The Thibaults (115 page)

The sound of their voices, breaking the silence, roused her a little and steadied her nerves.

The staying power she got from the pretence of easy conversation was precarious, yet her need to keep the truth at bay was so pressing that she went on talking by fits and starts, throwing out phrases as the cuttlefish projects its ink-cloud. And Jacques played up to her pretence, with an approving smile, secretly pleased, perhaps, that tonight again he could evade an explanation.

With an effort she had risen, and they stood gazing at each other. They were of almost the same height. “Never, never will I be able to live without him,” she was thinking. That was a way to avoid confronting another thought, the cruellest of all: “
He
is so strong; how easily he can live without me!” Then suddenly it dawned on her that Jacques, with the callous unconcern of a man, was choosing the way of life he wanted, whereas she, she had no power to choose, or to give the least deflection to her own course.

She blurted out a question, trying to adopt a casual tone:

“When are you going away again?”

He kept hold on himself, took a few paces absent-mindedly, then half turned towards her.

“How about you—when are
you
going?”

How could he have made it clearer that he intended to leave, and assumed that Gise, too, would not be staying in France?

With a faint shrug of her shoulders, for the last time she forced a weak smile to her lips—she was becoming quite adept at it!—then opened the door and walked out.

He made no effort to keep her, but as his eyes followed her receding form, they had a sudden gleam of pure affection. If only, without risk, he could have taken her into his arms, and shielded her! Against what? Against herself, against himself. Against the pain he was causing her (though he was only vaguely aware of it), and the pain he was yet to bring upon her—that he could not do otherwise than bring on her.

His hands thrust in his pockets, his feet planted well apart, he remained standing in the centre of the untidy room. Flaunting its motley labels, the suitcase gaped up at him, and he pictured himself back at Ancona, or perhaps Trieste, in the dimly lit steerage of a mail-steamer, jostled by emigrants cursing one another in unfamiliar tongues. Then an infernal din broke out at the bows, the sound of metal rasping upon metal drowned the angry voices; the anchor was coming up. The swaying increased and everywhere there was a sudden hush, as the ship began to forge ahead into the black night.

Jacques felt his breast heave; that almost morbid craving for some undetermined struggle, some gesture of creation and fulfillment of his being, was balked by everything about him: this house, the dead man upstairs, Gise—all the past with its snares and shackles.

His jaws clenched stubbornly. “I must get away from all this,” he muttered. “I must clear out.”

Entering the elevator, Gise sank onto the seat. She wondered if she would have the strength to reach her room.

Yes, all was over now; that explanation on which, in spite of all, she had set such hope, had been attained, accomplished. “Jacques, we’ve got to have a talk,” and his retort, “Yes, I too would rather get it over.” Then the two questions, both unanswered: “When are you going away again?” and: “How about you?” Four little phrases, echoing in her baffled brain … and now … what was she to do?

As she re-entered the huge, silent flat where in the background two nuns kept vigil at a bier, where nothing now was left of the fond dreams she had been dreaming in it half an hour before, a spasm of such distress shot through her heart that the dread of being alone proved more insistent even than her weakness and desire for rest. Instead of hastening to her own room, she entered her aunt’s.

Mademoiselle had returned and was sitting at her usual place, in front of her desk littered with bills and samples, pamphlets and medicine-bottles. Recognizing Gise’s footstep, she turned stiffly round.

“Ah, there you are? As a matter of fact …”

Gise stumbled towards her, kissed the ivory-yellow forehead between the snowy braids and, too big now to shelter in the little old lady’s arms, dropped at her knees, like a disconsolate child.

“As a matter of fact, Gise, I meant to ask you: haven’t they told you anything about the house-cleaning, disinfecting the flat, you know? No? But there’s a law on the subject. Yes, ask Clotilde. I wish you’d speak to Antoine about it. The first thing is to call in the Health Department. Then, to make quite sure, we’ll get some fumigator from the druggist’s. Clotilde knows how; you have to stop up the doors and windows. You must give us a hand that day.”

“But, Auntie,” Gise murmured, her eyes filling again with tears, “I’ll have to be going back. They’re expecting me—over there.”

“Over there? After what’s happened? You’re going to leave me by myself?” The words came out in jerks, timed to the spasmodic shaking of her head. “Can’t you see the state I’m in? I’m seventy-five, Gise.”

Yes, Gise was thinking, I shall go away. Jacques too. All will be as it was before—but with no hope left. Without a single ray of hope… . Her temples were throbbing, her thoughts in turmoil. Jacques had become incomprehensible to her; and it was the keenest pang of all that he, whom she had thought she understood so well all the time he was away, should now be a sealed book to her. How had it come about?

What should she do? she wondered. Enter a convent? There she would have peace, the rest that Jesus gives the heavy-laden. But first she must renounce the world. Could she make that great renunciation?

Giving way at last, she burst into tears and, drawing herself up, clasped her aunt tightly in her arms.

“Oh, it isn’t fair,” she sobbed. “It’s not fair, Auntie—all that!”

Alarmed and somewhat vexed, Mademoiselle began to remonstrate. “What isn’t fair? I don’t follow… . What on earth are you talking about, Gise?”

Gise sank back to the floor, helplessly. Now and again, groping for some support, a friendly presence, she rubbed her cheek on the rough fabric under which jutted the sharp knees of Mademoiselle, whose voice went droning on indignantly, while the old head wagged this way and that.

“Imagine being left alone at seventy-five! Really, considering the state I’m in …!”

THE little chapel at the Crouy reformatory was full to overflowing. Raw though the weather was, the doors stood wide open, and in the courtyard, where the snow had been trampled by the crowd into a morass of slime, the two hundred and eighty-six young inmates stood, bare-headed and unmoving, in serried files. The brass badges on their belts gleamed above their brand-new dungarees, and round them were stationed the guards in full uniform with revolver-holsters dangling at their hips.

The mass had been said by the Abbé Vécard; but the Bishop of Beauvais, who had a sepulchral bass voice, was in attendance to pronounce the final intercession.

The responses floated up and hovered for a moment in the throbbing silence of the little nave.

“Pater noster …”

“Requiem ceternam dona e’l, Domine.”

“Requiescat in pace.”

“Amen.”

Then the instrumental sextet posted on the dais struck up the closing voluntary.

From the start Antoine had been following the ceremony with keen interest. “It’s odd,” he thought, “the mania they have for playing Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ on these occasions; there’s very little that’s funereal about it. The sadness doesn’t last; at once it strays off into a mood of joy—that craving for illusion, I suppose. Like the way consumptives have of thinking about their death light-heartedly.” He remembered the last days of a young fellow named Derny—a composer, too—whom he had seen at the hospital. “Most people sentimentalize it; they fancy they’re watching the ecstasy of a dying man who sees heaven opening to him. We, of course, know better; it’s just a characteristic of the disease, almost a symptom of the lesions— like the high temperature.”

In any case he had to admit that a mood of tragic grief would have been out of keeping with the present funeral, which was invested with the utmost pomp and circumstance procurable. He was—with the exception of M. Chasle, who, the moment he arrived, had slipped away into the crowd—the only member of the household present. Having attended the service in Paris, the cousins and distant relatives did not deem it necessary to make the pilgrimage to Crouy in such glacial weather. The congregation consisted exclusively of the dead man’s colleagues, and delegates from benevolent societies. “Deputies,” Antoine smiled, “like me; I’m deputizing for the family.” And he added to himself, with a touch of melancholy: “Not a single friend.” What he meant was: “No one who’s a personal friend of
mine
. And for a very good reason.” Since his father’s death he had come to realize that he had no personal friends. With the possible exception of Daniel, he had had only colleagues or companions. It was his own fault; he had lived so long without a thought for others. Indeed, till quite recently he had been inclined to pride himself on his detachment. Now, he discovered, it was beginning to pall on him.

He watched with interest the movements of the officiating priests. “What next?” he wondered when he saw them retreat into the sacristy.

They were waiting for the undertaker’s men to shift the bier onto the catafalque erected at the entrance to the chapel. Then once more the master of ceremonies came and bowed to Antoine with the prim elegance of a rather jaded ballet-master, ringing on the flags his ebony wand. The cortege formed again, moved down the aisle, and halted in the chapel porch, to listen to the speeches. Dignified, holding himself erect, Antoine complied with the requirements of the ceremonial willingly enough; his consciousness of being the focus of many eyes stimulated him to play his part. The mourners massed on either side strained forward to see, following Oscar Thibault’s son, the Subprefect, the Mayor of Compiègne, the Crouy Town Council in full force and frock-coats, a young bishop
in partibus
“deputizing” for His Grace the Archbishop of Paris, and, amongst other eminent figures whose names were whispered round, some members of the Institute who had come unofficially to render homage to their dead colleague.

A powerful voice subdued the whispers of the crowd:

“Gentlemen, in the name of the Institute of France, I have the melancholy honour …”

The orator was Loudun-Costard, the jurist, a fat, bald-headed man, in a tight-fitting fur-lined coat with a fur collar. On him devolved the duty of sketching the dead man’s career.

“With unflagging zeal he pursued his studies at Rouen College, near his father’s factory… .”

Antoine remembered the photograph of a schoolboy, his arm resting on a pile of prizes. “So that was Father’s boyhood,” he mused. “Who on earth could have foreseen then …? No, one never gets to understand a man till he is dead. While he’s alive, the sum of the things he still may do is a wholly unknown factor, and it throws out every estimate. At last death comes and fixes every aspect once for all; it’s as if the real man came clear at last of the vague cloud of might-have-beens. You can see him in the round, take a back view, form a general opinion. That, by the way, is what I’ve always said,” he added, with an inward smile; “you can never make an absolutely ‘certain diagnosis till you have your patient on the post-mortem table.”

He was well aware that he had not yet done with musing on his father’s life and character; and that, for a long while yet, he was to derive from such musings interesting and instructive sidelights on his own psychology.

“When he was invited to bear a part in the labours of our eminent fraternity, it was not only his loftiness of purpose, his philanthropic zeal, and his vast energy that we invoked; nor was it only that fine, unswerving probity, which made him an outstanding figure of our generation …”

“Yet another ‘deputy,’ ” Antoine smiled to himself, as he listened to the flood of eulogy. But he was not insensitive to it; indeed he felt inclined to think that he had habitually underrated his father’s true worth.

“… and, gentlemen, let us bow our heads in homage to that noble heart, which to its last beat throbbed ever and alone for just and generous causes.”

The “immortal” had finished. He folded his sheaf of notes, hastily thrust his hands back into the fur-lined pockets, and modestly retreated to his place amongst his fellow-delegates.

“The President of the Joint Committee of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paris,” the ballet-master announced in a discreet voice.

A venerable old man, armed with an ear-trumpet and supported by a footman nearly as ancient and infirm as his master, tottered up to the catafalque. The sole survivor of a group of young men from Rouen who had come in the same year as M. Thibault to study law in Paris, not only was he the dead man’s successor to the presidency of the charity organization, but he had been his lifelong friend. He was stone-deaf and had been thus afflicted for very many years; indeed since earliest childhood Antoine and Jacques had always referred to him as “Old Door-Nail.”

“Gentlemen, in the feelings which unite us here today, there should be something more than grief for our great loss,” the old man piped. The high-pitched, quavering voice brought back to Antoine’s memory Old Door-Nail’s visit, two days previously, to the death-chamber. Then, too, he had tottered forward on the same servant’s feeble arm. “Orestes,” he had squeaked, on entering the room, “wishes to give Pylades a last token of his friendship.” He had been led up to the corpse and his bleary, red-rimmed eyes had pored over it for a long while; then, straightening up, he had gulped down a sob and yelled at Antoine as if they had been thirty yards apart: “Ah, if you only knew what a handsome lad he was, at twenty!” At the time Antoine had been genuinely moved by the old man’s remark. “How quickly one’s mood changes!” he thought. Recalling it today, he felt merely amused.

“What was the secret of his forcefulness?” the old man declaimed. “To what did Oscar Thibault owe his unfailingly well-balanced judgment, his unruffled optimism, that self-confidence of his which made child’s play of every obstacle and assured his triumph in the most arduous undertakings? … Is it not, gentlemen, one of the undying glories of the Catholic faith that it gives the world such men as he was and such lives as his?”