The Thinking Reed (27 page)
She pressed his arm and laughed, saying, “You are taking all these people much too seriously,” but as the elevator shot up, she knew that her complaint was not correctly worded. They were surrounded by every element in life which must be taken seriously if they wanted to continue to live, and none was under their control; but they were neither of them making any motion that would bring the situation into their power. Marc had gone out to prove that it took not more than half an hour to walk up and down the promenade of Le Touquet, and from a congested quality in his appearance and movements, and the grumbled roughness of the French he was talking, she knew that for all his sincere protestations of good behaviour he would behave worse before the day was done, just as one may sometimes tell by a person’s swollen features that he has been attacked by a cold of which he himself is as yet unconscious. She would, of course, be able to cope with him, but the rest of life was running through her fingers like water. It was a measure of her present incompetence, she reflected as she stepped out of the elevator and confronted Mr. Pillans, that she could not even control him. He looked as if he were abashed by the width and length of these vast corridors, and had never considered that, if they had been built wide and high and vast, it was only because the builder had aimed at pleasing him; and he made an anxious gesture of apology to the elevator boy because he wished to stay awhile and talk to her, as if his obligation to go down in the elevator were of a more servile and binding nature than the boy’s obligation to take him. Surely she should have found some trick by which she could persuade this malleable material to submit to the stamp she had chosen for it.
“I hope you enjoyed your lunch with Monsieur and Madame Bourges,” she said, after the first greetings. “They are charming people. I did not come myself because I did not feel very well, and after all I do not know them very well. I knew that if you went as Luba’s friend they would treat you as an honoured guest, for they adore her.”
“Well, who wouldn’t do that?” assented Mr. Pillans. “The Princess is just as lovely as she is beautiful.”
She had to listen to the echo of the words before she remembered that the Middle West, wiser than other parts, used two different words to express harmony of body and harmony of mind; and in listening she realized how tamely he had spoken, how like he sounded to a little boy assenting politely to a visitor’s praise of his kind mother or nurse, when he is bursting to talk about some fascinating little girl newly come to his school. “Yes, Luba is lucky,” she said obstinately, “she has everything the world admires.” But she was prepared for his next words.
“The person I’m crazy about, though,” he said, beginning to laugh and shake his head from side to side, “is that Madame Renart. I’m just mad about her. I think she’s the grandest girl I’ve met in years. She just doesn’t give a darn, does she? Not for anything in the world?”
“No,” said Isabelle. “I do not think she does.”
“And isn’t it funny,” he continued, “that though she’s Madame Renart, she isn’t French, because she’s just an ideal Frenchwoman, isn’t she? Carefree and light-hearted, ready to walk out on the President himself, if she felt like it, without a thought for tomorrow …”
Isabelle would have liked to say coldly, “You are an imbecile,” and leave him. All that part of her which was French and allied with France was humourlessly offended by his words, but the immense naïveté disclosed by them made her feel again that she should have been able to do what she willed with this simpleton. She lingered, raising her eyes to his face in an exasperated scrutiny, trying to make out what particular kind of trick it was she should have used on his simplicity. Immediately she was abashed; for though he was looking like a fool whose sensuality was weakened but not excused by his fatuity, though he was screwing up his eyes and shaking his head and rocking with suppressed amusement at the thought of Poots’s delicious antics, that was not the essence of his expression. However he might crumple up his muscles into laughter, there still stared from his face a paralysed submission to martyrdom and the most tranquil and hopeless recognition of its nature. She was reminded of a little boy she had once seen misbehaving at a children’s party, shouting and snatching toys out of their owners’ hands, waving his arms and kicking the furniture, while his eyes grew dark and fixed, his mouth became a heavy drooping line, in anticipation and fear of the punishment he was bringing on himself. She had been monstrously stupid in thinking that it was a trick which the situation required. What was called for was a flash of poetic genius which would find the words to make the dark thing in this poor creature declare why it forced him to mount this idiot cross. But her body and mind alike were empty of the vitality which was the first condition of such genius.
When she got to her room, she sat for quite a long time on her bed, holding her head in her hands. “It is a more serious matter than I supposed to have a child,” she thought. “I knew I was getting clumsier in my body, but I did not realize that I was also getting clumsy in my mind.”
She lay down and tried to go to sleep, but her mind wandered through the halls and antechambers, the crazy toppling towers and the cellars, lighted to look as if they were above ground, but very dark, of the palace where the rich must live. There was the closely matching imbecility of herself and the Lauristons. There was the knavery, bred of this imbecility which could acquire no standards, of Poots. Actually she was poor, of course, but an enormous number of persons succeeded in remaining rich when without means; they continued by reason of charm or associations of one or another sort, to frequent buildings, eat food, and use means of transport, that were financed by a first and never explicitly defended charge on the world’s wealth. They might even continue thus against their will. Luba had made countless touching and modest attempts to earn her bread, and each time the world of poverty, terrified into keeping a strict rule of industry and discipline, had roughly rejected her and sent her spinning back to the rich, who because of their lack of values, of their imbecility and consequent knavery, could not respect her genius for love, and sent her spinning back to the poor again. The fate of Luba was not to be borne. Isabelle felt that, if she herself had been harried along the roads and forbidden to rest all the time she was carrying her child, it would have been no crueller than the world’s refusal to let this woman live quietly and use her gift for tenderness.
But even if wealth was loyal to its possessor, it might destroy him. Isabelle saw again Mr. Pillans, who so needed Luba’s love and was compelled to reject it, who had looked at her through the twilight of the corridor as if he were looking up through water, saying that his fate was accomplished, his destruction complete. She liked him, she saw in his perverse abandonment to a sought misery an obscure but saintly gesture, an attempt to offer up an atonement for the sin and folly of the world, which pretended that he (whose weakness he knew so well) should be paid great honour because he had great possessions. It was true that Mr. Pillans’s destiny might not have been so spectacularly tragic if he had not been quite such a fool; but on the other hand wealth might malform a man’s destiny even if he were not a fool. Marc was wise in his head and his body, but because of this exemption from criticism, this ability to evade the consequences of any action, he was without discipline, he was without appropriate reverence for reality. He might get a little drunk tonight, he might say foolish and dangerous things. There was no safety where there were riches. Isabelle rolled over on her face and threw her pillows about, wishing she were altering the structure of the world.
She reminded herself that the poor probably suffered as many spiritual inconveniences as the rich, but found that no consolation. If one is tuberculous it helps one’s case not at all that certain other people are diabetic. Indeed, it added to her apprehension, by proving how grossly mistaken most human beings are regarding the cardinal facts of their existence, that she knew perfectly well how vast a proportion of the public would have asked nothing better than to be one of the very same group of rich people which were convincing her of the unwholesomeness of possessions. They would think it must be heaven on earth to be at Le Touquet for Easter, with the famous Lauristons, the Madame Renart whose photograph was always in the papers, the great lover Ferdy Monck, the beautiful Princess Couranoff, the fabulously wealthy Alexander Pillans. Some of them would think this with an excess of passion that would be formidable. They would resemble Monsieur Campofiore, of whom she found herself thinking with a nightmare intensity. She remembered the first night she had met him at the minister’s ball, of how she had seen him, after they had parted, leaning against the wall and jerking his head about as he scornfully recapitulated their conversation to himself; she remembered him as he had sat on the edge of the marble conduit in the garden on the Cap d’Antibes, crushing his newspaper against his chest, his teeth bared, his head thrown back, in an orgasm of hate. The intensity with which this extraordinary man envied the rich amounted to the degree of genius; and since the life for which he envied them existed only in his imagination, as was proved by his inability to enter into it and gratify his thirst for it as he himself rose in the world, the quality of this genius could justly be termed really poetic, really creative.
He was one among those innumerable children of the poor, both male and female, who spend their whole lives in the composition of a poem about the wealthy, which, though it cannot be a true poem because it is not the symbol of any reality, must nevertheless be engendered in them by some authentic though deflected ray of inspiration, since there is nothing in their environment, or at least nothing that could be logically expected, to suggest to them their subject matter. They sit at the doors of their dark hovels, with the carcass of the dead dog drawing flies to itself a few yards away on the cobbles, waiting till the wrinkled women with hanging bellies who are their mothers shall tell them that the offal which is stinking on the stove has reached the point at which it is arbitrarily supposed to be fit to eat; and from the most trifling intimations, from half a page of an illustrated paper found inside a packing case, from a glimpse of tourists waiting outside a garage while their car is being repaired, from intimations so trifling that they convey nothing whatsoever to those clairvoyant children’s playmates, they derive the knowledge that somewhere there are palaces full of air and light, shapely and shining lovers, delicate food and drink. This knowledge excites the female children to become beautiful, the male children to pass examinations and to install themselves in offices which have no desire to receive them; it empowers them to travel vast distances over the earth, to make huge disturbances in the distribution of property, to meet astonishing dooms far from the places where they were born. There is absolutely nothing easy or miraculous in this process. Their knowledge acts on them by injecting them with frenzy, so that the world whispers of the savage temper of these beautiful women, the harshness of these invincible men, of the rapacity in both. She thought of Monsieur Campofiore as he must have been when he entered upon his agony, a dark and ugly and prophetic child, sitting at a back garlic-breathing doorway among the stones of Origno, glaring at imagined fortunate people as years later he was to glare at herself and Marc. Distressed, she wandered about the stony village in her dreams; and there, and in other desolate places, saw him constantly and always with fear.
So, when Isabelle woke up and found Marc bending over her, she cried, “What, is he really here?”
“Is who really here?” he asked, smiling.
“Oh, who, indeed?” she wailed. “Monsieur Campofiore, of course.”
He straightened himself and walked some paces from her bed. “Need you speak of him, this night of all nights?” he burst out.
She sat up and rubbed her head, and remembered her dreams. “But, Marc,” she said, almost weeping, “you cannot be cross with me for something I said when I was still asleep.”
In an instant he was back beside her, and his arms were round her. “It is extraordinary, the way I am speaking to you today,” he said sadly.
“It does not matter at all,” she answered, “but do let us be careful. I feel so frightened of everything.”
“You will not believe how well I will look after you,” he said, and they kissed. “I am a clumsy fool to have awakened you,” he confessed. “You might have slept for nearly half an hour more. But I came to ask you if I had done right. You see, when I was out, I realized that, since our party was to include the charming Madame d’Alperoussa tonight, we were a man short, since that Bridget is coming, so as I ran into Alan Fielding I asked him to come along, and I wanted to know if you thought he would be all right.”
“Who is Alan Fielding?” she asked, lying back on the pillows and letting drowsiness submerge her again.
“That painter we met when we dined with the ordure’s aunts. Dark, handsome—”
“Oh, yes, quite a nice man,” she murmured, yawning. “But he smiles at one too much, I think.”
“What do you mean, he smiles at one too much?” demanded Marc. “Tell me, what do you mean? Has he been impertinent to you? Tell me! You know, I am the least jealous of men, and I am sure that you can look after yourself, but I will not have you annoyed.”
She felt for his fingers and laid them across her lips, and laughed through them, murmuring as she fell deeper into sleep, “The old fool I have married, the old fool …”
SHE HAD said to Marc as they went down in the elevator, “I wish you had not had that cocktail sent up to our room, it is so necessary that you should keep your head,” and he had answered in the words which are never used by a completely sober man, “Nonsense, you know that it is impossible for me to get really drunk. I always know what I am doing.” When they had seated themselves in the lounge to wait for their abominable party, he said mildly, as if hoping to repair the brusqueness of this reply, to allay the fears which it was bound to awaken in her, “Yes, my dear, it will be all right. You know, you were really quite sensible in what you said about tonight. I am exaggerating its importance, it can pass over quite quietly if only we are discreet.” As he spoke, he looked about him with a glance far more intelligent and apprehensive than his words, but the pouted thickness of his lips and the blotched flush on his cheeks and even his brow suggested that part of him was obstinately stupid and reckless. For a second she compressed her lips and repudiated him with a total bigotry, wishing she had never married him. But while he was ordering cocktails for his party, Annette came and stood beside them, greeting Isabelle briefly and then waiting for his attention with the air of one who bears news so important that out of respect for reality the audience must be collected and hushed before it is delivered; and as soon as he had dismissed the waiter, he lifted his head and looked up at Annette with a kind of clumsy, blindish vigour, which Isabelle had noticed about him at moments when he had suddenly reversed some narrow judgment she had passed on him and reestablished himself as her superior.