The Thinking Reed (45 page)

“Will you be quiet?” she sobbed. “It is not only I who talk too much. Kiss me.”

They clung together, and again the forces within them wrestled and nearly met.

“But one knows nothing, nothing at all,” she breathed, when they had come to the end of their strength.

“Nothing,” he murmured.

“Why are we so important to each other?” she asked. “Why does it matter as much as food and drink that we should be close like this? Why is it so necessary that we should make love? It is not merely a question of pleasure.”

“No,” he answered, “pleasure one can get anywhere.”

They both covered their mouths with their hands and were silent, thinking of people outside the room.

After a little Isabelle said, “I wish I were not a woman.”

“You had better leave things as they are,” said Marc, “It is your only chance of being where you are, as my morals are not what they call special.”

“No, I am speaking seriously,” said Isabelle, “I detest being a woman.” A sudden flame of anger passed through her and she slipped from his arms and went to the window and stood looking out on the paved garden and the trelliswork on the blank wall beyond, tapping her lip with her finger very slowly, in order to regain her self-control. She had never been able to live according to her own soul, to describe her own course through life as her intellect would have been able to plan it. She had progressed erratically, dizzily, often losing sight of her goal, by repercussion after repercussion with men travelling at violent rates of speed on paths chosen for no other motive than the opportunities they gave for violence. She had desired to make an ordered life with Roy, her body and her mind had worked to accommodate themselves to his; and all her adaptations had been made futile and changed into jangling nerves of grief by his rejection of all other activities in favour of the pleasures of describing vast trajectories through space, no matter what might happen at the point of impact. It had, of course, been Roy’s own fault that he had crashed. She had never admitted it before, it had been too painful; but Roy had taken a chance in letting the new and untried mechanic test his engine that morning, just as he had taken chances again and again before, with the weather, with the fall of dusk, with uncharted country. It was a wonder that he had escaped so long. She shook with rage against him. Then she had ricocheted from that shock to the arms of André de Verviers, where she should have found the rest and harmony that comes of matching beauty with beauty, had not his violent frivolity sent her staggering to the violent act of destroying the roses at his door, which sent her into collision with the violent coldness of Laurence, which sent her into the orbit of the violent heat of Marc. She shuddered, hearing her thin voice scream through the sudden hush in the baccara room at Le Touquet, feeling the pain sweep in waves through her pelvis and slowly in the following months change into a pain of the mind, but still keep a physical lodgement in her breast.

In terror she thought, “All men are my enemies, what am I doing with any of them?” But then it flashed into her mind, “That is why making love is important, it is a reconciliation between all such enemies, and there are degrees in such reconciliations. My reconciliation with Marc is absolute.” She turned and went back to him with outstretched arms. But as he drew her to him, she thought, “All the same, it is terrible what men do to women. Even if we annihilate the emotions it sets up, we cannot pretend it has no consequences. I may forget what Marc has done to me, but it has shattered me. I shall not be the same again.” A voice advised her coldly from the remote recesses of her mind. Had you not better learn to put up with men, since there is no third sex here on earth? Or have you made arrangements for travelling to some other planet where there is a greater variety? But it would be as well at this moment if you did not think, but felt. Pressing her mouth against his, she tried to preserve a sort of fairness in life. “It is probably that I do something to men as dreadful as they do to me, without knowing it. Perhaps I trip them up just as they beat me down.” But she knew that she was only softening the harsh lines of the picture her mind had taken of the world.

She said into his sleeve, “Also I do not like being rich.”

“What, my silly one, do you wish to be poor?” asked Marc.

“Not in the least,” she said. “That is a false alternative. If I dislike being lame, it is not because I desire to be hunchbacked. But do you not think that we live in some ways a detestable life? With Poots, and Lady Barnaclouth, and Laura and Annette, and all the pack of them?” She had changed her sentence abruptly in order not to name the d’Alperoussas, but she knew at once that he had noticed it, and was aware of her line of thought.

“Yes, our life sometimes forces us into surroundings that are not sufficiently unlike a drain,” he said soberly. “But what would you have us do? Go Bolshevik?”

“Why not?” she asked, as soberly. But his brows came together and he bent on her a kind, teasing smile, as if she had said something endearingly, femininely foolish. She thought, “How queer men are, they cannot detach themselves from their surroundings and criticize them; it is as if they were joined to the earth where they stand by the soles of their feet.” It occurred to her that Alan Fielding had not been like that, but again a cold voice spoke from the back of her mind and said, “But you know he was not quite a man.” She gripped Marc’s shoulders, enjoying their squareness, and with closed eyes she cried out in his defence, trying to identify what was necessary to her with what was right and subtle and penetrating, “It is comprehensible enough that you should not want to change society, because you have your work; that gives you discipline, that keeps you in touch with reality, when you do wrong you fail, when you do right you succeed. But a rich woman, she is nothing, she lives in a vacuum, insulated from life by flattery. One has complete freedom of choice, and no experience of reality to tell one what to choose. That is why I so terribly want a child, it is partly because I love you, but it is partly because, when I am having it, it will be the only time when my life is determined by necessity.”

“Stop talking and get up,” said Marc, rising to his feet.

“But if we do not talk things out, we will never know where we are,” said Isabelle.

“Yes, I know all that, but at this particular moment it is not quite true,” said Marc. “You see at the moment your lips are talking of one thing but your eyes are talking of another, and I think your eyes are talking the better sense. I would not dream of letting you have a child for at least another six months, but you are coming upstairs with me now. There is, after all, something between you and me which has nothing to do with children, which would exist if we were both sterile. Get up.”

“Oh, not just now, not just now,” murmured Isabelle.

“You are as heavy as lead to lift,” said Marc.

When she awoke, the room was nearly dark, and Marc was standing at the end of the bed in his dressing gown, looking down on her. They exchanged a smile; and she turned aside, drawing up the sheet to cover her breast, and pressed her still smiling face into the pillow and sank back into sleep. But Marc said, “Hé there! Wake up, there’s something I want explained. Where are all the photographs of you that were in my room?”

“Oh, that,” she murmured. “Ah.” She rubbed her face into the pillows, and affected complete repose.

“No, I really want to know,” he said. “You’ll have to wake up in a few minutes anyhow. It’s nearly dinnertime. Pull yourself together and tell me what you have done with them.”

“It is of no consequence,” she muttered, keeping her eyes shut. “I assure you they are all right.”

“And where exactly are they?”

She opened her eyes. “At Carrier’s,” she said. “They are having something done to them. I tell you it is all right.”

“But what is being done to them?”

She closed her eyes. “They are being reframed in shagreen,” she said, and drew the deep, regular breaths of a sleeping child.

“In shagreen! For the love of God, why? It will make my room look as if I were a tapette!” exclaimed Marc. “Now, it would interest me enormously to hear why you did that.”

“Nothing seemed more reasonable at the time,” she said. “I thought that the servants would all know at once what had happened if I left the house and then you suddenly put away all my photographs, so I sent them away to be reframed, as an excuse. It appears fantastic that only this morning I should have been so wicked. Oh, darling, how horrible it was. But, darling, why are you laughing?”

“Because the idea is so like you,” he said. “It is so ingenious, and so subtle, and it would have made so little difference in the end.” He blew a kiss over his shoulder as he left the room.

“Oh, darling, you are cruel!” she grumbled. Then she started up in bed, and called after him, “Marc, Marc! Come back! There is something I want to ask you.”

He came back, still laughing, and sat on the bed. “Well, what is it? Upon my soul, though I have no further use for you at the moment, I must admit that you are a well-made woman.”

“Why,” asked Isabelle, “do you have those ugly photographs of me in your room? You know, the one of me when I was at Miss Pence’s school, looking a frosty little prig, and that other dreadful one where I am looking like a giraffe at Rambouillet.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he answered, composing his features. “Somehow or other I like them.” But he burst into uncontrollable laughter again.

“I see what it is!” cried Isabelle, putting her arms round his neck and shaking him. “You like them because they make me look funny, and you think that I am funny! You think I do look like a frosty prig quite often, and that I do look like a giraffe when I am trying to be polite to people whom I do not much like, and you like laughing at me!”

“Oh, no! Oh, no!” said Marc, but his laughter shook him as he put away her arms and rose to leave her.

“Ah, you are cruel, you are mean, you are wicked!” she complained, throwing herself back on the bed. She remembered with what perfect taste André de Verviers had chosen the three most beautiful photographs she had ever had taken, and she cried out, in rapture, “Ah, this is real love.”

“One cannot have such good lust as we have had,” said Marc, “without real love.”

Isabelle did not think that she had better say that she agreed with him; she covered herself up and returned to sleep. When she woke again, the room was quite dark, and she clasped her hands behind her head and lay smiling at the vague summer stars behind the window-panes. Then Marc’s squat shape appeared in the lighted oblong of the door, he turned on the switches, and the windows became like mirrors. She leaned towards them on her elbow, delighted by the reflection of her happiness.

“See how good a little man I am in my dinner-jacket,” said Marc. “Madame will please make herself look more like the head of a household. Yes, that is better. I have told them to send up some dinner on a tray, since Madame is so recently returned from the clinic and is not yet very robust. And it appears that the American mail has come in. Here is the famous letter from Uncle Honoré. It is to me. But here is one for you.”

“It is from Luba,” said Isabelle. They were silent for some minutes, bending over their letters with that rapt attention which people find it easier to give their friends’ written than their spoken words. Then Isabelle asked, “Why should wild geese fly north at the beginning of the winter? It seems excessively imprudent.”

“I do not believe that wild geese would do any such thing, in spite of their reputation,” said Marc. “Who says they do?”

“Luba,” said Isabelle. “She says that the state of Missouri is exactly like Russia, and she has found a spot on the edge of her husband’s estate where there is rough grass and some birch trees and a long view over the prairies, and it resembles the spot on her father’s estate where she used to stand with her sisters and watch the wild geese flying north at the beginning of the winter.”

“Well, it may have been so in White Russia,” said Marc. “But how is she?”

“She does not say,” answered Isabelle. “She says only that there are many wild geese in America, so she will be able to stand there in the fall, watching them fly overhead, and that she will feel then just as if she were back in Russia.”

“One might have hoped for more precise news of her,” said Marc.

“Yes, indeed,” said Isabelle. “She is really the most provoking of creatures. There is hardly a line in the whole letter that is not about wild geese. Wait a minute, here is something written on the back of the envelope. But I cannot read it. Can you?”

“No, because it is in Russian,” said Marc. “Really, this is very tiresome. We must get it translated at once, for if the poor girl’s husband had died and she was left stranded without any money, this is precisely the manner in which she would choose to inform us. I shall take it down to the works tomorrow and find a correspondence clerk who can tell us what it means.”

“We need not wait so long,” said Isabelle. “The new footman is Russian, even to the extent of being called Ivan.”

“I will give it at once to Marcel and tell him to get Ivan to translate it.”

When Marc came back into the room, she asked him, “What is the matter? Has anything in Uncle Honoré’s letter worried you?”

He answered, “It is perhaps a pity that I should have made it up with a wife who can see through me so clearly. I did not think I had given anything away. Yes, Isabelle, the news in this letter is not altogether good.”

“Uncle Honoré is not ill?” she asked.

“No, he says he is in very good health,” said Marc. “But he is not coming to Europe this autumn after all.”

“Oh, Marc!” cried Isabelle. “What a shame! Oh, Marc, I am so childishly disappointed! Much more than I would have thought I could be!”

“I knew you would be,” said Marc. “I have thought lately that any woman who has endured as much as you have during the past few months must feel a natural desire to see some of her own people. But, darling, you must not cry. And surely you will not have so strong a need for him now that we are together again and are going to be happy.”