The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page A

mountains beyond still flushed like stone roses. They dined at home or at a little restaurant in the old port of Antibes, where an arch in the high wall showed masts black against blue and rigging with stars caught in it. At no time in such days was Isabelle not amazed by the infiniteness of Marc’s good will. Though all his ties were with the strong and not with the weak, he would not have had a sparrow fall, anywhere in the world.
    But people began to find them out. When they dined by the port, the great cream-coloured automobile waited for them in the square at Antibes, and it was excessively recognizable. From that time their gardens might as well not have been walled. Their early mornings were still free, and they padlocked behind them the road down to the private beach, but when they came back for lunch, there were people all over the gardens, and sitting on the veranda, dressed like the Russian ballet and often beautiful in themselves, but not what they wanted. These people had to be given cocktails, they often had to be asked to stay to lunch, and though they left in the afternoon about three, they were back again in the early evening, not so different as they should have been considering that this time they were not the same people. Gladys and Nikolai had gone over to dine with Daisy at Monte Carlo, but they had been replaced in all essentials and in most superficialities by Iris and Serge. As Isabelle extended her hand to the apparent third and fourth of this actual pair, and realized that she and Marc would not be able to go up to the lighthouse this evening because their dusk was going to be overpopulated by Doppelgängers of the crowd that had camped all over their noon, she saw that her married life was going to be made as difficult by Marc’s wealth and position as if his work had compelled them to live in an unhealthy climate. She had thought that she had many friends, but hers were a handful compared with the army that insisted on its vague ties with Marc. Her friends represented the cast of a legitimate play, which hardly ever exceeds a moderate number, since a theme cannot be crisply expounded by too many mouths, but his friends represented the cast of a Follies show, which, debating no particular point, but stirring certain large loose fantasies of delight in the lower levels of the mind, can be as numerous as the hosts of a dream. The fault in the situation was that he, like her, had his true place in the legitimate drama. He was, as his mother had often told her, serious. His heart wanted to work out one simple theme, and his naïve and powerful mind was eager to grapple with ideas in its Douanier Rousseau way. He was in this world not because of anything in himself, but because he had become associated in its eyes with the most erethic of all its fantasies, wealth. Once there, he was not altogether unhappy, for he loved to play for recreation as these people loved to play out of idleness, and his good tough stretchable body gave him a pleasant pre-eminence among them. But he and she made the same effect here as actors from the legitimate drama when they are called upon to play specially exacting parts in a revue or a musical comedy; they might stand out for their competence and their subtlety, but they lacked the bloom; undisturbed by the touch of thought, which made others round them delectable as peaches.
    Isabelle found her visitors not unlikeable people. It was true that they were catarrhal with affection; whether they were French, Russian, English, or American, endearments flowed from them as freely as rheum from an irritated mucous membrane. This was only in part due to mercenary motives, for a considerable proportion of them were so rich that they had no need to curry favour with their friends. It came rather from their intention, never formulated but governing all their actions, to treat life so that it would never form any pattern, to rub down each phenomenon till it became indistinguishable