The Thinking Reed (9 page)

Yet she knew she was falsifying the situation if she saw nothing happening save the spurning of Marc’s virtues by little-minded subordinates. They had their case against him. She had already guessed, from the hours he kept, that he overworked all the employees whose ranks brought them into personal contact with him; and now, from the harassed, almost exasperated manner in which many of these men came into his room, as if they could not trust him on any occasion whatsoever to refrain from laying an excessive burden on them, she knew that he was a worse slave-driver than she had feared. It was a matter, again, of over-simplified instruction. To guard him from laziness he had been taught to work every drop of strength out of his body, and to guard him from conceit he had never been allowed to suspect that he was stronger than other people. So from youth he had strode through the twenty-four hours at the pace of a Marathon race, dragging with him in increasing numbers human beings who had not his bull neck, his thick veins, his ropy sinews. And none of them could leave him, being manacled to him by the fact that he was their employer and they were his employees, and the same fact was a gag which prevented them from crying out and indicting him for lack of consideration. She saw, she did indeed, that there was a case against him, which was not less formidable because all his crimes were rooted in his innocence.

She saw it presented in terms of pageantry as they left the office just at noon, when the air was full of the stretched sound of siren-bleats, and all the workers were tumbling out of the shop doors to their midday meals. Out of one door tumbled a rainbow stream, the upholstresses in the blue and green and rose overalls Marc let them wear according to their taste. They were all springing and bounding with life, and some among them were beautiful, particularly certain exquisite blondes of the type the French working-classes occasionally produce, colourless but perfect creatures, in whom all the enticing qualities of youth are exhibited as in a transparent medium. When they saw Isabelle with Marc, they knew who she was, and they surged across the road and closed in on the automobile; they blotted out the sober day and the factory chimneys by a sudden flaring out of carnival laughter and the waving of handkerchiefs; they addressed Marc with hoarse cries as if they were rallying him on this new triumph of his potency, as if they were challenging him to turn this triumph into an orgy and embrace them all, and were threatening a jeering resistance so that he could thresh it all down, all in the sphere of fantasy but with the plangency of the intensest sort of day-dream. Marc grinned and roared back at them like a bull, and from the workmen, who were standing in dark, steady masses round the leaping, dancing, multi-coloured women, came an answering roar, harsh, wistful, mocking, stoical, full of what would declare itself, if it were ever profitable to do so, as definitely hatred. Isabelle smiled at them all, brilliantly and rigidly, but she found herself clutching Marc’s arm defiantly, as if he were a child who was behaving intolerably before a crowd of censorious adults, but who would have been faultless if only the whole world had not conspired to spoil him.

“Tell me,” she said, when they were on the road again, “do you ever have strikes in your factories?”

He was driving, and he used it as an excuse not to answer her for a moment, and then in a single word, “Sometimes.” Then, after a hundred yards, he went on, as if he were nerving himself to speak of something infinitely tedious, perhaps a little shameful. “Yes, we have strikes. Sometimes very bad ones. There was one terrible one two years ago. As you see, they all adore me, down there. But agitators sneak their way in and persuade them to do what they don’t intend,
les pauvres gosses.
”

“There may be more than that in it,” she said.

“Perhaps, perhaps,” he agreed, “but there’s that in it, too. And it’s serious. You see, the factories have to be left running like clockwork. When those silly fellows beyond the Rhine attack us again, we’ve got to make big guns and so on. The wheels must go on turning. Ah, but it’s difficult to talk about such things. Let’s talk of something else, my darling.”

It was indeed very difficult to talk to him about these things, for he knew nothing about principles or the past, but everything about the facts brought before him by his vast business. It was impossible to carry on any truly contrapuntal conversation with him, in which theory and practice, or his particular experience and the general experience of all other beings, could be harmonized. Whoever his adversary might be, their dialogue was certain to stagger him by its alternate revelations of Marc’s ignorance and his own. But Isabelle felt less and less acutely any pressing need to remedy this state of intellectual inchoateness, for she was growing more and more content with Marc as he was. The one embarrassment that vexed their intercourse was her inability to share fully with him her satisfaction at the progress of her emotions. But there was no help for that, since a woman cannot tell a man whom she is about to marry how pleased and amazed she is to find herself daily coming nearer to loving him, though in the circumstances he could not possibly hear better news. This discomfited her by its suggestion that the world in which human beings lived was not the same as the world of which they spoke and thought. But she forgot her discomfiture in the amusement of preparing for her marriage, of choosing her trousseau and her house, in the relieved knowledge that, though she had jumped a long way to escape from Laurence’s humiliations, she had landed on her feet, and in this gratifying and convenient growth of her affection for Marc.

About five nights before the wedding Isabelle found herself in a mood which she could surely take as a certificate that all was well. She dined with Marc at Larue, and was so happy with him that they both found it intolerable that they had to go on to a ball given by a certain minister, and grumbled about it comfortably in the automobile all the way to the Avenue Henri Martin, but did not mind it in the least when they got there, because they were still together. They walked through the rooms smiling up at the pictures, though these were Boldinis and de la Gandaras and Carolus Durans, awful exhibitions of that facility with paint which has nothing to do with painting, which is closely akin to the Italian art of winding macaroni round the fork; and they greeted all their fellow guests with acclamation, though these were for the most part of spurious distinction, pompous old men who seemed to believe in the importance of the orders they wore, and women whose pretentious conduct of huge hips and bosoms showed that they had misinterpreted the homage that had been offered to their fortune and their early beauty as evoked by some real and permanent value in themselves. Marc came on one of these last who had been a friend of his mother many years before; and such was his mood of melting benevolence that he greeted her with civilities which might have been mistaken for the first frolics of an infatuation. Why had they not met since his childhood, he inquired, though the answer was obvious to anyone who had known him in his manhood, and would she not dance with him? He cast round an eye to see if he could leave Isabelle in pleasant company meanwhile, and at the sight of a tall figure leaning against the wall near by, he clapped his hands, as if this was an encounter which was something more than convenient, something really opportune.

“Ah, but Isabelle, this is most fortunate! Here’s Monsieur Campofiore! How are you, my friend? Now, you two must meet! Isabelle, this is one of my closest friends, one of my co-workers whom I really couldn’t do without, who has done I can’t tell how much for my silly little affairs. Though, mind you, Papa sometimes puts his little boy across his knee and gives him what for!” He smacked his friend hard on the back, and flung back his head, roaring with the laughter which means comradeship rather than that anything funny has happened. His friend smiled. “And this, old boy, I’m telling you, is Madame Tarry, to whom I’m going to be married at the beginning of next week. Isn’t that a piece of news? Well, I’ll leave you two together to conspire over what you’re going to do to keep your foolish child in order! And now, Madame!”

Isabelle kept her eyes on him as he whirled the elderly lady round and round the room, watching him with tender amusement, for though he danced quite neatly, he infected every dance with the bounce and hop of the polka. But she was not unmindful to bow her head and murmur acknowledgments as the tall stranger beside her uttered certain formal sentences of felicitation, for she had a notion that he might be an odd and touchy kind of person. There was something old-fashioned about his aspect, reminiscent of the elegant gentlemen in the illustrations scattered through the text in the old editions of Maupassant and the Goncourts, for he had a silky, pointed beard and an air of self-contained gravity, and his clothes had a touch of fantasy and abundance about their cut, unusual in modern tailoring, which so envies the clinging economy of the human skin. He was perhaps one of those misfitting people, more commonly female than male, who find no way of getting on terms with their own age but are ambitious, and so go about cutting a figure in the manner of those who struck them as glorious when they were children. She was at pains to make herself agreeable when he came to a pause by saying, “You speak French as if you were French, Monsieur. As a foreigner I am jealous.”

“Madame,” he answered, “I am French.”

“I beg your pardon! I was misled by your name.”

“I owe my name, which no doubt seems to you ridiculous—”

“Not at all,” said Isabelle warmly, “it is far from being ridiculous, it is beautiful. What could be ridiculous about a field of flowers?”

“I am not simple enough to think that most people are of your mind,” said Monsieur Campofiore. “But such as my name is, I owe it to the circumstance that I come from a little town called Origno, in the Alpes Maritimes, behind Nice, very near the Italian frontier.”

“Ah, in the mountains! That must be charming.”

“It is not charming at all,” said Monsieur Campofiore, in such a manner that she was obliged to believe him. “The mountains there are without beauty or dignity. They are heaps of rubble overgrown with scrub. In summer the country is excessively hot, in winter there is flood and avalanche.” After a moment’s pause he added, with no increase in cheerfulness, “My father was the tax collector there.”

“That must have been interesting,” said Isabelle.

“He did not find it so,” replied Monsieur Campofiore. There seemed to be no fruitful way of continuing this line of conversation. Isabelle looked round the room to find a happier topic, and said, “I wonder who those two very beautiful girls are, who have just come in. They are the best-looking women here, don’t you think?”

“My opinion would be valueless if I gave it,” replied Monsieur Campofiore. “I regret that I am forced to regard the ladies of your world as failures, since they do not succeed in excelling the women of the people in beauty to any extent that would justify the greater amount of care and money that they lavish on themselves.”

“I am sure you are right,” said Isabelle.

A silence fell, which was broken only when Monsieur Campofiore said coldly, “I take no pleasure in such occasions as these, none at all. I am forced to attend them by my official position. But I cannot express how tedious, how insipid I find them.”

“I can understand that very well,” said Isabelle, “but all the world has not the same tastes. Lots of people here imagine that they are having a most wonderful time.” Just then she caught sight of Marc, his face shining with absent-minded happiness, while he spun his gratified old lady round and round and round. “Why, look at Marc!” she said, laughing confidently, since this was his friend. “He seems to be enjoying himself quite a lot.”

“Ah,” said Monsieur Campofiore, “Marc Sallafranque would enjoy himself on the edge of the pit.”

It was the pure voice of hatred that spoke. He hoped that Marc would fall into the pit, he hoped that the pit would be deep. Isabelle continued to smile at the dancers, but a shudder ran over her scalp.

Presently she saw old Sam Soutar from the Embassy and beckoned him to her. As he obeyed, the man by her side muttered his respects, bowed, and retired.

“Sam, you know everybody,” she said, “who is that terrible man I’ve been talking to? His name is Campofiore.”

“Why, what’s Campofiore been doing? He’s usually a quiet chap.”

“But what is he? What does he do?”

“He’s a bottle-washer in one of the Ministries, either Finance or Commerce, I can’t remember which at the moment.”

“But is he very important, has he much power?”

“No, I should think he was quite insignificant. He’s got no family connexions, he’s got no political backing, nobody seems to take much notice of him.”

“You’re sure?” asked Isabelle. But just then Marc came to a standstill in front of them, beaming with satisfaction at the treat he had given his partner, though it was apparent from her dishevelment that what pleasure she had felt at his attentions had for some time been obliterated by sheer physical pain. Isabelle could not bear to tell him that somebody he had claimed as a playmate was an enemy, that there was hateful stuff in human beings which was incensed by his simplicity; and if Campofiore was unimportant, she need not speak of the incident. It would do later on, say if there was any question of inviting him to their house. She held out her arms to Marc, and he drew her into the dance. She bobbed like a cork on the choppy motion of his steps, and was quite happy, for though this was not in any strict sense of the word dancing, it was dancing with him. But again a shudder ran over her scalp when a vista opened among the dancers and showed her Campofiore, back in his place against the wall, his lips moving and his head jerking, as if he were repeating over to himself a conversation in which he had had very much the best of it. The incident came back to her during an hour of panic on the night before her wedding eve, which did not affect her very deeply because she had known that it was bound to come. To help herself through it, she had kept unopened till then a thick envelope imprinted with her Uncle Honoré’s Californian address, which she imagined would contain an amplification of the affectionate but brief cable he had sent in reply to her announcement of her engagement. But its thickness proved to be due to the presence of several legal documents which required her signature immediately after her marriage, for Uncle Honoré had contented himself with an expression of his love and his readiness to give her the benefit of his sixty-five years’ store of wisdom whenever she should need it. At this she felt curiously desolate, and sat for a long time by her window, staring at the moon, wishing that she knew more of the fixed principles by which life was determined, and regretting that she had never had a prolonged private conversation with Uncle Honoré. She had really not the faintest idea what he believed. All she knew was the easy attitude of tolerance, stiffening only when the distaste for violence was aroused, which his beliefs had led him to adopt. That she had imitated as far as possible, and it had helped her; but she was aware that in her own case it was a façade without foundations which, well as it had sheltered her from bad weather, might be blown down by any worse weather. She shivered as if the moonbeams falling on her breast were cold, though the night was warm.