The Thinking Reed (37 page)

“Mr. Fielding was not here for very long, and I rested all the time from lunch till he came for tea.”

“That is as it may be,” said Marc, “but you look exceedingly tired.”

“Very well,” said Isabelle, “I am tired, I need rest, it is six o’clock, and we are not going out until nearly nine. Go away then, and let me rest until half past eight.” She lay down on her chaise-longue and closed her eyes.

“I am glad to see that under pressure you can become sensible,” he said, and went to the door. But from there he turned back and knelt down beside her. “Forgive me, but I am so anxious about you.”

For a minute she did not answer, and then she put out her hand. When he laid his face against it, she felt that his features were crumpled together. At that she sat up and drew his head to her breast, as if he were her child, but cried out, as if she were his child, “Oh, do not be angry with me any more! Do you realize, we are quarrelling because we love each other? You are cross with me because you are anxious about me; I am cross because you are cross on the day that was to be our fête, and so it goes on, and we act like enemies.”

“But we love each other, it is quite certain that we love each other,” he said.

“That is just what I cannot bear,” she told him, “that we should love each other and should act as enemies.”

“That is just the funny way it often happens,” said Marc placidly.

“But I do not like it,” she said. He rubbed his face in her hand, and she murmured, “Not that it is worth while labouring that point when I like you so much.”

“You do?” he asked, and laid his lips to her throat.

She reflected that soon she must let him make love to her again; that perhaps it would be good to begin that night. But she found herself thinking of it less as a surrender to her affection for him than as a performance she had to give, and she asked, “Is this a very long play we’re going to?”

He said, “No, and we needn’t stay after the second act. It isn’t the play I want you to see, it’s Mardrelle. She wouldn’t be playing at all at this time of the summer if she wasn’t the mistress of Duroc, who can’t leave Paris because of the work he’s doing for the government, and it won’t be put on again in the autumn, so I wanted you to take the chance of seeing her. She’s really got something, she reminds me of what Ève Lavallière was like when I was a little boy.” Like most Parisians of his class, he had been reared from childhood to be a pedantic and grudging but impassioned dramatic critic. “And it’s precisely in the second act that she’s so good. We could come out before the third act.”

“Then I can manage it,” said Isabelle drowsily.

Isabelle was indeed glad that she attended the play. It had seemed to her a nervous and exhausting business to be a woman, unsustained by public opinion, when she left her house. She had turned round enviously as they drove down the Champs-Elysées, to look back at the sunset which was blazing through and about the Arc de Triomphe with a scarlet, militarist romanticism that was superbly appropriate, triumphantly harmonious with the French idea of glory; and it had occurred to her that, while participation in the least important battle of any campaign brings a man the support of a whole nation, the most tremendous sexual victory, ending in the capture of a position vitally important from the highest biological standards, brings a woman nothing but the approval, which may be momentary, of her actual partner. But at the theatre she realized that she had been thinking as a member of the English-speaking races. The whole of the play was the character played by Mardrelle, a charming woman; but here it was given an honourable treatment which it would not have received among her own people. An English play about a charming woman would have had to allay the audience’s anxiety as to whether she was not costing men too much and whether she was fulfilling her moral obligations; its last scene would inevitably have been a disclosure that she was really a good sort and comparatively inexpensive. An American play on the same subject would have been dictated by an interest in regionalism; the woman would have been not of the earth but of Park Avenue or Broadway or the Middle West. But this play was simply written to exhibit an actress who was neither beautiful nor very young, but who had the gift of remembering exactly what it had been like to pass through the characteristic stages of a woman’s life in a society dominated by Christian ideas of sex, to be a virgin and to be taken by a man, to be pursued and to be abandoned, to be deceived and to deceive, to be happy and to outlive the conception of happiness. Neither the audience nor the playwright nor the actress doubted for a moment that this material was interesting for its own sake, and that the interest it aroused was of a respectable kind; and it was significant that the actress also must have been sustained by this faith, for it was known that she had come from the slums of Toulon by a road which must again and again have exposed her to brutality and desertion. The flesh across her cheekbones was infinitely tired, and it could be imagined that she had often learned what it is to be buffeted across the mouth, to be thrown about by unguaranteed strangers in transports, divided only by a hairbreadth from the murderous, to face the police without the weapon of prosperity. But from the pride of her stance, from the serenity of her high-pitched, miaow-like voice, and the perfect assurance with which she rehearsed her feminine experience, she showed that at no time during the frightful ordeal had it been suggested to her that women were not important, or that what she was doing was unadmirable apart from the displeasing circumstances in which it was done. There was more here than the integrity of a healthy body and a uniquely sturdy will. Over the actress and the spectators arched a consolidating national ideal. Had an indiscreet angel breathed over the auditorium that Marc and Isabelle were that night to be united after a long severance, Mardrelle herself would have waved her handkerchief and led the audience in the expression of an enthusiasm that would have had something in common with the sunset round the Arc de Triomphe and the idea of glory.

“Do you want to wait for the next act?” asked Marc as the curtain fell.

“Do I? Do I?” asked Isabelle hesitantly. She was about to answer that she did not when she caught sight of André de Verviers standing in a box opposite them. He had a companion, an Englishwoman or an American, in travelling clothes, and he was holding the door open for her while she picked up her gloves and bag. It was evidently an affair. He was looking down on her in an absorbed silence, which he would probably break by saying very thoughtfully, if she did not wear earrings, “I would like to see how you look with earrings,” or, if she wore them, “Some day you must let me see how you look without those earrings.”

“Yes, Marc,” said Isabelle. “This woman is so delightful that I would like to see the play to the end.” She could not endure to think of meeting André, she was not clear why.

“You see, I begin to know a little what you like,” said Marc. “But, indeed, you have quite French taste now. That is quite natural, however, since you have so much French blood in you. I need not talk as if I had been a missionary.”

“You French do not worry yourselves lest French taste should be the worst in the world,” she teased him; and they sat hand in hand looking at the ill-drawn cartoons, spotted news photographs, and naïvely unattractive advertisements which were flashed on the curtain, offering yet another proof that Paris is a village as well as a capital, since they were of an order to be expected in a parish hall rather than in a fashionable theatre. She was warm with thankfulness because she was with Marc and not with André; and she wondered what complication was behind his presence there that night. His entrance into the box was probably the climax of several concurrent dramas, all painful to everyone but himself, all completely gratuitous. He would not be in Paris at this time of the year had it not thereby bought some perverse pleasure. Either he had extracted from his companion, whose good looks were slightly disordered by unhappiness, that she should break her plans for a reasonable summer and disappoint the friends who had hoped for her society, and should endure the heat and dust for the sake of being solitary with him; or he had compelled her presence without asking for it by leading her to suspect that he was remaining in Paris in order to be with another woman, so that she felt forced to stay on and on, exciting him to embraces so that she might prove that there was nothing in her suspicions, which, however, he would always carefully renew immediately afterwards. Isabelle pressed close to Marc, who was a good animal with direct reactions, who ate when he was hungry, who roared when he was enraged, who howled when he was hurt, who guffawed when he saw a joke; and when most of the people who had left their seats had returned from the foyer, she said, “Do you know, now that the people are coming back and sitting down for the next act, I do not believe I want to stay for it after all. I believe it will be too much for me.”

“Well, well,” grumbled Marc happily. “I suppose it was God who made you a little windmill.”

She took some time to put on her gloves, so that the three blows which raise the curtain had already sounded before they left their seats, and then she moved briskly, since it was certain that there could be no further risk of running into André. She had foreseen that she and Marc would go out into a calm warm darkness which, in the wide and empty streets of a Paris midsummer night, would be private to themselves. But a sudden storm had broken, heavy rains were beating back from the pavements. Marc ran out in search of their car, and Isabelle stood watching him from the door for a moment, smiling at the way he shook himself like a sturdy little dog under the onslaught of the falling waters; and when he was out of sight, she turned back into the lobby, meaning to look at a frame full of photographs of Mardrelle. But she checked herself at once, for there were two other people beside herself in the lobby, and these were André de Verviers and his companion. Isabelle had forgotten to reckon with one of André’s most persistent whims in the conduct of a love affair, which was to go to a place only visited for the purpose of witnessing a certain spectacle, and probably extremely difficult of access because of the large number of people who desired to witness this spectacle, and then to ignore it totally in a show of absorption in his beloved. He would secure front-row seats for the Davis Cup or a ringside table for the most fashionable night club, and then never look at the players or the cabaret, but only at the woman he had brought with him. He would turn on her a dark and drowning stare so fixed, so completely not to be affected by a rally between Tilden and Cochet, or the worst that a Negress wearing a peacock’s feather in her behind could do for sight and sound, that before long it successfully competed with the spectacle for public attention. This technical trick served two purposes. It enhanced his reputation as a romantic lover, and it afforded the basis for many exciting quarrels with his mistresses, who could be accused of coldness when they writhed under this adoring gaze, which made them only a little less conspicuous than Tilden or Cochet or Josephine Baker, and that in richly compromising circumstances.

It was to this second purpose that he was turning it now. Isabelle could hear the woman begging him to remember the other occupants of the loge, who, from what she said, were certainly their friends and had probably even accompanied them to the theatre, and what they were bound to think if he and she left before the end of the performance. And as Isabelle turned round to hide her face from them and stood looking out into the rain, tapping her heel with impatience because Marc did not come back, she heard André, in a voice sad as the falling of leaves, ask her companion if it could possibly be that such trifles seemed important to her. He began another sentence, on a slightly higher pitch, as if he intended it to be longer and more poignant; but he did not complete it. A silence fell. When he spoke again, it was very softly, and his companion answered by an exclamation of surprise. Isabelle was so certain he had seen her that she pulled open the swing door and tried to go out; but the rain was too violent, she had to step back, and she found him beside her, holding out his hand. She realized as soon as she met his eyes why she had feared meeting him. It was not, of course, simply because they had had a love affair and she was now married. That had happened, but so had the battle of Sadowa; neither event touched any nerve in her mind, her life would have gone on in the same way had all her knowledge of them been excised. It was because she had known exactly how he would smile at her when they met.

Aloud, André said with perfect good manners, with a touch of brotherly affection that was even more than correct, that was a charming offering to a woman who had been in social difficulties from a man whose position had never been disturbed, “But, my dear Isabelle, what a pleasure to meet you! One never sees you anywhere nowadays. How are you? How are you?” But his narrowed knowing eyes and his twitching lips conveyed, “So you surprised them all, did you not, by the extraordinary scene you made in the Casino at Le Touquet? But you did not surprise me, my dear, who remembered how you flung down the roses outside my door, that insane day not so very long ago! And I admire you none the less for it, because I know that such excesses are part of your temperament, your really delicious temperament.”

Isabelle replied, “Ah, André, you have such a good heart that you will be hardly disappointed at all to learn that I am far better than you hoped.”

As he broke into nervous laughter and felt for words, she looked over her shoulder, anxious to leave this man who had forced her to counter his folly by a greater one, and saw through the glass door that Marc had found the car and was hurrying back under an open umbrella; and the excessively energetic movements of his squat body, bent low under the storm, and the excessively concerned expression on his rain-wet face, reminded her that she was turning her back on André only to go to a man who had been even more foolish and had thereby forced her to a still greater folly. She looked away from these two men who were her enemies, to André’s companion, who, she felt, ought to be to some extent her friend, or at least drawn to her by a common belief in moderation, since she was a woman. But it unfortunately happened that the Englishwoman or American, whichever she was, was turning on her a grey-blue stare coarsened by that claim to complete understanding, that abandonment to unreserved condemnation, which human beings will never permit themselves regarding those of whom they know much and rarely regarding those of whom they know little, but which they indulge in without hesitation regarding those of whom they know nothing. It was evident that she had heard about the scene at Le Touquet and was finding an acute pleasure, such as nasty people find in seeing someone extremely drunk, in thinking of Isabelle as a brawling virago.