “Marc, give me some water!” “Marc, fetch Nurse!”

She had begun to be irritated by Marc the first time she saw him after the surgeons had finished with her. He had knelt trembling by her bedside and had said, “But you know now, don’t you, my darling, that there was nothing in what you thought?”

Isabelle asked in weak amazement, “What, do you mean that you weren’t going to gamble?”

“Oh, yes, God forgive me,” he sobbed, “that was what I was going to do all right. But I mean, about me and Luba.”

“But I never thought that really,” she murmured.

“But you did, my darling,” he assured her. “Really, you did, in the Casino. You are sure you did not think it?”

“Of course I did not,” she said.

“I am so glad, you must have been quite out of yourself,” he said.

“No, no,” she protested.

“You were, indeed, my darling,” he told her. “But in the midst of your delirium you were inspired to make the unique gesture and speak the unique words that saved me.”

With an immense effort of impatience she opened her eyes, and she saw that his attitude and expression so closely resembled the abjection of the faithful on their knees at a shrine that she would have been a fool to interfere with it. She reflected that it would be better for a wife to be regarded by her husband as humanity regards St. Catherine, or any female saint, even including those who most certainly did not exist, rather than as it regards Queen Elizabeth, or any other female genius, even including those who have been of most practical service to it. It seemed to her, the more she thought of it, that she must never try to convince Marc that she had deliberately decided to make the scene in the baccara room in order to stop him gambling, and that the loss of her child had been, not the cause of that decision, but its consequence. If she did, criticism would set in, it would go on nibbling through the years. First Marc would begin to complain to himself that a more tactful woman would have found another way of getting him to stop gambling; and in the end it would seem to him that by abandonment to shrewishness she had killed his child. It was entirely necessary that she should let him go on believing she had been demented and blind instead of cunning and far-sighted. Nevertheless, she disliked having to lie continuously about a matter so important to her. Often she asked herself furiously how Marc would have liked it, had he found himself obliged to pretend to everybody, even his board of directors, that the Sallafranque automobile was made, not from the designs of engineers he had employed for the purpose, but according to the revelations of a nun living in a cave, to whom he had been directed in a dream. Enraged, she would close her eyes and pretend to sleep; and she would not open them even when she felt Marc bending over her, though she knew it would distress him to go back to Paris without having said goodbye and hearing once more that she had forgiven him.

Fortunately, it seemed to be understood by the doctors that it would be best for her to go somewhere else than her home when she could leave her bed and walk. She went first to a clinic thirty miles from Paris; but in the opposite direction from her home in the valley of the Chevreuse. For a short time she was pleased by the change. The clinic was situated in one of those parts of France which, without possessing any distinctive features, are infinitely pleasing to the eye, simply because they are both water-logged and light-logged. The garden was divided from pastures juicy with broad-bladed grass; all day and all night the blue-grey leaves of the poplars rustled by her windows, murmuring of cool springs at their roots, as a shell murmurs of the sea whence it came; and she could walk no distance without coming on scattered ponds and intersecting canals on which patterns of yellow and white water-lilies were superimposed on the reflected skies. But the lens of the air was undimmed, nothing was merged by dampness, every object was chastely and brilliantly distinct. She would have enjoyed it greatly, had she enjoyed anything.