She reflected, as she drew near the warm glow of the Champs-Elysées, that nobody had less reason than herself to feel discontented with the present, or anxious to alter the past. There was Roy, of course. As she thought of his destruction, the melancholic mood of the avenues seemed only the bare truth. If she could have gone back and haled him out of death, where he did not belong, she would have done so at any cost. But she had Marc. The only thing the past had ever given her which she lacked now was friends, of the sort she had had at school, like Eugenie Gray or Olive Mather, or Hilda Chalk. The only one of the group who was like herself transplanted to Europe, Blanche Yates, she scarcely ever saw, except at parties where there were lots of other people and they could not talk. She had no time left for such things. By the time she had ordered the meals and gone over the books, visited her hairdresser and her dressmaker and her milliner, entertained at luncheon and dinner the people whom she was obliged to entertain because of Marc’s social and business connexions, and had kept up her ties with Marc’s mother and sisters, she needed to spend any leisure that was left on being alone, so that the springs of her vitality could renew themselves. There was a definite process by which one made people into friends, and it involved talking to them and listening to them for hours at a time. She walked along for some time, wondering how her daily programme could be changed so that she was freer for this process; but it occurred to her that this press of business which ousted friendship was not a peculiarity of her life with Marc. She had made no friends when she was married to Roy, because of the rush from aerodrome to aerodrome, the machine-gun rattle of receptions, conferences, banquets. She had made no friends when André de Verviers was her lover, because of the insatiable demands on her life of his jealousy and his caprice. Perhaps men, and the social structure which men have made, saw to it that women were worked till they dropped, so that there should be no force in them that was not expended in the service of their men.
But if that were so, and women must always be friendless, they were sentenced to a privacy of fate which made a living woman not so alive as a living man, a dead woman deader than her dead man. Nobody knows the whole truth about one except one’s friends. From husbands and lovers one must keep many things to oneself, one must be silent about one’s troubles, particularly those that follow from one’s choice of these beloveds, since one dare not spoil their courage. She could not have risked sapping the strength of Roy’s nerves by telling him that sometimes when she was watching his plane fear rose in her breast as the plane rose from the ground, and circled and stunted round her heart and bowels as the plane played in the air, and was not quiet till the plane had landed. But she had still friends then, she had sat down and written to Eugenie and Olive, and when some day they saw the news of her death in the papers they would remember what she had told them, they would speak of the mixture of anguish and rapture that her first marriage had been, it would live again on their lips, maybe someone would hear them and repeat it again through the years. But what was happening to her now would go unrecorded, it would be shut up with her in her grave and would be dust when she was dust.
Well, if it was so it must be so. “But surely,” she thought, “there is something extraordinary, something abnormal about women’s lives.” But how could women’s lives be extraordinary or abnormal since there are more women than men and they have always led the same sort of lives? They are in the majority, time has approved, why should there be this feeling of oddness, of incongruity? It was perhaps because every inch of a woman’s life as she lived it struck her as astonishing, either because nothing like what she was experiencing had ever been recorded, or because it had been recorded only falsely and superficially, with a lacuna where the real poignancy lay. She murmured, “Roy! André! Marc!” and at the sound of each name she felt bewildered as if she had been the first woman ever born, as if when she died she would go out uncomprehended from solitude to solitude. She was in front of her own house now, she drew to a standstill, astonished by intimations of strangeness as if she had been walking on an Italian hillside in the dusk and had come on an Etruscan tomb. The lit windows were not less mysterious than those which were still dark.
But her key fitted the lock. The house was hers, everything she saw was familiar, her feeling of isolation was simply a malaise that meant nothing, like giddiness. She was Isabelle Sallafranque, she was wealthy, she had kin and friends all over the world, the lamp at her desk in the little library showed a pile of letters from them, waiting on the Canton enamel dish. The American mail had come in, and had brought a letter from Uncle Honoré, which, since it was thick, probably contained some business communication; but she dropped that as she saw underneath an envelope addressed in Laurence’s agreeable angular writing. She stood with it in her hand for a minute, staring into the shadows of the room, wondering why she felt disturbed. She was certainly not still in love with him. Though she would have stuck to her guns if her first interpretation of his character had been disputed, she knew now that his virtues were of as little interest to her as the finest possible vegetarian regime would be to a meat eater. She shook her head and smiled as she slit open the envelope: then bit her lip, because he wrote that he was about to be married.
Behind her the door opened, all the lights were switched on, she felt Marc’s hands on her waist, his lips on her nape. “Ah, leave me alone for a minute, darling,” she cried impatiently. “I am reading such an interesting letter. Laurence Vernon has written to say he has become engaged.”
“Well, you will not like that too well,” said Marc, letting her go.
“What do you mean?” she asked, feeling alarmed. “Why should it matter to me?”
“I always feel that every attractive woman I have ever met should withdraw herself from the society of all others of my sex,” said Marc, “and shut herself up in a sealed paddock till I get round to her. Mind you, I do not mean to get round to her. I am serious, myself. But I feel that it would be only nice of her if she took our meeting that way. All men have that attitude, I think; and it is only when one is being disagreeable that one pretends women are not exactly like men in their attitude to these things. So of course you will not like Laurence getting married.”
“How absurd you are,” said Isabelle. “I mean that you are perfectly right, of course.” The young woman involved was a Southerner whom Laurence had met on the steamer going back to America.
“Moreover,” said Marc, as he read the letter over her shoulder, “I think there was a little between you two that you have not told me about. I do not think Laurence was under the impression that you were an elderly gentleman, bald-headed, and employed in the Ministry of Commerce.”
“Why do you think that?” said Isabelle.
“Because he looked at me and was too fair-minded to think anything spiteful about me,” answered Marc, “but I saw him examining my physique several times and telling himself that, though he was anxious that his dear friend Isabelle should be happy, he thought it a pity she should have chosen anybody so short and fat.” He broke off, moved back to the door, and turned out the switches that he had lit when he came in, so that the room was in shadow save for the little lamp that shed a circle of light on the letter in Isabelle’s hand. “Laurence thought, probably,” he went on, “that you, being beautiful, should marry some miracle of good looks like André de Verviers. Not understanding—for you Americans have so little experience about certain things—that there may be in such splendid beings whom one would think formed for the relationship between the sexes, something that prevents them from ever being serious, from being any good at the hearth, though one would never blame any woman for wishing that it might be otherwise.”
A silence fell and Isabelle, still bending over the illumined letter, realized it to be Marc’s belief that she had, like so many women in Paris during the last ten years, suffered an unrequited infatuation for de Verviers, that she had either wished to marry him, or had been left by him after she had become his mistress. Her first impulse was to throw back her head in laughter and tell Marc how much energy she had put into the business of getting rid of André. But in her, every impulse was followed by one forbidding her to act until she had deliberated; and the briefest moment of thought suggested that she had no right to betray André, since at times he had made her very happy. Besides, if she explained to Marc that he had mistaken the roles of the personages in her drama, that it had been Laurence whom she loved and André who was the superfluous suitor, it would have upset Marc’s theory of values and left him puzzled and self-distrustful. He could understand and approve André’s charm for women, because it was the result of physical vitality such as he himself possessed; and since he hardly knew André and underestimated his own other qualities, he was able to imagine that the only difference between them was that in André this vitality had found a beautiful envelope. To him, therefore, a woman who loved André was demonstrating the possession of a taste which ultimately he himself might satisfy, But he would find it totally incomprehensible that any woman should love Laurence, and if he knew that she had ever done so, it would set up in his humble mind a dread that there existed some precious human quality which he did not possess, and that for lack of this he would never really please her nor deserve to do so. She would not have had him think that for the world. The longer she deliberated on it the more it appeared not worth while correcting his misapprehension. He had the elements in her story right, and if she had pedantically insisted on further corrections, she would have placed herself among those wives who interrupt their husband’s stories by crying out, “Now, darling, why do you say we had three valises and four trunks? We had four valises and three trunks.”
As she stood in thought a blush covered her face and ran down her whole body. The elements in her story included her own humiliation and misery, and Marc knew of them. Just such an exposure as she had feared, and tried to avoid for ever by marrying Marc, had at last befallen her. Then a kind of counter-blush, a wave of relief and pleasure, broke over her face and body. What one fears from the blow that leaves one exposed and unarmed is what the world will do to one when it finds one in such a case. Evidence piling up since childhood suggested that it would mock and chastise one. But in the case of Marc the evidence lied. He, if he found a human being delivered into his power, would clothe and comfort him. He knew that she had been despised and rejected by some man, and this knowledge was exciting in him no trace of harsh sadistic triumph, but only tenderness and pity. It came to her that he had spoken of André only from an exceptional delicacy, because she now recalled that yesterday at dinner somebody had asked her if she knew André de Verviers and, when she had replied, she had stuttered a little, which Marc knew to be her habit when she was embarrassed. He was saying to her, “Do not be afraid lest I should come to know anything about you. I know it already, and there is no part of your destiny which I do not accept.” She contemplated Marc’s attitude to her in this matter in ecstasy, as one listens in a concert hall to a phrase of music by a master played by a master, feeling that the whole world is but a wall built round this performance, the sky the roof that covers it, that here is the centre of life.
She regretted that her controlled and secretive temperament had made her rest immobile, still bending over the letter which she held in the circle of light under the lamp. She turned slowly towards Marc, who was still leaning against the lintel of the door, and tried for a word, for a gesture, that would candidly avow her love of him, her gratitude for his love. But she found herself smiling mysteriously at him, not as if she were surrendering all her secrets, but as if she were withholding from him many more than she really had; as if she were saying to him, “Ah, you think you are clever, you think you know all about me, but you know nothing, though I like you so well that perhaps I might tell you everything if you went the right way about persuading me. But you must find out for yourself what that right way might be …” It was as if an older woman of the coquettish type, full of factitious crises which she particularly disliked, had taken control of her body for a minute. But before she could correct the effect she was giving, Marc had come towards her and had taken her in his arms, and she was puzzled to see that he seemed to be ravished by her look. She would have been irritated had he not been so warm and tender that she wished for nothing better than to rest in his arms, her eyes shut, while his lips travelled along the line of her jaw.
“Tell me, darling,” said Marc, “who is coming to dinner tonight?”
“Eighteen people,” she answered, not opening her eyes. “To meet the Ortegas.”
“Oh, my God,” said Marc. “South Americans. They will never go home. I shall be so tired when they have gone. Darling, will you not go upstairs and rest a little?”
“Ah, no!” she said. “No!”
“But I think you will,” he said, and drew her by the waist, out of the room, up the staircase. She made little murmurs of protest, and as she passed the door of the salon, she clutched at the handle.
“No, my darling,” said Marc. “No.”
“Ah, but I must!” she cried. “I will not be happy upstairs unless I know that they have done what I told them with the flowers.”
“Very good,” said Marc, “and I am glad to see that you admit that you will be happy upstairs, once you have learned that they have done what they should with the flowers.”
He flung open the door and turned on the switches.
“Look,” he said, “but quickly, look quickly. We mustn’t waste time.”
She looked round the great, brilliant room, and saw that her servants had set where she had directed the great vases full of Michaelmas daisies she had bought at the market that morning. Their lovely pale colours keyed down the brilliance of the room, and diluted as with moonlight the flood of yellow brightness from the candelabra, exactly as she had intended.