The Thinking Reed (30 page)

Luba was crossing the road ahead of them, alone. Nobody had wanted to walk with her. “What is she doing?” asked Poots in a mean, amused tone; and Mr. Pillans laughed in a shame-faced way, but taking care that she should see he was following her lead like the child who has been raised to favour by the school bully and jeers at its humbler playmate of yesterday. The road was lit by the double glare of the moon and the electric standards to the brightness of a stage in some cheap and artless theatre. The budding trees, flooded with light from above and sideways, had the insubstantial look of painted canvas scenery, while the clothes and demeanour of the people passing into the Casino gardens, being adapted to a dimmer atmosphere, gave them the air of an unsuitably clad and ill-rehearsed troupe. As Luba advanced across this unfavourable area, she was inspired to swing her arms up and over her head and down again in a wide circle, while she stared up into the sky. Actually she was following the beam cast by the lighthouse which stands in the middle of Le Touquet, which had been standing there long before one brick of the Casino and the hotels and the villas was laid; and Isabelle knew she had passed into contemplation of a life determined by necessity, of men tending a lamp so that boats should reach port in safety, of men on these boats hauling ropes with bleeding hands so that there should be food for the women and children, of women bearing children as fields grow corn, because it is their season, and the sowers have passed that way. A world so firmly welded together by natural processes would easily find some room for a loving slattern, while this horrible world they inhabited demanded such artificial activities from all its creatures that they had to cultivate the concentration and suppleness of acrobats. It was unfortunate that the place should make her look like an artless prima ballerina, swayed by some absurdly private and provincial conception of the romantic.

“Isn’t the Princess beautiful?” asked Isabelle coldly. Poots slewed her head round and looked at her through the darkness, plainly reminding herself that hostesses often had dreary hobbies—they liked one to go to church on Sunday morning, or insisted on breaking up the dinner party to be in time for a performance of cheap opera at a working-man’s theatre—and that because they were hostesses they had to be humoured. “Gorgeous,” she agreed, “gorgeous,” and at the same time Mr. Pillans said with authentic fervour, “Yes, indeed,” although a minute before he had been echoing her mockery. Nothing had happened to change his attitude except the authority of Isabelle’s tone. She noted that he was still malleable to a certain degree.

As they entered the hall of the Casino, Madame d’Alperoussa came smartly to a halt and faced Isabelle and Alan, lifting a massive forefinger. They felt small and alarmed, but she slowly engaged them in a smile full of roguish reference and began to beat time with the band, which was playing the “Habanera” from
Carmen. “L’amour, l’amour est enfant de Bohème,
” she hummed. “
Il n’a jamais, jamais connu de loi, Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime, Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi.
” For a second they saw her young and adorned with cotton poppies, tenderly self-divested of her strength. But that had been only an episode in her inflexible career. Immediately she reassumed her grand manner, like a veteran putting on his shako and his top-boots after a moment snatched for pleasure, and looked about her with dilating nostrils to see where her duty lay.

Isabelle turned to Marc to see if he had seen this little performance, and murmured to him, smiling, “Do you know, she is so absurd that sometimes I find myself liking her.” But Marc stared out of hot eyes and said, “I object to you feeling that you like her. You are my wife. It is an infamy that you should have had to sit at the same table with her. You are my wife.” He made a sweeping, pompous gesture, wholly devoid of his own personal quality. “Such women,” he pronounced, “are perils to France, a temptation to its manhood and an insult to its womanhood.”

Isabelle saw that he was now completely drunk. His good humour and his wit had gone from him. He was therefore infinitely dangerous. She said, “Oh, Marc, Marc, be careful.”

“I know what you mean,” he grumbled. “Oh, I will not gamble. I will be a good child. You will like that. All women like making children out of men.”

“No, no,” she said, and smiled at him. “Well, it will be all right again soon.” But there was no good in staying with him. She followed the rest of the party through the crowd to the baccara room, and immediately she was surrounded by people she felt exceedingly ill. She suspected that she must have passed into some new phase of pregnancy which was going to be sufficiently disagreeable to make her understand at last why women consider childbearing a hardship. Though her child was not so restless as it had usually been of late at this hour, it seemed suddenly to have become much heavier. This was not marked enough to cause her pain. She was already so fond of her child that no direct contact with it struck her as anything but pleasant, and she interpreted this heaviness as a sign that it was going to be specially fine and large. Her eyes flashed in pride. But she was filled with alarm by the indirect effects of her state. For some reason the life she had been leading all her adult life seemed wholly new to her. For years she had been visiting places like this Casino, but all at once it had become completely strange to her, and she felt like a child who has been brought to some school or hospital, and finds herself unable to believe all the assurances which are made to her regarding its benevolence because of the unfamiliarity and the sheer incomprehensibility of the routine. She looked about her, trying to take refuge in the surface of the scene, in the bright lights, in the brilliant flesh of these well-nourished people. But something had happened to her eyes; the scene seemed tinselled and palpitating, the deeper colours seemed to glow as if they were under water, people’s faces seemed like stretched silk visors. And everything seemed to have slowed down to crawling pace. She had been wondering why Alan Fielding was talking so tediously, but when Gladys and Serge spoke to her, she felt the same impatient anxiety that they should get to the end of what they were saying, and she realized that the fault was in herself; and everybody seemed to her to be moving sluggishly through a hot and throbbing atmosphere. None of these errors in impression amounted to a delusion, but she found herself thinking with a silliness that appalled her. She caught her eyes staring in strained attention at an elderly woman with witch-locks falling on her shoulders and a Fortuny dress of pleated silk, the kind of woman who would probably claim to be an early interpreter of Debussy and to have bravely sung Méisande to whistling audiences, and who was now talking to a cluster of friends with an outmoded vivacity which made her bring down a large ostrich feather fan alternately on the arms of the man on her right and the man on her left with a coquettish rap. Isabelle recognized she was watching this to see whether the man on the right or the man on the left received the last blow delivered before the party moved away, because she had formed the imbecile idea that if it were the man on the left the evening would be unlucky for her.

“I am quite ill,” she thought, “quite ill.” A fine sweat came out on her forehead and under her armpits. “I cannot stay here any longer. I must go home and lie down.” She turned to Madame d’Alperoussa, feeling childishly eager to cast her weakness down before the strength of this old soldier, who would no doubt slip a hand like a trestle under her elbow and steer her out of the crowd, muttering heartening and comradely oaths in her ear. But just at that moment she was tapped on the spine by a pair of peculiarly hard knuckles, and when she swung round she saw Lady Barnaclouth, looking more like an eagle than ever, in a very smart, clear-cut sequined dress such as a female bird of prey would certainly have chosen, and followed by her sisters as by two ravens.

“I say, your husband’s French,” said Lady Barnaclouth.

“I know,” said Isabelle.

“Then why did you say you were Americans?”

“I did not, and I am,” said Isabelle.

“You don’t express yourself very clearly,” said Lady Barnaclouth, “but then very few women do. What I was thinking was that, as you’re French, you’d be able to tell me how I could get my grandnephew Toby Lauriston into the wine trade over here without any nonsense about a premium.”

“Oh, God! Oh, God!” exclaimed Isabelle. Just then Lady Barron and Lady McKentrie began to call to their sister. “Eva! Eva! Here’s Lord Stavenham,” and she found herself alone. She turned again to Madame d’Alperoussa, more eager for the support of her strength than ever, her face flaming with exasperation, tears of self-pity standing in her eyes. “I feel so ill!” she began, “I feel so awfully ill!”

But Madame d’Alperoussa stared at the mask of her distress as if she were a wardress in charge of a prisoner who was affecting to be hysterical in order to evade search. “Is that not the great English Lady Barnaclouth?” she asked gruffly.

“It is, it is,” said Isabelle, “and, Madame d’Alperoussa, I am so sorry, I am afraid I will have to go back to the hotel—” But she stopped, because Madame d’Alperoussa’s face did not soften. On the contrary, it hardened.

“I understand perfectly,” she said sullenly.

“But what is this?” Isabelle asked herself in amazement. “She isn’t sorry for me! But I have said I am ill. How can she not be sorry for me?” Her eyes sought Marc, but he was standing by the entrance of the baccara room waiting till Monsieur d’Alperoussa had finished greeting some friends. He was looking at the floor, the very set of his neck on his shoulders showed that he was drunk, nothing was further from his mind than any thought of her. Feeling alone, she trembled and wondered, “Why have I made this woman so angry? My God, the lines running from her nose to her mouth! She will try to punish us for this, and her idea of punishment will be something as subtle as a sandbagging on a dark night. Marc was right, these are really dangerous people. But what can I have done to her? What can I have done to her?”

She stared in perplexity at Madame d’Alperoussa, and immediately perceived the answer to her question; for the woman was looking at Lady Barnaclouth as a dog might look at a bone through a shut window. This was evidently an example of the peculiarity in the social universe which is similar to interstellar time in the physical universe. People at a sufficient distance from conspicuous personages do not see them as they are, but as they were long ago, perhaps ten or twenty years before, and these remote observers may be dazzled by fires which, at the moment of dazzlement, are the coldest of ashes. Madame d’Alperoussa had so grossly misinterpreted the incidents of the last few moments as to suppose that Isabelle was in awe of Lady Barnaclouth as a social superior, that she had been embarrassed at being seen by her in such company, and that her plea of illness had been an excuse to bring the situation to an end. This tough old sergeant-major had the same waking nightmares as the stupidest little schoolgirls who sob on their pillows because the Latin mistress did not smile at them on the stairs, and she must have seen one of them now. “Madame d’Alperoussa,” she said, “would you like to meet Lady Barnaclouth?”

Madame d’Alperoussa ran her tongue over her dry lips. “She is a very famous great lady,” she replied.

“Then I will introduce her to you in a moment,” said Isabelle. “But I did not think you would want to meet her, she is not very interesting. It is a great name, but she is
assez chose.”
She tried to make her point clear, though the stale air was beating in her ears like a drum. “She is always begging favours and trying to sell things.”

“Well, one can buy,” said Madame d’Alperoussa.

Isabelle turned away and passed her handkerchief over her forehead and her lips. In her ear Alan Fielding murmured, “I say, you do look wild.”

“Do you mean I am untidy?” she asked in consternation.

“Oh, no!” he answered. “I don’t suppose you have ever been untidy in your life.”

“I do not think I have,” she said.

“I only meant that your eyes are blazing and your colour is brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and you look as if at any moment you might cry out some tremendous tragic secret.” He gave one of those rich, contented laughs which any new aspect of her drew up from the depths of his big, handsome body. “You look superb. Queenly but Bacchic.”

She thought wearily, “My good young man, how I wish the conventions of society were such that I could frankly own to you that the tragic secret which chiefly worries me is that the baby I am going to have in four months has suddenly begun to weigh a ton. Also my husband is drunk, we have a couple of gangsters hung round our neck, to say nothing of Poots and Lady Barnaclouth. I am forced to stay in this detestable place because I do not wish to be sandbagged by the gangsters, when my one desire is to be lying on my bed in my room at the hotel, in the darkness, feeling my child grow.” She cried out urgently, seeing an unfavourable movement of the crowd, “Lady Barnaclouth! Lady Barnaclouth!”

Lady Barnaclouth at first believed that Isabelle was recalling her for the purpose of discussing the prospects of her grandnephew in the wine trade, but the introduction was at last effected, although not until Isabelle had mentioned several times, the last time very loudly, that Madame d’Alperoussa’s husband was a most interesting man and exceedingly rich. Then they were able to go into the baccara room, and there she could at least sit down on one of the benches against the wall, but she narrowed her eyes because she did not want to see the scene. This was the core of the life of pleasure in a town built for pleasure; it was thronged with people who would have been embarrassed had it been put to them that they pursued any other end than pleasure. But it reminded her of a waiting room in a railway junction at which she had once spent an hour in the course of a journey across England. The walls were monotonously panelled and painted an unpleasant greenish neutral tint, and the carpets, the electric-light brackets, the benches, the official desks, the chairs round the gaming-tables, were solid and well made but of the dreariest design, as if they had been purchased out of public funds by depressed functionaries. Not only did the room offer nothing beautiful to the eyes of its frequenters, it destroyed their own beauty, which was the principal asset of many of them. Against this harsh background delicacy and youth were devoured, and coarseness and age were magnified, particularly near the gaming-tables, which were hideous in themselves, which radiated hideousness. With their green baize and mahogany they recalled the heavy fittings of a Victorian household, the billiard-table, the butler’s tray, the wood-framed bath; and they were made sinister as operating tables by the lamps which poured on them cones of brutal light.