The Thinking Reed (11 page)
But the afternoon was endless. Marc and Isabelle played bridge and backgammon until their eyes ached, and then they revolted, though Laura grew waspish, since she could gamble for ever. Then they went out to the tennis courts but there they had to choose their partners from Madame Bourges, who was unalterably a rabbit, and the professional, whose play with his employer’s guests was panderish, and young Dan Creed, who was six foot six, and Mrs. Postleham, whose game was said, by those who ought to have known, to represent the excess of an insatiable temperament. Later they went to the sea and tried surf-riding with the Bourges’ new motor boat. But Marc and Isabelle had long mastered that art, which is exciting only so long as one is a novice and uncertain of one’s balance; once it becomes a matter of standing upright on a board till muscular fatigue makes one drop off, it ceases to be a sport and resolves into its component parts, of which the last two, the impact with the sea at a high speed and immersion until people in a boat choose to pick one up, are not in themselves attractive. Later they went back to the swimming pool and drank more cocktails, the Capuchin monkey skipping backwards and forwards over their bodies. They patted it tenderly, envying its animal wisdom. Then they went back to the house to dress. Isabelle flung herself down on the bed, and Marc came and lay beside her, nuzzling his face against the curve of her waist and grumbling, “I’m bored! I’m bored!” To him boredom was a tragedy, for he had no more realization than if he had been an animal that any state he was in would ever come to an end. She murmured comfort to him and stroked his hair, which was strong and wiry like a dog’s coat, and presently rose and began to put on her evening garments. She walked up and down the room, brushing her hair, in a white satin slip that made astonishing the gold of her sunburned arms and legs. Marc rolled over on the bed and grunted wistfully, “Ah, if we hadn’t had this dreary day, I could have done something about that!”
It was difficult to get him up and make him dress, because he had gone back to being a little boy, and his starched shirt affected him as if he were five instead of thirty-two. But downstairs, when they were all gathered together, their sunburn glistening like grease paint and giving their evening clothes a look of theatrical costume, and had drunk some more cocktails, the feeling that at some point during this expedition they were going to have a good time regained the ground it had lost during the day. They found further exhilaration in the speed of the great automobiles, and the brilliance of their swoops round the darkening curves of the Corniche, and they dismounted laughing at the Duchess’s villa. They cried out with admiration when they passed through the house and were greeted by her and the other guests beside the lily pool, for by some device of lamps set on the ground the whole air was flooded with gentle, diffused beams, and the terraced gardens marched down the hill to the sea like a staircase of starlight. Men and women alike turned to each other faces shining with magic, romantically hawklike with deep shadows, and distant groups either floated in silver or were silhouetted black and leaner than they were, like gay and fluid skeletons. Presently they all sat down at a long table, the length of the terrace, and shadows filled their glasses with the muted sharpness of champagne and covered their plates with food that was either burning hot or icy cold. A flower of good cheer ought to have burst into bloom, were it not that there is a special foe of dedicated persons known as accidia. It descends on them suddenly and is not to be repelled by argument. They are living their customary life, they are performing the exercises they have found most suitable for the promotion of their faith, but the wells of the spirit run dry. The purpose to which they have vowed their souls stares at them like a senseless monster, not worth nursing. The support of grace is withdrawn from them, melancholy flows in their veins. This disorder has most often been noticed in monasteries and convents, but no votaries are exempt from it, whatever their vows.
It was here in the villa gardens, triumphant as the plague, before the dinner was eaten. As the diners sat over their coffee, the window of the music room above them was thrown open, and the voice of a famous Polish tenor strode out and was suspended in the night. But it would not serve; the auditors sat glum. When there was silence again, they scattered miserably among the flowers and fountains, murmuring that they had never known a lousier party. Later the gardens suddenly became dark around them, and there was a moment’s hush, when only the sea spoke on the rocks below. Then there began the hissing, tearing, knocking sounds of fireworks, which touch and lacerate because we remember them from our earliest childhood, and the soft curtain of night was riven by showers of golden rain, by burning Catherine-wheels, by emerald flowers wider than a constellation, and a peacock that for a minute blotted out half the universe with its more brilliant fires. Those who sat and watched in the darkness did not find the darkness in their souls dispersed by these simple but supreme achievements of light. Even as anchorites in their cells are at times tormented by voluptuous visions, so these people, who had come together with the intention of breaking down their experience to elementary sensations of pleasure, were distraught by a momentary disability to find anything whatsoever agreeable. When the peacock had furled its tail and was itself furled into the night, and the blackness closed in on them again, they turned to each other, muttering plans for immediate flight, and when the lamps were switched on again, the white beams disclosed most of them already on their feet, in fugitive attitudes. It seemed to Isabelle as they went out that the Duchess was near to tears; she was growing old. But Isabelle could do nothing, she and Marc had been brought by the Bourges, who were now murmuring frenetically that they would feel better at the Sporting Club. In the great automobiles the whole party sat huddled up, saying over and over again, “Say, wasn’t that terrible? Wasn’t it perfectly terrible?”
The Sporting Club was shut, because it was summer. They had to go to the Casino, at which some of them exclaimed in distress, though they did not abandon their intention of gambling, just as good Church people will grumble if they have to attend a place of worship higher or lower than their habit, but will not contemplate missing a service. When Marc and Isabelle were sitting on opposite sides of the roulette table in the Casino, they exchanged sickly smiles, and she perceived from a shadow of concern in his eyes that she was looking ghastly. She was indeed aching with that depression, which oddly takes the form of a sense of guilt, that comes to those who find themselves alone in sobriety among the alcoholized; but he was looking ghastly too. Through boredom he had accepted most of the drinks that had been offered him during the last twelve hours, and though he was not drunk, since the resilient composition of which his nerves were made was almost impermeable to alcohol, he was suffering from indigestion, just as if he had stuffed himself with a like quantity of cakes or fruit. His pallor was blue in the shadows, and he kept on yawning, to his own great distress, for he had had perfect manners drilled into him in his children’s party days, and he felt he was being rude to the two women on each side of him. When he yawned, it filled her with panic lest she should go to sleep, and she began to talk with a drowning grip on animation to the man next to her. The only subject she could think of was the mural decorations, feeble and yet robust in their presentation of their feebleness, decadent and yet strong as any pioneer in their confident assault on their audience, the pictorial equivalent of the ballet
Coppelia.
When they were finished laughing at a panel depicting some girls in that kind of peasant costume which involves wearing their corsets outside instead of inside their clothes, she looked across the table and saw that Marc had left his place. She thought that he must have gone out because he was ill, and she was much relieved when he came back with a handful of chips.
“Ah!” she said to her neighbour, “I’m so glad. I thought my husband had gone out because he was ill, but he only went to change some money.” “Ah, did he now!” answered her neighbour, in such a peculiar tone, amused and cynical, and something even more malicious than this, that she stared first at him and then at Marc. But she could see no reason for the amusement or the malice. Marc had bought chips for ten thousand francs or so, and he was putting them out in fairly substantial piles; the amount was no larger than what was being risked by at least two others of their party, and his procedure differed not at all from anybody else’s at the table. It was true that his expression was sulky and desperate, and fitted grotesquely on a face that had been designed for good humour, and she suspected that perhaps her neighbour had been misled by this into thinking him a little drunk. But then, had that been so, there would have been nothing specially noteworthy about it, for both Gustave Bourges and Prince Ostrogin were in a state of being moonishly amused at anything that passed before their glassy eyes. She passed her hand over her forehead, and was about to dismiss the matter as a fantasy born from the toxins of her fatigue and the hot stagnant air, when she looked across the table and recognized on Sarah Bourges’s face an envenomed version of the expression she had suspected in her neighbour. It was impossible to mistake its meaning. It betrayed the glee felt by the mean-spirited when they see people who do not deserve humiliation forced to suffer it through some accidental contact, of which they themselves are unaware. So do they look when a wife finds herself in the presence of a woman who is or has been her husband’s most beloved mistress, but, knowing nothing of it, sits unperturbed. It suddenly seemed to Isabelle that there was something ashamed and voluptuous about the heavy mask Marc was bending over his counters, and she had to exercise the sternest self-control to prevent herself staring round the room to see if it contained any specially desirable woman. It was a great relief that Marc lost his money in a very few turns of the wheel, shrugged his shoulders, and rose in an almost churlish insistence on departure.
NEXT MORNING Isabelle woke up in Marc’s arms, muttering, “It was horrid last night in the Casino.”
He looked past her with the grave eyes of a beaten dog. “It is funny that once I quite liked roulette,” he said.
“We’ll never, never, never do that again,” she yawned, rubbing her face against his chest.
“Never again,” he said.
They purged themselves by leaving the house as soon as they had breakfasted, and spending the whole day on the hills between Grasse and Draguignan. The amber walls and rusty roofs of Fayence, the pure blue flowers that showed on the grass as fine as spiders, the steep town of Callas, set on a hill like a dunce’s cap, a cistern glowing like an emerald at the bottom of a valley of olive terraces, these gave them the cleansing and remorseful pleasure felt at the first natural objects seen outside the sickroom by an invalid whose prolonged illness has been in part his own fault. They came back at dusk, and dined at the little place by the port, and went to bed early, having seen none of their friends all day, and therefore feeling reconciled to mankind.
When she woke up on the following day, she felt magnificent in health, and very playful, even a little cruel, and she stretched out her arms towards Marc, to embrace him, to torment him. But he was not there. He had risen, in a hurry, it appeared, for he had left the sheets thrown back, and had not tucked them in again, as he had always done before when he had got up while she was still sleeping. She sat up in bed rubbing her eyes and trying to exorcise her feeling of alarm. The bathroom door was closed and from behind it was a sound of running water. Marc was having his bath, the morning was going on its normal course; there was nothing extraordinary about it except the earliness of the hour. She could see, from the angle at which the sunshine lay on the balcony, that it was long before their usual time for rising; and as her eye dwelt anxiously on this differently shaped patch of brightness, it was drawn, and forgot its anxiety, to the view palely painted above the balustrades.
Today the milk-white sea was divided by glassy waterways into crinkled continents, and was divided from a sky almost as colourless as itself by a broad blurred line of indigo blue. All the landscape was tenderer than she had ever seen it. The rising sun discovered rosy sands under the dark trees on the edge of the islands, and picked out the houses on the high land about the bays and made them almost as warm as flesh. The Esterel mountains no longer showed as a rugged and continuous range, blue and fantastic, but disclosed themselves as a multitude of gentler hills, of mild hues which claimed that here also was the soil, which men live by, which being watered gives grass and flowers. There was a plenitude of light, as much as the space between earth and sky could hold; but there was nothing to tell the eye of heat; and when she went to the window, a cool wind blew on to her bare body, as if there were a mystic essence in the morning which would preserve its freshness however the sun might assault it, for so long as the season decreed for its existence. It was inviolable though doomed. To enjoy its brief perfection, to feel all around her this magically renewed air that would in an hour be as used as if time had never known morning but had always stood at noon, she put on pyjamas and ran barefoot out of the room and downstairs. The salon felt dead as living rooms do before the household has arisen; but in the garden the air was like the breath of life.
The wind of the morning was light as yet, a mere wandering freshness; within the netted loggia the tropical birds flashed brightly back and forth, more silently than later in the day, as if the light had not yet made its full call to them. There was such a stillness among the trees as there is after dawn. The green fireworks of the four palm trees that stood at each corner of the walled garden dripped gently rigid from their proud, gnarled rocket-sticks; the gold-powdered mimosa branches waited delicately, ready to bend beneath the weight of an air, but no air leaned on them; the fig tree bore up under the pervading corpulence that plumped its stocky trunk, its sleek leaves, and its fleshy fruit. Each presented to the eye, whole and observable, a form utterly undisturbed by movement. The flowers, too, the high hedges of oleander with their clear and vivid yet somehow impure range of reds and pinks, like fruit juice stained with cream, and in the beds the fawny-orange gladioli and the dahlias that were made sombre by their velvety surface even when they were white, were more themselves than they would be later in the day. There was a fineness of colour there now which the noontide sun would take by its heat, as it would take by its light the power from the eye of the beholder to see delicately the residue. All brightness of leaf and flower looked cool as if the day were damped with mist, only there was no mist, but an extreme clearness. She walked slowly through the garden, liking the cold shock of the tiles under her feet, lifting her arms above her head and drawing the freshness deep down into her lungs.