The Bachelors (25 page)

Chandelier disliked M. de Coantré even more now that he was sick, but this is too natural an impulse for us to condemn him on that score.

'Seems he's a count!' he would explain to customers. 'As soon as I saw him arrive I said to the old man: " He's a bad hat. Look at the bags he's got under his eyes. That's a sure sign, you know." Something tells me that he's been up to no good. Right from the start he tried to worm his way in. But we didn't let him.'

Chandelier's 'soul' was made up of three attributes, exactly three: avarice, dishonesty, and envy. In this Chandelier was a fair specimen of his land.

Six people, male and female, were waiting in Gibout's anteroom when Léon arrived. He sat down and went over in his mind what he would say to the doctor, 'You know, I think the time has come to take it firmly in hand.' In order to ingratiate himself, he intended to promise him some sensational information about the relations of the Champagnys in the Nivernais.

Time passed. Léon studiously refrained from touching the books and illustrated papers laid out on the table; in common with all the other patients, his mind was a blank — he developed to the utmost the impressive power he had of taking no interest in anything. After twenty-five minutes, no one having yet been ushered into the consulting-room, abusive thoughts crossed M. de Coantré's mind: 'Gibout is making love to his wife,' or 'He's reading his newspaper and has left us mouldering here simply in order to create an impression of being overloaded with work,' or 'He's engaged in genealogical investigations aimed at discovering which of the two is marrying beneath it in the marriage of the carp and the rabbit.' He realized that he felt nothing but ill-will and contempt for this man in whose hands he was placing his life. He could not forgive him for not having taken him seriously; nor, perhaps, could he forgive him his health, his children, his money. The silence of a baccarat salon reigned in the waiting-room, and on the faces there was a bovine brutishness. No one, it seemed, resented this long wait, as though the present prostration of these people was little different from their normal state. At last, after forty-five minutes, Gibout opened the door and made a sign with his head: 'First please.' An old woman got up and went in. During this short instant Gibout gave M. de Coantré a smile.

A quarter of an hour went by. Léon had been faintly surprised to see that Gibout did not signal to him to go in first. 'After all, I am the Count de Coantré, nephew of the Baron de Coëtquidan. Is he going to let half a dozen peasants and their wives go in front of me? Perhaps he has had a note from old Octave since the other day leaving him in no doubt about my social standing.' It was certainly something new for Léon to be sensitive about what was due to him. M. de Coantré on his high horse — that was a sight! He had waited hours in Lebeau's waiting-room and been quite happy. Perhaps this fit of ill-humour arose partly from his physical weakness, partly from the extreme of moral wretchedness to which recent events had brought him. He had reached the end of his tether, and now must pass into an entirely different state. He had been beaten like a piece of red-hot iron, and was now becoming solid.

When Gibout opened the door again Léon glared at him. Gibout gave him a friendly look and said, 'Can you wait just a moment?' to which he replied with good grace, 'Yes of course.'

His ill-humour had vanished, melted by a smile from Gibout. But as the visit dragged on, his anger rose again and swelled within him, and the blood rose to his cheeks. A mad idea crossed his mind and stayed there just long enough to be rejected: the idea of making a sensational exit. He realized the folly of it: cutting himself off from the only man here who could do something for him! He went on waiting.

No one who had seen him then would have recognized either the good-natured expression of the Coantré of Arago or the agonized face of the poor wretch emerging that morning from his attack. This sudden insistence on being treated with respect, together with his impatience at not being so treated, gave him an unusual, an almost unbelievable expression of hardness. At that moment he really hated Gibout, and he gave himself up to this hatred with a feeling of profound release. It did him good, made him feel a new man, as though he had just taken a swig of strong alcohol. For the first time in years his back was no longer bent: whatever the components of this feeling — anger, hatred, pride, malevolence — it was certainly a vigorous affirmation of life. He was sharply aware that he would be unable to avoid being rude to Gibout when the doctor received him, and that moreover he would make no effort not to be. Every other minute he looked at his watch. Once more the idea of leaving swept over him. He
knew
that the moment would come when there would be nothing left inside him to resist it.. ..

Suddenly he got up, went to the door and exclaimed in a biting voice, but without looking anyone in the face: 'If
you
don't mind being kept hanging around by a quack!' He opened the door. He could hear someone getting up in the next-door room. The maid appeared.

'Will you tell your master that I'm not the sort of man who waits for an hour and a half outside a village doctor's door.'

He went out. The night had fallen. His anger had all the characteristics of drunkenness: it gave him the courage and the pleasure that drunkenness gives. This feeling is not peculiar to the weak: 'Anger is sweet as honey,' Achilles said. He had gone no more than a few yards when he saw the bus, which had just stopped. He got on to it.

There were only three passengers in the bus, which flew along between two rows of phantoms (the white-painted trunks of the trees bordering the road), its speed matching the rhythm of his feelings. 'Now I understand,' he kept repeating to himself. What had he understood? In what way had his life been changed? The abyss still yawned in front of it. But something
had
changed, and that was his own opinion of himself. Just as the slats of certain shutters open at the slightest touch, turning a dark room into a sunlit fairyland, so a simple change of attitude — recalcitrance instead of acquiescence — transformed his inner world from shadow to sunlight.

He got off at the stopping-place and started down the forest path. The forest was empty of noise, scent and colour. Under the sky heavy with snow, great cold clouds sped by. The moon, blurred like a young girl's face after a night of love, was giving its habitual performance — now above a roof, now among the branches, now running into a cloud like a rabbit into its burrow — the whole thing devoid of the slightest pretension to poetry, the despair of the literary man. The pines formed a screen against the sea wind, their trunks silhouetted against the pale sky, tall, vertical rods that suggested a clump of huge tapers. But when M. de Coantré passed through a clearing the wind hurled itself at him and the trees swayed and knocked against each other like drunken men. Within sight of Picot's house he stopped to look at some wild geese migrating. The formation was the shape of a long ribbon flying very low — six hundred feet perhaps — sinuous and all of a piece like some flying carpet from
The Arabian Nights
or a monstrous serpent of the air. The geese — some fifty of them — were flying straight into the wind, a calm and vigorous flight, without passion or pretence. When the leader changed direction all the rest followed him with such speed and unanimity that the formation, from one end to the other, seemed to be revolving on a hinge; and the whole line, revealing their chests and bellies instead of their coats, changed from grey-brown to ash-grey. Motionless, M. de Coantré watched them until they had disappeared.
They
were free!
They
had no money troubles!
They
were going to the sunlit lands! And he remained lost in thought, struck by the impression of will, of cohesion, of mystery, of something brought from afar, which the flight left behind it, like the trail of a dream across the empty sky.

The fire in the house had gone out. He relit it. Going outside to fetch some more sticks, he heard the cry of the geese, their migratory call, so different from their call at normal times (both feminine calls, more tuneful than the call of the wild duck). He searched the sky but could not pick out the new flock: they were flying too high. And there was something disquieting about these signs of a life that could not be seen, these cries that seemed to have been uttered by the sky itself. M. de Coantré remained there for as long as he thought he could hear them still. When he went in, the fire had again gone out, and again he relit it.

He settled down and, keeping his greatcoat and his hat on, dined off tinned food. He ate little, having found few provisions in the cupboard. If he had eaten a lot his feelings during the hours that followed would have been different. If he had had a few drinks, they would have been different still. Which shows how little importance these feelings had; chance made them what they were; all feelings are like that.

'Now I understand,' he kept repeating to himself as he ate. He had understood the prescription that could cure him of his misery: this prescription was pride. 'Why didn't I think of it before?' Through pride he had broken with the man who could have saved his life. Through pride he had broken with the man who could have given him money. And all his misfortunes passed automatically from a sordid to a lofty plane, where they no longer hurt him.

Meanwhile the fire had again gone out. This struggle with the fire was exhausting. He wondered whether to relight it, and then with a weary shrug, 'Ah well, since it doesn't want to,' he tucked himself fully clothed between the sheets. He lay there quite still, his eyes wide open staring at the wall, watching the steam from his breath which seemed to fill the room with a sort of alien presence. He tried to distinguish in the silence the cries of other migrants. But he could hear nothing, except from time to time a piece of furniture cracking with the wild force of a man or a beast. If he had heard the geese he would have dragged himself from the warmth and gone out, so moved had he been by the first flight. Thus do secluded invalids put worlds of nostalgia into the contemplation of a corner of blue sky or the evocation of a landscape. And there are simple and even coarse people who are overcome by a mysterious poetic emotion, like nothing they have ever experienced in their lives — to the point of beginning to write verse — when the hand of death is upon them.

He put out the light. The cold seemed to him more intense, and he pulled the sheet over his head as he used to in the days of Mariette when he wanted to think of her more vividly. He had a poignant impression — was it partly an effect of the darkness? — that his new-found strength was leaving him, was returning to the atmosphere, like an intoxication wearing off, or the heat and glow draining away from an electric fire that has just been put out (his eyes themselves were going out). And yet this strength did not leave him quite as it had found him. He had been carried to the extremity of his being, and then beyond, into a region that was almost unknown to him, by a long ground-swell, and now, withdrawing, it left him alone, remote, detached from himself and from everything else. 'No one! no one!' he repeated inside himself. Under the sheet a smile, which was the final flower of his sadness, took shape on his features and stayed there, and he shook his head slightly as if to say, 'Incredible! It's incredible!' When he had already sunk into sleep, this mysterious smile was still on his lips.

Outside, the uneventful night went on. The whole forest crackled with the wind and the cold. The sleeping toads throbbed in the undergrowth, shaken by their too-powerful hearts. The foxes slept in their dens, snouts resting on one another's spines, thrilled by their stench, and the wild boars in their lairs dreamed of the star-cracked ice they had licked in the evening light. In newly formed puddles the water congealed once more, and all around the mud hardened on the trunks of the trees against which hinds and stags had rubbed themselves. But in the depths of the clear sky, above the crouching stillness, the wild geese were still passing, their feet tucked under their bellies, borne by the wind among the myriad insects of the upper regions, along the great migratory route, like those invisible ocean routes for ships or the routes followed by the stars. These new flocks were flying in V-formation, each bird almost touching the next except for three which flew alone for no apparent reason. The unbelievable power of their flight created up there the whirlwind noise of a group of cyclists on a racing track. Sometimes the V broke up, and the fragments continued in the same direction. Then they joined up again, drawn towards one another by a sort of magnetic attraction, while another current attraction drew the whole flight towards the south like the needle of a compass or a magician's wand. But still three dissenters, strange and self-willed, flew on alone as though deep in thought.

Having slept a little, M. de Coantré woke up to find himself equipped with a plan he had vaguely considered during the summer and which now reappeared in the shape of a definite decision: the very next day he would go into hospital in Le Havre. He had no doubts about being accepted there: either they would regard him as indigent, and he would be taken in without having to pay, or they would bank on his family doing the necessary when the time came. He had relapsed into a state in which he felt he had no rights but, as before, still counted on pity and charity. As for his illness, whatever it was, although he did not know whether it was serious or not, he was quite capable of passing himself off as more unwell than in fact he was: even in this solemn hour his little subterfuges had not deserted him. No matter how little good they had done him, no matter how many warnings fate had given him, he received not a glimmer of light, and what he was he would remain to the end. And in the low houses of the hamlet, as in the lairs of the forest, the same inner darkness enclosed both beasts and men, fraternal puppets, in their sleep that was scarcely less conscious than their waking hours.

The prospect of the hospital gave him almost as much of a fillip as he had received from his outburst at the doctor's. In hospital he would be warm without having to look after a fire; he would have the pleasant sensation of feeling his bare legs under the sheet without having to keep on his trousers, or even his underpants, as he had always had to here. Oh, there was no longer any question of pride. For a moment pride had held him upright like a steel corset; the corset once loosened, the body had gone limp again. Above all; his departure for the hospital gave him a precise aim for the following day, providing an escape from the sinister, the hellish idleness which awaited him. As soon as he got up in the morning he planned to give his body a bit of a wash, and then to strap up his trunk and suitcase. The very thought of this made him quiver with joy; he felt brave enough to face up to Chandelier, to find, without anyone's help in this hostile or seemingly hostile village, a man who would cart his luggage to the bus-stop.... Through the shutters, the glow of the night penetrated the room, and as he thought of the wild geese winging their way towards the warmth and the light, his own hopes merged with that other hope flying high up in the skies.