The Thinking Reed (35 page)

When Isabelle found herself possessed once again by that particular thought, she went back into the lighted room and began to manicure her nails. Then, laying down the orange-stick, she looked at herself in the mirror and said, “This is absurd. At that stage it has no more consciousness than a sea-anemone or a limpet. It is absurd to feel about it as if it were a person whom I had known.” She rose and took off her clothes very quickly, as if she were stripping herself of her destiny, and got into bed, and turned out the light. After some time she turned on the light again, and opened a book. She was reading only German books now, though her French blood made her feel that German was not a rational growth like any Latin language, but was an arbitrary invention like Esperanto or Ido; and indeed their writers struck her as working under a handicap, since their tongue made the most perfunctory remark sound like a considered judgment. It was impossible to listen to the bloodhound solemnity of the German vowels without believing that they clothed a philosophical revelation proceeding from profound experience, to regard the massive span of a German sentence without believing that it had been constructed to meet the strain of the heaviest conceivable intellectual traffic. French writers laboured under a handicap of the contrary kind, for their language made a considered judgment sound like a perfunctory remark; and this worked to their advantage, because they were therefore under the continual need to justify their claims to seriousness by the exhibition of their subtlest and most valid intellectual processes.

But for all that, she knew quite well that the French were not perfect. Her own life had come to ruin in France, and that was natural enough, for there was in French life a contentment with the petty which was enough to prevent it from forming any noble and continuous pattern. She recalled contemptuously how the two doctors in the other clinics had made love to her. If she had acceded to their desires, the encounters must have produced so little pleasure, owing to her manifest preoccupation, and the complete lack of physical or mental sympathy between them, that it would have been as disgusting for them to have gone to any trouble to procure it as it would have been if they had greedily put themselves about to obtain a small sugar cake. All that could be said for them was that they had a greater sense of reality than the German doctor. When they perceived that she was suffering from a malady too insidious to cure, they offered to have sexual intercourse with her, which they could in fact have done. In the same situation the German doctor had attempted to distract her by pretending that a mountain understood her complaint and could remove it, which was not the case. Her heart went out in rage against the two peoples: the French, who had their eyes always set on the mean little satisfactions well within their grasp, on overcomplicated food and oversimplified sex, on the steady pay of the civil servant, on the ribbon of the Legion of Honour, on a glass of syrup taken on the terrace of a cafe with a group of friends, and who never looked up to wonder at the strangeness of the forces of which these were only the superficial manifestations; and the Germans, who are so absorbed in recognizing the existence of these forces that they entirely ignore their superficial manifestations, which after all are valued preliminary points of contact with them, who talk about food and sit at table during hours of ritual consumption, yet have invented only a few dishes, who are infatuated with the idea of music and the large rhythms on which it rolled among the spheres, yet go to concerts and play musical instruments with the most promiscuously invariable enthusiasm and the starkest insensibility to the quality of the actual sounds produced.

She rebuked herself for her irritability. These people were doing their best, they were carrying on. Though these doctors were useless in regard to herself, they did other work well. The doctor with the beard was an impassioned neurologist, and had talked to her with fire of a disease which made its victims fling their bodies about as if in unremitting fanaticism, and of a fantastic but successful treatment which mitigated their sufferings by adjustment of a nerve in the nose. She had seen the doctor with the inflated chest tenderly intelligent over a child with weak lungs; and this German doctor was without doubt being of service to those of his patients who were accustomed to eat and drink too much. All over France, and all over Germany too, there were men milking cows and getting the churns to the railway stations on time, and women nursing sick children so that they got better instead of worse. There were, in fact, in both these countries, and indeed in all countries, innumerable people living lives which made her revolt in shame against the kind of night she was probably going to spend. She would rise from her bed, hour by hour she would walk from the window to the door and from the door to the window, leaning her hand on the dressing table as she passed so that she could know the reassurance of contact with solidity, while her heart raged uselessly against death and grieved after a child that had been irrevocably destroyed. Then all the next day she would be drugged by lack of sleep. She could imagine no more completely wasteful manner of spending the twenty-four hours, and suddenly she thought with nostalgia of her house in Paris, of the pigeon-hole in her desk where she kept her housekeeping books, of the clear morning light that shone through the muslin curtains in her dressing room and irradiated the bowed white head of her cook, who stood waiting for the day’s orders on flat-heeled shoes thrust wide apart under bunched black skirts, acting the part of a poor old widow woman, simple and patient and honest, whereas she was in fact a thief and a miser, a tyrant to her subordinates, the depraved and jealous mistress of the twenty-year-old second chauffeur, a sublime artist, better than any chef, and a devoted servant so long as she was ridden on the curb. Isabelle hungered to be back wrestling with this woman, or fortifying the maître d’hôtel, who was a strayed intellectual and apt to become melancholy at dinner parties, and to betray written on his face a doubt whether there was any real justification for that or any other festivity in this universe, but who was perfect in staging their everyday life, or making any of those personal adjustments which made her populous household endure from day to day, and to the next.

She started up, kneeling on her bed, and said aloud, “I ought to be at home! I am not leading a normal life. They have got me again.” She had miscarried her child because she formed part of a society that was itself a miscarriage, that had not cohered into a culture or a civilization, that could not cohere into even the simplest sort of pattern. There came back to her that disgusting night on the Riviera, where innumerable gorged people, scattered over a garden, had failed to be born into a party, though the voice of a great singer hung in the air above them, calling them to voluptuousness as to prayer, though fireworks multiplied and exceeded the beauty of the stars above them. It was the same night that Marc had for the first time revealed before her his passion for gambling, that destiny had for an instant lifted its hand from the map of the future and had clapped it back again before she could comprehend what she saw. It seemed to her that the tale begun on that evening had been accomplished at Le Touquet. But suddenly she saw that it was continuing here and now in the clinic. She stared about her at the hygienic surfaces of her room as if it were a dungeon, and she remembered how the beam of the lighthouse at Le Touquet, passing over her walls, had made her think that if she had been a sailor’s wife she might have been dead by then. Now she felt that if she had been a sailor’s wife she might have been much more alive than she was, since she would have had neither the freedom nor the money to wander from one useless regime to another, among people who meant nothing to her.

She said aloud, “Marc, I must come home.” Then she looked at herself anxiously in the pierglass of the wardrobe opposite her bed, for she was aware that she was undertaking an immensely difficult task. She was not sure if she could possibly stop thinking about Le Touquet, and her reflection made her doubt it. There was a darkness about her face which was not of her skin. But her eyes travelled down the glass to her body, which was naked, since she had thrown herself between the sheets without a nightdress in her precipitate flight from her obsession, and she was astonished and amused. Her body knew nothing of what had happened to her. Her skin was ustred by the sun just as it had been during any other summer, even the most fortunate. Neither it, nor the high medallions of her breasts, nor the arch of her ribs, nor the hollow of her stomach, gave any intimation that she had of late been utterly worsted by humiliation and grief. Serene in its muscular and venous wisdom, idyllic in its smoothness as a land where the art of writing has not yet been discovered, her body confronted her without memory. She stood up on the bed, watching in the mirror how her knees pressed out and straightened, perfectly accomplishing what her will designed. She said, “I am young, I am strong,” and she put her hand to her head, tilting it backwards so that she could look distastefully at its dark and sullen gravity, as hypochondriacal in its resolve to be the reverse of a sundial and mark only the shadowed hours. “The thing is not to think so much!” she cried. “I will go back to Paris and live, just live. I will run the house, and be busy all the time, and never remember Le Touquet.” She lay down and turned out the light, and slept till morning.

Isabelle went early to the doctor’s room, to tell him that she was leaving that night, and when he objected, she reminded him that he had promised her that the mountains would give her peace, and firmly assured him that they had. She perceived at once that she had been right in supposing this to be a proposition which he would not find in his heart to dispute, any more than the French doctors had found themselves able to frustrate her intention of returning to a lover; but he was unable to disguise a certain amount of regret that the mountains had acted quite so promptly on one of his wealthiest patients. He controlled himself, however, and gave her a long address on health and happiness and courage and simplicity, looking immensely wise and speaking with sibylline deliberation, but achieving nothing but a loose association of ideas, while she fixed her eyes on the photographs of his nine sons and daughters which were ranged along the mantelpiece. As his discourse continued, it appeared likely that these children, though differing widely in age, were all the result of a single intolerably long and discursive sexual act. She found herself longing for the clarity and sharpness of speech that she heard from Marc and his relatives; and she found herself thinking of the man before her with fear and hostility, as if he must be dangerous because he was not lucid, which was not logical but was exactly what Marc and his relatives would have felt about him. “I have become a Sallafranque,” she said to herself; “I must go home to the Sallafranques.” She smiled to think of herself acquiring ideas through family alliances, through habit and the frequentation of the herd, instead of through the use of the mind.

She wired to Marc telling him that she would arrive some time next morning, and that he must not meet her, because she was not sure that she might not break her journey for an hour or two, and might even take an aeroplane from Geneva. This was not true, but she wanted to arrive in Paris alone, as if she were a young person with her life still to make, as if she were going to Marc not because she was committed to return to him, but because he represented the most favourable opportunity in a world full of alternatives. And, indeed, the sight of Paris filled her with delight. The drive from the Gare de Lyon intoxicated her with a sense of possible distractions because it took her through parts of the town which she never visited and which she looked on with the fresh eye of the stranger. The morning sun was shining on the quays in the Bercy quarter, stencilling on the amber water the oily yellow image of the chestnut leaves, already half consumed by summer, and setting long, shallow shadows beside the hills of barrels, which were far less familiar to her and far more astonishing than the Taj Mahal. “I must drive out here one day,” she said to herself, “and see if this extraordinary district really exists. Miles and miles of nothing but barrels, it is really not credible.” Suddenly a wood fire sent its country smell to her nostrils, and she remembered that this was the only great city which is also a village, where countless metropolitans follow unaltered village ways. It showed its bucolic quality in the little shops on the river, which, in the very face of Notre Dame and the Law Courts, and at the elbow of the Hôtel de Ville, offered seeds and plants, birds and fishes, on so modest a scale that they might have been functioning in the most inglorious provincial town; and on the stalls by the river parapet which exposed for sale all sorts of printed rubbish that in any other capital would have been hawked in the suburbs or left in the attics, so obviously could most of it appeal to nothing but the simpletonish desire to turn over the page just to see what was on the next. But the Parisians who were hurrying along the streets to their work had remained villagers, not because they were unsophisticated or unadaptable, but because they were fierce. They defended the customs that suited them as savagely as they would attack anyone who tried to take from them lovers that suited them. Many of them were ugly, a certain number of them looked cruel, they wore dark clothes with an air of murderous thrift and contempt for lightness. But they were all splendidly themselves, having been compelled by the extreme degree of their aggressiveness to throw aside everything that was not real and necessary to them and worth the trouble, which in their case was apt to be furiously inordinate, of defending. “What an amusing people to live among!” Isabelle thought affectionately; and she added, “What an amusing family!” For it was from these people that the Sallafranques had risen unperturbed by their good fortune; it was to these people that the Sallafranques would return unperturbed by poverty if their fortune changed. “What I have to do will be quite easy,” she told herself, as the taxi passed the sky-broad spaces of the Place de la Concorde, and she looked up the wide trench of the Champs-Elysées to the Arc de Triomphe. This was her own Paris, where she lived, where she walked every day, and her memory was charmed by a thousand recollections of morning freshness and the harmless extravagance of early sunshine spilt over pavements, of prodigal purchases of flowers in the name of housewifely duty, of unplanned, unfatiguing encounters with acquaintances and their dogs.