The Thibaults (113 page)

We must compel respect by dint of virtue.

“Case-hardening!” Antoine mused. He was learning that his father had been not only rigid but—deliberately—case-hardened. Yet he would not shut his eyes to a certain sombre grandeur in such self-repression—even though it led to sheer inhumanity. He pictured it as almost a wilful deadening of every natural sentiment. Sometimes, indeed, it seemed that, being the man he was, the merit he had acquired at such cost made M. Thibault suffer.

Respect does not necessarily preclude friendship, but rarely, it would seem, invites it. To admire is not to love and, if virtue wins esteem, it does not open hearts.

A rankling regret, which led him so far as to write, a few pages later:

The just man has no friends; God compensates him with recipients of his benevolence.

Here and there, if rarely, a truly human note was struck—so out of tune with the rest that Antoine was dumbfounded.

If to do good does not come natural to us, let us do good out of despair—or, at least, so as to refrain from doing evil.

“There’s something of Jacques in all that,” Antoine murmured. But it was hard to lay a finger on it. There was the same emotional tension, the same harshness, the same dark ferment of the instincts. He even wondered if his father’s aversion for Jacques’s adventurous disposition had not been sometimes implemented by a secret similarity of temperament.

A good many of the aphorisms were headed: “
A Lure of the Tempter
.”

A Lure of the Tempter
: fetish-worship of the Truth. Sometimes is it not harder, and more courageous, to be loyal to oneself and persevere in a belief, even if it be undermined, than presumptuously to shake the pillars and risk bringing down the whole edifice?

Is not the cult of consistency higher than the cult of truth?

A Lure of the Tempter
. To mask one’s pride is not to be modest. It is far better to flaunt the failings one has not been able to overcome, and to convert them into energy, than to lie, and weaken oneself by hiding them.

“Pride,” “modesty,” and “vanity” were words that cropped up on each page.

A Lure of the Tempter
. Self-belittlement, speaking humbly of oneself— is not that a stratagem of Pride? The right course is to keep silent about oneself. But that is impossible for any man, unless he feels assured that others, anyhow, will speak well of him.

Antoine smiled once more, but with an irony that soon froze on his lips. What melancholy there was even in a commonplace like this, when written by the pen of M. Thibault:

Are there any lives, even those of saints, in which falsehood does riot play a daily part?

Moreover—and this was far from fitting in with Antoine’s impression of the last phase of his father’s life—it seemed that, crusted though it was with certainties, the old man’s peace of mind had steadily diminished with the years.

The output of a man’s career, the scope and value of his activities, are determined, more than one would fancy, by the natural affections. Some there are who have missed achieving a life’s work worthy of their talents, for lack of a beloved presence at their side.

Occasionally there were intimations of a secret frailty of the flesh.

Can a sin that has not been committed warp a man’s character, and cause as much havoc in his spiritual life as an actual misdeed? Its effect is similar, and the sting of remorse as keen.

A Lure of the Tempter
. We must not confound with love of our neighbour the emotion that we sometimes experience at the sight of, or contact with …

The rest of the line had been struck out; but, holding the page up to the light, Antoine made out the missing words:

… young people, even mere children.

There was a pencilled note in the margin: “July 2, July 25, August 6, August 8, August 9.”

A few pages further on a new note was struck.

O God, Thou knowest my unworthiness and my affliction. I have no right to Thy pardon, for I have not broken, I cannot break, with my sin. Fortify my resolve that I may shun the Tempter’s lure.

Antoine suddenly remembered certain obscene words which had escaped his father’s lips when he was delirious, on two separate occasions. M. Thibault’s self-examinings were interspersed with appeals to the Creator’s mercy.

O Lord, behold, he whom Thou lovest is sick.

Keep watch over me, O Lord, for if Thou leavest me alone I shall betray Thee.

Antoine turned some more pages. A date added in pencil in the margin, “August ‘95,” caught his eye.

A charming token of love. He had left his book lying on the table; his place marked with the wrapper of a newspaper. Who can have been up and about so early this morning? A cornflower, surely from that corsage she was wearing yesterday evening, now replaced the strip of paper.

August 1895. Completely baffled, Antoine searched his memory. In 1895 he had been fourteen. That year M. Thibault had taken the family to a place near Chamonix. Someone he had met at the hotel? His mind went back at once to the lady with the poodle. Perhaps the following pages might clear the matter up. No, there was not another word about the lady of the cornflowers.

Still, a little further on, he found a flat, dry, faded flower—the very flower, perhaps—between two pages, on one of which was a quotation from La Bruyère.

She has the makings of a perfect friend; and, with it, something that might lead one beyond friendship.

In the same year, dated December 31, as if by way of conclusion, came an entry recalling M. Thibault’s schooling with the Jesuits:

Saepe venit magno jcenore tardus amor.

But vainly Antoine racked his brain for memories of the summer vacation of ‘95-—the leg-of-mutton sleeves and the white poodle… .

It was impossible to read the whole book at a sitting, and anyhow the entries gradually fell off during the last ten or twelve years. M. Thibault had become a leading light in the world of charities, and his duties in connexion with them left him little spare time. Except during the vacations he rarely wrote in the ledger, and excerpts from religious literature once more bulked large. Not a line had been written since Jacques’s departure, or during the old man’s illness.

One of the last entries, written in a less firm hand, conveyed a mood of disillusionment.

When a man achieves distinction, he has already ceased to merit it. But may it not be that God in His mercy grants him this eminence in the world’s esteem to enable him to bear the disesteem in which he holds himself, and which first poisons, then dries up, the well-springs of all happiness, nay, even of all charity?

The last pages of the book were blank.

At the end was a small pocket in the silk lining of the leather cover; it contained odds and ends: two amusing photographs of Gise as a small child, a calendar for 1902 in which the Sundays were nicked off, and a letter on mauve paper:

April 7, 1906.

Dear W.X. 99,

I could echo word for word all you tell me about yourself. Yes, I cannot now conceive what prompted me to put such an advertisement in the paper, considering how I was brought up; and I am quite as shocked at my having done so as you can be at having studied the Matrimonial Column in your newspaper and yielded to the temptation of writing to a total stranger whose identity was concealed by two mysterious initials.

For I, like you, am a fervent Catholic, and most attentive to my Religious Duties; indeed I have never neglected them even for a single day; in fact it’s all so wonderfully romantic, don’t you agree, that one would think a Sign had been given us, and God wished you and me to have that moment of weakness when I put in the advertisement, and you read it and cut it out. I should tell you that I have been seven years a widow and am feeling more and more the sadness of a loveless life; what makes it harder is that I have no children, and so that consolation is denied me. Still, it can’t be always such a consolation, as you, who have two grown-up sons, in fact a real Home, and as far as I can make out a very strenuous business life, you too complain of loneliness and lovelessness. Yes, indeed, I agree that this urge for Love we feel must come from God, and in my prayers to Him morning and night I always ask it may be granted me to know once more the joys of having someone tender and true always at my side, joined in the bonds of Holy Wedlock. And to this man, sent me by Heaven, I too will bring a faithful, loving heart, and a youthfulness of the emotions, which surely is a Pledge of Happiness. But though I hate to think I may be giving you pain, I can’t send you what you ask, though I quite understand your desire. You do not know the kind of woman I am, or who my dear Parents were, now dead but always living for me in my prayers—or my place in Society. Once more I beg you not to judge me by that momentary weakness when I put that notice in the paper, and please understand that, feeling as I do, I can’t bring myself to send you a photo, even a flattering one. But what I will gladly do is to ask my Confessor, who since last Christmas has been Senior Curate in one of the Paris parishes, to get in touch with the Abbé V. of whom you spoke in your second letter; my Confessor will give all the information required. As for my personal appearance—I might go myself and call on the Abbé V., in whom you have confidence; he will then be able …

The fourth page ended with these words. Antoine hunted for the next one in the silk flap; it was not there.

He could not doubt the letter had been meant for his father; the references to the “Abbé V.” and the two sons proved it. Should he tackle the Abbé Vécard? But the priest, even if he had played a part in this matrimonial project, would certainly refuse to speak about it.

Could it be the lady with the poodle? Antoine wondered. No, this letter was dated 1906—not very long ago. The year when he had been working under Philip at the hospital, and Jacques was in the reformatory. The bonnet, wasp-waist, and leg-of-mutton sleeves wouldn’t fit in with any date so recent as 1906. Well, there was no finding out now; he would never know the truth.

He put back the ledger, locked the drawer, and looked at the clock; half-past midnight. He rose from his seat. “The rags and tatters of a man’s life!” he murmured. “And yet what a full life it was, a life like Father’s! There’s always far more to a human life than anyone imagines.”

As if to wrest a secret from it, he stared for some moments at the leather-upholstered mahogany chair from which he had just risen, the chair in which, over so many years, solidly planted and leaning a little forward, M. Thibault, turn by turn ironical or cutting or portentous, had pronounced his dooms.

“What did I really know of him?” he mused. “Only one side of him, the patriarchal side—the authority which by divine right he exercised over me, over us all, for thirty years; but I must say this for him, always conscientiously. Stern and ruthless, but always just according to his lights; devoted to us, as to his duties. And, of course, I knew him too as the social despot all looked up to and feared. But the real man, the man he was in solitude, communing with himself, what was that man? I haven’t a notion. Never once did he drop the mask and utter in my presence a thought or sentiment in which I could detect anything genuinely personal, anything which came from deep down in his heart.”

Now that Antoine had dipped into these papers, lifted a corner of the veil, and had a glimpse into his father’s privacy, he realized with a thrill that was almost pain that, for all the pomp and circumstance, the man now in his coffin had been a man like others, and pitiable perhaps as they; and of this man who was his father, he, Antoine, had known absolutely nothing.

And suddenly he asked himself: “And what did he know of me? Still less. Less than nothing! A schoolmate who had lost sight of me for fifteen years would know more about me. Was that his fault? Wasn’t it, rather, mine? Here was a well-read old man whom many eminent people regarded as shrewd and levelheaded, one whose advice was well worth taking—and I, his son, never asked him his opinion except as a matter of form, after I’d consulted others and already made up my mind. Surely, when we were alone together, two men like us, of the same blood and the same type of character, might have exchanged ideas—and yet between us, father and son, there was no common language, no possibility of communication; we were strangers.”

He took a few steps up and down the room. “Yet—no!” he murmured. “I’m wrong. We weren’t strangers to each other. That’s the terrible thing. There was a bond between us, a very real one—the bond that links father with son and son with father—absurd though it seems, considering our relations with each other, to think of such a thing. That unique, instinctive sense of kinship—it existed, sure enough, deep down in our hearts, in his and in mine. In fact that’s why I’m feeling so bowled oyer just now; for the first time since I was born I’ve had a glimpse of something that lay behind our lifelong estrangement, something I never could have guessed—a possibility, a quite exceptional possibility, of mutual understanding. And I’m now convinced that despite appearances, and though there was never the least glimmer of an entente between us, there has not been and there will never be in the whole world another person—not even Jacques—so well fitted to be understood by me as to the real man he was under the surface, or so well qualified to penetrate, almost at a glance, the secret places of my personality. Because he was my father, because I am his son!”

He was standing by the study door. His fingers settled on the key. “High time to go to bed.” But before switching off the light, he turned about and gazed again at the familiar room, once tenanted by a busy mind, and empty now as an abandoned shell.

“Too late,” he thought. “There’s nothing to be done—for ever.”