“You are not,” said Alan, as she dried her eyes, “you are just what I thought. I might have known I couldn’t get you.”
She put away her handkerchief and wound her arms round his neck and said, “Oh, Alan, forgive me for coming here to see what I could get out of you. I saw I could get heaven from you, you are so nice. But I ought to have known that I loved Marc. How did I come to forget it? That is what I cannot understand.” Laying her face against his cheek she begged, “But don’t cast me off altogether, I am so fond of you.” To herself she said, “You are touching him in such a way that he will remember you as more beautiful than you are, you are etching yourself on his memory as deeply as you can. Can you not leave him alone if you don’t want him?” She was obliged to answer, “No.” Nor, she reflected, was this the sole way in which she was an exceedingly unpleasant woman. “I am like Monsieur Campofiore, only I crave moral and not material riches. Heiress as I am to ethical squalor, and exposed throughout my childhood to every disadvantageous influence, I am driven on through life by an insatiable craving for goodness. But even as Monsieur Campofiore hates those who are born to the kind of wealth he covets, so I hate Marc, who is naturally good. How I detest myself! But I must struggle on under the burden of what I am.”
The dogs, aware that distress had entered the room, uttered faint well-bred whimpers against her skirts; and Alan turned from her a face that was wooden with misery. “Oh, my dear!” she whispered. “Please do not mind so much! You should be sorry for Marc, I am so dreadful a creature! You will be so much happier with someone nicer than I am!” But there rushed through her veins the hope that she would not have to stay comforting him too long and could return to Marc. She listened with delight to the sound of the rain running abundantly down the skylights.
WHEN ISABELLE entered the little library, she found Marc sitting in an armchair, looking at his shoes, while the maître d’hôtel moved about the room, picking up the newspapers and journals which covered the floor, and addressing his master with pointedly casual remarks of a stoical tendency. “At the end of life, they say,” Isabelle heard him pronouncing, “one usually finds that life has been neither so good nor so bad as one thought it.” As he perceived her, he became silent; and her ears were immediately caught by a certain risping sound with which she was already familiar. She looked about and found the Siamese cat drawing its claws down the back of Marc’s chair.
Whipping it up, she said to the maître d’hôtel, “Could you find any use for this cat if we gave it to you?”
He was, as she had often noticed before, particularly at her dinner-parties, a contemplative. He said, “Madame is extremely kind, but I am not sure …” Across his face there could be seen rolling, like slow ideological cyclones, complicated doubts as to the morality of keeping animals with untamed instincts in the confinement of a home, of providing them with delicate food for which many a human being might have been glad, of lavishing affection on them when their response was bound to be partly mechanical and partly mercenary. Isabelle said, “Ah, well, I think I saw Marcel outside.” She opened the door and called to her husband’s valet, who was lingering in the hall with an air of eagerly awaiting an opportunity to serve his master’s interests, if necessary by an act of self-sacrifice; although his actual purpose was probably to collect the commission on some clothes returned from the dry cleaners’. “Marcel, could you take this cat if we gave it to you?”
He looked at her sharply to make quite sure that she meant it before he asked, “Oh, Madame, do you really mean it?”
“Most definitely,” said Isabelle.
“Then, Madame, I’ll take the little darling with pleasure,” he said. “I know the very home for it, where they’re aching for a cat, their own, which they worshipped like their own child, having just died and they not having the money to buy another one. Ah, it will be pleasant to see the bright faces round that hearth when they find what Madame’s kindness has brought them.”
“He is going to sell it, of course,” said Isabelle, when he had gone. “But we would only have talked about it, and never have done it. Marc, Marc, what is the matter?”
Marc said, “That is not like you, Isabelle. That is like some quite other kind of woman. To give a present I had given you to a servant, because it is all over.”
“But, Marc,” she said, “you do not understand. I gave the cat away because we cannot possibly keep it when there are children about the house, so we might as well get rid of it now, before it does any more damage,”
“But of what children are you speaking?” said Marc.
“Why, of ours,” said Isabelle. “Whose else?”
“My God, my God,” said Marc. “Are we not going to be divorced?”
“Certainly not,” said Isabelle. “But of course, I have not told you. I realize now that it was an absurd idea. Do you not think so yourself?”
He did not answer but sank back into his armchair. Panic filled her, the room became black, she flung herself down between his knees and cried, “Marc, you have not begun to like the idea during the day? Marc, I cannot bear it, I could not live without you. Tell me that you do not want to leave me!”
He muttered, “No, I do not want to leave you,” and put his hands under her armpits and raised her until their mouths were level.
When her lips were free, she said, weeping, “I did not know,” and he answered, “Neither did I.”
“One knows nothing,” she said.
“Nothing,” he repeated.
They clung together, and forces within them, which they could not have identified by any name, which were harsher and more pitiable and more august than love is supposed to be, used their two bodies, as if in an effort to wrestle clear of the flesh and fuse.
At last Marc said, “We will live quite differently. I will look after you so well. I will never make a fool of myself again.”
“Hush, hush!” she said. “You must not talk of that any more.”
“Why not?” he asked. “I was a fool, a murderous fool.”
“But we must not think of that any more!” she murmured. “We are going back to the beginning. The thing that happened was only a mistake, it was an accident, now I want to forget it, I want to think of you as being better than I am in every way. But what am I saying?” She started to her feet and stood in confusion. “That sounds abject, but it is not. I want to feel like that about you not because you are a man and I am a woman, but because you are you and I am I. If we were different people and I were really better than you, I should be quite content to think it, it should be possible for a wife to feel that her husband is not superior to her and for the marriage to be all right.” But she stopped and covered her eyes. With reluctance, because Roy was still dear to her, she saw her first marriage as splendid but relatively insipid. Thinking of it was like watching an aeroplane speed glittering through high blue space with the monotony characteristic of successful flights, and it appeared to her the secret cause of this insipidity, this monotony, was that she had never felt Roy to be better than herself. They had been equals and comrades, as she approved. She cried, shuddering, “Marc, I cannot understand it, I feel we ought to be equals, and yet I know you to be my superior, and I like it. Tell me, is everything I have thought about men and women wrong, or am I being swayed by my emotions?”
“How soon after all this you are able to talk,” said Marc.
“But if we do not talk about it, we will not understand it,” said Isabelle, “and we must understand everything about ourselves or we may go wrong again.”
“Oh, I am not blaming you,” said Marc. “No, I do not think you need worry about your feeling that I am superior to you. For I too feel quite sure that you are superior to me, and I too like it. So, you see, that makes a kind of equality between us.”
“Nonsense, that will not do,” said Isabelle. “You could not have two people running a department in your works, each thinking the other was the head. It would have to be definitely settled which was first and which was second.”
“My works,” said Marc, “though doubtless among the most important objects in the universe, are not a pattern for all departments of it. I think the process is a little different. You see, none of us can see our own faces. The faces we see in mirrors are not our own, the left is turned to the right, and as soon as we know that we are regarding our own images we falsify our experiences.” He rested his brow on his hand and became silent.
“Go on, go on,” she said.
He lifted his head with an effort and continued, “You see in my face a self which I do not know, which must amount to far more than myself as I know it, since it is the sum of all that has happened to me, and I only know what is happening to myself from minute to minute. You think the self you see in my face is superior to yourself, just because you can’t see your own face, because you too judge yourself by the minute to minute specimens, which are only parts of the whole.”
She deliberated gravely on what he said, cupping her chin in her fingers. “Perhaps you are right,” she said, “but still I think that people who look on both our faces would like your self better than mine.”
“Do not be stupid,” he said. “You know that you are talking of what never happens. Neither of us ever shows a true face except to the other. That is why we are important to each other.” He dropped his head on his hand again, and his muffled voice went on, “It is a mystery, it is all a mystery. I have often thought that in loving you I love a woman of whom you have never heard, of whom you have not the slightest idea, who is nevertheless entirely real.”
Isabelle said nervously, crossing her hands on her breast, “You are making too much of the mystery, I do not think there are many women to be made out of me. I am as clear as glass, you know everything about me …”
She paused. A number of things that he did not know about her, or knew falsely, raced through her mind. He believed that she had loved André de Verviers in proud, dumb misery, like a sculptured woman on a sarcophagus, folding her marble draperies across her marble lips; whereas she had known with him first a cheerful delight, almost wholly without implications, like swimming or riding a good horse, and then a nightmare vexation as of clearing up the litter of a picnic party in a high wind. He believed that she had smiled kindly at a door closing on Laurence Vernon, and gone back to her book with relief; whereas, in the infatuation of that time, she had longed for his pithlessness as if he were more than even the flawless man she imagined, as if he were a way of living that led to peace. And Marc did not suspect that at the moment she had promised to marry him she had indeed been a sculptured woman, folding her marble draperies across her marble lips, her eyes as sightless with humiliation as if they were chiselled circles. In astonishment she recalled the flash of Marc’s yellow shoe as it flew up to kick the waiter’s behind in the vestibule at Laurent’s. She stared at him as he crouched in his chair, so obviously and pre-eminently the most valuable object that the world could offer her, and realized that, when she had actually taken the first steps towards marriage with him, she had believed it to be a farce into which she had been compelled by a tragedy. In fact, though in a sense Marc knew everything about her, he was grossly mistaken about her relations with the most important people in her life, including himself; and though her mind lay open before him, vowed to a perpetual extremity of candour, there was in fact nothing less possible than that she could correct these errors.
Marc looked up at her and laughed. “You look so like a little girl when you suck your thumb like that,” he said, and again let his head fall forward on his hand.
Isabelle stood still in perplexed silence. The motives that had brought her to this marriage, she reflected, were a secret not only from Marc; should she make them public, the whole world would disbelieve either in them or in her present emotions regarding him. That was not how love was supposed to begin. In fact, this was an uncharted universe. But Marc was saying something, speaking very indistinctly, his lips against the palm of his hand. “What is it?” she asked, kneeling at his feet.
He said, “All day there was just one thing I thought of over and over again.”
“Oh, darling, was it something good?” she asked. “I do so hope I left about some piece of evidence which showed my real mind, which showed I would not lose you for the world.”
“It was the telegram,” he said. He narrowed his eyes and nodded at her, sly, like a peasant. “The telegram from your friend Blanche. I figured out to myself that, if it were all finished between us, you would not be able to bear being alone, you would want to run back to somebody you had known in the old days when you were a little girl in America. But you did not think for one moment of going to stay with Blanche. But then …”
She cried out and put up her hand to smooth away the lines on his face.
“But then I had to remember that you are stiff-lipped, you have grand manners, you will not break. Other women who had left their husbands might run about to their friends, telling them all about it, but you would not, you would go white and precise and would see no one. I could see you, like a cold day. I became sure that the very reason you had refused to go and stay with Blanche was that you meant to divorce me. Ah, don’t do that, don’t pity me, for then I became atrocious.” He pounded on the arm of his chair and began to shout. “I pretended to myself that your grand manners were a lie, that underneath them you were just like all other women, that when you seemed to differ from them it was just a woman of the world’s trick, and so all that argument didn’t apply. I went about saying to myself, ‘Ah, she’s just like the rest of them, if she’d really done with me she’d be with her gossips!’ And then I couldn’t keep that up, to pretend you were not proud is like pretending that a cart that goes on four wheels goes on two. Do you know what I did then? I dwelt on what I’d done to you. I said to myself, ‘Yes, she is proud, but think what agony she has been through, I made her lose her child, that would break down anybody’s reserve, if she were going to leave me she would have to talk, so my argument about the telegram holds.’ I said that to myself, Isabelle.”