The Thinking Reed (16 page)
“Hurry, hurry,” said Marc.
“Ah, Marc,” she protested.
His mouth came down on hers, his hand that was not on her waist reached out and turned down the lights. “Ah, Marc,” she protested again, “I wanted to see the room …” She pushed his shoulders away with the palms of her hands, and, partly to tease him, partly because she would have liked to make sure that they had set the little occasional tables as she had directed, and partly out of that virginal shyness which renews itself a thousand times if love is present, she delayed peering back into the darkness of the room.
“Come,” said Marc.
“No, wait a minute! There is something I have always wanted to know, and I always forget to ask. Tell me, what is the French for Michaelmas daisies?”
“We call them
les vendangeuses.
”
“Ah, how pretty! But I wonder why?”
“Just look at them!” He switched on the lights; the pale clots of blossom stared at them again. “They stand almost as high as women, you know, and they never have the look of being originally the colours they are, pink and blue and mauve, but only of being white that has been stained. They are like women that have been to the vineyard and got stained with the grapejuice. Also something might have happened to them there that is apt to happen round the vineyards at vintage time. They are not quite tidy like other flowers, they are wide-eyed as if they had seen something surprising, they are very still. Ah, the poor little things!”
His hand put out the lights and pulled ajar the door, and his mouth pressed down on hers again, but she continued to look reluctantly into the darkness of the salon. The ray of light from the landing showed her nothing but the four eaglets on one of the ormolu candelabra she had brought from La Rochelle, winging their way to the four quarters of the globe, but held back by stiff yet gracious bands. It was so in marriage, when one loved one’s husband. Wild things that would have flown away and been lost in the violent airs above the edges of the earth were restrained within four walls, to be perpetual in their beauty. She turned to face her husband and her body became fluid in his arms, her head fell forward on his chest. She saw the melancholy evening slinking away like a beaten dog from her warm and happy home.
The sole anxiety which troubled Isabelle in these days was fear lest she might not have any children. Her marriage with Roy had been sterile through no design of theirs. But that, she reflected, was hardly evidence. It would have been almost as supernatural for her to have had a child during that time when she was almost perpetually being propelled by combustion engines through cold airs of transcontinental, transmontane routes, or through still colder airs across the skies, as it would have been for one of the automobiles and aeroplanes that bore her on these flights to produce a litter of shining and steely young. But now her life, though as busy or even busier, was calmer and more deeply rooted; the times were more propitious; and indeed by Christmas she had reason for hope. But she was not convinced, since she had often heard how resolute women could forge the symptoms of maternity, until after the New Year, when she and Marc had gone for a fortnight to St. Moritz.
It was on one of the horse-racing days. They had left the stand because Marc had wished to see a new camera that one of the newspaper photographers was using, which appeared to be simply a glass box; and while he examined it and talked with its owner, Isabelle strolled away with Luba. Since their arrival Luba had constantly been in their society, for though she attached little importance to the circumstance that Monsieur Leclerc, who was in America, had not written to her for three months, mentioning it with tender laughter as a proof that though he was French by birth he was Russian in many of his characteristics, they found it ominous. Isabelle felt her apprehension for her friend increase as they walked through the crowd and it was herself, not Luba, at whom the people stared in admiration. Public acclaim had never meant much to her, since she saw no useful end which it might serve; and now she was happily married she would have been quite content if custom had ordained that she must wear a yashmak when she walked abroad. But this withholding of admiration from Luba annoyed her because it was unjust, since Luba had not lost her beauty. As yet her only fault was that she had been beautiful too long. It was a cruel injustice, for such admiration was necessary to Luba since she was one of those women who, if they are not chosen as queen at the tourney, will never be chosen at all. Her splendid appearance could make claims upon the world, which all the vague and apologetic rest of her would either never make, or would relinquish without an effort. Isabelle found her eyes blurred by her sense of the difference between her own settled happiness and Luba’s destiny; and she turned her away from the crowd and brought her to a halt beside the rails of the track.
There the genius of the place restored her to serenity. They were looking across the lake at the dark theatre of pinewoods on the farther shore, which man had hardly marked, and at the superior and dazzling theatre of white peaks, which man had not marked at all. She was not ordinarily an enthusiast of the Swiss landscape, for it seemed to her that if snow mountains were beautiful, then vanilla ices and meringues also must be conceded beauty. But she was exalted by the thin and glittering air; its quality suggested that water might become intoxicating not only when certain substances are added to it, but when others are taken away from it. All recollected climates seemed by comparison stained and cloddish. Actually she did not doubt that too long a sojourn there would be as perilous as residence in the tropics, that it would stimulate to a perpetual physical activity as destructive in the long run as languor to the balanced life of body and mind. But that did not prevent her from being transported into delight by the breath she drew into her nostrils from this glorious atmosphere, brilliant as a diamond, which lay under the pure, purged blue sky.
A pistol shot rang out. This did not rend the nerves, for it was a sound in harmony with the countryside; such noises are heard on the glaciers when the ice cliffs split, on the mountain slopes when an avalanche breaks away. In a world where the snow crackles under foot, where the air itself crackles in the ear, a louder crack than usual made no matter. Isabelle was almost surprised that it had a meaning, that it was the signal for the starting of the race. Smiling, she leant forward on the rail as the horses came round the bend in the track, each tailed like a comet with its cloud of sparkling, scattering snow. As they came nearer, she bent even lower and her smile became ecstatic.
“Isabelle! Isabelle!” cried Luba suddenly, so emphatically that the people near by swung round to look at her.
“What is it?” asked Isabelle. “Is somebody down?”
“No, no,” said Luba, turning her back on the race. “It is that I have just remembered that it is the fifteenth. The fifteenth!” she repeated rapturously, though her neighbours were throwing her unfriendly looks and giving their attention back to the race. “Today it 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 wooden dolls painted in bright colours. It was all so nice.”
“It is, however,” said Isabelle faintly, “it is, however …” For her world had gathered itself into a Catherine-wheel of very pure colours. She had been listening to the sound of the horses’ hooves hammering on the snow-covered ice, and as they travelled nearer she had felt the hammered rhythm in the soles of her feet, her spine, her temples. She had enjoyed participating in the rhythm of the rushing brutes, knowing a pleasure she had not known since as a child she had galloped about her nursery, pretending to be a lion or a tiger. But then suddenly from within herself had come a counter-motion so potent that it nearly brought her to her knees. It was brief, it was the feeblest possible flutter. But it brought a new rhythm down like a hammer on the other rhythm that was hammering on the ice, making her heart stop, revealing to her that she possessed lengths of intestines of which her mind had not taken an inventory, convincing her that nothing could possibly happen outside her nearly so extraordinary as what was happening inside her. The white peaks spun together, the pinewoods swam up to the pure sky, but she brought them back to order by her deep, quiet breathing. “It is, however,” she continued firmly, “not the fifteenth until tomorrow,” and she gave all her attention to the horses, which were now passing them. Proximity showed that they were animals which would have been allowed to race only in a thoroughly democratic country; but as they passed, they crossed the light at an angle which turned the spray of snow behind them to blown rainbows. It gave her an excuse to cry out as if in admiration.
“Ah, so you really are amusing yourself, darling,” Marc exclaimed at her elbow.
“You cannot think how much,” she said.
The place was intoxicating. It was her friend; when she stood at her window in the morning and looked out to the bronze woods, the white hills, the bright air, she felt as if she would never grow old, as if no pain could etch into the healthy hardness of her nerves. Yet there was an enemy here also. It was the mode of life she had encountered at Cannes, the rules of the lay brotherhood that had taken vows of wealth, unchastity, and disobedience to all standards. Suddenly she found herself in the midst of it, like one of those abducted heroines in old-fashioned Protestant tracts, who wake and distastefully find themselves immured in a convent. Beings richly endowed by nature and good fortune raced out in the morning on the ice-rink and the ski-slopes and the toboggan-track, and diverted their vitality away from their brains to their muscles. In this superbly invigorating air they were able to spend hour after hour in conditions precluding all danger that they might possibly lapse into thought. But when exhaustion and the failure of the day drove them indoors, they were faced with their dread again. Sound blood was coursing through their veins, astringent air was scouring their lungs, they were better animals for the day’s exercise; and it is the inveterate habit of the human animal when it feels well to think, to speculate, to evolve standards. So, as on the Riviera, they called in alcohol as a prophylactic; they sat in the bar diluting the universe, and began to discuss whether Ferdy Monck had had a right to say what he had said to Gordon Lloyd at the ice-hockey match the other day, and whether Annette had really spoken to Laura as people said she had in the
patisserie
on Saturday morning. All possibility of friendship was undermined by their promiscuous amities and sudden enmities. They disciplined the flesh, which is by nature apt to pick and choose, until it became as hardy an acceptor of traffic as a railway junction; and they had as little to do as possible with that not inconsiderable human invention, the word, using as small a vocabulary as possible in their talk, avoiding it altogether when written, and substituting so far as possible for the use of it at the bridge table and backgammon board the contemplation of numbers.
They were doing here in the winter, in fact, everything that they had done in the Riviera in the summer. These vows were for life. In this war there was no discharge. Isabelle felt herself as much alarmed by this demonstration of the tenacity of the system as the devout are before witness to the prevalence of the Freemasons, or Protestants when faced with the power of the Jesuits. She found, too, the demonstrators themselves much more alarming than they had been in the South. There the strong sunlight dimmed their quality, and the warm air, dense with salt, muffled their stridencies. Here, flushed with exercise and excited by the altitude, they disclosed how beautiful most of them were, how strong nearly all of them were. Whirling with the freedom of birds on the dark ice-rink, they were more graceful than any birds, with their flourished hands, their spinning heels. Coming in at the end of the day to sit round the bar, the hard brilliance the cold air had veneered on them melting with the warmth and what they drank, they shone like liquefying jewels. This way of living was not the resort of defectives, it was the deliberate choice of human beings who, judged by physiological standards, must be counted high types.
The perversity of this choice appeared more clearly here in Switzerland than on the Riviera, for here there was possible no nocturnal dispersions in gardens and on the borders of the sea, or to adjacent towns or friends’ villas. The icy night barricaded the visitors in the village; they could be seen concentrated in a few hotels. The overheated, overcrowded rooms and corridors where they sat were filled with a continual clatter, as if they were continually taking up the substance of life and throwing it away from them with easy, powerful gestures, so that it broke into pieces on the floor. There were other people there, of course, not of their kind, busy men snatching a holiday with their wives and families, who had probably no sympathy with ruin, who would be moderate and sensible in all their ways. But it was disquieting that these seemed to concede the importance of the votaries of incoherence, to admit that they possessed a glamour and a force which they themselves lacked. They were always staring at them, stuttering if they had to speak to them, becoming clumsy when they came too close to them. Isabelle, looking into her own mind, recognized with a shudder that she herself would have been resentful if the glorious Daisy had not accepted her as an equal, that she was able to despise the votaries only because she was freely admitted to their company.
Towards the end of their stay she was happy only out of doors in the morning, before most people were about. Indoors, or out of doors at any later hour, the question came to her too often, “Why do we need to know these people?” and had always to be answered that it was quite inevitable. She and Marc could exclude them for the most part from their home; she was beginning to see some sense in the reluctance with which the French ask any but a small circle of intimate friends to sit at their hearths. But all the same she and Marc were bound to meet these unwanted companions whenever they tried to take advantage of their wealth. Whenever they decided to play golf on the finest course, or go for a holiday in any specially beautiful place, they always found the course and the place in the hands of these people. They were the most prodigal spenders of their time, and they could command the best all over the world. There was, of course, a great deal of beauty too remote and too untamed for their domination, but Marc and Isabelle were too busy to seek them out; it troubled Marc if he were not in touch with his factory by telephone at least once a day.