The Thinking Reed (19 page)

“When is this fellow Pillans coming down?” asked Marc.

“Tomorrow morning, she says,” answered Isabelle.

“That’s good,” said Marc. “One thing at a time, and we have to make the acquaintance of young Renart and his wife tonight at dinner.”

“Ah, yes, we shan’t be alone much longer,” said Isabelle. “I wish we could have gone to some little place in Brittany.”

“But, my darling,” said Marc, putting his hand to his head, “we hadn’t time. I have only barely time to make this trip. As it is we shall have to leave on Monday afternoon. And I don’t know anywhere in Brittany really comfortable that wouldn’t have been crowded, and we never have time to run about looking for places. Besides, I hadn’t time to get up a party, and here I can get someone to give me a round of golf if I just sit about in the lounge and wait. But I know what you mean, my dear. I wish we could have been more alone.”

“I believe you are very tired,” said Isabelle.

“I am tired as a dog,” Marc owned, and for a little time he lay back and rested, his head partly on the sand, partly on the hem of her dress.

Sleep was another of Isabelle’s gourmandises at this time. Every time she lay down on her bed the world around her became warm and very soft, like one of the more delicate furs, and she stayed lapped in its softness hour after hour, deliberately returning there every time she came up to the surface of consciousness, till she was aroused by some other person. That afternoon she sat with Luba in the sunshine till the last possible moment, and went to lie down about four, and slept until her maid came to dress her for dinner. She turned from side to side, with her eyes shut, pleading, half in jest and half in earnest, for just five minutes more, and telling the maid to go and dress the Princess first and then come back to her. But she was told that the Princess had been dressed for some time, that indeed she and Marc had already gone downstairs to wait in the lounge in case the Philippe Renarts were early for their dinner engagement. It was necessary that she should rise at once, and so she did, though her lids were still closed as she stood up and let the maid splash alcohol on her bare body, though she was rubbing her eyes when the maid sat her down in front of the mirror and brushed her hair. She opened them for assurance that she was not yet too ugly when the maid was slipping on her so unnaturally loose gown, and at the sight of herself, still seemly and looking not so much unlike any other beautiful woman dressed to dine, her splendid greed became excited by the thought of dinner. She hurried out of her room, hardly letting the maid smooth the great powder puff over her arms and shoulders, and put herself in the lift, smiling benevolently at the attendant.

But Marc and Luba were sitting by themselves in the bar.

“Not a sign of the Renarts,” Marc said irritably, as he settled Isabelle in her chair. “My God, what I would have given to dine early and simply tonight. A plate of onion soup, a steak with some morels, and some apple fritters. And then to bed at ten.”

“Are they happily married?” asked Luba. “Sometimes people are late for dinner because they have suddenly noticed something wrong about their relationship, and they sit down and talk it out.”

“Talk it out when the dinner is on the table!” exclaimed Marc, really shocked. “No, Philippe Renart is not that sort of man. He is not very brilliant, but he is sensible enough. Waiter, another Martini.” He pulled out his watch again. “Even if the trouble was that they were too newly or too happily married, they still ought to consider that other people are waiting for their dinner.”

“Oh, I am so hungry!” sighed Isabelle.

“My poor child, can’t you possibly take a cocktail just to keep you going?”

She shook her head and pursed her lips. In these days the mere mention of alcohol made her mouth feel fouled. “But I will eat some potato chips,” she said, constrained by her immense hunger, though she knew they were too salty for her.

“They are showing themselves extraordinarily ill bred,” said Marc, pushing the dish towards her. “I never care when I dine, me. But it is the bad manners of it that disgusts me.”

“What a pretty woman that is, sitting on the high stool by the bar,” said Isabelle, looking round for something to distract his attention.

“It is Suzette Lefévre, and she is not pretty at all,” said Marc, “she has pop eyes and she is too thin, you can see all her vertebrae. In fact, she is like something you find at the bottom of your plate when you eat bouillabaisse. Ah, why did I remind myself of food! It is not, mind you, that I am hungry. But I dislike rudeness. Particularly to you, my dear, and I feel it is to you the Renarts are being rude.”

“But do you not like her dress?” asked Isabelle.

“No, I hate these queer materials that you women think it smart to wear nowadays. Think of getting into an auto with a woman after having longed to be alone with her all evening and then finding that she is dressed in stuff like a fisherman’s oilskins and that you might as well both be characters in
Les Travailleurs de la Mer.
This is abominable. Waiter, I will have another Martini.”

“It was far worse in the Revolution,” said Luba. “Then we waited and waited, and nearly always there was no dinner.”

“But why should it be like a revolution at all?” asked Marc. “I have come to the Guillaume-le-Conquérant at Le Touquet for Easter. I do not see why things should be in the least like Moscow under the Bolsheviks. My dear, we will not wait any longer. I will just take this cocktail, and then we will go in to dinner. God knows, no man cares less than I do what he eats and when he eats, but to discourtesy I decidedly object. Ah, there is Philippe! The poor fellow, perhaps there has been some accident for which he has to make excuses! Ohé, Philippe!”

Isabelle was always delighted by the speed with which Marc’s anger went from him. He stood up and waved to Philippe, a slight, apologetically built young man who was seeking them not by standing still and looking round the bar, but by threading his way quickly between the tables and chairs, dropping oblique glances on those whom he passed. His mild and furtive gait suggested that he was in the habit of purchasing his friends’ liking by the performance of commissions that they themselves found too trivial or too embarrassing. Marc stood up and gesticulated to him, with wide, handsome, approving gestures. It was as if he were saying that, though his old schoolfellow did nothing but fetch and carry, he fetched and carried very faithfully and meant no harm.

“Well, here you are, you blackguard!” he shouted, clapping Philippe on the shoulders. “It’s not us that kept you waiting now, is it? Isabelle, my dear, this is Philippe Renart, of whom you have heard me speak so often. And Madame la Princesse Couranoff, may I present to you Monsieur Renart. But, for God’s sake, Philippe, what has been the matter?”

Lifting his face from the women’s hands, Philippe began to explain in English, which was to him plainly not merely a foreign language which he had mastered, but a form of chic, “My wife has sent me down to cover myself with excuses and to promise that she will be down in a minute. It is entirely our fault that we are late.”

“Well, of course it is,” said Marc. “Who did you think we would blame for it?”

Philippe paused a minute and contemplated the interruption without humour, but without irritation. Isabelle suspected that he was recalling to himself that his old schoolfellow had always been naïve. He continued. “You see, as it happens, my wife has several relatives staying in a villa here, and they have a cocktail party this evening, and there were many important people there, so she found it difficult to get away. You see”—he paused and drew in a breath—“Poots was a Lauriston on her mother’s side.”

“But what does it mean this word Poots?” exclaimed Marc, who did not appear to be satisfied with the explanation.

“That is what my wife’s friends call her,” answered Philippe, outstaring him; and he repeated it firmly, “Poots.”

“Well, sit down and have a drink,” said Marc. “A Manhattan? Very well. But tell me more about this name. I have never heard it before, though it is charming, of course. Do you,” he asked, turning to Isabelle, “have such a name in your country?”

“It is perhaps a nickname?” she suggested. “I have always heard that the English are very fond of nicknames.”

“Yes, Madame,” said Philippe, bowing as if to mark her recognition of the finer shades of living, “it is a nickname. My wife was Lady Virginia Sandways. But she is known by everyone as Poots.”

“Poots,” repeated Marc. “Ah! I see! It has something to do with Pussy, it is like
mon petit chat?
”

“No,” answered Philippe doggedly. “It hasn’t anything to do with that.”

“It’s just a nickname,” explained Isabelle. “It doesn’t mean anything at all. I’ve noticed that about English nicknames. Unlike most French ones, they often don’t mean anything at all.”

“So it is just Poots?”

“Yes,” replied Philippe.

“Poots? Like boots, only it doesn’t mean anything?”

“Yes,” replied Philippe.

“
Tiens,
” said Marc. “Well, here’s your Manhattan. Waiter, I’ll have another Martini. There’s nothing to do but kill the worm.” He was now talking such rough grumbling French as one of his own workmen might have used. He looked round yawning, and indeed the bar was nearly empty. It was after nine, and almost everybody had gone in to dinner. Isabelle had emptied a plate of potato chips. She found it difficult to focus her attention when Philippe turned to her and courteously said, “My wife was hoping that you and Marc and Madame la Princesse might honour us by coming to dine with her aunt, the Countess of Barnaclouth, tomorrow. She is a very celebrated figure in English life, you know.”

“Yes, she once wrote to ask us to give her an automobile for nothing, because she said it would be such a good advertisement,” said Marc.

“I am sure we shall be delighted,” said Isabelle. She knew Marc would be sorry in the morning. He would grieve over his unkindness to Philippe, whom he had known all his life.

“At half past eight, then, at the Villa Sans Souci. It is in the woods not far away. That will be charming,” said Philippe, a little soothed. “My wife will be so pleased. There are several of her relatives staying there just now. Lady Barnaclouth has her elder two sisters there, Lady McKentrie and Lady Barron. They were all painted by Sargent, you know. It is a very famous picture.”

“Ah!” said Luba suddenly. “It was like that in Russia before the Revolution. All the great families sent their beautiful women to Paris to be painted by Boldini and de la Gandara, and even before the war it was found that they were worth nothing. Nothing at all.” She smiled at Philippe with a tender pity which he did not appreciate.

“But Sargent is still a very famous artist. It is not like that at all, is it?” he appealed to the other two.

“Yes,” said Marc.

“Of course not,” said Isabelle. But she could hardly keep her attention on what she said, she was thinking so intensely of soup.

“Of course it is not so,” Philippe said. “It still hangs in the place of honour at Barron Hall. Lady Barron’s son, the great sporting Lord Barron, owns it.”

“I have met him at Washington,” said Isabelle, feeling a little guilty. For if this little man had known that his wife’s famous cousin knew her very well and had even asked her to marry him, he would have known the desolation of a small boy showing off his stamp collection to a schoolfellow and finding that the other possessed a duplicate of the parcel of his collection.

“Ah, you know him, our dear Sangaree,” smiled Philippe.

“Sangaree?” snapped Marc. “Is that an English name?”

“No,” said Philippe tensely. “It is a nickname. It is really the name of a West Indian drink, but he is called that because it was the name of a racehorse that won the Derby for his father the year he was born.”

“My God, my God!” said Marc.

But Philippe had leapt to his feet. “Ah, here is Poots.”

Isabelle felt it extremely annoying that they had had to wait so long for somebody so little individual as Poots. They surely could have gone in to dinner with any of those replicas of her which had surrounded them when they first sat down in the bar. For Poots had the face which had been fashionable among Englishwomen for some years; her complexion and her hair were lustrous as growing flowers, but her eyes were pulled wide open and her upper lip lifted by an expression of fastidiousness in which delicacy had no part. She might have been a horrid little girl at a children’s party, staring at some unfortunate child who was being sick. And she had the voice which had been fashionable among Englishwomen for some years, a tired and timbreless gabble which made a curious claim to sense, which pretended that though the speaker was late, or in debt, or taken in adultery, it was the very contrary of her fault, since she had been besieged by people inferior to herself in sagacity, who had urged on her a delay so great, a financial policy so extravagant, a sexual habit so profuse, that the lesser degree of her actual fault made it appear by contrast a virtue, or at least an unusually practical and restrained way of dealing with the situation. She spoke as if, till only a few minutes before, she had been forcibly detained at her aunt’s cocktail party by a guerrilla army of people who had not her sense of the obligation of punctuality, and as if a person without her own strength of character would still be there, would still be keeping the Sallafranques waiting. Several times she repeated, “So at last I simply said to them, ‘Well, I can’t help it, I’ve got to be going,’ ” raising her eyebrows and pulling down her mouth in an expression of weary common sense.

But although Isabelle was familiar with Poots’s type, she recognized in it a certain mystery. Poots was a fool. Her activities and her affections were on the nursery level. Yet she was not without shrewdness. It could be seen from her manner that she had listened to all her husband had said about the wealth and importance of the Sallafranques; she made all her apologies several times over, she took the trouble to uncover her teeth in a smile when she caught their eyes. But it was also apparent that immediately she had set eyes on the party she had divined that Luba’s empire had passed from her, that she was unhappy and down on her luck. Poots bowed to her only a very little from the shoulders, her eyes and mouth remaining sullen. She had seen it as beyond all possibility that Luba would ever own a house in which she would find it convenient to stay. That was clever of her, considering that Luba was still beautiful, and grandly dressed. But again it was stupid of her, for she might have guessed that, if Luba was a friend of the Sallafranques, they would prefer people to be polite to her.