The Thinking Reed (40 page)
“Oh, Madame Elise, you are formidable!” sighed Isabelle.
“Shall I try on this chemise before I alter the other,” asked Elise, “or shall I go on with the other and shall we try them both on together at the end?”
“Go on with the other,” said Isabelle. “There is something I want to do. Adrienne, give me my dressing gown.”
She went into Marc’s room and sat down on his bed. She was aware that in Paris one could do anything one liked in complete secrecy, provided only that one did not mind everybody in the world knowing what one was doing; that it was impossible for any amorous or political or financial association between important people, however carefully they might conceal it from their own kind, not to come at some point under the observation of some member of a vast confraternity of concierges, laundresses, hairdressers, florists, telephone operators, messengers, and servants, which was here far more united and powerful than such confraternities in other capitals, because it read the papers intelligently, was less divided by a sense of social differences among itself, and found satire its natural means of expression. This meant that only rarely did a scandal break with a shock on Paris, however much it might startle the husbands, wives, fellow ministers, or business partners of the intriguers. It gradually emerged into the common consciousness, as a coral reef is lifted above the waters by the efforts of individually insignificant but innumerable and tireless workers. His friends would not be surprised when Marc and she separated. They would have learned it long ago, through Adrienne, through Elise, through the Duchesse de Campierre’s laundress, through Monsieur Claude Issot. Their attitudes, whether they were approving or disapproving, would have been so long considered that they would present no element of shock. The trouble in every such affair came later, when it was sufficiently established in fact to become the subject of journalistic comment. There then broke out those satanic intellectual exercises which proved that the French genius was too universal, since coprophilists, who in other countries timidly attempt to smear the world with small portions of filth and are hustled into lunatic asylums, here use their vice as an artistic medium and turn the whole world into filth by the magic of superb prose. She shuddered to think of the atrocious verbal martyrdom to which Angèle de Campierre and Achille Clairon, Marc and she, alike were doomed.
Isabelle knew she would be jeered at as yet another American heiress who had forced her way into a French home and had proved unable to maintain its standards of decorum; and all Marc’s enemies who hated him because he was not sufficiently to the Right would join with those who hated him because he was not sufficiently to the Left, in order to revive the charges of dangerous publicity which had been brought against him first over his gambling. Only because their divorce was entirely necessary for the well-being of both of them could she endure to bring such an ordeal on either Marc or herself; and she had felt the most acute anguish as she lay on her bed, trying to prefigure at what point her story would be betrayed to Adrienne and Elise, to the laundress and Monsieur Claude Issot, and it occurred to her that their acute intelligences would probably begin to work when Marc removed her photographs from his room. He had an inordinate number of them, because he liked to take snapshots of her and have them enlarged, usually to an excessive size. It was unthinkable that he should want to go on sleeping in a room with twelve or fourteen large representations of her. Sooner or later he would throw them into a drawer, and Adrienne and Elise, the laundress and Monsieur Claude Issot, would set in motion the spoken words that would in course of time rot into the vile printed words which even the bravest must fear. Her heart began to beat very fast. She could not bear to think of this moment of betrayal although, if it did not come in this form, it would certainly come in another; and it occurred to her that she might collect them now under the pretext of having them put into new frames of a kind which she had lately heard him admire.
She went about the room, taking them from the walls and the tables: the one of her when she was still at Miss Pence’s school; the one of her when she came to Paris for the first time to go to the Sorbonne—she had never been able to think why he liked them so, for in both she was a starched and leggy child, with the pasteurized look of a wealthy orphan; the one they got from a newspaper, at the garden party at Rambouillet, bending down over a group of short and plump official wives like a civilly condescending giraffe—it was perhaps a sign how little they were really suited to one another that he should be without any sense whether a photograph showed her at her best or at her worst. On his dressing table stood the one which showed her in her wedding gown; but that her outstretched hand did not reach. There lay in front of it, on a sheet of foolscap, a heap of crystal and metal fragments. They were large enough for her to recognize them as the ruins of Marc’s favourite clock, which always stood on the table beside his bed. She drew the tip of her forefinger along her lips. She did not believe this had happened by accident. Marc’s bedside table had to be exceptionally broad and deep to carry the mass of papers and technical books he brought back from the office, the bottles of mineral water he liked to drink in great gorging draughts when he woke for a minute, the cigarettes, the many small objects—such as wooden dogs, a pocket adding-machine, or a tiny cactus—which he collected during the course of the day; and she was aware of his tendency to express rage and misery by throwing things on the floor, though he was careful not to give way to it in her presence. She put down the photographs and began to pick up and lay down again the metal wheels and springs, the small bright jewels, the broken arcs of thick crystal. Marc must have stayed awake longer than she did, for the breaking of the clock must have made a considerable noise, and she had heard nothing.
The door flew open and Marc’s valet came in, whistling and carrying a tray of clean linen. “Ah, pardon, Madame,” he said, and by something too kind in his greeting, too concentrated in the attention with which he laid his tray on a chair and began sorting out the shirts from the vests, Isabelle knew that she must be looking agitated.
Steadying her voice, she said, “It isn’t like you, Marcel, to leave this rubbish about. Yes, what’s left of the clock. It looks untidy.”
“It does indeed, Madame,” answered the valet. He was a great rogue, with an unctuous manner of agreement. “But what am I to do? Monsieur forgot to telephone to me about it. He said it was given to him by Monsieur Dompeyre at the works, and that he would inquire of him whether he got it here in Paris or in Switzerland, and that he would ring me up as soon as he knew, so that I could send the firm the pieces, for them to identify it and send him one just like it. But he forgot, and I’m just leaving them here, hoping he’ll remember it today, for though this is a big house and nothing is lacking, Madame, there is no sense in my packing those pieces as I would had they to go to Switzerland, if all I have to do is to take them round the corner. String and cardboard and sealing-wax are cheap, I know, but there’s no sense in waste.”
“You are admirable, Marcel,” said Isabelle, understanding him perfectly. Actually he meant that he would not be deflected by his duties from his prosecution of intricate personal relationship among the female members of the staff till the last possible moment. But the ring of one of his phrases echoed in her ear and puzzled her. “What do you mean: you hope Monsieur will remember today?” she asked.
“Well, he forgot yesterday,” said the valet. “But then we all know how busy Monsieur is. If he wasn’t another Napoleon, he’d never be able to remember anything.”
“But wasn’t this clock broken last night?” asked Isabelle.
“Oh, no, Madame,” answered the valet. “You know what Monsieur is, how quite like Napoleon. He had arranged to ring up Monsieur Delnomdedieu, who always leaves home at nine, and he left it till ten to, by this clock, and then he found Monsieur Delnomdedieu had gone and that the clock was a quarter of an hour slow, so he threw it on the floor. Ah, these great men, they’re all alike, they all have their little ways.”
Isabelle picked up the photographs from the dressing table and the others from the writing table, the mantelpiece, the wall between the windows, and went out of the room. In the passage she stood still for a minute, murmuring to herself, “What insupportable behaviour! Of course I am right to go. As we got older, it would become too degrading. Nothing would ever be safe.” At the door of her room she came to an abrupt halt, aware that Adrienne and Elise had turned on her faces which ominously indicated that they found her appearance even more interesting than their conversation; and she realized that she had almost certainly precipitated the moment she had hoped to delay by entering with her face drawn in disgust and her arms full of her own photographs, which she had removed from her husband’s room. For an instant she felt abandoned by the whole world, including destiny. She would have liked to throw the photographs on the floor and sit down among the shattered glass with her head on her knees and cry. Nobody cared for her, the only person who could ever have really belonged to her had been taken from her by a violent and uncalled-for act of cruelty, she was somebody who was doomed to blunder and be watched by people who were without tenderness for her.
She put down the photographs neatly on her writing table and said, “Adrienne, we must send these photographs to be reframed. Monsieur has suddenly got a craze to have them all set in shagreen.”
“In shagreen?” said Adrienne. “That seems not quite the right material for Monsieur’s room, which could not be more masculine.”
“In shagreen,” said Isabelle firmly. “He saw some photographs at Monsieur Delnomdedieu’s that had been framed in shagreen, and they pleased him enormously. You must send them off to Carrier’s this afternoon.” She would pay the bill and order them to be destroyed before she left the country. The desolation of that voyage, even if it were only over to Dover, brought tears to her eyes, and she walked past the two women into her bathroom.
“Madame, wait a moment, the telephone,” said Adrienne.
“I do not want to speak to anybody,” said Isabelle, keeping straight on towards the bathroom. But the wing-sleeve of her dressing gown caught on the back of a chair and ripped from hem to shoulder, and she cried out, “Oh, God! Oh, God!” She leaned over the chair and began to weep in harsh and painful sobs.
“Oh, Madame, lie down on your bed! Allo! Allo!” said Adrienne. “Madame, you are not yourself yet! Mademoiselle, j’écoute, j’écoute!”
“Oh, Madame, you must sit down!” said Elise, putting her arms about Isabelle and drawing her into the chair. “And you should go back to the country. One doesn’t get over a bad illness in a day, you know.”
“Give her a glass of water,” said Adrienne. “Allo! Allo!” Her face expressed the kindliest concern for her mistress, but her hands were crooked avidly round the telephone, and it could be seen that she could not bear to detach herself from the instrument, lest the identity of the caller should give her a clue to the situation. She was physically agitated from side to side by this conflict between her heart and her head. Isabelle, seeing this, burst into laughter, and Adrienne, swaying even more violently, cried out, “Quick, quick! A glass of water, I said! And some eau de carmes!”
“No, no,” said Isabelle, “I may be ill, but I am not hysterical. I am only being amused.”
“Yes, yes,” said Elise, “but we have each our own way of being hysterical. Madame, I beg you to go back to your bed.”
“It is Mr. Fielding,” said Adrienne triumphantly. “It is Mr. Fielding,” she repeated mournfully. It was evident that she was gratified to find that certain suspicions she had formed were correct, but doubted whether she ought to feel such gratification while her mistress was so troubled.
“Oh, what does it all matter? What is the good?” exclaimed Isabelle. “Yes, I will speak to him.” His voice came to her from the distance with its peculiar and pleasant quality, like a freshet of clear water, and she cried gaily, before the women had time to leave the room, “Ah, yes, what a good idea! I should like nothing better than to come out and see your house today! Yes, come and call for me in your car, I prefer little cars, and I can eat anything for lunch. Yes, I will be ready in half an hour—no, three-quarters.”
When Isabelle looked over the banisters and saw Alan Fielding walking up and down the hall, she felt as if he had come to let her out of prison. The flash of his smile was like the brightness of a key that could unlock the heavy doors which shut her in with waste and violence and uncertainty. When they crossed the pavement to his automobile, she wished that they were living in a ballet, so that she could dance and spread out her skirts against the wind which, having driven plump golden clouds across the sky all morning, had suddenly dropped to the level of the town and was romping through the streets like a boisterous country visitor. It was not credible that she should feel so well and happy so soon after she had been despairing and hysterical; and her contentment endured, it was evidently not merely the effect of getting out of the house. In the Bois de Boulogne it would not have surprised her if the people rowing on the lakes and walking on their shores had all known each other and assembled with some common festive purpose which they would all at once declare by waving across the fretted silver waters and bursting into song; and the couples sitting under the trees, although their attitudes expressed fatigue at least as often as affection, and the leaves and grass were grey with dust, and the sun had gone behind a cloud, made pictures of the eternal harmlessness of the human race, which co-exists with the eternal harmfulness, and may be sought everywhere in vain during the working hours of man, but discloses itself in all its inefficacious innocence and gaiety whenever a holiday has been granted. Isabelle was about to ask Alan if he did not notice a special cheerfulness about the day, when she reflected that that might perhaps not be wise.
As they raced along by the river, Alan Fielding said, “My luck’s been rather good. I got you to come out here and have lunch with me because the day looked fine, and now it isn’t going to be fine at all, it just stayed clear long enough to give me my chance.”