The Thinking Reed (18 page)

“I am talking too much, perhaps,” said Isabelle, “but you must forgive me. All the time I am a little drunk these days. I am so well. But go on telling me about Luba.”

“There is nothing much to tell you except that she is miserably lonely and hurt, and when I asked her why she had not been to see us, her lip stuck out like a child’s and she said she did not think we would want her, because she was
déclassée.
She talked to me like a whipped child.”

“Oh, nonsense,” said Isabelle, “let us take her with us to Le Touquet and she will feel better in no time, and forget all about it.”

“Darling, that would be very kind of you!” Marc exclaimed. “Could you really bear to do that? For we must not forget, Luba is really very tiresome.”

“Darling,” replied Isabelle, “the question is not whether I can bear her, but if you can. As I tell you, I am always a little drunk now and amiably so. I will sit with her while you golf, if you can stand her at meals and in the evening.”

“Oh, I can do that quite well. At night she really looks very pretty, it is a pleasure to have her about.”

“Very well. Did she tell you where she is living?”

“Oh, at the old address. It seems that has been arranged. The little house belongs to her.”

Isabelle picked up the telephone and, as she waited for the number, put her hand over the mouthpiece. “Is Luba still keeping up with people?” she asked. “What was she doing in the Ritz bar?”

“She had come to meet the Marquise de Trayas, but she was half an hour too early. I met her just coming in as I was going out.”

“Ah, is that you, Luba?” asked Isabelle, and cut through the little blurred barkings of affectionate greeting with her invitation. “But of course we really want you,” she said presently. “We insist that you come. It is no use your refusing, we shall fetch you in the automobile on Wednesday just after lunch.”

“But, Isabelle!” broke in Marc. Isabelle, however, silenced him with her hand, and when she put down the telephone she said, “I know, Marc. You cannot get away till four. But I will send the automobile to her at a quarter to two, and with her servant and the chauffeur working at her all the time she will be ready by three and then the automobile will bring her back here, and we shall have some tea, and be off by four.”

“I need never teach you how to arrange things,” Marc observed comfortably.

“But you must go on telling me about poor Luba,” said Isabelle. “Did you say that the Marquise de Trayas was concerning herself with her? I wonder if she sees any possibilities in her future. Claire is always very practical.”

“Well, as a matter of fact, she did say something about having hopes for Luba,” Marc recalled. “It seems that she had Luba to meet some people at lunch a day or two ago, and that one of the men was immensely taken by her and has been with her constantly ever since. In fact, it was because the three were going to meet her that she had asked Luba to meet her at the Ritz bar. But the man was one of your compatriots, my darling, and suffered thereby from the need to use modern methods of transport practically incessantly. He had flown to Brussels, and should have flown back today, but was fogbound.”

“Claire is serious,” meditated Isabelle, “she is almost never vulgar. She would not have tried to foster this inclination had there not been the promise of some dignified future for Luba. I suppose she did not tell you the man’s name?”

“She did, but I have forgotten,” said Marc, “it is very stupid of me.”

“How funny,” said Isabelle, “you never forget anything as a rule.” She picked up the telephone again and called a number. “Ah, is that you, Claire?” she asked presently. “How are you? Well, I hope. But I won’t pretend this is a mere social call, I am not feeling frivolous. I want to know about our dear Luba—Marc has said …” After she had listened for a few minutes her eyes began to sparkle, and she uttered little pleased exclamations. At the conversation’s end she turned to Marc and said, “Why, it is more fortunate than I could have hoped! Bizarre, of course, but then that brings it into line with the rest of her destiny. The man is Alexander Pillans. You have heard of him?”

“Weighing machines and scales, isn’t it?”

“Yes, and marriages. He has been married three times. He lives in St. Louis, but he is very rich and as well known a figure all over the United States as if he lived in New York, and the story has amused people. You see, his first wife was just a plain little woman, whom his dreadful old Scotch father who made all the money forced on him when he was twenty-one. Then she died, and he started marrying famous beauties. He married Liane Mardi, first.”

“She was a dreadful woman,” said Marc, “very beautiful, but till I saw her at the Folies I did not know that a pair of legs could look as mercenary as a face.”

“Well, of course that did not last. She amused herself spending his money for a time, but there is one thing he insists on, that he must go on living in the dreadful Pillans home that his father built, a replica of the Château of Chambord, in a flat park a mile outside St. Louis. He is a poor little thing really, very short and shrunken, with enormous ears and eyes. I do not expect he feels safe anywhere except in the house where he was brought up. So she left him and he married Margherita Stravazzi.”

“She is a splendid creature,” said Marc, “but dreadful too. She is one of those women who have as deep and irresistible an impulse to offer herself up to disgrace as the martyrs have to go to the stake. If her whole material future depended on her being faithful to you, she still couldn’t help deceiving you with the valet de chambre.”

“There are very few valets de chambre in St. Louis,” said Isabelle; “she did not stay long. But do you not think it sounds very hopeful for Luba? Obviously he longs for the glittering unchaste women that his father denied him in his youth, but he would never part with them if he could help it. Well, Luba is still glittering, and though she is not young, I suppose she is no older than Liane Mardi or Stravazzi, and she will give him everything that his plain and devoted wife gave him. She will notice nothing about the house, she will find something about it that reminds her of Russia. Claire says she will see that he comes to Le Touquet for Easter, and I see no reason why anything should go wrong. Yes,” she sighed happily, lying back on her cushions, “I have arranged the whole business.”

Marc burst out laughing, and she lifted her head sharply, crying, “Why, you’re only pretending to be amused! What is it that displeases you in all this? You would not be hard on Luba because she is not a young girl in a white muslin frock, or on Mr. Pillans because he was born without dignity? We were born into this world, we must make the best of it.”

“No,” answered Marc, “I was thinking nothing unkind of Luba. I never would. And I am never contemptuous of those among your compatriots who seem not to have been taught by their surroundings how to live. It is a form of poverty, one doesn’t mock at it. It was only …”

“Tell me, tell me,” said Isabelle. “I cannot bear suspecting that you disapprove of me.”

“It is only that I am a little startled at the way you propose to cure Luba’s malady so simply by finding her a suitable man,” Marc smiled. “I am a man, and I feel that when men break women’s hearts it is only nice of the women to let it appear as if the men had done them irreparable damage. Luba should mourn a little longer, I feel. Just out of compliment to my sex. It is quite silly of me. It is only that …”

His voice died away. The flames of the log fire flickered and seemed to shake the walls; it was as if the existence they had been leading in the room had sustained a shock disturbing enough to quicken its pulse. Isabelle turned her face away from him and rolled over on the cushions, saying through laughter that he was a Turk, a Pasha, but she was troubled by the sense of insecurity which always filled her when she realized that the world in which human beings lived was not the same as the world of which they spoke and thought. Surely in each human being there is both a hungry, naked outcast and a Sister of Charity, desolate without those whom she can feed and clothe and shelter; and these cannot minister to each other. That is the rule which has been put in to make it more difficult. They must find a stranger outside the skin to whose Sister of Charity the outcast can offer his sores, to whose outcast their Sister of Charity can offer her pity. She had learned that by being an orphan, by being a widow, not during the days of weeping, for she kept on record nothing that she thought or felt under the stress of violent emotion, but in the empty later days; and she had learned it again by watching the conduct of several people, which, without this hypothesis, would have been inexplicable. But there was this other phantom world, to which Marc had alluded, where human beings were regarded not as dual but chaotic by nature, where human relationships were as arbitrary as dance steps, where sex appeared as a flight and pursuit instead of a collaboration to a mutually desired end, and men were supposed to have scored a point if they bungled a passage, and women were required to maintain their dignity by stiffening into rigid attitudes of suffering when they might still freely move their limbs, and no heed was paid to the real urgencies of life. When she heard people speak calmly on the assumption that they were living in such a world as that, and had accepted it, and were perpetuating it by their acceptance, there flashed before her a vision of humanity as a faintly smiling madman stepping out of a high window, of a coquettish madwoman holding a lit taper to her muslin gown, and she felt alarmed not only by what she feared of her fellows, but also by her solitariness in fearing it. But the moment passed, the flames fell and the shadows were steady. She continued to laugh, and presently there was no part of her mind that was not amused.

Their expedition was entertaining from its beginning, when the car brought round Luba on Wednesday afternoon. She was touching and delightful when she started on a journey, because the stated fact that she was going to a certain place for a certain time failed to make any real impression on her; she had found the world full of fictions, and she saw no reason why this should not be one of them. She waved goodbye to the Sacré Coeur where it shone white on the Butte of Montmartre at the left of the Beauvais road, owning that, though she had been very miserable in Paris, she had been very happy there too, just as though she were never to see these parts again. As they drew nearer to Le Touquet through the night, she peered smiling from the dark windows, as if to see the details of the home where she was to live in contentment, and for ever. Marc and Isabelle had been afraid she might want to stay up very late, but she was as tired out by her extreme imaginative abandonment to the idea of travel as most people are during their first day out on a transatlantic liner, and she could hardly stay awake to eat any dinner, though Marc had it brought up to their salon.

The next morning Marc and Isabelle slept very late, and woke up very good-humoured and lazy and gossiping, so that it was a long time before they were dressed. Marc kept on coming out of the bathroom, it might be to ask her if she had ever noticed some particular trait in his mother’s character, or to tell her of how he had bicycled here from his father’s place at Lille when he was fourteen; and she did not go to have her bath when he had finished, because greediness overcame her, and she took a brioche, clotting the fine yellow sponge with a thick layer of bland yellow butter. He stood beside her laughing, his hand on her waist, while she ate with the special innocent sensuality of her state, pressing the mingled substances against her palate, crushing out the flavour with her teeth. When at length they were ready to go out, they suddenly remembered Luba, whom till then they had entirely forgotten. They went into her room and found her still asleep and translating, as dogs do, all her dreams into little cries and movements. She laughed several times while they watched her, but then rolled over and seemed about to cry, so they woke her. She went into the bathroom to dress, but she kept on losing things, and would never have arrived at being fully clothed if Isabelle had not rung for her maid and told her to take the business in hand.

They stepped out at last into a day that was grey but not cold, and exclaimed at the flowers in the hotel parterres, the rigid imperial hyacinths, the mobile daffodils. Then they turned and looked back at the hotel and laughed at the forest of rounded turrets that rose from the precipice of windowed walls; for though the Guillaume-le-Conquérant might have been a legitimate version of a Norman chateau so far as forms went, it had been rendered not more imposing but comically raffish by being made so much over its accustomed size, just as cinema organs are. Isabelle and Luba were enchanted by the delicate birch woods all round, which were still black and bare except for a few witty little green leaves here and there; but they were drawn, as if they were children, as if they were poor folk who rarely had a holiday and must snatch the essentials, towards the wonder of the sea. They were pleased at the way that the town became more tawdry and homely as they went, and they found a long street lined with shops full of rubbish, where Marc bought brooches made of shells for his women, and a big rubber ball painted with a sprig of white heather. Then they made their way to the sands and walked for a little till they found a stretch where there were not so many people, and then Isabelle sat down and rested while Marc and Luba played ball. A black dog that had followed them joined in the game, but although its antics were amusing, Isabelle’s eyes turned to the grey sea. She looked out over the face of the waves, and her mind followed her gaze, exulting in its power to realize space, swinging backwards and forwards like an eagle between the white surf and the dark bar of the horizon. She felt sure that she would not die when her child was born, and that she had strength enough to answer all demands it might make on her.

Presently Marc felt that Isabelle’s attention had gone from him, and he stopped playing and ran back to her, and sat down beside her on the sand. He asked her if she was all right, and she answered that she was, and let him take her hand. They watched Luba as she ran about throwing sticks for the dog to fetch, and noted that she was looking rested and beautiful, and perhaps a little younger, and, as always in the open air, indistinct; for her yellow hair matched the sands, which under the grey sky and in front of the grey sea looked more yellow than usual, and for lack of sunlight her white woollen dress looked a beige shadow. Though she was older than either of them, they bracketed her and their child in their talk, as young things in their charge.