Read Online The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West - Free Book Online

horrible world of violence that she feared, where one soul delighted in inflicting pain on another, where force and fraud were used to compel victories which were valueless unless they were ceded freely to an honest victor. It would be far better to resign herself to losing all she wanted. She looked across at him as a farewell to what she had wanted, and at the sight of his fine, grave face, on which even this crisis had failed to mark the lines of any expression that was not noble and reasonable, a storm of refusal raged in her. Why should she lose him? And had she tried all ways of keeping him? She had rejected dishonesty, but she had not made full trial of honesty. It was a difficult thing for a woman to be honest; it required from her the full organization of courage. She found that as she coughed to clear her dry throat and leaned forward to make the attempt.
    “Laurence,” she said, “I want to tell you why I threw down those roses outside André de Verviers’s door.”
    With that detestably distant smile he answered, “I am sure it is a most romantic story.”
    Lowering her eyelids she spoke it out. “No, not romantic! One would have to be starved of all pleasantness, a tired, homely stenographer or an old hospital nurse, to think it romantic. It is a very silly story, Laurence. When I came over here after Roy’s death, I was desperately unhappy and lonely. I wanted a companion with whom I could build up a new life; I have no family to fall back on.”
    “You are very young,” he said reflectively. “One forgets how young you are.”
    “Oh, not so young,” said Isabelle. “No younger than most of the women in the world who have had to make great decisions. That is the special handicap of our sex, the important part of our lives comes before we have acquired any experience. And in my ignorance I thought there was nothing very difficult about the decision that was before me. I merely had to choose a partner, and I looked round and chose André de Verviers.”
    Laurence made the faintest moan of disapprobation.
    “Men do not look the same to women as they do to other men,” she reminded him, “and I had no superior tie. I knew of nobody whom I could have loved, who was free to love me. And André is a superb human being, just as Roy was. I thought I could have had some of the same sort of happiness with André I had with Roy. So we were to be married this summer.” She pondered for an instant whether she ought to be more precise about her relationship, and decided that she need not. Though men were not very jealous, they thought they were under an obligation to be extremely so, and it would relieve Laurence of this tiresome necessity if she were to leave him the possibility of thinking that André and she had not been lovers. “But, Laurence!” She looked into his eyes. “André isn’t any good.”
    “I can believe it,” he nodded.
    “It was not so terribly foolish of me to think that he might have been,” she defended herself. “What else had Roy got to start with except just that physical faculty, that trick of accomplishment, that André has? Only something hidden, that turned everything he did to gaiety and happiness. Well, it was hidden too, the thing that governed André, and turned everything to fever and violence and disorder.”
    He murmured sympathetically, “Yes. Yes. I know. One doesn’t see it, the thing that governs people …”
    “And I had, you know, other ideas. I wanted to make something decent of my life. I wanted to marry a man who was devoting himself to some work that mattered, I wanted to help him and have his children, and bring them up well. I wanted to live at the centre of a focus of pleasantness, and harmony, and things coming right. And instead I was tossing about in a whirlpool of useless passion and frenzy and jealousy, that wasn’t even real, that was all put on to whip up sensation. I didn’t want that, I didn’t want it any more than I wanted to marry a