The Thinking Reed (29 page)

She had been too stupid to realize that an ordinary pretty woman has hardly more chance of impressing a gross and enormously rich elderly man than one particular Brussels sprout has of being remembered by an epicure, and that to attract Monsieur d’Alperoussa’s attention she would have been obliged either to be the mistress of somebody he desired to humiliate, or to perform some spectacular feat that appealed to his sense of improper fun, such as changing her drawers on a flying trapeze at one of the classic circuses. It was affecting her almost to tears that he did not speak to her, and she had just sufficient self-control left to jerk an occasional word and glance at Mr. Pillans. But for him that was enough. His glasses were twinkling archly, and he had the expression of one who, if not actually using baby talk, was thinking it. Only his natural sweetness and good manners made him sometimes turn to Luba; but nothing good came of that. When she was strained beyond bearing, she lapsed into coherence as other people lapse into incoherence. The child in her gave up its struggle to make the grown-ups understand, and she fell back on the conventional phrases she had been taught by her governess when they were preparing her for life at Court. Nothing passed her lips which could be of the slightest service to her or the man beside her. She was no longer in communication with her own genius, and there was something dead in her aspect, as if she had severed connexion with her external beauty also.

It might have been possible for Marc and Isabelle to organize their guests into some semblance of festivity, had it not been for the d’Alperoussas’ desperate need to explain the rigidity of their moral attitudes. This wrecked the normal development of the dinner party, the more so because Monsieur d’Alperoussa wished to make his explanation to Marc, and Madame d’Alperoussa wished to make hers to Isabelle, and as Monsieur d’Alperoussa was on Isabelle’s left and Madame d’Alperoussa on Marc’s right, this meant that they were hurling their declarations of integrity diagonally across the table. Madame d’Alperoussa alone would have wrecked the occasion. She was so large and so spectacular in her gestures that by contrast Philippe Renart’s efforts to make small talk with her acquired the touching quality of futile activity carried on by some miniscule animal, say the turning of a wheel by a white mouse in a cage. Her shoulders were as broad as Alan Fielding’s, and she had such a profile, classical and collapsed, yet fine in ruin, as one of the Roman Emperors that Suetonius thought worst of, in his later days. The crenellations of her superbly dyed hair were immensely deep and formidably regular, and it would have been impudence to attempt to evade the majestic glance she bent on Isabelle’s face as she pointed out that they were being obliged to eat their dinner only two tables away from that woman, Noemie Aveline. When Isabelle inquired who Mademoiselle Aveline might be, Madame d’Alperoussa threw her eyes to the ceiling, held up an immense and trembling hand, palm forwards, and said, “
C’est la derniére des
…” Her emotion was so great that it forbade her to articulate the last word. Only the airy feather of an
f
, quivering between her lips, revealed that it must have been “
filles.
” Having swallowed, she was able to tell Isabelle that only last winter this creature had committed the most incredible series of infamies, taking a young man of good birth from his beautiful young wife, who was now dying in a sanatorium in Switzerland, and plundering him with such rapacity that his father and mother had had to part with their last penny before they went down to the grave in grief.

It appeared during the rest of the meal that there were several other women in the restaurant whose presence was felt by Madame d’Alperoussa as a monstrous insult. Wearing a noble and mournful expression which gave her the contours of a bloodhound, she related story after story closely resembling the pious tracts and novels of the early nineteenth century, since they represented every illicit love affair as designed by the seducer with the intention of treachery, and every victim of cruelty as dying in body as well as soul. A deserted wife’s heart or lungs never stood by her, a well-brought-up child inevitably developed meningitis on being orphaned by its father’s misconduct. At the end of each of these recitals Madame d’Alperoussa returned to the food on her plate and the wine in her glass with the slow avidity of one seeking to be restored after a severe emotional strain; and indeed she might well have been exhausted, for she was digging deep, she was revealing her innermost process, she was showing herself as an immensely powerful human soul repudiating itself. This woman might quite well have claimed that she feared nothing. She was in essence Madame Leonie, the lion-tamer, to be seen on the posters of the travelling menagerie, in tights and hessians, with her six maned monarchs of the darkest continent standing cowed on their barrels behind her. Nothing could kill her. If she had been involved in some historical disaster of the first magnitude, some supreme breakdown of the masculine system, some triumph of disorder, she would somehow have reintroduced the principle of order. One could imagine an ancestress of hers, so like her as to be practically herself, following an army in retreat. No matter how deep the snow, how loud the cannon, she would have marched on with long undismayed strides, dropping out only to perform brusquely and efficiently the characteristically feminine functions, to brew fortifying soup out of horsemeat over the chopped boards of an abandoned carriage, to console with her body some comrade who in his delirium and despair had remembered the delights of sex, to give birth to a child and to sling it on her shoulders as she rose. In her large, widely dilating nostrils, in her long, deeply fluted upper lip, could be read that faith in discipline and endurance as the solution of all problems which is to be found, not among generals, for leadership in itself entails a certain degree of softer fantasy, but among sergeant-majors. Yet she insisted on denying that faith, in twisting the countenance on which it was so bluffly inscribed into the lachrymose grimace of a plaster saint, and in ending her request that Isabelle should join her Committee for the Assistance of Unmarried Mothers with the phrase, incongruously uttered in a voice hoarse as from the parade ground, “Some of their stories are too terrible to be heard.” She knew perfectly well that no stories are too terrible to be heard, but she was determined to offer treachery to all her knowledge and experience. She had cast out fear, and for stupid and trivial reasons she was letting it in again. After having made a magnificent recovery from early rape, innumerable abortions, and progressive infamy, she was humbling herself before a standard which she must have known to be fatuous and cruel in its imposition of artificial penalties under the pretence they were natural consequences. Something in society was nullifying this woman as it had nullified Annette and Laura, as it was threatening to nullify Marc.

“How necessary it is,” said Madame d’Alperoussa deeply, “to guard well the young girls.” She shook her head at her plate, on which there was still some foie gras mousse, and a waiter bent down to take it away, thinking she had made a sign of dismissal. But she clapped both her hands on the rim of her plate and cried, “Hé quoi!” with such a hearty, good-humoured determination to be done out of not one single mouthful of what she liked that it could easily be seen what would have happened to anyone who had tried to guard her well when she was a young girl. She would have meant no real harm, but there would have been a certain number of black eyes and broken bones. Isabelle looked up at Marc to see if he was enjoying the peculiar savour of this woman, but as at all times during the meal, his eyes and ears were held by the grappling-hooks of Monsieur d’Alperoussa’s words and gestures. These words came with extreme fluency in a French as grubbily international as a sleeping-car; and his gestures not only illustrated the stories he was telling but particularized that he had been born in some country where it is necessary to bargain in the bazaars, where marriages are arranged by professional intermediaries and performed during the childhood of the contracting parties, where the administration of the law is corrupt, and where it is not safe to drink the water unboiled. The actual stories he was telling were pitifully thin compared with these rich implications, being mere cartoons illustrating his own financial integrity. “There he comes every day for six weeks to my office, and he sends his name in to me, and I say, ‘No, I won’t see him. He may be the sixth richest man in France, but I won’t see him. He’s not honest.’ ” They were incredibly naïve stories; one could not imagine anybody believing them. It was impossible to credit that he was a very clever man. He looked, indeed, like the kind of misshapen little creature who sleeps under railway arches or on embankments in great cities; and Isabelle wondered if it could not be that a man could fall into grandeur, as he can fall into misery, simply because he cannot satisfy the demands that society makes on those who petition it for a modest living.

But when Monsieur d’Alperoussa was looking furtively at Marc to see if he had made his point, or when a waiter brushed against him and he swung round suddenly, it could be seen that he had his peculiar gift. He had a talent for crime. It was as detached from intellectual ability as a naturally well-placed voice. Simply he would know by instinct, always and everywhere, how to slip the false coin across the counter so that it would be taken, how to grip the detective round the knees without losing one’s balance so that the minute he goes down one can be off and away. This trait at first seemed comic, because of the vast difference between what he and his wife were and what they hoped to appear. It was evident that they were full of social ambition. Isabelle had watched them bow deeply to an ageing man and woman who scarcely responded, and she had watched them scarcely respond to a young man and woman who had bowed deeply to them. But in fact they were so firmly imprinted with the mark of what they were that it would not have seemed surprising if at any moment Madame d’Alperoussa, on catching sight of some individual connected with the law, should have put her thumbs in the corners of her mouth and emitted a piercing whistle, on which Monsieur d’Alperoussa would leap to his feet and, hastening to some spot on the restaurant floor marked with a chalk sign such as tramps leave on barns, would pull up a trapdoor, down which a stream of accomplices would disappear. So inherently disreputable were they that their own funerals would be the only public functions which they would ever be able to attend without raising expectation of a police raid. But Isabelle began to imagine what these people were like when they ceased to play at being respectable, and did not laugh. To follow the expressions on the little man’s cold grey face, that was at once cringing and menacing, was like feeling vermin move between one’s body and one’s clothes. She could believe that he paid men to commit murder. She asked herself how it was possible that she should be sitting at table with him, and she had to remind herself that she had put to sea in a very comfortable ship that took on only passengers of certain means, and that he had been well able to pay his fare. There was no help for it. Society, which was merciless to so many, which persecuted the weak and the trustful with flails, would not lift its hand against this man. It came into her mind that Monsieur Campofiore was a state official, and with a shudder she wished that she had been born on a different planet. She looked for help to Marc, but he had just swung round towards the table of jaundiced men and dowdy women who had been regarding him satirically all the evening and were now breaking into bitter laughter, and when he turned his head again, he stared down at the tablecloth, contracting his lips and nodding wearily in pretended attention to Monsieur d’Alperoussa’s current story of tremendous financial gain rejected on account of fine moral scruples.

It was of those people at the next table that he spoke when they found themselves side by side in the lobby, waiting while their guests got ready to cross the road with them to the Casino. She was beginning to tell him that she felt quite ill when he said, “Did you see those salt cods at the next table? They are the Delaveries. They would be here this night of all nights, they who never move out of their fourteenth-century fish-basket in the Pas de Calais. I tell you, God hates me.”

“But who are the Delaveries?” asked Isabelle.

“They are reactionaries who hate me because I am not far enough to the Right,” he answered. “It is an old story. The Delaveries own property all round the town where my father’s factories were, and they are very active politically. There has been a war between our families for years. They have said the most frightful things about us.” He was silent for an instant, then spoke of what was never spoken of among the Sallafranques. “They have even stated that we have Jewish blood in us.” He twitched and went on. “They have been aching to find out something against me, and of course the gambling business was meat and drink to them. But this is far better.”

She pressed his hand. But he said disagreeably, “Please do not begin to tell me that all this does not matter.”

“No, no,” she murmured; and to distract his attention she went on, “But after all the d’Alperoussas are funny. You can’t deny that they are funny. Do you remember how you told me that if the talk was too improper I was to pretend to be ill and leave the table? Well, there’s been no need for that. I don’t think we’ve either of us heard such edifying conversation since we left school.”

But he did not laugh. They stood side by side in silence till their guests gathered about them, and they all moved towards the door, to go over to the Casino.

In her ear Alan Fielding said, “You know, when somebody who swears they’ve never studied painting can say such penetrating and fundamental things as you were saying about Masaccio, it makes people like me who have done nothing else all our lives but stew over pictures just sit down and despair.”

She could have said nothing about Masaccio, a painter with whose work she was imperfectly acquainted, except “Yes” or “No.” But he had to take the cigarette out of his mouth, he was smiling so happily over her wisdom.