The Thinking Reed Read Online Free PDF Page A

there had crept into her attitude more of the ramrod stiffness of a sentinel rather than the shy recession of a votary of love taking the veil. She would not let this brawl enter her gates, and that was all. But she was to lose her resolute calm, and the force that sustained it, during the time he led her to think he was deceiving her with Princess Natalie Avitzkin. He said he had not done this, that it was she who had misread inevitable movements, which meant no more than that he was doing his social duty, and built fantastic dreams on them; but she knew he spoke falsely. It could not be by accident that he had so perfectly forged the appearance of surfeited ardour hankering after change. Perhaps they might speak of Natalie and how she had looked at the Opera, her fairness giving out rays as she sat in front of the blackness of a box, though Isabelle would not say that it had struck her that he had bowed a little too long and too low before that box. A little later he would talk of the paramount beauty of golden hair, and then would break off in embarrassment, and lay a kind hand on her dark hair, as if he were caressing a child about whose future he knew a sad story. At meals he would become absent-minded and stare into the distance, and then come to himself with a start and be uneasily cheerful and affectionate. He became hesitant and distracted about appointments, and at last presented himself with a melancholy air of bearing up nobly under his own penitence. That evening she dismissed him quickly and coldly, contriving that they should be interrupted, and telephoned to the American Express Company to reserve a compartment for herself and her maid Adrienne on the train for Berlin the next night. She had read that her old Professor of Archaeology was staying there till he went on an expedition to Siberia, and she knew that he would probably be glad of her as a bottle-washer and a financial aid.
    When André rang up the next morning, Isabelle would not speak to him; and she heard a sound as if her coldness had been so pleasing that the air had been forced out of his lungs in a spasm of delight. She turned away from the telephone, foolish with misery. It appeared to her proven that he had divined her plan of departure and was so eager to be rid of her that he rejoiced. To be able to answer any of the other people who rang her up that day, she had to affect an air of maenad joy, as if it were with an impulse to hysterical laughter that she was struggling. “Yes, I am going to Berlin, and then to Russia!” she cried, as if she were going there to be whirled up in the vortex of some orgy so riotous that already it was pulling her off her balance. She never knew who among them told him; but an hour before she had to leave the hotel for the station there was a knock on the door. Her maid opened and then turned round to her, silently asking what she was to do. André leaned against the doorpost, so white that she forgot the trouble that was between them, and asked herself what frightful physical cause, what sudden malady or overdose of drug, could have changed him to this. But in a croaking cry he asked, “You are going to Russia?” and she remembered everything, and stiffened. “Of course,” she said. Adrienne went. He flung himself forward on Isabelle; they collapsed together in trembling entanglement on the top of a shoe box. “But—but—” he stammered, and had to begin again in French, for he had forgotten all his English, though normally he spoke it almost as fluently as his own tongue. “You were really going to Russia?” She whispered, “Yes.” He took possession of her again in a long kiss, which was honest, which gave himself to her, so that she was not ashamed of her return. From this embrace he broke away to gloat on the look of her and cry out, “You were going to Russia! You were going to leave me, just because I made you jealous!” He was trembling and running with sweat, he looked like a man who has