The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West

by which life was determined, and regretting that she had never had a prolonged private conversation with Uncle Honoré. She had really not the faintest idea what he believed. All she knew was the easy attitude of tolerance, stiffening only when the distaste for violence was aroused, which his beliefs had led him to adopt. That she had imitated as far as possible, and it had helped her; but she was aware that in her own case it was a façade without foundations which, well as it had sheltered her from bad weather, might be blown down by any worse weather. She shivered as if the moonbeams falling on her breast were cold, though the night was warm.
    But the morning after her wedding she woke up enjoying renewed confidence in Uncle Honoré’s wisdom. He must have divined, from what she had told him about Marc, that for the moment she would be in no need of his counsel. On waking she found herself alone, and leant from the window sill for a minute, humming, before she began to dress. They had started so late from Paris on their journey to the South that they had arrived at this little inn long after nightfall; and she found herself in a part of France that was quite new to her. It was the France one sees in tapestries. Over rolling country, very cool in colour, were scattered pastures and cornfields and tall woods standing on higher ground. A grey village lay like its own map on the side of a hill, and the flat square summit was a great church, visible far away not only as a building, but as a symbol of the faith in the land. Everywhere there was a spreading beneficence of mild light. At the end of the inn garden, which was so neatly cultivated that the hoe marks between the cabbages showed like fine stitching, was a stream that gave back some of this light, sliding quickly yet glassily by the willow trees. On the brink of it stood the innkeeper and Marc, looking into the water and wagging their heads, plainly exchanging platitudes, as Frenchmen do, for the pleasure of feeling their mouths full of the good meat of common sense. She turned away with tears in her eyes, remembering how the night before, in his arms, she had found herself in a country quite new to her, more full of gentleness and tenderness than any other she had known.
    They lingered five days in Yonne; but after that they were obliged to make their way down to the villa at Cap d’Antibes, which was being lent them by Marc’s grandaunt Berenice, because the offer of it had been an olive branch. For the last two years, it seemed, Grandaunt Berenice had been very much displeased with Marc, for some reason or other, and this was the first movement she had made towards a reconciliation. There was really no hardship in accepting the offer, for the house was a kind of Moorish palace, full of hoarded coolness which the summer could not dissipate, and round it was a walled and terraced garden watered by its own springs, which slid perpetually along broad marble conduits. Marc and Isabelle used to sit there when they got up, looking across the milky bay of Cannes and the dark islands that seemed to be floating sometimes on the water and sometimes on the air, at the Esterel mountains, which were so like the morning mists in their ragged majesty that it was always surprising when the full light confirmed their fantasy and showed them solid rock. As the sea turned blue, they went down and swam or sailed their boat, and they lunched on a wire-screened veranda with half a dozen tropical birds making bright streaks under the shadowed eaves. In the afternoon they rested in a vast bedroom, where the darkness was reflected in old mirrors as amber and much lighter than it was, and in the evening they played tennis, or swam again, or walked up through the pines to the lighthouse and sat by the chapel, with the sun setting behind the Esterel on their right hand and on the left the Bay of Angels growing inky with night, though the pillars of rock behind Monte Carlo and the Italian