The Thinking Reed (8 page)
ISABELLE HAD been right in her supposition that André de Verviers would be too alarmed by her vehement rejection of his roses to take any steps to interfere with her engagement. But she was wholly prevented from exulting in her success by the circumstance that the engagement thus preserved intact was not the one she had had in mind when she formed the plan. She was, however, too busy for melancholy to master her days as it did her nights, for without pause her unpremeditated marriage thrust unforeseen experiences on her. Very soon she was made aware that there was some truth in the rumour that a Jewish strain accounted for Marc’s close black curls and his rubber-ball vitality; for nothing else, she realized, could account for the emphasis which his family laid on the necessity for perfect Catholic orthodoxy in the conduct of the marriage, not only at the first meeting with her, but almost in the first moment of that meeting. Hardly had she been freed from the embrace of Madame Sallafranque, a small and smart woman whose gleaming Schiaparelli clips gave her the air of a competent vivandiere, when she was introduced to two priests, who were sitting back on the lambskin and aluminium sofa, with fingertips pressed to fingertips, looking self-consciously shrewd. They regarded her with an eye at once solemn, negotiating, and bland, as if she were a coffin that had presently to be carried down a winding staircase, and they could promise her that she would suffer no rude concussion during this progress, since they were neat-handed men of infinite experience in these matters. It appeared immediately that they were there to instruct her on the steps that would have to be taken for the nullification of her first marriage, in order that, as a good son of the Church, Marc should not err by marrying a woman who had divorced her husband. When Isabelle explained that she had lost Roy not by divorce but by death, they were at first incredulous, as if they had believed till then that natural widowhood was impossible in the United States, but on learning that he had been killed in an aeroplane they nodded and said several times, “
Ah, mais parfaitment, mais naturellement!
” and addressed themselves to the subject of her conversion. Isabelle felt obliged, though she knew she was offending against the social spirit of the occasion, to tell them that her family had never lapsed from the faith and that she had been baptized into the Church in infancy.
It was as great a contretemps as she had feared. The priests showed the coldness natural in undertakers who had been summoned to a house where there was nobody even ill; and Madame Sallafranque overwhelmed them with profuse apologies that were at once domineering and abjectly mendicant. This was very different from the attitude to which Isabelle had become accustomed in her own home, where the priest took his place with the family doctor and solicitor as an expert in a defined sphere, whom prudent men consulted and obeyed when they were vexed by certain problems, and where he was treated, in consequence, with the unemotional respect due to one who fulfilled a useful function. Here, she saw, ecclesiastical approval was being snatched at as if it were a material object conferring a benefit, say a card of admission to a gala fête from which one would otherwise be excluded with some implication of contempt. But there was something not petty in the appeal; it might have been admission to a fortress that had been sought by those who had fared ill under the hail of arrows outside. There was even something profound too. Perhaps there still existed people who had not intellectualized their relations with their medicine man out of all recognition. She was not at all distressed to find herself among men and women who were simpler, more unashamed, more acquainted with humiliation, and more primitive than those she had known before.
But it would have been foolish if she had felt it was condescension for her to mingle with the Sallafranques. Marc’s father and grandfather had been great industrialists, who had called into being a small township within the shadow of Lille, who had been formidable as ironmasters were in the days when ironmasters were formidable. But the Germans had occupied that township for four years, and in the third year Marc’s father had a stroke. It was easy to believe that, by these vehement little people, prolonged disappointment and heartbreak might be dramatized as a suspension of all bodily faculties, though their vitality would dispute death inch by inch. When the Germans went, they left the works a heap of old iron on ravaged ground; and Marc, who was twenty-four when he came back from the war, showed a curious reluctance to build them up again. With no counsel to guide him but a few croaks from a sick-bed, he began to badger the Government for permission to spend only a driblet of the reparations money due to his firm at Lille, and to devote the mass to the factory for making cheap automobiles which his father had started as a side line ten miles outside Paris. He had got that permission by jumping up round ministers like a big eager puppy, by being a pest like a puppy; and for the next ten years he had worked so hard that midnight often found him laying his head on his desk and blubbering with fatigue. At the end of that time the factory had grown into a town larger than the one the Germans had destroyed.
Its size appalled her when Marc drove her there for the first time. Like most Americans, she felt that great industrial undertakings were proper only in the United States. It was in the first place upsetting to all preconceived notions that Europeans should have sufficient energy for them; and in the proofs they furnished that they had there was something specially stark and alarming. The town was sallow with cement, which had been hacked up into little cubes as separate dwellings and vast cubes as apartment houses, lavishly dour with the meaningless tension, the scowling balconies, the grim uncorniced walls, of modernist architecture; and around them stretched gardens lusciously rank with the product of dogged labour. There was no hint of poverty here, but nothing communally owned or public was handsome. The principal square was a waste of ragged grass, which supported nakedly the plate glass and chromium bandstand Marc had built as a memorial to his father. The shops were not very different from village shops, with just space enough for tradesman and housewife to wage a bargaining battle, and the cafes were gaunt resorts with round tin tables. There was no place of amusement at all except a shooting-gallery and the cinema palace which Marc had financed; and the population, the strong men who seemed to be slouching along in maillots and trousers not so much out of slovenliness as out of insolence, and the many-chinned women, who trundled their immense corpulencies in front of them with the confidence of beauties, did not look as if they would be easily distracted by any form of entertainment from their gloating contemplation of the inexorable practical demands of life, its harshness, and its willingness to be placated by the performance of certain harsh rituals. Nothing could be less like the reassuring appearance of an American industrial town, with its evidences of the existence of a new race which can find absolute contentment in the consumption of sweet foods and drinks, the possession of radios, and the contemplation of films. She looked at Marc with a new respect as she realized what terrifying material he worked on, and, as the car slid into a courtyard huge as the approach to some Egyptian palace, and as they walked later through hall after hall, where the whirling driving-belts lifted the eye from the innumerable squat machines with the soaring and admonitory effect of pillars in a cathedral, how tremendous was his creation. And when she told him this he said, “Well, darling, perhaps it’s not so bad. For a factory, it’s a factory.”
Yes, Marc was a great man or, at least, a great industrialist. But he was a child, too. Social fictions deceived him completely. He placed complete credence in everything that anyone said to him, whether it was a servant telling him that his master was out, or a woman saying she had not been able to attend his mother’s reception because she had had a headache. One serious consequence of this was that, when people said that they were pleased to see him, he really believed that at the sight of him they had been transfixed by an actual
frisson
of pleasure. As he had been in childhood the son of a rich man and all his adult life had been himself a rich and spectacularly successful man, people had always been declaring that they were pleased to see him, and had put considerable emphasis to their declarations; and he had deduced from this that he was universally popular. This was not due to immodesty on his part, for if he had set himself to analyse the situation, he would have without hesitation pronounced the operative factor to be not his own charm, but other people’s generous readiness to give affection. It was not even due to insensitiveness. Isabelle knew that she was free from any such delusion only because she had been warned from childhood that a great part of the homage she would receive would be caused by public knowledge of her family’s wealth. First her parents, and after their death Uncle Honoré, had gone to great pains to give her this instruction in a vein of cynical but happy humour which would prevent her feeling either arrogant or aggrieved over the situation; and later this instruction had been confirmed by literature. But the Sallafranques had not been able to bring so much subtlety to the education of their son. They had done their best, and it was far from being a mean best, to train Marc never to imagine that money gave its possessor real consequence, and they were unable to go further, because they had no humour except good humour and were wholly deficient in irony; and Marc’s natural sweetness had led him to accept this imperfect teaching absolutely, and to assume that everybody else in the world was of the same high-minded opinion. Literature had no chance to correct him, for since he had left school he had never read a book.
So entirely creditable to Marc was this delusion, so purely the product of his candour and humility, that Isabelle felt ashamed of suffering embarrassment at it, and she set about disciplining herself not to notice it. But that she could not do during this visit to the factory. For there it continually appeared, from minute to minute, that just as his enormous vitality had transformed his father’s plaything into an industrial masterpiece, so it had developed this charming error into a fantasy which departed so monstrously from reality that it was dangerous. As they drove into the courtyard they passed a crowd of workmen standing round the door of one of the workshops, and Marc lifted his arm and saluted them with a panache which Isabelle had thought fallen into desuetude among all persons of authority save princes in musical comedy. They answered with a roar of greeting that was partly spontaneous, a response to the spontaneity of his own gesture, but which was in the main raucous and unloving. Some genuine affection there must have been, for he was a fair though an exacting employer, and a fountain of kindness for hard cases. And it was true that there was a ring of gross good comradeship about the cheer, but that was because the sight of the boss made them visualize and taste in their imagination the pleasures he enjoyed as a very rich man, the food, the drink, the women, the right to sail in white boats on blue seas, the right to hit and not be hit back. Perhaps, too, some of them had won money backing his horses or his racing automobiles. But a sense that it was only in imagination that they could enjoy these pleasures, and that, though they may have won their bets, the horses and the automobiles remained their master’s, was making the faces they turned towards him wolfish behind their smiles. So it seemed to her eyes, and the history of Europe during the last fifty years or so gave her no hope that she was seriously mistaken. Yet Marc turned to her and beamed, “You will see, they all adore me here.”
It was the same when they sat in his office, a stupendous apartment designed in that modernist style which represents the last attempt of bad taste to escape the criticisms of good taste. Having been reproached so often for excessive and ill-conceived and ill-executed ornamentation and poor design, it has set about getting rid of all ornamentation, and as much design as possible. Here onyx mantelpieces set flat in the wall stared out with the nakedness of a shaved cat; and tables that were plain circles of glass on glass rods, and chairs that were not even cubes but mere outlines of cubes in aluminium and canvas, seemed to grudge being three-dimensional. Isabelle had observed, in the houses of such of her friends as had followed this fashion, that such featureless settings threw into unnatural relief the characteristics of everything introduced into them and made it seem intrusive. A red book left on one of these glass tables looked scarlet and untidy; a woman sitting on one of these chairs looked highly coloured, her attitude asymmetrical, her dress a trailing extravagance. This effect of the style made it peculiarly unsuitable for an office. The neat piles of paper look litter, the desk a pretentious indoor form of rubbish heap; the file of people called into the room to meet the future Madame Sallafranque showed against the plain background not as employees, but as human beings, diversified in type, active of soul. Marc, however, sat swinging from side to side on his aluminium and rubber revolving chair, with his strong hands patting his sinewy yet plump thighs, turning on all these people an invariable smile which implied that they were all alike, and in nothing more alike than this passionate loyalty to him.
There was, indeed, some truth in his theory; for certainly there were some who loved him. There was an old bearded man, with a proud carriage of the head and humble eyes, who plainly felt for the Sallafranques as a shepherd feels for the just master that protects him and for the sheep that he must protect. There was a man with a cock’s wattle of chins and a chest like an air cushion, who introduced several abstract nouns such as “
la civilisation
” and “
l’humanité
” into his greeting to Isabelle, which took the form of congratulations on her good fortune in marrying into such a great industrial family. It was evident that he had made some identification between the Sallafranque business and “
la civilisation
” and “
l’humanité”;
and there was no limit to the sacrifices he would have made for any one of the trinity. There were one or two spectacled, high-shouldered intellectuals, whose genuinely amused yet tender smiles showed that they had perfectly grasped Marc’s farcical and noble character, but unfortunately they represented a type of which Marc was always afraid, which he constantly suspected of laughing at him. And there were several younger men who idolized him, but that was only because they thought he was sly, hard, and greedy, as he was not. Their admiration would have been tinged with contempt if they had ever realized that he was candid and diffident, and would give up any advantage rather than use it to another’s hurt. She saw that contempt in the eyes of some of the middle-aged men, and with a thrill of pleasure and surprise realized that she resented that look almost as much as she had resented it once on the flying-ground when she heard two envious pilots speaking maliciously of Roy’s aviation; she must be nearly in love with Marc.
