The Thinking Reed
The Thinking Reed
Rebecca West
To
HENRY MAXWELL ANDREWS
“…
Vivamus quod viximus, et teneamus Nomina, quae primo sumpsimus in thalamo.”
“
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this.
”
—Pascal’s Pensees
THE THINKING REED
Contents
THE KNOCKING on the door did not wake Isabelle because she had started up from sleep very early that morning. This was a new thing. Until about a fortnight before, she had slept for nine hours every night, no matter when she might have gone to bed. She needed the rest, for she was still young, she was two years younger than the century, she was just twenty-six; and though her white skin never flushed, and her fine small features were as calmly gay as if she were a statue that had been carved looking like that, she was in motion all her waking hours. She was beautiful, she was nearly exceedingly rich, she had been tragically widowed, there was an exotic distinction about her descent from an Orleanist family which had never lost its French character, though it had been settled in St. Louis when that was a fur station in Louisiana. Therefore many people liked meeting her. All sorts of houses were open to her, from the kind where the dirt-dimmed chandeliers seem like snuff-droppings on the bosom of the ancient Faubourg Saint-Germain air, to the kind where the modernist furniture looks like the entrails ripped out of locomotives. Isabelle went to most of them; and in between her visits she rode horseback, hunted the wild boar down in the Landes, sailed a boat at Cannes, played tennis with the aces, and enjoyed the beating because there was beauty in the inflicting of it. The game was too fast for her body, but her mind could always follow it.
There were times, indeed, when she completely abstained from doing any of these things. She would lie for hours on a chaise-longue, so inert that the folds of chiffon which dripped from her body to the floor hung as steady as if they were stone, her clear face upturned to the ceiling, still bright but not brilliant according to its custom, like a star reflected in tranquil waters. But even then her right hand moved ceaselessly, turning on her wrist as though it were throwing a shuttle. There was indeed a shuttle at work, but it was behind her brows. Her competent, steely mind never rested. She had not troubled with abstract thoughts since she had left the Sorbonne, but she liked to bring everything that happened to her under the clarifying power of the intellect. For she laboured under a fear that was an obsession. By temperament she was cooler than others; if she had not also been far quicker than others in her reactions, she might have been called lymphatic. But just as it sometimes happens that the most temperate people, who have never acquired the habit of drinking alcohol, or even a taste for it, are tormented by the fear that somehow or other they will one day find themselves drunk, so Isabelle perpetually feared that she might be betrayed into an impulsive act that was destructive to such order as reason had imposed on life. Therefore she was for ever running her faculty of analysis over in her mind with the preposterous zeal of an adolescent running a razor over his beardless chin.
So, between sport and pedantry, she was busy enough, and on most nights her eyes closed the minute her head touched the pillow. But last night she had lain awake for quite a long time facing the fact, which seemed to be adhering to the ceiling just above her bed, that so long as she was linked with André de Verviers, she was the ally and the slave of everything she hated: impulse, destruction, unreason, even screaming hysteria. The accusation that posited a state of affairs shameful to herself, that was barbed with horrible circumstantial details for which there was not the smallest foundation in fact, that was suddenly supposed to have been annulled—and this she found most disagreeable of all—by a violent embrace which could have no logical bearing on it, and was loathsome to her because she wanted the accusation discussed on its own terms and withdrawn as untrue—this must be her daily bread, so long as she was with André de Verviers. This would have been abominable to her in any case, even had there not been so near at hand an embodiment and a promise of the kind of life she longed to live; even if Laurence Vernon had not come over from Virginia to see her.
She was miserable, but she was young. All that day she had ridden in the Forest of Compiègne. She rolled over, she murmured, “Ah, if only Uncle Honoré were here to tell me what to do!” and suddenly she slept. But after a few hours she was as suddenly awake again. She remembered how she had stood in André’s room, shaking herself as if his arms had left bonds about her, wiping her mouth impatiently, and crying out, “Yes, that’s all very well, but why did you say you were sure I was having an affair with Marc Sallafranque?”
André had not answered her but had shuffled barefoot past her to the table, poured out a glass of Evian, and sat back on the duchesse sofa, taking a long drink. “Oh, how beautiful you are!” he breathed over the rim of the glass, nodding his head in connoisseurship.
“But you must tell me why you said it!” she cried. “I have the right to know!”
He shrugged his shoulders, laughed, and went on sipping the water. The trees in the courtyard rustled, and a tram wailed outside in the Avenue Marceau; the quality of the sounds said, “You are alone with him late at night.” The candles in the silver sconces were guttering; their reflection on the mother-of-pearl veneer of the Venetian furniture said, “Everything is romantic here.” She knew pride and humility in acknowledging that as he sat here, his fine hand lifting the glass to his fine face, he was not less beautiful as a man than she was as a woman; and about his eyes and mouth there was the signature of wit. This should have been perfection. It was not.
She implored him, “Why won’t you tell me? There must be something you’ve heard! You see it spoils everything! I can’t understand how, if you think I’ve been unfaithful to you with Sallafranque, you can want to make love to me! It spoils everything.”
He stretched out his hand to her, holding it as one does when one summons an animal, palm down, the thumb fluttering against the curved fingers. She perceived that her demands seemed like the begging of a pet dog at meals, to be soothed rather than granted by the wise master. It appeared to him that she was making an error in timing, probably due to her foreign taint, by arguing with him about his accusations. That had served its purpose in making trouble, delicious, exciting trouble, which had scourged the nerves to a climax. There was no need, therefore, to worry about its validity now. This principle, that any means was justified to whip up excitement, ran through his life. It explained his royalist politics. He and his friends knew perfectly well that nothing was less likely than that France should have a king; but royalism made for trouble, it provoked libels, face-slappings, duels, deaths, imprisonments, escapes from prison. Therefore they upheld it, they did not reason about it.
She found herself shuddering with disgust. Her knees gave way under her; she had to let herself fall on the sofa beside him.
He thought she had come to be nearer to him, and circled her body with a loving, turning snake of an arm. In a way he loved her. He had the extremest preference imaginable for her society and he evidently believed this to be eternal. Though he did not need her money, he was always asking her to marry him. It was extraordinary how little these considerations alleviated her distaste for the cruel, brawling quality of half his dealings with her.
As his lips touched her ear and found a patch of sensitiveness, her nerves made her break out in complaint, and into the wrong complaint, a lesser one than that which was making her feel clumsy with misery. “And you said it before we left the drawing room,” she mourned. “Madame Vuillaume must have heard.”
“She is so stupid she would not have understood if she had,” said André comfortably; and, seeing a loophole for his Parisian passion for anecdote, he continued, “Did I ever tell you how her husband made his money? It’s rather a good story. When Ferdinand of Bulgaria came to Paris in 1912 …”
While he was telling the story, she kept her eyes on the parquet, and in its peat-coloured depths she saw the face of Laurence Vernon, and behind it the avenue of cypresses that led from the old post road to his quiet home, Mount Iris. As André finished, she said, “You do not understand, André. I want to leave you. I want all this to stop.”
“Oh, my little one!” he exclaimed. He was really alarmed. She must be quite upset not to laugh at a really funny story like that. “You mustn’t say such things to your André. I haven’t done anything to make you unhappy, have I?”
She cried out, “Of course you have! Again and again! I tell you I loathe all these scenes and accusations and rages. I want this to come to an end. I don’t love you.”
“Oh, my little one, how can you say such things? Think what wonderful lovers we are! You are too young,” he said, a pedagogic tone coming into his voice, “to realize how exceptionally fortunate we are in that respect.”
“But that isn’t enough. It doesn’t make up for the abuse, the excitement, the hatefulness.” To her own surprise she began to weep. “I tell you I can’t bear it any longer. I can’t go on.”
“My poor child,” he said remorsefully, taking her in his arms. “Stop trembling like that, you’re safe with your André. Ah, I see what the matter is.” He assumed an air of solemn authority over physiological mysteries. “I have been too much for you, I am afraid. My little darling, I am wicked, I should have been more careful of you—”
“You haven’t been too much for me,” she said, with some indignation. “When I tell you that I am sick to death of the cruel, lying things you say to me and the tempers you fly into, why should you assume that it’s something else that’s the matter with me? Particularly when the things I’m complaining about nobody could help hating, whereas what you’re talking about nobody would mind very much”—she broke off, and he released her with a pat of the hand.
“When a woman is very tired,” he said with a return of midwifely sententiousness, “she does not know what is the matter with her. It is then that a man who loves her understands her far better than she does herself. Come, darling, put on your things, I am going to send you home now.”
“Yes,” she said, “I am going home. And I will never come here again.”
“Ah, my darling,” he said, down on the floor, where he was looking for his shoes, “when you wake up tomorrow after a good long sleep, you will have forgotten that you ever said or thought these words.”
She sighed in despair and stood looking down on him, full of foreboding at his physical power and distinction. He was so finely made, so well dowered with the dignity of grace, that on all fours he was as little at a disadvantage as a tiger. He was an idiot, but his body did not know it. Resting her chin on her clasped hands, she turned and went slowly to the other end of the room. She took her powder-puff out of the bag she had left on the mantelpiece and passed it over her face, peering into the mirror, for here the sconces were not lit, and her reflection swam white in brown darkness shaken by ruddy firelight. With an exclamation of dismay she pressed still closer to the mirror, unable to believe her own expression. She was young enough not to have outgrown the persuasion adults plant in children, that their emotions are trivial and cannot carry the full freight of human joy or woe, so she was surprised to see on her face the mark of utter weariness, of deep suffering.
André’s voice called to her from the distance, “Hurry up, darling. You’ll be getting cold.” At its charm she shuddered. His good looks, his adroitness, his amiability, had lost all power to affect her. They were admirable of their kind, but they were so inextricably entangled with elements she detested that for her they might never have existed. But he had a hold on her for the simple reason that, when he and she were linked by passion, they formed a pattern which was not only aesthetically pleasing but was approved, and indeed almost enjoined, by everything in civilization that was not priggish. When, an hour or so before, he suddenly paused in the denunciations he was hissing into her face, swayed for a minute and grew paler, and then drew his arms softly yet closer and closer round her body and pressed his mouth gently yet heavily on hers, she would have felt stiff-necked and ridiculous if she had resisted, like a republican who refuses to stand up in a London theatre when “God Save the King” is played. She felt herself the victim of some form of public opinion, which was so firmly based on primitive physical considerations that the mind could not argue with it, and it operated powerfully even in the extremest privacy.