The Thibaults (108 page)

Adrienne came up. “There’s two men been round, sir, from the undertaker’s. They’re coming back at seven. Oh, and did you know, sir,” she added rather awkwardly, “Mile. Gisèle has been taken ill?”

They knocked at Gise’s door. She was in bed; her cheeks were flushed and her eyes fever-bright. It was nothing serious, however. Clotilde’s cablegram, coming at a moment when she was already rather out of sorts, had been the first shock; after that, the scramble for the train, and particularly the thrill of seeing Jacques again, had thrown her off her balance. The cumulative effect of these emotions on her young, unstable constitution had been so overwhelming that immediately after leaving the sick-room on the previous night, she had had an attack of violent internal pains and flung herself onto the bed. She had suffered all night, listening to every sound and guessing what was happening, but unable to move.

Her answers to Antoine’s questions were so reticent that he desisted. “Thérivier’s coming this morning. I’ll send him to you.”

Gise gave a little jerk of her head in the direction of M. Thibault’s room; she felt little grief, and was at a loss for words.

“Then … it’s over?” she asked timidly.

His only answer was a nod; then suddenly the thought came to him, stark, clean-cut: “And it was I who killed him!”

He turned to Adrienne. “Bring her a hot-water bottle and a poultice to start with.” Then, with a smile to Gise, he went out.

He repeated to himself: “Yes, it was I who killed him.” For the first time he stood back from his act, viewed it in the round. At once he added: “And I did right.” His mind was working swiftly, lucidly. “No humbug now; there was an element of cowardice in it—I couldn’t face that nightmare experience any longer. But because I had a personal interest in his death, was that a reason for staying my hand? Certainly not.” He did not shirk the terrible responsibility. “Obviously it would be dangerous to authorize doctors to … However absurd and inhuman a rule like that may be, theoretically it’s got to be obeyed to the letter.” And the more he recognized the cogency and soundness of the principle as such, the more he approved of himself for having knowingly infringed it. “It’s a question for one’s conscience to decide. I don’t want to generalize. All I say is: in this particular case, what I did was right.”

He had come to the death-chamber. He opened the door softly, as he had always done, not to disturb the invalid. And as his eyes fell on the quiet face, his heart missed a beat. There was something so startling, so incongruous in having to associate the mental picture he had of his father with the notion of a corpse, familiar though this was to him. He paused a moment at the door, holding his breath. That dead thing had been his father! That body with the hands serenely folded on the breast, ennobled, calm, so grandly calm. All the chairs had been pushed back against the walls, leaving the deathbed in the centre to make its full theatrical effect. In attitudes of grief, like two mourning dark-robed figures on an ancient vase, the nuns were stationed on either hand of the dead man, whose statue-like repose lent a real grandeur to the scene, for all its artifice. That man had been Oscar Thibault, a master of men. Now that proud voice was stilled, all that power reduced to impotence. Antoine hardly dared to make a gesture, break the silence. Then again he told himself it was his work; and, as his eyes lingered tenderly on the familiar face which he had so well reconciled with silence and repose, he all but smiled.

Entering the room, he was surprised to observe Jacques, who he had thought was still in bed, sitting with M. Chasle in a corner of the room.

The moment he saw Antoine, the little secretary sprang from his chair and tip-toed towards him. Behind the tear-dimmed glasses his eyes were fluttering. He grasped both Antoine’s hands and, at a loss for better words to voice his regard for the dead man, he spluttered out: “A charming—charming—charming fellow!” perking his chin towards the bed at every “charming.”

“Of course one had to know him,” he went on; there was a note of petulance in his tone as if he were arguing down a possible detractor. “A bit crushing at times, that’s so. But so just, so very just!” He stretched forth an arm, like a witness making affirmation. “An upright judge, indeed!” Then he tip-toed back to his chair.

Antoine sat down.

A sediment of memory, settled at the deepest levels of his consciousness, was being stirred up by the odours drifting in the air. Across the reek of stale chemicals—an aftermath of recent days—and the new warm fumes of the wax candles, he could make out the musty smell of the old blue rep upholstery that dated from his grandparents’ time—an odour of dry wool, to which the polish, applied to the mahogany every day over half a century, had added a faint tang of resin. He recalled the cool fragrance of clean linen that would issue from the wardrobe, were its doors opened, and the odours of varnished wood and old newspapers, mingling with a clinging pungency of camphor, that came from the chest of drawers. And he knew, too— how often had he inhaled it closely, as a little boy, when it was the only seat low enough for his small legs!—the dusty smell of the tapestry-upholstered
prie-dieu
which two generations of obeisant knees had worn to the thread.

All was still; not a breath stirred the candle-flames.

Like all the others in the room, Antoine was gazing at the corpse, fixedly, in a sort of trance. In his tired brain dim wraiths of thought were struggling to take form.

“That something which made Father a being like myself, the life that still was in him yesterday—what has become of it? Lost for ever? Or does it still exist—somehow, somewhere? In what form, then?” He pulled himself up disgustedly. “That sort of thing leads straight to muddled thinking. Really, one would think I’d never seen a corpse before! I know that idea of something ‘blotted out,’ of ‘nothingness,’ is totally unsuitable. The continuity of lives—life germinating life
ad infinitum
—that’s the right way to look at it.

“Yes, I’ve said that to myself often enough. And yet, gazing at that dead man, I don’t feel so sure. That idea of ‘nothingness’ forces itself on me, it seems almost defensible. When all is said and done, death is the only reality; it refutes everything, baffles all argument … preposterously.”

Then, “No!” he said, with an angry shake of his shoulders. “That’s morbid nonsense. When one’s on the spot with
that
right under one’s nose, suggestions filter in. That shouldn’t count. It doesn’t count.”

With an effort he pulled himself together, sprang briskly up from his chair. And at once an emotion, urgent, warm, and comforting, came over him.

Signing to Jacques to follow, he went out into the passage.

“Before settling anything we must find out Father’s last wishes. Come with me.”

They went together to M. Thibault’s study. Antoine turned on all the lights—ceiling-lamp and wall-lamps—and the sudden glare seemed like an outrage on this room where hitherto the only light had come from the green-shaded desk-lamp. As Antoine went up to the desk, the bunch of keys he had taken from his pocket jingled merrily.

Jacques kept in the background. Unconsciously he had moved near the telephone, was standing at the place where yesterday… Could it have been only yesterday, fifteen hours ago, that Gise had appeared behind him, at the door?

He cast a hostile glance round this room which for so long he had regarded as an inviolable sanctuary, where of a sudden nothing remained to guard it from intrusion. The sight of his brother kneeling like a burglar in front of the gaping drawers made him feel embarrassed. What did his father’s last wishes, all those old papers, matter to him?

Without a word he stole away from the room.

He went back to the death-chamber, which had a morbid fascination for him, and in which he had passed the greater part of the night, in a calm limbo midway between dreams and waking. He foresaw that very soon he would be driven from it by a stream of plaguy intruders, and he did not wish to lose a moment of this tragic confrontation with his youth. For nothing could ever conjure up the past to him so vividly as the mortal remains of that omnipotent being whose hand had ever barred the way of his ambitions, and whose authority had now passed away, wholly and abruptly, like a tale that is told. Walking on tip-toe, he softly opened the door, entered, and sat down. Jarred for a moment, the silence of the room closed in again, and once more Jacques could plunge himself, with a mournful ecstasy, into the contemplation of his dead father.

Immobility.

That brain which day and night, for almost three-quarters of a century, had never ceased one moment to link thought to thought, impression to impression, had run down for ever. So had the heart. But the cessation of thought was what touched Jacques most nearly; how often had he bewailed, as if it were a bodily disease, the never-ceasing activity of his own mind! Even at night he felt his brain, when sleep had let the gears out, racing like a motor out of control, rumbling and roaring in his head, churning together the kaleidoscopic visions that he called dreams, when memory had retained some fleeting atoms from their endless flux. One day, fortunately, all that furious activity would stop. One day he too would be freed from the torment of thinking. Then at last silence would come; and, with the great silence, rest. He remembered that river-bank at Munich, on which he had dallied a whole night long with alluring thoughts of suicide. And suddenly, like the memory of a phrase of music, some words he once had heard came echoing through his brain: “We shall have rest.” It was the closing sentence of a Russian play he had seen at Geneva. He still could hear the voice of the actress, a Russian with a childish face and candid, fanatic eyes. Swaying her little head from side to side, she had repeated: “We shall have rest.” In her voice there had been a dream-like quality, with elfin, bell-like overtones; and her eyes had been a little weary, with less hope in them than resignation. “You have had no joy in life … but patience, Uncle Vanya, patience! We shall have rest … we shall have rest.”

THE influx of visitors began a little before noon; first the tenants of the other flats and various neighbours to whom M. Thibault had done kindness came to declare their sympathy. Jacques made off before any of the family appeared. Antoine, too, was out, attending to urgent calls. Each of the charity societies to which M. Thibault had belonged included some of his personal friends on its committee. The stream of callers did not cease till nightfall.

M. Chasle had transported to the death-chamber the chair which he called his office stool; it was the chair on which he had sat as he worked day after day for many years. Throughout the day he refused to leave “the deceased.” He ended up by seeming as much part of the funeral appointments as the wax candles, the sprig of consecrated box, and the kneeling nuns. Each time a caller entered, M. Chasle would slip from his seat, proffer a mournful greeting to the new arrival, then hop back onto his perch.

Mademoiselle had made several attempts to shift him—out of jealousy, most likely; it vexed her to see him cutting so fine a figure of posthumous devotion. She was suffering—probably she was the only person in the household to feel genuine grief—but her sorrow took a different form: she was unable to keep still. The poor old creature who all her life had lived in others’ homes, and had never possessed anything of her very own, was for the first time, perhaps, feeling the possessive instinct, and feeling it intensely: M. Thibault was
her
corpse. At every moment she would go up to the bed (which the curvature of her spine did not permit her to see in its entirety) and pull a sheet straight or smooth out a crease, murmuring the while a fragmentary prayer. Then, shaking her head and locking her thin fingers, she would exclaim as if it were something quite unbelievable:

“He has entered into rest—
before me
!”

Her heart had grown so parsimonious, so sparing of emotion, that neither Jacques’s return nor the presence of Gise seemed to have stirred it to any deep response. The two young people had been so long absent from the family circle that she had lost the habit of thinking about them. Only Antoine counted, and the maids. And just now she seemed to have a curious animosity towards Antoine. In fact, she embarked on a downright wrangle with the young man when the day and hour for coffining the body had to be fixed. Antoine wanted this to take place as soon as possible; once a coffin had replaced the corpse visible in their midst, the nerves of all would be better for it. Mademoiselle protested as violently as if she were being robbed of all that remained to her on earth: the mortal remains of the master of the house, the last sad token of his physical existence. She seemed obsessed with the idea that M. Thibault’s disappearance was a finale only for her and for the dead man. For the others, and most of all for Antoine, it stood for a beginning, the dawn of a new era. But before her lay no future; the past had fallen to pieces, and with it her world had come to an end.

Towards the close of the afternoon, when Antoine had walked home, exhilarated by the keen, raw air that stung his eyes and braced his sinews, he found Felix Hequét, in full mourning, standing at his door.

“No, I won’t come in,” the surgeon said; “I only wanted to express my sympathy with you today.”

Tourier, Nolant, and Buccard had already left cards. Loiselle had telephoned. The manifestations of sympathy from his colleagues had produced such an effect on him that, when Dr. Philip called in person during the morning, and Antoine heard his “chief’s” expressions of condolence, he at last realized something he had been forgetting till now: not only was M. Thibault dead, but he, Dr. Antoine Thibault, had just lost his father.

“Yes, old man, I’m terribly sorry for you,” Hequét sighed discreetly. “As doctors we may be always rubbing shoulders with death, but when it visits someone near and dear to us—why, it’s as if we’d never seen a death before! … I know what it is,” he added. Then, straightening up, he held out his black-gloved hand.

Antoine saw him to his car.