The Thibaults (118 page)

Daniel.

Jacques had read the eight sheets through without a break. He remained standing under the lamp, trembling, bewildered, deeply moved, his thoughts in a tumult. He was experiencing more than a swift renewal of his friendship—though this was strong enough to make him feel like taking the first train to Luneville right off; there was something deeper, too: a brooding anguish rankling in a dark, acutely sensitive region of his emotions, on which he neither could nor would let in a ray of light.

He took a few steps, shivering less with the cold than with the fever of his ruffled nerves. He was still holding the letter. Moving back under the hideous stridence of the electric buzzer, he set to reading the letter again, as calmly as he could, from beginning to end… .

Half-past eight had just struck when he left the Gare du Nord. The air was keen and pure, the water in the gutters frozen, the sidewalks dry.

He was faint with hunger. A cafe in the Rue Lafayette caught his eye and, turning in, he sank heavily onto a seat. Without taking off his hat or even troubling to turn down the collar of his overcoat, he dispatched three hard-boiled eggs, a plateful of sauerkraut, and half a loaf of bread.

After satisfying his hunger, he drank two glasses of beer in quick succession, and glanced round the room. It was almost empty. Facing him, at a table on the other side, a woman, dark, broad-shouldered, and still young, was seated in front of an empty glass. The discreet, sympathetic glance she cast in his direction vaguely stirred him. She seemed too quietly dressed to be one of the professionals who prowl about the Paris railway stations. A beginner, perhaps. Their glances met. He looked away; at the least encouragement she would have come and joined him at his table. There was a look of sad experience on her face, yet with it a certain innocence, that had its charm. For a moment he was tempted, in two minds. She seemed a simple soul, very close to nature; and he was utterly unknown to her. It might soothe his nerves… . Now she was gazing at him boldly, perhaps guessing his quandary. He, however, took care not to catch her eye.

At last he made a move, paid the waiter, and went out quickly, without looking her way.

Out in the street the cold gripped him. Should he walk home? No, he was too tired. He went to the edge of the sidewalk, watched the traffic, and hailed the first empty taxi.

As it drew up beside the kerb, he felt a light touch on his elbow. The girl had followed him.

“Come to my place, if you feel like it,” she murmured awkwardly. “It’s in the Rue Lamartine.”

Good-naturedly he shook his head, and opened the taxi door.

“Anyhow, please give me a lift, to 97 Rue Lamartine,” she pleaded, as if she had some special reason for wanting to keep with him.

Grinning, the driver looked interrogatively at Jacques.

“Well, sir, is it 97 Rue Lamartine?”

She thought, or made as if she thought, that Jacques had consented, and jumped into the taxi.

“All right,” Jacques said. “Make it Rue Lamartine.”

The taxi began moving.

“Look here, what’s the good of trying to snub me like that?” There was a warm resonance in the voice that went well with her appearance. Then, bending towards him, she added in a tender, soothing tone: “Why, boy, anyone can see you’ve had a hard knock!”

Gently she pressed him in her arms, and the soft warmth of her caress melted Jacques’s reserve.

Yielding to the lure of being consoled, he half stifled a sigh, without replying. Then as if his silence and the sigh were a surrender, she hugged him tighter and, taking off his hat, drew his head onto her breast. He let her have her way. Then a wave of misery came over him and, without knowing why, he burst into tears.

“In trouble with the cops, ain’t you?” she whispered. Her voice was trembling.

He was too dumbfounded to protest. But then it struck him that with his scratched cheeks and his trouser-legs caked in mud, he might well pass for a fugitive criminal in this dry, frost-bound Paris. He closed his eyes; that this woman of the streets should take him for a criminal gave him an exquisite thrill.

As before she read assent into his silence, and pressed his face passionately against her bosom.

Her voice changed yet again; grew alert, conspiratorial.

“Like to lie low for a while at my place?”

“No,” he replied, without moving.

It seemed she was schooled to obey, even when she could not understand. After a moment’s hesitation, she whispered:

“If you’re short of cash, I can help you out.”

This time he opened his eyes, sat up.

“What?”

“I’ve got three hundred and forty francs in there.” She patted her little bag. “Like to have them?” In the vulgar voice there was a rather gruff, big-sisterly affection.

Jacques was so touched that he could not reply at once.

“Thanks,” he murmured at last, shaking his head. “I don’t need it.”

The cab slowed down, and drew up in front of a low doorway in an ill-lit, deserted street. Probably, Jacques thought, she would ask him to come in with her. In that case—what?

The problem was quickly solved. She got up and, resting a knee on the seat, hugged Jacques for the last time.

“Poor kid!” she sighed.

Her lips groped for his mouth and pressed it fiercely as if to wrest its secret, taste the savour of a crime; then quickly she released him.

“Anyhow, don’t go and get yourself copped, like a damn fool!”

She jumped out of the cab and slammed the door. Then she handed five francs to the driver.

“Take the Rue Saint-Lazare. The gentleman will tell you where to stop.”

The car moved off. Jacques had just time to see the girl vanish down a lightless passage, without once looking back.

He was feeling dazed. He passed his hand over his forehead, let down the window. Cold, clean air fanned his cheeks; he drew a deep breath. Then, smiling, he bent forward to the driver.

“Take me to 4A Rue de l’Université, please,” he called out gaily.

NO SOONER had the last mourners filed out of the graveyard than Antoine took a car to Compiègne on the pretext that he had orders to give the monument-mason. In reality he wished to avoid the crowd returning by the first train back. The five-thirty express would get him to Paris in time for dinner, and, with luck, he would travel back alone.

Luck was against him.

When, some minutes before the train was due, he stepped onto the platform, to his surprise he at once ran into the Abbé Vécard. It was all Antoine could do to conceal his vexation. The priest explained. “The Bishop was kind enough to bring me here in his car; he wanted to have a chat.” Then he noticed Antoine’s look of weariness and gloom. “I’m afraid, my dear Antoine, you must be quite worn out. Such a crowd and all those speeches! Yet, later on, you’ll look back on this day as a very memorable occasion. What a pity Jacques wasn’t present!”

Antoine was beginning to explain how, in the present circumstances, his brother’s absence seemed to him natural enough, when the priest broke in.

“Yes, yes, I quite follow you. It was wiser he should stay away. But I do hope you’ll let him know how—er—edifying the ceremony was. You’ll do that, won’t you?”

Antoine could not refrain from querying the term the priest had used.

“ ‘Edifying’? Well, for others, perhaps. But not for me. I assure you that all that pomp, all that eloquence-to-order …”

His eyes, meeting the priest’s, found in them an understanding twinkle. Obviously he shared Antoine’s views of the speeches they had heard that afternoon.

The train was coming in.

Noticing an empty car, they entered it, even though it was ill-lit.

“May I propose a cigarette, Abbé?”

Gravely the priest raised his forefinger to his lips.

“Tempter!” he smiled, taking a cigarette. Puckering his eyelids he lit it, puffed, withdrew it from his lips, and examined it with gusto as he blew the smoke out through his nostrils.

“In a ceremony of that kind,” he continued good-humouredly, “there’s always bound to be a side that is—as your friend Nietzsche would put it—human, all-too-human. And yet, when all that is discounted, the fact remains that such collective manifestations of the religious and moral sentiments have something that stirs our hearts, to which we can’t help responding. Isn’t that so?”

Antoine did not reply at once. Then, “I wonder!” he murmured dubiously. Again he fell silent, gazing pensively at the man in front of him.

For twenty years he had been familiar with the Abbé’s placid countenance, the shrewd insistence of his gentle eyes, his confidential tone, the air of constant meditation given him by the poise of his head always drooping a little to the left, and the way he had of fluttering his hands at the level of his chest. But tonight he found that something had changed in their relations. Hitherto he had always thought of the Abbé Vécard in terms of M. Thibault—as his father’s spiritual mentor. Now death had struck out the middle term. The reasons which formerly had led him to adopt a wise reserve in dealing with the priest had lost their cogency; now he could treat the Abbé as man to man.

After his trying day, he found it harder than usual to tone down the expression of his thoughts, and it was a relief for him to declare bluntly:

“Well, I must own that sentiments of that kind mean nothing, nothing whatever, to me.”

The priest assumed a slightly bantering tone.

“Still, unless I’m greatly mistaken, the religious emotion has its place amongst human emotions, and indeed is recognized as fairly widespread in mankind. What’s your opinion, my friend?”

Antoine was in no mood for trifling.

“I’ve never forgotten something Abbé Leclerc, my tutor when I was reading for my philosophy degree, once said to me. ‘There are some quite intelligent people who have no feeling for art. You, I suspect, have no feeling for religion.’ The worthy man was merely indulging in an epigram. But I’ve always thought that the remark was absolutely true.”

“Supposing it were so,” the Abbé replied, in the same tone of affectionate irony, “you’d be greatly to be pitied, I’m afraid! You’d be cut off from half of life. Yes, there are hardly any major problems of life of which it isn’t true to say that a man who’s unable to bring a religious sentiment to bear on them is doomed to see only a paltry fraction. That’s what makes the beauty of our religion… . Why do you smile?”

Antoine could not think why he had smiled. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the nerves, natural enough after the emotions of the past week and the trying day he had been through.

“Come now!” The priest, in his turn, smiled. “Can you deny there’s beauty in our faith?”

“Of course not,” Antoine cheerfully asserted. “I’ll allow it all the ‘beauty’ you like,” he added teasingly. “But, all the same …”

“Well?”

“All the same, beauty’s not enough. It should be rational as well.”

The Abbé’s hands fluttered in amiable deprecation.

“ ‘Rational’!” The soft brooding tone suggested that the word conjured up a host of problems which, for the moment, he was not disposed to tackle, but to which he had the key. After some reflection he went on in a more pugnacious tone:

“Perhaps you are one of those who fancy religion is losing ground in the modern mind?”

“Frankly, I haven’t a notion.” Antoine’s moderation. surprised the Abbé. “Very likely not. It’s even possible that the activities of the most modern minds—I’m thinking of the very men who are furthest from dogmatic faith—tend indirectly towards assembling the elements of a religion. Towards—how shall I put it?—bringing together concepts that, taken as a whole, would constitute an entity not so very different from many Christians’ idea of God.”

The priest nodded. “How could it be otherwise, human nature being what it is? Only in religion can a man find a compensation for the lower instincts he discovers in himself. It is his only dignity. And it is also the only solace for his griefs, his only source of resignation.”

“You’re right there!” There was a ring of irony in Antoine’s voice. “Men who set a higher value on the truth than on their peace of mind are pretty rare. And religion is the supreme purveyor of peace of mind. But you must forgive me, Abbé, if I remind you there are others, in whom the desire to understand is more imperative than the craving to believe. And such people …”

“Such people,” the priest broke in, “cling to the cramped, precarious assurances of reasoning and the .intellect; and never get beyond them. Well, we can only pity them—we whose faith lives and moves on another, infinitely vaster plane, the plane of feeling and volition. Don’t you agree?”

Antoine’s smile was non-committal. The light in the compartment was too dim for the priest to see it, but the fact that he proceeded to enlarge upon the theme showed he was not altogether dupe of the “we” he had just used.

“People think they’re very enlightened nowadays because they insist on ‘understanding’ things. But believing is understanding. No, it would be better to say that there’s no common ground between understanding and believing. Some today refuse to accept as true what their intellect, inadequately trained or warped by a subversive education, is unable to prove to its satisfaction. The explanation’s simple: they are the victims of their limitations. It’s perfectly feasible to understand God’s existence, and to prove it logically. From Aristotle on— and we mustn’t forget he was the master of Saint Thomas Aquinas—logical proof has never been lacking… .”

So far Antoine had refrained from any overt protest, but now the gaze he cast on the priest was frankly sceptical.

His companion’s silence was making the Abbé ill at ease, and he hastened to continue. “Our religious philosophy, when dealing with these subjects, furnishes the most closely reasoned arguments… .”

“Excuse me,” Antoine broke in at last, genially enough, “but are you sure you’ve the right to talk about ‘religious philosophy’ or ‘closely reasoned arguments’ in such a connexion?”

“What’s that?” The priest sounded positively shocked. “Why shouldn’t I have the right …?”

“Well, for one thing, strictly speaking, religious ‘thought’ is usually a misnomer, for behind all thinking there lies doubt… .”