The Thinking Reed (14 page)
He picked up her hand and kissed the palm. “We should be doomed all right then.”
“Think,” she mused, “if anybody from another planet should have seen Adam and Eve, and been told that hosts of their descendants would stake all their happiness on the number of marks on a card, or the place where a ball fell on a wheel, he would not have believed it! It is a habit that we will be able to throw off without an effort, just as I shall stop painting my toenails scarlet when I leave here.”
“Of course I will,” said Marc. “You know, when I have thought of gambling, it has always seemed something dark and powerful in my mind, a nightmare presence that could bide its time and then jump out on you when you were least expecting it, as if it wasn’t something I did, but something outside myself that could take control of me and make me do things I didn’t want to. But you make life seem so simple. One just does what is most reasonable, and everything is bound to go all right.”
“Yes, of course it is,” said Isabelle. “The world would be a terrible place if that were not so. Look, there are those doves again. The one is really quite a bright red, isn’t it? I never saw a dove that colour before.”
They sat, hand in hand, watching the flight.
“We must hurry if we are to get in a bathe before lunch,” she said, but she was too contented to make a move.
“Let us wait a little,” murmured Marc. “See, François is coming out of the house with the letters. We might as well have a look at them before we go down.”
“And there is somebody with him. It is Luba. Look, she has caught her sleeve in the door. I suppose she wants to bathe with us.”
“Ah, poor Luba,” said Marc. “We must be nice to her. I think she is going through a very bad time just now. Leclerc is obviously tired of her. She is not so beautiful as she used to be, and it is no longer very chic to have a Russian émigrée mistress.”
“Poor dear,” said Isabelle. “I like her so much.” She waved her hand in welcome. “Good morning, Luba!”
“Good morning, dear people!” called Luba. “I come to see if you go swimming?”
“In a minute,” cried Isabelle. “And we were only saying we hoped you would look in and come too. But just let’s look at our mail.”
Marc went and took the letters from the butler, then slipped his arm through Luba’s and brought her along to the bench. She pecked in greeting over Isabelle, but was a little inaccurate in her aim, and then stood laughing and swaying between them, in pleasure at their company. Some other factor than nearsightedness made her move vaguely and turn her face about from speaker to speaker like a nearsighted person. There was a strange combination of opulence and indeterminateness about her appearance; her skin was so burned that it matched her tawny hair and eyes, and she was like a statue worked in golden haze; her pyjamas were beautiful and costly, but they had been caught in so many doors that it was difficult to say if she were well or ill dressed; and Isabelle noted that it had lately begun to be impossible to tell if she were young or old.
“There is nothing here for me but a letter from Maman,” said Marc, “and it will be all about finding her that Louis Treize armoire we’ve heard of so much already. Shall we go?”
“Wait a minute, I have a letter from Uncle Honoré I should like to look at,” said Isabelle. “Sit down, Luba.”
But there was nothing really important in Uncle Honoré’s letter, though in his postscript he offered once more to lay at her disposal the store of wisdom he had collected during his long life whenever she should need it. The events of the morning made her feel grateful that she had this resource to fall back on, though she had complete confidence that they would lead to nothing disagreeable. She was replacing the letter in its envelope with a smile of satisfaction when Luba picked up the folded newspaper from the bench beside her, looked at it, uttered a cry, and dropped it.
“Ah,” she said, turning dim yet shining eyes from one to the other, “you wonder why I cry out! It is because I see the date. Today used to be a great feast in Russia. You cannot think what fun we had with our friends; we used to go out and kiss each other on both cheeks, and give each other presents of little round flat cakes fried in goosefat. It was all so nice!”
“That is yesterday’s paper,” said Isabelle. “Let us go and bathe.”
BY OCTOBER Isabelle was settled in the house where, she intended, she would live until she died. It was not one that she would have expected to choose. She had hoped to live in one of those high houses which make the Ile Saint-Louis look like a tall grey barge moored on the Seine, or in a discreet little villa in Passy which would have sent up prodigious thickets of lilac above its trelliswork palings in springtime, or in one of the blackened palaces of the Rue de l’Université, that long alley street full of amber antiquity and little shops which have stewed in their stuffiness for centuries, so that it seems kitchen-warm on the coldest day. She had hoped, indeed, to live in some quarter where Paris made no attempt to disguise that it is an overgrown provincial town. But the house she chose was in the dreariest part of the Haussmannized boulevards, among over-handsome mansions like heavy-bosomed dowagers, decked with dark stone garlands of swollen flowers so pompous and nineteenth century that they could please no one save as illustrations to Proust. Marc and Isabelle had gone to look it over only because it belonged to a family friend who was eager to disembarrass himself of it, since he had inherited it without the fortune to maintain it. Yet once they had been inside the drawing room, Isabelle was firm that they must live there. It was not, indeed, that she felt charmed by the sight of the vast chandeliers, which even through their linen bags betrayed a vulgar turbulence of curves like the cavortings of ill-painted nymphs in the Salon, or anything else in the stupidly magnificent room. It was that Marc had taken her to the window, and led her out on to the balcony, to show her an oblique view of one of the entrances into the Parc Monceau. He had stood, for a longer time than he was accustomed to spend on occupations unconnected with business or love or sport, looking down on the nurses and governesses stalking hip or shoulder deep in a bubbling tide of children through the gateway into the glades and vistas which the incredible colours of autumn, added to the fantasy inherent in the design, made exactly to resemble a setting for a fairy play. “Upon my word I wish I was with them,” said Marc. “When my sisters and I were little, we used to play there every afternoon. We had tremendous fun. There’s lots of things in there, you know. There is a grotto, and a colonnade, and a sham tomb, and crowds of monuments. One to Maupassant, particularly, which we used to pretend was really to somebody else, a hero in a story we made up. I must ask the girls if they can remember anything about it.” It appeared to her that, if her children played every afternoon in the park where their father had played when he was a child, there would be restored to her life something that she had lacked till then, being an only child, early orphaned, and early widowed.
She had no trouble in furnishing the house. A year before, one of Marc’s grandaunts had died and left him her house in La Rochelle with all its contents; and when they went down to see it, they found its creaking darkness peopled with the best kind of Empire furniture. The first rays of light from the opened salon door showed four golden eaglets, small and of a composed flight, springing away to the four quarters of the globe, but restrained by stiff yet gracious gold bands joining them to the justly proportioned circle of a candelabrum. When the caretaker threw back the shutters, she saw that in the vast room there were three others of these arrested flights, simple as diagrams, complete demonstrations of a theorem of beauty. She would be able to use them to replace those riotous chandeliers in her Paris drawing room; and everywhere she found things that would free her home from its stupid metropolitan magnificence, being themselves magnificent and provincial. There were chairs that had a care for pomp and wore their stars and swans with an air, but acknowledged the contours of the human hindquarters, and stuffs on which time had been able to work sunset wonders in the way of faded colours, since they had been made to last and the design was seemly; and upstairs there were beds that were fantastically nursed between two walnut cornucopias and shadowed by torrents of brocade falling from the rings in an eaglet’s mouth, yet were solid enough to hold one safely while one was being embraced, or giving birth to a child, or dying.
There were no marks of later taste anywhere in the house, and all had been conserved by the most faultless housewifery; this, she learned, was a consequence of the condition of various married pairs. A well-dowered bride and bridegroom of the days of Napoleon had been contented with their home till they died, and their son and his wife had been too poor to alter it. Then Marc’s grandaunt had brought their son a fortune, but an instant coldness between the two had made them reluctant to spend it on the house, as if both hoped that something might happen which would make all such expenditure waste money. In the meantime local scandal must be allayed, so the house was kept dusted and waxed as if it was beloved like other houses: and by the time the husband died, its care had become a habit with the wife. “It is a long story, I will tell you it some time,” said Marc. “Anyway, she went often to Spa and Baden, but she always came back here, and it had always to be in perfect order for her.” Isabelle was moved by the idea that happiness and unhappiness had worked together to deliver to her precisely what she wanted as the background of her life; and she felt gratified that she was about to restore these stable, solid things to just such a serene home as that in which they had begun.
When Isabelle explained to Madame Sallafranque, who, owing to some other node in family life, had never visited La Rochelle, how beautiful and useful the inheritance had proved to be, she was amused because her mother-in-law expressed gratification not at its beauty nor its usefulness, but at the amount of money it would save Marc and herself. Isabelle accounted for this thriftiness by recalling that, though Madame Sallafranque had forced herself into a contemporary mould by her clothes and her postures, she in fact belonged to an older generation. But to her surprise not only Marc’s uncles and aunts, but his two sisters, Natalie and Yolande, whom she had regarded as bestriding the moment with a circus rider’s ease, expressed just the same satisfaction at the francs that had been conserved. With a start Isabelle began to query the attitude in which she had been brought up, which would have regarded it as unreasonable and even ungallant for her to consider any proposed expenditure save from the point of view that she was wealthy and that whatever money she laid out would be replaced by next year’s income. This attitude was perhaps not universal. It was perhaps peculiar to the United States. It was perhaps not so sensible, nor even so entertaining, as the attitude of the Sallafranques. Once she began to root out her early prejudice, she could see plainly that it was really both more reasonable and more gallant not to waste money but to use it to build up a barricade between poverty and one’s children.
“I like doing the things French people do,” she told herself with the deepest satisfaction. “But of course I am really French. I do not really belong to the United States.” She remembered jests she had heard made by Americans about the meanness of the French; and though when she heard them those who had uttered them had been her friends, she now thought of them as her enemies. As she calmly scrutinized her household books, she recalled the uncomprehending frenzy that filled English and American housewives keeping house in France, when they performed the same task, because they could not reconcile themselves to the custom by which the chef collected commission on foodstuffs, the chambermaid on the laundry, the butler on the fuel for the furnace and on the wines. It was surely something not easily distinguishable from meanness which made them unable to appreciate these charges as a wise permanent tax, designed to stabilize the social structure by making employees benefit directly by their employers’ high standard of living. She enjoyed her own calm acceptance of this institution, as she enjoyed fulfilling the obligation laid down on her of seeing that none of her servants threatened its foundation by exorbitance. There was nothing casual about life in France, it demanded perpetually that one should hit the note in the middle.
There was only one flaw in her new existence. She was friendless. That occurred to her one late afternoon in November, when she was walking along one of the avenues that lead from the Seine to the direction of the Arc de Triomphe, with an air, at such an hour, in such a season of the year, of passing somewhere on their route a woman weeping gently by an urn. A light mist hung about the trees and made the distance mournful; and the dead leaves which eddied slowly down through the windless calm, being the last, were so desiccated that they lay pallid and crepitant on the dark ground. The hurrying passers-by, bending their heads under the cold airs and the gathering dusk, seemed a different race from the people who swept by in shining automobiles, more pitiful, humble, innocent, and oppressed. One man, not ill-dressed or unhandsome, turned about after he had looked into Isabelle’s face, walked at her heels for a time, and then addressed her gallantly; but his voice betrayed that he was quite old and there was no urgency in his gesture. This too was a dead leaf, a last witness to a bygone abundance. Everything in the scene spoke of dissolution, of a past that had taken everything with it, of a present that held nothing but regret and nostalgia. As the lights went up one by one along the vistas that were as poignant as if seen through tears, Isabelle found her own heart aching, although she knew quite well that this melancholy was an illusion born of the time and place. She asked herself, as she had often done before, how it was that Paris should evoke as no other city a delicate misery over the irrecoverable past, when it had been built and was lived in by people who were exceptional in their stoical, even brutal acceptance of the past as spilt milk. But she supposed that in this respect Paris was like all masterpieces, which produce in the spectators emotions which have never passed through their creators’ minds.