The Thinking Reed (34 page)
Here, too, she found Marc’s visits irritating. He would say, “Why are you touching that tree-trunk as if it were something extraordinary?” And she would realize that she had been standing in a trance by a felled oak beside the path in the woods, marvelling that the massiveness of things should mean nothing, that the three-dimensional world should, in fact, not be solid at all, should be only the flimsiest membrane over a void. He would say, “What interests you about that angler?” And she would realize that she had been watching the man fishing on the edge of the canal for some moments, astonished that he could stand there so calmly, when his doom was in front of him and behind him, and might even take what he loved before it took him. She was obsessed with the immanence of death, and her only safety lay in ignoring her obsession. It was fatuous. What had happened to her at Le Touquet had brought no new fact before her attention. She had always known that everybody must die, and that she, and the people belonging to her, were not exempt from this rule. Since there was no life known which was free from these conditions, every reasonable person must take them for granted.
This despairing preoccupation with death must therefore, Isabelle supposed, be due to some such state of hypersensitiveness as she had passed through after the only attack of influenza she had ever suffered, when the ticking of a clock seemed a perverse assault on the senses. Then they had cured her quite quickly with tonics and massage, which showed that such distress had a physical basis. They were giving her tonics and massage now, but evidently not enough, nor of the right kind. She therefore mentioned her depression to the doctor in charge, a short, sensible-looking man with a beard, in the hope that he might suggest a change in her regime. But he answered her chiefly in abstract nouns, of which she had often noticed there were more in general circulation in France than in any other country, and she saw that she had fallen into the hands of one of those modern doctors who have strayed too far from aperients in the direction of the soul. He gave her no helpful prescription, but spent every day a longer period in her room, using more and more abstract nouns, until his conversation seemed to have broken all links with reality. But she grasped that this was not the case the afternoon he led her to the window and pointed out that, even as in the garden below the delicate blossoms of spring had given place to the roses of summer, so youth and its illusions gave place to maturity and its deeper, richer, and, he could swear, more delicious experiences. His voice throbbed, and she recalled with embarrassment that, whereas in England and America a beard usually means that its owner would rather be considered venerable than virile, on the continent of Europe it often means that its owner makes a special claim to virility.
“Do not be dismayed,” he continued, “by the malignity of fate, but step forward into the smiling garden of life and pluck with those beautiful white hands the roses of love. Bend over them with all that abandonment of which I saw at the first glance that you are capable, inhale deeply those perfumes of sensuality which nature has designed as an inspiration for such superb women as yourself.”
“Ah, how you understand me!” sighed Isabelle. “It is for precisely these reasons that I desire to return to Paris.”
The doctor’s beard fell. “No one can admire Monsieur Sallafranque more than I do,” he said. “It is to be seen at once that he is a king of industry, full of force, full of geniality. But I wonder if he can treat you as you ought to be treated at this crisis of your existence, with delicacy and consideration as well as masterfulness?”
“I must confess,” said Isabelle, to bring the encounter to an end, “that it would not be only my husband whom I should hope to see in Paris.” She cast down her eyes.
As she had anticipated, the doctor felt there were certain plans which no right-minded man could oppose. He sighed and left her shortly afterwards, showing no sign of malice, but warning her sadly that Englishmen knew nothing of the arts of love. This puzzled her until she remembered that he had been in her room a few days before when Alan Fielding had called to see her. She was immensely amused by this man who knew everything about life and made such gross errors in his observations of it. When Marc’s automobile stopped outside the house half an hour later, she had an impulse to run downstairs, put her arm through his, and walk him round the garden, sharing her amusement with him. But she gave up the idea, it had become fatiguing for her to tell him anything long or involved.
She did not go home yet. She went to another clinic which her specialist recommended to her, some two hours before Grenoble, so far away that Marc could come to see her only at weekends. Here she was at first happier. The countryside had a jolly quality which prevented it assuming the bleakness characteristic of mountains, in spite of its elevation. The heights lifted shoulders as full-fleshed as a young peasant woman’s, and the slope falling from a cliff that caught the very first light of dawn was as green as the grass in a valley orchard, and the red roofs of the villages were the very colour of comfort. Most of the flowers that grew in the district she had never seen before, and when she came to a crossroad, the names on the signposts were all unfamiliar. It was as if she were starting in a world that was new but not in the least strange. Here she slept and ate better than she had done since Easter, but she was still melancholy, so she asked the doctor in charge if he could not give her a stronger tonic. But nothing he gave her did what she required, though he was of a more modern school than the doctor with the beard. He had the manner of a believing priest when he spoke about fresh air; he prescribed sun-bathing as if it were a step towards some audaciously selected goal; it was his pleasure to go about dressed in flannel trousers and a sailor’s singlet, some sizes too small for him; and he rolled about the grounds stretched taut across an exercise wheel. As the weather grew warmer, he presented himself without the singlet, nude to the waist. He was agreeably tanned by the sun, but was disfigured by overdeveloped muscles, which came and went under his skin like small peripatetic tortoises; also he carried his chest as if it were a highly inflated football hung round his neck. Isabelle liked him for the sparrow-like cheerfulness he derived from his hygienic obsession, and his visits to her grew daily longer.
But one day it happened that they met in the village and halted together to watch a young farmer leading his bride from church; and with the manner of one demonstrating to a class of students he turned to her and said, “In the presence of such happy children of the soil as those, one realizes what is so often forgotten in the devitalizing atmosphere of great cities, that nature has given men and women the power to re-create themselves through the enjoyment of their bodies, provided only that those bodies are healthy.” As he concluded, he struck himself a sharp blow on the strained singlet.
“I have never been in a great city which seemed to have forgotten that truth,” said Isabelle.
“Come,” he said, “let us go back to the clinic.” As they walked along, he said in a vibrant undertone, “It is not good, Madame Sallafranque, for a woman young and vigorous as yourself to live in a solitude that is contrary to the laws of nature.”
For a second Isabelle contended with that sensation which, so oddly, spreads over the skin alike when a chalk is drawn down a blackboard or when an advance is made by an undesired person; and then she replied, “I agree with you entirely. It was for that reason I wished to return home almost immediately.”
Tensing his biceps, he objected angrily, “Monsieur Sallafranque is too much a man of the metropolis to give you the revitalization of your forces which you require just now.”
She murmured, “It is not Monsieur Sallafranque whom I desire to see in Paris.”
The doctor was silent for a moment. Then, expanding his ribs and caressing his hollow stomach, he asked her if her lover was a real man, if he could play tennis, if he did winter sports, if he could climb mountains.
“I wish to return to Paris at this particular moment,” said Isabelle, “in order that I may say goodbye to him before he leaves to lead an expedition up Mount Everest.”
The little doctor’s arms dropped limp by his sides, he let his ribs and his stomach fall, and he looked so woebegone as they walked in silence to the clinic that she wished she could confess to her lie. But when she told Alan Fielding, who looked in at the clinic on his way to inspect a picture that had just been left to the museum at Grenoble, his amusement revived her brutality. They laughed over it until their laughter lost connexion with its cause, and became amusing and satisfying in itself, like the laughter of children. She was sitting on the window-ledge, and she was so shaken that she looked behind her to make sure that the window was closed and she could lean back. Her eye travelled through the glass to the plain below, which, when she had last looked at it, had been enamelled to an intense green by the glow of a cloudless sunset. It was now a bowl of chilly shadow. She shuddered, and the thought of death returned to her. Again she did not go home. She went to a clinic in Switzerland kept by a famous German doctor, who had helped to restore some relative of Marc’s after a bereavement. It appeared to her, as soon as she saw him, that it was unlikely he would do the same for her, and that she would feel offended and outwitted if he did. He was tall and bent and moved very slowly; he had long, thick white hair, and his eyes always seemed to be looking into the distance; and though these characteristics delighted his other patients, she found in them only ground for mistrust. From his reminiscences she deduced that he had been a child at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and must therefore be under or just seventy; had he taken reasonable care of himself, he should have been still upright and alert. Hair so long was out of place in a hospital, and eyes which were always looking into the distance might have been admirable in a sailor or a shepherd, but were plainly not the sort most useful to a competent doctor. She felt increased suspicion of him when he closed their first interview by laying his large and prematurely tremulous hand on her head and saying gutturally, “Ah, my child, you will see how small your troubles will seem to you, up here in the mountains.” It did not seem to her that it could ever seem to her a trifling matter that her husband had got drunk and forced her into making a scene which had brought on a miscarriage, and she saw no reason why she should be likely to take this curious view of the affair more among mountains than in flat country.
One night he came to her room when she was standing on her veranda, which looked across the valley at a snow-covered peak, now ghost-coloured in the starlight, rising above the crumpled darkness of the lower mountains. He joined her, and after a moment’s silence, which was not so silent as he supposed owing to his stertorous breathing, he extended a trembling finger towards the peak and said in a strangled tone, as if a piece of wisdom were fighting its way up from the bottom of some accumulated store within him, “Ah, our wise old brother, the Hüpfenstrudelalp. On how much suffering has he not looked down … on how much sorrow … and on how much joy. Ah, he will soon cure you, my child.” He then took her hand and recited Heine’s “Du bist wie eine Blume,” and left with florid gestures of farewell, greatly coarsened by his own sense of their picturesqueness. She found herself quivering with rage. What right had he to feel that he was doing anything that ought to be done, taking notice of anything that ought to be noticed, when he was merely indicating that, in the same world where she and a great many unhappy people found themselves, there was also a mountain? In point of fact, the Hüpfenstrudelalp had probably not looked down on any great amount of human emotion, for the valley beneath, being infertile and poor in timber, had hardly been settled till the English began mountaineering in the middle of the nineteenth century. It had probably been witnessing joy and sorrow for about as long as the local railway station. But in any case, even if it had seen as much human passion as the whole of the Occidental civilization put together, that would still not have given it any power to cure her. She was not at all sure that these mountains were not definitely the worst place for her mental malady, for the sudden evenings, which flooded the valleys with cold darkness at an instant’s warning, always brought back the idea of death into her mind. After every sundown it was with her. She had been on the balcony when the doctor came because she wished to isolate this thought and argue it into its proper place, which she could not do in her lighted room. There her attention was distracted by innumerable objects, the pictures on the walls, the books on the table, the brushes and combs and manicure set on her dressing table, so that the obsession was able to insinuate itself into the background of her mind, and all at once she would find herself in the power of her insanity.
It was not that she was afraid of dying herself. She had faced that many times in her imagination during her flying days with Roy, and she knew that it would probably mean a painful convulsion and a moment of great terror followed by relaxation into nothingness, no worse than fainting to the person who suffered it, though falsely considered so by those who witnessed it, for the purely subjective reason that they perceived it to come at the end of the victim’s life and not at some point during it. It was the general aspect of it that appalled her. She was not resentful because it took everything. Nobody would want to live for ever, and the variety of life depended on the occupation of the stage by successive generations. She hated death because it took its victims in a disorderly and violent way, without regard for their value, at the wrong time, with disgusting physical results. It had taken her child, who might have become anything, whom she had known from its movements to have some special glorious and endearing quality. But even if it had been an ordinary child, Death should not have taken it, for it was absolutely necessary, if the universe was not to be a chaos of pain, that parents should die before their children. Anyway it should not have taken the child at such a stage and in such a way that sensible human opinion denied it a grave. She was not able to think of it as being in any particular place.