The Thinking Reed (2 page)

She felt that again in the little hall, when he opened the front door, looked back at her, and shut it again. Looking down on her tenderly, he murmured, “You have given me more pleasure than any other woman.” She said sharply, “Ha! King Lear!” and wanted to explain that at last she understood how Cordelia had been cloyed by her sisters’ excessive protestations of affection, but she could not prevent her body yielding, not to the spirit but to the shape of his embrace, as water follows the contour of a river-bed.

When they were out in the courtyard, with the spring sky curdled by starlight above them, and the wind swinging in the treetops, Isabelle felt relieved. The stars were very high, and the wind was fresh as if it had come from woods and fields a long way off to visit these imprisoned branches. A vast universe stretched away in all directions from this house; and she would be a fool if she could not find some path of escape through it. In the street outside, her long, low, speed-shaped car made her exultant. Of space there was plenty, and she had the means to cover it. She called out to wake her chauffeur, softly but sharply, desperately, as if some danger had overtaken them while he slept, and they had just time to fly.

But once she was in the car and André was bending over her, tucking her rug about her, her sense of freedom left her. Behind his subtle, changing expressions there was a deadly composure, sign of a settled calm which would always leave him in a position to seek what he wanted in the most workmanlike style. She remembered that she had come to his house that night only because at a certain time at Madame Vuillaume’s party, when the Princesse de Cortignac and Monsieur de Gazièere were coming towards the alcove where they sat, he had gripped her wrist. In another moment that couple of
mauvaises langues
would have had something to wag about, so she had to whisper, “Yes, I will go back with you now.” She had meant to shut the door on him as soon as she had got into her car, but he had managed to delay her passage across the pavement until some other people had come out of the house behind them. Turning on him to say, “I only told you that because you forced me, you can’t come with me,” she looked past him at the faintly smiling, inquisitive faces of men and women older than herself, natives of the country where she was a stranger, compatriots and therefore partisans of André, watching to see if her movement changed into some dramatic and betraying gesture. There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one. So she had smiled up at André and settled back on her cushions while he took his seat beside her. That was why she was still with him, hours later, and entangled still further with the trivial and the time-devouring. And it would always be so. Any night that he wanted this pleasure, so much sillier than drunkenness, of screaming, shaking hate, that dared to change at its ugliest climax into the likeness of love, his tactical genius would force her to procure it for him.

She cried out desperately, “I want to leave you!”

He gazed on her thoughtfully, like a cook who has been brought an unfamiliar kind of game and wonders if she ought to prepare it like quail or like plover. “My dear,” he said gently, “I thought I had made you too tired. Now I begin to doubt whether I have made you tired enough. Come back and stay a little longer with me.”

“Oh, don’t be such a complacent idiot!” she exclaimed. “Will you stop regarding me as a technical problem in appeasement? I’m just a woman who intensely dislikes you. Can’t you grasp that?”

He bent his face closer to hers. It was like a young moon in its pale, calm radiance, its remoteness from any human appeal that might be raised to it. Isabelle flung herself forward and rapped on the glass, calling to the chauffeur, “
Allez! Continuez! Vite!
”

Then she sat back and shut her eyes, and thought of Laurence Vernon and his home. Her husband had taken her to Mount Iris two or three times in the last few months before he was killed. One morning when they were staying in Washington, Roy had found on the breakfast table a letter from Laurence, whom he had come to know through some reunion at Princeton, saying he had read in the papers where they were, and asking them to come and stay with him as soon as possible, that very day if they could. Roy had said laconically that Laurence was fine, that they must go and start at once, since they must be back at the Aerodrome in a week’s time; and she had been put at the telephone forthwith to call up various people and say that they would not be able to come to the party after all. She remembered well how she had sat at the window while she made these calls, rejoicing in the warmth the sunshine sent through her silk morning gown, and smiling up at the high blue sky between the roofs, because the answering voices were always so exactly what the outer world would have derisively expected from them. They were at first surprised, not conceiving what alternative could possibly tempt anybody from a good Washington party; then they were clouded by the suspicion that the only conceivable alternative to a good Washington party was another and better Washington party, and that there had happened some monstrous overlapping of dates, in which they had been worsted. But she soothed them, saying that it was because of Roy’s next big flight that they had to leave.

They left the hotel an hour later and motored south through the warm fall day. Many miles lay before them, they stopped only once for a stand-up lunch outside a roadhouse. To the end of her life she would remember again the taste of the fried egg sandwich on her tongue, could bite again into the stored coolness of the apple she picked up from the red heap on a trestle table. Looking back on her marriage, she saw it always as a time when tastes were more pungent, colours brighter, sounds clearer and more intelligible than they had ever been before or since. She would never again see the country round Laurence Vernon’s home as she saw it the first time with Roy. They had been travelling long hours when the automobile climbed the height of the pass; through air soft with evening, soft with autumn, they looked down on the inspissated fires of the woods that tumbled up and over half a dozen ranges which met here and pooled their rivulets in one deep, sinuous, richly growing valley. This had been a battlefield, Roy told her. Boys had drunk like beasts from those rivulets, and had given back blood for water as they drank. As she sighed, Roy pointed out a line of cypresses that had found a level plane running through the contours of hills and dales and marched on in a straight black column. That, he said, was the avenue that led to Laurence Vernon’s home, which would make her forget that there had ever been war in these parts. Every white pillar of the colonnade was intact, though if one looked closely, it could be seen that each and all were pock-marked with bullets. The Gothic chapel by its side was still as it was when the first Vernon in those parts had built it to relieve his nostalgia. Indoors the china and silver shone on the polished table with a lustre that had not been dimmed by the months they had spent buried in the earth while the looting Yankees searched in vain; and as one sat there one could not believe that both Laurence’s grandfathers had been killed in Pickett’s Charge in their early twenties, and that even Laurence’s father and mother had never seen them, for it seemed impossible that this household was not ordered by someone who had at least been in contact all his youth with someone of the old unshattered South.

Isabelle believed what he had told her when, just as they had turned into the avenue, Laurence Vernon stepped forward out of the cypress shadows and stopped the automobile. He climbed in, was introduced to her, told her in precise words how glad he was to welcome her, and settled down beside her, making civil inquiries. The letters on a book that he laid on his lap spelled Plato. Always, every time they visited him, he strolled down the avenue to meet them, an open book in his hand, and always the letters on the cover spelled an ancient name, Plato, or Lucretius, or Plotinus. Those books had made her wonder if she might not work out some spiritual equivalent of the Einstein theory regarding the re-entrant nature of time, for it was plainly through reading these writers of the remote past that Laurence owed his serene command over the present. Perhaps we are all of us born with one foot on the present, and can grip it with the other only if we swing it far enough back into the past. Her husband, dear Roy, had never made the experiment, and he seemed as if he had to hop about, whirling his arms and legs, to keep his balance on the moment. There was always a fine, fairish glaze on his skin, a dampness about his red-gold curls, as if the sweat of effort had no chance to dry on him. But Laurence, with his fine short pointed brown beard, which he never fingered, his clear brown eyes, which never sparkled, his trim body in his formal and unnoticeable clothes, seemed to rest as comfortably in the hour as if it were a library chair: so comfortably that he could think with a coolness and detachment that she knew to be rare triumphs over the modern world. During that and other visits she learned that he had thought himself right out of the illusions common to the Old South. He preferred the classical to the picturesque any day; he knew that any tradition festered which did not in every generation take fresh vows of service to the timeless gods of justice and reason. But he had not made the error that others who have performed that feat of divestment have fallen into, by adopting the illusions of the New North. He was full of schemes for bringing money down to the South, for developing the resources of his country and making her nobody’s old downtrodden mammy; but he was fighting—if one could use that word of an activity in which there was no passion—every attempt to enslave the people by the same conscienceless industrialism as has made the Yankees the drab men-machines they were. When he told her what he was doing, she felt, not only in the interest of the first hearing, but all the many times after, “Laurence is what I would have been if I had been a man. He is living the life I would have liked to live.”

They had always known they were the same sort of people, she believed. There had been a moment once, when his recognition of that had struck her mind as clearly as if he had spoken it aloud, in the dining room, when his neighbour Mrs. Bellamy had come in to take port. It had been a recognition without the smallest practical consequences, it had even been without any emotional effects. For across the table had sat Roy, who had a power over her that made mere community of tastes seem a good that was indisputable but no occasion for enthusiasm, like a plate of cereal; and as for Laurence, everybody knew that he would marry Nancy as soon as her invalid husband was dead. But that arrangement obviously might leave some of his mind free for other imaginings. When Southerners said, “Why, Mrs. George Fox Bellamy, she was Nancy Rivers Taylor,” it sounded glamorous, because of the southern habit of speaking the maiden style of every matron as if it had been the name of a beauty, but this woman’s thirties were certifying her as insipid, and the trailing cut of her chiffon dress hinted that she had a silly conception of romance. Still, the Bellamy place was but a bare five miles from Mount Iris, and Laurence was much too busy to go far afield seeking for a woman; and there was just enough there, in a water-colour way, to make a man who needed to fall in love able to find his need in her. There could be no question but that vows had been exchanged. If they had not, Laurence would not have risen suddenly from table and closed the French window, for no one of the party was cold, and his acute perceptions must have known it. She had known from his face that that had been a symbolic gesture by which he reminded himself where his obligations lay, by which he shut up the wild thing that had threatened to come out of the unfettered darkness and break up the order he had imposed on his emotions. Isabelle had remembered that when she had come to life after the disaster and realized that no amount of grieving can put together a crashed aeroplane or anything that was in it. It had seemed sensible to come to Europe and treat her life as a room that had to be completely refurnished.

It was her fault for not having attributed due importance to the chiffon dress. It should have told her that Nancy was wholly given to the trailing and the asymmetrical, and when it came to the point, would commit any folly to escape being incorporated in the formal design made by Laurence and Mount Iris. There, Isabelle was conscious, she had for a moment stopped thinking. She should have foreseen that, when the invalid husband died, Nancy would be dismayed by a situation no longer irregular; that she would fling herself into a marriage with a stranger that, for no reason that the character of the involved persons could suggest, gave the disorderly impression of an elopement; and that Laurence would come over to Europe. She should have foreseen that one day Laurence would be shown into her drawing room and that she would know, as she smiled rather blankly into his more ardent eyes, how justly she had read the meaning of that moment in his dining room. Now he and Mount Iris were hers for the taking. The thought made her breathe slowly for a minute. It was not greed that she was feeling, for she could have acquired as good a home as Mount Iris by purchase, and several better ones by marriage. It was the most naïvely good part of her that was pleased. She wanted Mount Iris for the life that Laurence lived there, because it seemed to exclude all the heated sort of wrong she feared more than anything else in life. She could imagine herself sitting at dusk, in the hall, looking out at the white afterglow that was divided by the dark pillars of the colonnade, while Laurence walked up and down, passing as a black silhouette across the strips of light, as an ordinary clothes-coloured figure across the strips of darkness, his head down, his step regular and slow. He would be thinking over the material the day had brought him; he would be weaving an intellectual protection for him, for her, for their children, from the arrows that the passion-governed world without shot so recklessly. She trembled in an ecstasy of gratitude; and then was still, as she remembered that at the moment Mount Iris was wholly inaccessible to her.