Free The Thinking Reed by Rebecca West Page B

hail of arrows outside. There was even something profound too. Perhaps there still existed people who had not intellectualized their relations with their medicine man out of all recognition. She was not at all distressed to find herself among men and women who were simpler, more unashamed, more acquainted with humiliation, and more primitive than those she had known before.
    But it would have been foolish if she had felt it was condescension for her to mingle with the Sallafranques. Marc’s father and grandfather had been great industrialists, who had called into being a small township within the shadow of Lille, who had been formidable as ironmasters were in the days when ironmasters were formidable. But the Germans had occupied that township for four years, and in the third year Marc’s father had a stroke. It was easy to believe that, by these vehement little people, prolonged disappointment and heartbreak might be dramatized as a suspension of all bodily faculties, though their vitality would dispute death inch by inch. When the Germans went, they left the works a heap of old iron on ravaged ground; and Marc, who was twenty-four when he came back from the war, showed a curious reluctance to build them up again. With no counsel to guide him but a few croaks from a sick-bed, he began to badger the Government for permission to spend only a driblet of the reparations money due to his firm at Lille, and to devote the mass to the factory for making cheap automobiles which his father had started as a side line ten miles outside Paris. He had got that permission by jumping up round ministers like a big eager puppy, by being a pest like a puppy; and for the next ten years he had worked so hard that midnight often found him laying his head on his desk and blubbering with fatigue. At the end of that time the factory had grown into a town larger than the one the Germans had destroyed.
    Its size appalled her when Marc drove her there for the first time. Like most Americans, she felt that great industrial undertakings were proper only in the United States. It was in the first place upsetting to all preconceived notions that Europeans should have sufficient energy for them; and in the proofs they furnished that they had there was something specially stark and alarming. The town was sallow with cement, which had been hacked up into little cubes as separate dwellings and vast cubes as apartment houses, lavishly dour with the meaningless tension, the scowling balconies, the grim uncorniced walls, of modernist architecture; and around them stretched gardens lusciously rank with the product of dogged labour. There was no hint of poverty here, but nothing communally owned or public was handsome. The principal square was a waste of ragged grass, which supported nakedly the plate glass and chromium bandstand Marc had built as a memorial to his father. The shops were not very different from village shops, with just space enough for tradesman and housewife to wage a bargaining battle, and the cafes were gaunt resorts with round tin tables. There was no place of amusement at all except a shooting-gallery and the cinema palace which Marc had financed; and the population, the strong men who seemed to be slouching along in maillots and trousers not so much out of slovenliness as out of insolence, and the many-chinned women, who trundled their immense corpulencies in front of them with the confidence of beauties, did not look as if they would be easily distracted by any form of entertainment from their gloating contemplation of the inexorable practical demands of life, its harshness, and its willingness to be placated by the performance of certain harsh rituals. Nothing could be less like the reassuring appearance of an American industrial town, with its evidences of the existence of a new race which can find absolute contentment in the consumption of sweet foods and drinks, the possession of radios, and the contemplation of films. She looked at Marc