“What has been happening over here?” asked Mr. Pillans.
“Nothing very good,” said Alan Fielding.
“So I guessed from Monsieur Sallafranque’s expression,” said Mr. Pillans. “He seemed to be getting pretty mad at something.”
“What, was he here?” exclaimed Isabelle.
“Standing right behind you,” said Mr. Pillans. “He left just as I came up.” He paused, and then added with a certain luxury of self-abasement, “I guess that’s how people seem to be feeling about me tonight.”
“What has made you feel that?” asked Isabelle.
“I’m not bright enough to amuse your friend, Madame Renart,” he explained in laborious lightness. “A boy friend of hers came along, name of Barnard, and she asked me to give him my place at the table.”
“Is that Barnard the South African millionaire?” asked Alan Fielding.
“Yes, that would be him,” said Mr. Pillans. He repeated with a full sense of the implications in his statement. “Yes, that would certainly be him.” But there was still luxury in his tone. It was apparent that nobody could cure him of his infatuation for Poots by giving him proofs that she was mercenary and treacherous, since these emetic qualities affected his perverse soul as aphrodisiacs.
“I believe,” thought Isabelle, “he would think more of Luba if that ridiculous idea of this young man Fielding were true.” She began to laugh.
“Am I being very funny?” asked Mr. Pillans.
“No, not funny, but simple,” said Isabelle. “Do not be offended. I am an American too, so I have the right to say that all Americans are simple.” She had not meant to say that any more than she had meant to laugh, but the place and the heat and the horrible people and her own physical misery were acting on her like the kind of drunkenness which dictates intricate speeches and actions to its astonished subjects. She found herself continuing, “You think Madame Renart very chic, don’t you?”
“Why, yes,” said Mr. Pillans timidly. “Don’t you think that she is?”
“Oh, yes, she is very chic indeed,” answered Isabelle, “so chic that anyone could see it across the road. And she’s wicked too, isn’t she?”
“Why, no,” protested Mr. Pillans. “I think she’s lovely. She may be a little playful, and apt to walk out on people if they aren’t giving her a good time, but that’s only natural. She’s young, and so very attractive that she’s used to having things her way.”
“But you think she’s wicked, don’t you?” Isabelle pressed him. “Wicked, I mean, in little exciting ways, like being unfaithful to her lovers, and getting what she can out of them, and throwing them over before they have stopped caring for her. You see she’s full of that, don’t you?”
His eyes glistened, he smiled bashfully, as if he were a boy owning to some precocious appetite. “I guess all the most attractive women are like that,” he said. “They get spoiled with all of us men running after them.”
“But she’s wicked in such a simple way,” said Isabelle. “There is no subtlety about it, no grandeur. You know, although these English put it over on us Americans, their roots are not so very deep. Their aristocrats don’t go back and back into the past, the way the good French families do, the ones that aren’t Bonapartist. There are very few English titles that go back to the Tudors, and many of them date from the eighteenth century. There are even a lot that came up in the nineteenth century, just like our families in the Middle West. They stand not for tradition, or romance, or anything beautiful at all, but just for money, just as they say of us in the Middle West.”
“Is that so?” asked Mr. Pillans. “Is that so?”
“It is indeed,” said Isabelle. “I believe the Lauristons made their money out of iron. It is no wonder that, when the daughters of such families go wrong, they cannot be distinguished from young women in Chicago or Milwaukee or Cedar Rapids who find themselves obliged to supplement their incomes by prostitution. God found it necessary to bring Madame Renart into the world three thousand miles from the Atlantic seaboard in order to prevent her using the term ‘sugar-daddy,’ and I am not sure that He is going to be successful.”
“You are very sarcastic,” said Mr. Pillans.
“But Luba,” said Isabelle, and stopped and watched his face. For a second it cleared, as if he were a small boy who remembers in the middle of trouble at school that at lunchtime he will be back with his mother. Then it clouded again, as if the small boy remembered that this kind of trouble would shock and grieve his mother, and she might be angry with him. But though such small boys think of running away, it is their mothers they really want. “Luba,” she said again, and her whole body shook with exasperation because the emotion on his face would not precipitate, he remained idiotically incapable of seizing the satisfaction offered to his deepest need. In a voice harsh with contempt, she began to demonstrate his idiocy. “Luba, however,” she said, “does it in the grand manner.”
“Does what in the grand manner?” asked Mr. Pillans.
“Why, what you consider so romantic and interesting,” said Isabelle. “Breaks faith, is exigent, cruel, and lascivious. Takes men away from women for other reasons than that she cares for them, leaves those men for other reasons than that she wants to give them back to the women from whom she stole them. Just sweeps on, triumphant and pitiless.”
“Now, that’s what I used to think she must be like when I first saw her,” said Mr. Pillans. “She carries her head very high, and all that golden hair’s like a crown.”
“And what made you change your mind?” asked Isabelle.
“Why, she seems such a home-body when you get to know her,” said Mr. Pillans.
“My dear Mr. Pillans!” exclaimed Isabelle. “How easily you are taken in, simply because, being a great lady, she doesn’t wear her duplicity on her sleeve. Ah, there’s race, there’s race.”
“But are you sure she really is like that?” doubted Mr. Pillans.
“Do you not remember how you first saw her in a theatre with a man who was besotted with her?” asked Isabelle. “I think you know from your own experience that that is not done by kindness.”
“True enough,” he agreed, and for a moment looked old.
“But if you find Madame Renart more attractive,” she continued cruelly, “you are at liberty to do so. Many people”—she made her laughter more offensive with pity—“particularly among us poor Americans, would consider Madame Renart far more fascinating than Princess Couranoff.”
“Oh, no, no, I saw the difference between them at once,” murmured Mr. Pillans.
“But I thought better of you,” said Isabelle. “I thought you were one of those rare Americans who have a taste for magnificence, who are not afraid of life when it becomes dramatic. And even I must admit that Luba is magnificent, that she is making my life a drama that would hold a theatre enthralled.”
“Even you must admit …?” repeated Mr. Pillans. “But why do you say, even you?”
“Well, consider my part in the drama,” said Isabelle darkly; and after he had remained gaping for a moment or two, she added with affected sharpness and impatience, “Have you noticed nothing, Mr. Pillans? Has everything that has happened during the last few days gone clear past you?”
“Well, I’m not sure that I’ve got everything quite straight in my mind,” he owned.
“Good heavens!” exclaimed Isabelle tragically. “Can it be that you have not noticed that my husband is madly in love with Luba?”
His mouth opened and did not shut.
“Oh, I treat her as if she were my friend, I cover it all over, because that is how women are expected to behave in Europe,” she continued. “And of course you would never guess it from her. She is superb. And it is not only a question of self-possession. She is not aware that she has any guilt to betray, for she has no heart and no conscience, nothing but pride and acquisitiveness.”
There came to him again that look of a boy giving way to some shameful appetite. “Ah, she can’t help it,” he said. “Women like that can’t help it.”
“And women like that own the world, don’t they?” she asked. “You would give women like that everything, wouldn’t you? You feel they have an innate right of precedence over the women who are simple and faithful and loving, don’t you?”
He looked at her with dazed and honest eyes. “I know just how badly you must be feeling about all this business,” he said. “But still I guess it may help if you face the truth and realize your husband isn’t himself over this. There are women men feel about just the way you say. They aren’t good, but you have to give them everything they want. There are men that way too, like Napoleon. I don’t suppose anybody would call him a good man, but his soldiers didn’t ask anything better than to follow him. The great thing to remember is that they get tired, that sort of people. That’s what you’ve got to remember now about your husband and the Princess. They get tired and then they quit, they don’t give a darn, that kind of woman.” His face shone as if he had newly washed it with soap, so radiant was he in his enjoyment of his past experience of being robbed, cuckolded, and deserted, and in his sure and certain hope of being so again.
Isabelle could have struck him; yet she felt also generous and exalted. Perhaps because she was now feeling as ill as if she were sunstruck, the drunkenness which was dictating her speeches and her actions had mounted to inspiration. Usually, even when she knew, she could not share her knowledge. That was not true, of course, when she was speaking to Marc, and she was certain she would always be able to say what she wanted to her baby, as soon as it was old enough; but that was because they were parts of her, as she was a part of them. To everybody else she could present only her intellectual findings in almost diagrammatic form, without persuasiveness, without fidelity to a hundred observed details: a brittle and transparent model of the warm and living truth in her mind. Now, suddenly, she found her mouth unstopped. The same kind of poetic power that dazzled her when it proceeded from Marc, flashing out of the night of his sullenness, was now flashing out of her numbness. She knew she had at her command an amplitude of images by which she would be able to convince Mr. Pillans that he was pursuing death, and not life, and that he was near reaching his goal. She would be able to shame him for the complaisance with which he had received her lie about Luba’s treachery, and point out that in his lickerishness after that treachery he was more perverse than many a poor soul in jail on account of preference for his own sex. She would be able to preach to him the security of such love as she enjoyed with Marc, the defence it provided against instability and tragedy and disorder.
But she was interrupted by Alan Fielding, who said, “I see your husband is going to teach Monsieur d’Alperoussa how to do it.” She fixed her eyes on his face and felt them grow enormous. She looked away from him, down on the floor, and murmured, “To do what?”
“Gamble, of course,” said Alan Fielding.
“Of course,” she said. Not to betray Marc, she gave a sweet, insipid smile. “Where is he?” she asked.
“Just over there, by Lady Barnaclouth and Madame d’Alperoussa. He is talking to Princess Couranoff,” he added awkwardly, as if preparing her for a sight which might displease her.
She groaned aloud at his innocence. If Marc could have been distracted at this moment by the body of another woman, she would have made their bed with her own hands. When she had pressed her way to his side, she looked first at the chips in his hands. Like such rich men as are not mean, it was his habit to carry a great deal of money on him, sometimes as much as sixty thousand francs; he must have bought at least that amount of chips, counting those he had already given to Luba. Then she looked at Marc’s face; he managed to have the appearance at once of a pompous elderly man and a vicious boy. Then she looked round the room. The universe would be quite simple and enjoyable if this room and its contents could be lifted out of it on a fishing-line and dropped into nothingness. For a second she amused herself with that inept thought, playing that she was pulling up the fishing-line.
“But take more than that, Luba,” she heard Marc say. “Take all you want.”
“But I do not want so many,” said Luba. “Please do not give me any more. They will be all wasted; you know I have no luck.”
“Marc,” said Isabelle. “You know you must not gamble.”
He answered insolently, “Why must I not gamble?”
“Because you gave an undertaking that you would not,” she said. “They will take the business away from you. Remember Monsieur Campofiore.” It seemed to her possible after all that the man raging in the restaurant had been Monsieur Campofiore, and she looked wildly round the room to see if he was there.
The minute she took her eyes off Marc’s face, she lost her power over him. He said, “They will not take away my business. Let them take away my business. Then they will see. That is why I am going to play tonight. It is a challenge, a challenge to the government. Which persecutes me, a loyal son of my country. Which treats me like a child. Which says I may not do what I like with my own money.” He threw some of the chips into the air, and though they fell widely he caught them all with a delicate turn of his gross wrist. People about them stopped talking and began to watch. He raised his voice. “While it permits these aliens, these criminals, these meteques, these men without a country, to throw about the millions they have leeched from the veins of France.”
She shuddered, recognizing what a fool and a bore Marc would be if he were not continually subjected to the discipline of his business, if idleness were to begin its work on him. She murmured, “Marc, Marc,” and pressed close against him, trying to remind him who she was.
“Let us go along and take our seats,” he said to Luba. “The duke and his friends are going.”
“But, Marc!” said Isabelle. “You must listen. You must not do this thing. I am ill.”
He was an infinity of distance away from her. He sneered, “You are trying to make a child of me.”
“No, no,” she said. “I am really ill.”
“You were feeling perfectly well at dinner,” he said. “You are trying to prevent me from making my protest. You are a woman, and women do not understand impersonal matters. Besides,” he added with malice, “you are not French.”