The Thibaults (15 page)

The Abbé paused. The studied calm of his features made his silence all the more telling. Then, his eyes fixed on the middle distance, without a word of introduction, he began speaking, or, rather, intoning words that Jacques knew well:

“ ‘A certain man had two sons… . And he divided unto them his living. And not many days after the younger son gathered all together, and took his journey into a far country, and there wasted his substance with riotous living. And when he had spent all … and came to himself he said, I will arise and go to my father and will say unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and before thee, and am no more worthy to be called thy son… . And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy son …And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was a great way off, his father saw him. And the son said unto him, Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in thy sight, and am no more worthy to be called thy…’ ”

Before the priest could utter the last word, Jacques’s self-control broke down and he burst into tears.

The priest continued in a different tone:

“Yes, my child, I felt sure you were not utterly corrupted. This morning I said my mass for you. Well, like the Prodigal Son, arise and go to your father, and he will have compassion. And he, too, will say: ‘Let us be merry, for this my son was lost and is found.’ ”

Then Jacques remembered how the hall had been lit up for his homecoming, how M. Thibault had worn his frock-coat, and it made him still more contrite to think that perhaps he had “let down” their preparations to welcome him.

“There’s something else I want to say to you,” the priest went on, stroking the boy’s hair. “Your father has just come to a grave decision about you.” He hesitated and, as he groped for his words, mechanically passed his hand to and fro over Jacques’s protruding ears, laying them flat against his cheeks, then letting them spring back. Jacques felt his ears burning, but dared not move his head. “I approve of his decision,” the Abbé added, putting his forefinger on his lip and riveting his gaze on the boy’s eyes. “He intends to send you, for a while, away from home.”

“Where?” The word was a stifled cry.

“He will tell you, my child. But whatever you may think at first, you must accept the punishment with a contrite heart, as a measure taken for your good. At the start, perhaps, it will sometimes be a little hard, when you find yourself alone for hours on end; but remember at those moments that there is no solitude for the true Christian, and that God never forsakes those who put their trust in Him. Come, my boy, come with me and ask your father’s forgiveness.”

A few minutes later Jacques was back in his room, his face swollen with tears, his cheeks blazing. He walked over to the looking-glass and gave his reflected self a look of concentrated ferocity; it was as if he felt the need of some living human form to act as the target of his malevolence, his imprecations. But just then he heard a step in the passage. Glancing at the door, he saw the key had been removed. He piled a .barricade of chairs against it. Then, running to the table, he scribbled a few lines in pencil, pushed the letter into an envelope, wrote the address, stuck on a stamp, and rose. He seemed at his wit’s end. To whom could he entrust the letter? Here, everyone was an enemy. He opened the window. The morning was grey, the street deserted. After a while an old lady and a child came slowly past. Jacques dropped the letter; it fluttered slowly down and came to rest on the pavement. When he ventured to look out of the window again, the letter had disappeared, the lady and the child were almost out of sight.

And now he gave way to his despair; with a whimpering cry, the moan of a trapped animal, he flung himself onto the bed, his feet pressing against the boards, his .body arched convulsively, his limbs quivering with baffled fury. To stifle his cries, he clenched his teeth on the pillow, for, in the chaos of his mind, one thought was clear: he must not let the others gloat over his despair.

That evening Daniel received the letter:

To you, My Friend, to you, the only person in the world whom I love, the daystar of my life, this is my last will and testament to you.

They are severing me from you, from everything; they are going to put me in a place—I dare not tell you what it is, I dare not tell you where it is. I am ashamed for my father’s sake!

I feel that I shall never see you again, you who are all to me, you who alone could make me kind and good.

Goodbye, my dear, goodbye.

If they make me too miserable, too angry with everything, I shall kill myself. Then you must tell them that I killed myself deliberately, because of them. And that yet I loved them.

But my last thought on the threshold of the next world will have been for you! For you, my friend!

Farewell!

DURING the nine months which had elapsed since the day when Antoine brought back the two young truants, he had not gone to see Mme. de Fontanin again. The maid, however, recognized him and, though it was nine o’clock, showed him in immediately.

Mme. de Fontanin was in her room, the two children with her. Sitting very straight under the lamp, in front of the fire, she was reading aloud. Jenny, snugly ensconced in an easy chair, was toying with her plaits and, as she listened to her mother, gazing at the flames. Daniel was sitting a little way off, his legs crossed, a drawing-board on his knee, finishing a charcoal sketch of his mother. As he paused for a moment on the dark threshold of the room, Antoine was uncomfortably conscious that his visit was ill-timed; but it was too late to retreat.

Mme. de Fontanin’s greeting was rather chilly, but principally she seemed surprised to see him. Leaving her children to themselves, she led Antoine to the drawing-room. On learning the reason of his visit, however, she went out again to fetch her son.

Daniel looked seventeen now, though actually he was two years younger, and an incipient moustache darkened the curve of his upper lip. A little disconcerted, Antoine looked the youngster full in the face, in the rather blustering way he had; now his look seemed to imply: “There’s no shilly-shally about me; I’m one of those fellows who always go straight to the point.” As on his previous visit, an unavowed instinct led him to exaggerate this pose of “downrightness,” once he was in Mme. de Fontanin’s presence.

“This is it,” he said. “Our meeting yesterday set me thinking and I’ve come to talk things over.” Daniel looked surprised. “Yes,” Antoine went on, “we scarcely exchanged two words—you were in a hurry and so was I; but it struck me—I don’t quite know how to put it. Well, for one thing you didn’t inquire about Jacques, from which I drew the conclusion that he’d been writing to you. I was right, wasn’t I? What’s more, I suspect he tells you things I don’t know, and which I ought to know. No, wait, please, and hear what I have to say. Jacques left Paris last June; it’s near the beginning of April now, which makes it nine months he’s been away. I haven’t seen him, he’s never written to me, but Father sees him often. He tells me Jacques is fit and working well, that the solitary life and discipline have already done him a world of good. I sometimes wonder if he isn’t deceiving himself, or being deceived. Since seeing you yesterday I’ve been feeling worried about it. I got an idea that perhaps he’s unhappy in his present surroundings, but as I’m in the dark about it, there’s nothing I can do to help him. And I can’t bear to think that. That’s why I decided to come and talk it over frankly with you. I appeal to your affection for him. It’s not a question of betraying confidences, but I’m sure he tells you what his life is like in that place. You’re the only one who can either reassure me, or prompt me to take active measures about it.”

Daniel heard him out impassively. His first impulse had been to decline the interview altogether. Holding his head high, he gazed at Antoine, and his very indecision gave a certain aloofness to his look. At a loss, he glanced towards his mother. She had been watching him, wondering what he would do. After some minutes of suspense she smiled to him.

“Tell the truth, my boy,” she said, with a decisive gesture. “One never has reason to regret it when one tells the truth.”

With a gesture curiously like his mother’s, Daniel began to speak. Yes, he had had letters from Thibault, now and then; letters that had become shorter and shorter, less and less communicative. Daniel knew, of course, that his friend was boarding with a tutor somewhere in the country—exactly where he did not know. The postmarks on the envelopes showed that they had been posted on a train, somewhere on the Northern Railway. Was it a sort of cramming school Jacques was at?

It was an effort for Antoine to conceal his amazement at the pains that Jacques had evidently taken to hide the truth from his closest friend. Why had he done it? Perhaps it was the same feeling of shame as that which led M. Thibault to convert, for the benefit of the world at large, the reformatory colony where he had confined his son, into “a religious institution on the banks of the Oise.” A suspicion that perhaps his brother had been compelled to write such letters crossed his mind. Perhaps the poor little chap was being terrorized! He remembered the campaign run by a Beauvais newspaper of the scurrilous sort, and the lurid charges it had brought against the Social Defence League. True, M. Thibault had won his libel action against the newspaper, all along the line—yet could one be so sure …?

Antoine felt that, in the last resort, he could rely only on his own judgment.

“Might I see one of the letters?” he asked. Noticing that Daniel was blushing, he excused his abruptness with a belated smile. “Just one letter,” he explained. “Whichever you care to show me.”

Without answering, without waiting for a lead from his mother, Daniel rose and left the room.

Now that he was alone with Mme. de Fontanin, Antoine was conscious of the same feelings as he had had before: curiosity, a sense of an unfamiliar atmosphere, and a certain attraction. She was looking in front of her and did not seem to be thinking of anything. But her mere presence seemed enough to stimulate Antoine’s mental processes and quicken his receptivity. It was as if the air around her were charged with a peculiar conductivity. And, at that moment, unmistakably, Antoine felt an atmosphere of disapproval. He was not far wrong. Though she had nothing definite against M. Thibault, or Antoine—she had no idea what had become of Jacques—the one glimpse she had had of their home-life had left her with a most distasteful impression. Antoine guessed her feelings and was inclined to agree with her. If anyone had ventured to criticize his father’s conduct, he would certainly have protested vigorously; but at that moment, in his inmost self, he was on Mme. de Fontanin’s side against his father. He had not forgotten how, the year before, after his first experience of the atmosphere of the Fontanins’ home, he had for several days found that of his own home almost unbreathable.

Daniel returned. He handed Antoine a cheap-looking envelope.

“That’s the first. It’s the longest letter, too.” He went back to his chair.

My dear Fontanin,

I write to you from my new home. You mustn’t try to write to me; it’s absolutely forbidden. Apart from that, everything is all right. My tutor is nice, he is kind to me, and I am working hard. And I have met quite a lot of nice fellows here. My father and brother come to see me on Sundays. So you see I’m quite all right. I beg you, my dear Daniel, in the name of our friendship, do not judge my father too harshly; you don’t know all the facts. I know he is kind and good, and he has done well to send me away from Paris, where I was wasting my time at the lycée; I see it myself now, and I’m glad. I don’t give you my address—-to make sure you won’t write, for if you did so it would be terrible for me here.

I will write to you again when I have a chance, my dear Daniel.

Jacques.

Antoine read the letter twice. Had he not recognized his brother’s writing, he would have had difficulty in believing it came from him. Someone else had written the address on the envelope—obviously a more or less illiterate person—and there was something mean and furtive about the handwriting. Form and contents disturbed him equally. Why those lies? About the “nice fellows,” for instance. Jacques was living in a cell in the famous “special annex” which M. Thibault had provided for boys of good family, and which was always empty. Jacques, he knew, never spoke to a soul except the servant who brought his meals and took him for walks, and a tutor who came from Compiègne two or three times a week. “My father and brother come to see me”! M. Thibault visited Crouy in his official capacity on the first Monday of each month, to preside over the administrative committee, and it was true that on that day, just before leaving, he always had his son brought to see him for a few minutes in the parlour. As for Antoine, he had proposed going to visit his brother during the summer holidays, but M. Thibault had put his foot down. “It’s essential,” he had said, “for the course of re-education your brother is undergoing, that he should be kept in absolute isolation.”

His elbows propped on his knees, Antoine twiddled the letter between his fingers. His peace of mind was badly shaken and of a sudden he felt so painfully at a loss, so lonely, that he was on the point of telling everything to the enlightened woman who, by some happy chance, had crossed his path. Looking up, he saw her with her hands resting on her lap, and with a thoughtful, somehow expectant look on her face. Her eyes seemed to read his thoughts.

“Do you think we could help in any way?” she smiled. The silken whiteness of her hair made the smile and the features seem those of a still younger woman.

But, just as he was about to make the plunge, he paused, noticing Daniel’s shrewd gaze intent on him. Antoine could not bear to seem irresolute, and even more disliked the idea that Mme. de Fontanin might not regard him as the man of rapid measures that he was. But to himself he gave a more congenial reason for his silence—that he could not divulge a secret Jacques was at such pains to hide. Feeling unsure of himself, he cut the awkward situation short. He rose and, as he held out his hand, assumed the impressive look he deliberately cultivated, a look implying: “No questions, please! You see the man I am! We understand each other; that’s enough!”