The Thinking Reed (5 page)
SHE LIKED so little what she had to do, and knew so well what happiness lay on the other side of doing it, that all the morning she was trembling with nervousness. Her hands shook, her mind shook; she was a trifle stupid. When Sallafranque rang her up and asked her at what time he might see her, a rush of tenderness for his affectionate simplicity made her desire that he might know about Laurence and herself sooner than anybody else and count as her first friend to be adopted as their friend; so she told him that she was lunching with a friend at Laurent’s and that, if he called for her at half past two, he might hear great news. He answered with a bubble of joy which she took as proof of his good nature, his readiness to rejoice in the pleasures of a friend as if they were his own, until he had rung off. Then she realized that he had thought she meant she was going to promise to marry him. She sat and stared at the telephone aghast. She would not have exposed him to such humiliation for anything in the world. But she did not see how she could ring him up and make the matter plain without a degree of indelicacy which, in this already sullied day, she felt reluctant to undertake. Besides, the morning was getting on, and she had arranged to have a manicure and a face massage, as an anticipatory rite of purification for the disorderly act she was to commit later in the day.
At half past twelve she took André’s roses in her hand and looked at herself in her long mirror, not that she needed reassurance of her beauty, which had ceased to be relevant to any serious purpose of her life, since by now Laurence must have received some final impression of her appearance. What she needed was to recognize herself as the person she knew, who she had been all her life, who was incapable of being forced to make a scene by the pressure of passion. She waited till it was nearly twenty-five to one, to make quite certain that André would be out, for though he ought to allow a full half-hour to get to Versailles for that lunch, he would perhaps not hurry, since his hosts were not French. Then she went down to her automobile, and told the chauffeur to drive to André’s house. As the car travelled up the Champs-Elysées she looked ahead at the Arc de Triomphe, raising against the whitish spring sky a shape appropriate less to architecture than to furniture, as if it were a wardrobe storing the idea of French military grandeur, and she childishly attributed her troubles to her residence in a country where life stamped itself in such spectacular forms. Then she knew the vertiginous pain of a patient who is going to a nursing home for an operation which is not strictly necessary, which is undergone solely as a precaution against future crises; she wanted to stop the automobile, jump out, to take the chance that some other way of ridding herself of André would present itself. Perhaps her Uncle Honoré would come to France this summer, and would be able to suggest something. It was well known that that old man understood everything. But when the automobile slewed off the Champs-Elysées into the avenue whose trees marched down to the Seine, she remembered how often, and with what feelings of humiliation, she had forced herself against her will to make this journey during the last few weeks. She picked up the roses she had let fall on her lap, and held them tightly.
“When will Madame want me again?” asked the chauffeur.
“Oh, at once, at once!” she said gaily, and went forward to her deed.
Decidedly, part of her trouble had been merely that she was in France, for nowhere else in the whole world would there have been this courtyard. She had liked coming here, and since it had an air of liking to be visited by happy lovers, she had humoured it. Yes, that accounted for at least part of the trouble. She passed through the archway, and sniffed as always the antique pungency of the concierge’s meal, seething in a pot that had no doubt never been emptied and filled afresh since Paris was Lutetia, that might have begun its simmering in even earlier and sterner times, so that the basic flavour still carried a trace of tender prehistoric child. She was peered at as always by the concierge’s wife, pressing against the dimness of her window her drooping bosom and features congested by malevolence; how realist are the French to keep at their doorways a perpetual reminder that the body of man is corruptible and his nature fundamentally evil. Then she entered into the courtyard itself, into the tender evidence that the French are romantics; that though civilization constrains them to live in great cities, they remain provincials at heart, and when they have to build high walls, knock them down again with their minds. This place was like a square in a little town, not the square where the market is, but the smaller one where the women sit and gossip over their sewing in the evening. There were cobblestones underfoot, clean as they are in the country, and trees tall as they are by village fountains. It was quiet with more than absence of noise, it seemed to be manufacturing quietness, in which the toot of a motor horn in the street outside sounded as feebly as if a tiny child had set its lips to a toy trumpet. In the very middle of the square an old dog lay asleep under its flies. To the left was a tall cliff of dwellings determined wholly by necessity, its windows placed at ugly intervals, its dark stone scored with pipes. It was entered by a double door of glass and yellow-painted iron, such as might have admitted to a lycée. One knew nothing about it except that there existed behind one of its windows a human being who knew the emotions of fatherhood, for near the entrance was propped up a child’s bicycle that some adult had been painting green. One knew also that behind another of its windows was a woman who had once been young, who had learned nothing since, for she was singing an air from
Thaïs
by propulsion of the breath from a bosom choked with syrup, in a manner that one had thought long universally discredited. In fact, there were in that building souls whom metropolitan influences had tried in vain to ravish from their simplicity.
To the right was the house, much lower, only three stories high, where all the shutters were always closed because the banker’s widow was still dying at Nice. She had been ill so long that her residence had fallen into some disrepair. The creepers had not been cut back, and tendrils grew about the faded green slats of the shutters. But it was one of those houses which, in emptiness, are fragrant as an empty scent-bottle. One saw the darkness of the rooms peopled with ghosts of women belonging to the eighties, with frizzed light auburn hair set forward on their heads, fawn-dark, faintly Mongolian eyes, long slender waists rising from a fluff of frills like silk-cased spiral springs, and vitally important explanations, long withheld from the noblest reasons, turning to red phthisis between lip and tiny scrap of handkerchief. Beside the lachrymose charm of this home of spectres most other houses would have looked gross and bourgeois, but not this house of André’s, which some nobleman had built during the Second Empire as a replica of a Renaissance pavilion in his country park. It was looking its best at this moment, for the grey stone, marked with purplish shadows where the rains had dripped from the rich mouldings, was wreathed with the languid green leaves of wistaria, and its mauve flowers, which, in spite of their fragility, hung with the weightiness of fruit. But it owed little to the benevolence of the seasons; it could depend on its own style, the magnificence that had here curbed itself and been for a moment light, that had with perfect justice scaled down its method of elaboration from pomp and castle-size to the moderate measure of a man living alone except for love. She had cried out when she first saw it, it had seemed so beautiful. It was small blame to her that she had entered it! It would be beautiful again when André was a ghost like the women in the house next door, and was visible only to such lovers of the past as had a special feeling for this age. Then he would be seen looking out under the broad brows of the mansarded windows purged of his triviality and restlessness by the censorship of man’s romanticizing memory, dark and beautiful and grave with consideration of private delights, like a young man painted by Giorgione. It was only in the present that he and his house were intolerable; and that present she was now going to shatter and elude.
She went up the flight of four curved steps that led to his door, rang the bell, and went down the steps again.
In time old Michel hobbled out, his greenish-black trousers concertinaing round his legs. André would not dress his maître d’hôtel properly because his aristocratic relatives were very poor and never renewed their servants’ liveries. At this reminder of the complete factitiousness of André’s existence she was swept by a wave of irritation, and she began to get the roses into the right position, their flowers in one hand, their stalks in the other.
“Ah, Madame!” Michel called down to her. “Monsieur André did not expect you, he’s gone to Versailles for luncheon. But won’t you come in and write a note?”
She tried to answer him in the words that she had been rehearsing since the morning; but her lips were dry, her mouth opened and shut but emitted no sound. She could, however, perform her planned action. She broke the flowers in two across the middle of the stalks; she did that easily enough, because she had prepared them with scissors at home. Her pleasure at finding that she could execute at least part of her programme, and that it succeeded so far as to make Michel’s eyes pop out of his head and bring him down to the second step, gave her back her breath.
Isabelle cried out, quite loud, “Tell your master that I want neither him nor his flowers!” And she began to tear off the petals from the flowers, the leaves from the stalks, and scatter them on the ground.
“But, Madame!” said Michel. “But, Madame!” He came down another step, but no further. Horror, even fear, was on his face. She did not wonder. She wished she could stop at once, having made her point. The air from
Thaïs
had stopped, and in the stillness she heard above her a metallic clash, as if someone had very sharply thrown open a window high up in the flats. Perhaps she was being watched. She longed to turn round and run out of the courtyard, but a peculiar motion which Michel had made with his right hand, and a canny narrowing of his eyes, had filled her with alarm. It was as if he were promising himself that when she had gone he would sweep up all this detritus of blossoms, and would spare himself the embarrassment of telling André. She looked down and saw, between the cobblestones and the slab of pavement at the foot of the steps down from the house, a narrow section of earth still wet from the early morning showers. Down on this she cast the most complete red and white roses she had left, and with her heel she ground them into the mud. She knew that Michel, who was clean as a cat, would not dabble in the dirt to retrieve them. André would see them as he came in and would inquire what had happened, and Michel, she knew from the gape of his old jaw, would tell everything; for the savagery she had put into the grinding of her heel on the roses had made him feel concern for the safety of his adored master. Yes, late that afternoon the two men would bend over the muddied petals, and Michel would quaver, “Like a madwoman, I tell you, Monsieur André, like a madwoman!” and André would grow pale with apprehension of hitherto undivined resources of recalcitrant womanhood. He would fling back to the house and spend the evening smoking very quietly in his library; and when her engagement was announced, he would do nothing, absolutely nothing.
She took one last look at the pavilion and its wistaria, and went out of the courtyard, saying to herself, “This is goodbye to all the French thing. It’s lovely but it is not really a part of me. Our family’s emphasis on its French origin is a piece of snobbery like André’s refusal to buy Michel a new livery. By this time our blood has become wholly American. Now I am going back to my own people.”
She felt so light-hearted, so freed from the past, that she walked past her own car, and her chauffeur had to call her back. When she got to Laurent’s, she wished she had walked, for she was too early. There was no Laurence waiting in the lobby, and she was sorry, for she wanted someone to greet her at once, so that she could release the happy laughter that was welling up in her. She chose a table on the terrace, for she knew he would want to eat out there where the trellis wall shut out all the urban lower part of the landscape, with its babies and nurses and seats and gravel walks, and admitted only the full-foliaged treetops and the bright crest of the fountain spray. She ordered some tomato juice, for she would never again need a cocktail to pick her up, since she was never going to be down, and sat at her ease and sipped it, looking at a group of trees, a chestnut and two planes, that were swaying rhythmically together, like gods wrestling together and coming to no falls because their forces, being divine, are equal. But presently she looked at her watch. At first she had been alone because she was too early; now she was alone because Laurence was late. Yet he was never late. Surely he had said Laurent’s? She leant back on her chair, and was able to look into the lobby, and there he was, standing quite still with his back to the terrace, his arms crossed on his chest, his head bowed, as if he were pondering something of a desperate nature.
She called to her waiter. “Tell Monsieur Vernon that Madame Tarry is here.”
“But I have already told him,” he answered.
They both stared at the long, rather stiff, narrow-waisted back. “Perhaps Monsieur is expecting another guest?” suggested the waiter.
“I don’t think so,” said Isabelle, and smiled to herself. It was touching that even Laurence, the most polished and self-possessed of human beings, should be timid before this moment and should try to stave it off as long as possible. At that instant Laurence chose to swing round, and though he lifted a hand in gay greeting, he showed by a lifting of the shoulders, a compression of the lips, that he found their scrutiny embarrassing. The waiter pivoted on his heel and became part of another group, and Isabelle smiled up into Laurence’s face as he bent over her hand. “Had you forgotten you had asked me?”
“No, I certainly hadn’t,” said Laurence, and sat down opposite her. His body slumped into his seat heavily and clumsily for him. “What’s that you’re drinking?”