The Thinking Reed Read Online Free PDF

escaped by a hairbreadth from a great danger, who has stepped aside just as the propeller begins to whirl and has felt its breath on his brow, who has arrived so late that the gates of the elevator are clanged in his face and he sees it drop like a stone down the shaft. “You were going to do that to me! But I tell you we belong to each other!”
    There had followed a whole month of peace, during which they had progressed with their love and had done much towards changing it into permanent kindness. But even then she had been disquieted, and had sometimes raised her fingers between his lips and hers, and shuddered with a lightning flash of enmity as she lay in his arms. For he had cried out, “You were going to leave me, just because I made you jealous!” although she had never told him that he had made her jealous. She felt it as their common misfortune that a sentence which was wrung from him in what was perhaps the sincerest moment of his life should be damnable and unforgettable evidence of his insincerity. She felt the sham hope, the real despair, of a woman whose husband has just come out of a clinic after the last of a series of cures for morphinism, and is doing very well, just as he always has done during the first few weeks after treatment. Not in the slightest degree was she surprised when he began to wriggle through the one loophole she had left him. She had dismissed all her admirers, except Marc Sallafranque. Marc had to stay. He had to stay, for one thing, because to dismiss him would have conceded that André and she were two insane persons gibbering at one another, since it was perfectly obvious that she could not possibly entertain Marc as a husband or a lover. He was too grossly, too comically successful as an industrialist, his very name had passed from him to the article he manufactured. A Sallafranque was no longer a man, but a cheap car. A woman might as well ally herself with Monsieur Eau de Cologne or Monsieur Pâté de Foie Gras. Moreover, though he was not unlovable, he was grotesque. He was tall enough but he looked short, because his body was overweighted with the cylindrical fatness of a robust little boy, and his square jaw went straight down into a bull neck almost the same size round as his head, so that he seemed made all of one thick, rubbery piece. In the midst of this podginess his melting brown eyes, his snub, dilating nostrils, and his wide mouth made a muzzle like a terrier’s, expressing a purely sensuous gaiety and melancholy so candidly that one would no more deal with him by cold reason than if he were a terrier, and one felt at no time that one was dealing with a man. It was a terrier that did funny tricks, too. He was comically violent; when he wanted to go upstairs in a hurry, he would put his feet together and hop up several steps at a time, with great springs of his strong legs, and once, when he had grown impatient in a restaurant, he had rushed on a waiter carrying in a pile of plates and had dealt them like cards on the floor around him. It was impossible to think of him without laughing, but the laughter was always kind, for he was so good, so generous, so guileless, so bravely humble in his subservience. It would have been as absurd and insulting and heartless to count him among the admirers who must be dismissed as if he had been a trusty footman. But not doing so had given André his chance. They happened almost every third day now, these revolting scenes, when he pretended to believe her capable of being unfaithful to him with this grotesque, when his voice pattered out accusations against her on one persistent note till she swayed and had to clap her hands over her ears, when his arms would sweep out in menace, not against her, but against the order of the room, so that a vase would be hurled from the mantelpiece and crash on the hearth, until he drew her to him in a reconciliation which would have been shameful to both of them if he had believed half of what he had