The Thinking Reed Read Online Free PDF Page B

been saying, which was an irrelevant climax to an evening of slapstick idiocy if he had not.
    And she could not get rid of him. It had earlier been the intention of both of them to be married in June, and that was still his intention. She was grimly conscious of his power to carry it into effect. He would see to it, by such technical devices as he had employed that very evening at Madame Vuillaume’s party, that they should constantly be alone together, and that the generic woman in her who loved the generic man in him should have endless opportunities to betray the individual woman in her who loathed the individual man in him. He might even draw so much public attention to their continuing relationship, that she would find it socially necessary to marry him. What he would make of marriage she would not let her mind run forward to discover fully; if she had been threatened with cancer, she would shrink from precise foreknowledge of her ultimate torture. Marriage with André would not be torture, but it would be tomfoolery. In spite of herself, infuriating visions passed before her. At the very best, he would practise private fidelity to her and public flirtation with innumerable conspicuous women, so that she would be ridiculed by the world as a complaisant wife, and yet would have no reason to complain. Nothing sane could proceed out of their marriage, because it would have to be based on André’s assumptions about love, which had the madhouse trick of cutting up the mind into inconsistent parts. He was himself two people in his attitude to passion. When he was her lover, he was grave and reverent, but too often there was afterwards this solemn clowning about sex, this midwife chatter about the bringing to birth of pleasure. Don Juan, it seemed, was a case of split personality; his other half was Mr. Gamp. And he did what he could to draw her with him into the madhouse, for he tried to split her personality into two. It was suggested to her that her beauty and her capacity for passion were a separate entity, a kind of queen within her, and that it was to this that his loyalty was given, and that the rest of her was a humbler being, who ought to feel grateful that this superior part had caused her to be associated with such a grand gesture of chivalry. She, Isabelle, was supposed to be possessed by la femme as by a devil. Such an hypothesis made her feel as if she had been plucked back to the dark ages, to find her way among the cobwebby delusions of alchemists.
    But in Laurence Vernon’s mind she would find unity. He would have but one image of her there and that distinct as the figure on a Greek coin. He would have but one clean-cut image of their marriage, as simple as the year in the mind of a farmer. In the spring he would lay the foundation of his plans for public things and she would have her children, in the summer they would admire to see how their work fared in the heat of the day, in the autumn there would be harvest, and since the days grow shorter and they would have so much to talk over, no doubt winter also would not hang on their hands. Men grow weary of many things, but not of the seasons of the year. The thought of how she was being cheated of a profitable simplicity for a complexity that was sheer loss made her have tears to wipe from her face as her automobile stopped at her hotel. It made her mutter miserably as she fell asleep. It had made dawn look colder than its own greyness when she woke, as it looks to those who have been roused by recollection of their bankruptcy. It made her sit up in bed and stare when there came a knock on the door, as if that must mean sudden danger, and pull on her dressing gown and rush to turn the key as if the world were so full of such dangers that precaution was worn out, and there was nothing to do but put down the head and charge them.
    There stood in the corridor outside nothing more terrible than two women, their arms full of flowers; but at that their arms were