The Thibaults (37 page)

“But what in the world did you write on the card?”

“Oh, yes, the card. It was so perfectly idiotic I hardly like to tell you. What I wrote was this:
I do NOT believe!
With an exclamation mark. Underlined. On a visiting-card. A monkey-trick, eh?
I do NOT believe!
” His eyes widened, staring ahead. “In the first place, can one ever affirm such a thing—positively?” He stopped speaking for a moment, to watch a smartly dressed young man in mourning who was crossing at the Médicis corner. When he spoke again his voice sounded brittle, as though he were forcing himself to an odious confession. “It’s absurd. Do you know what I’ve been thinking of for the last minute? I was thinking, Antoine, that if you died I’d like to have a close-fitting black suit like the one that fellow there has on. I even, for an instant, longed for your death— impatiently. Now, don’t you think I’ll end my days in a padded cell?”

Antoine merely shrugged his shoulders.

“It mightn’t be such a bad thing, perhaps,” Jacques continued. “I might try to analyse myself right up to the final stage of madness. Say, that’s an idea! I might write the story of a highly intelligent man who goes mad. Everything he did would be insane, yet he would act only after the most scrupulous deliberation and behave, on his own estimate, with perfect logic. Do you see? I’d install myself in the very centre of his mind, and I’d …”

Antoine kept silence. That was another pose he had essayed and it had become second nature with him. But there was such awareness in his silences that his companions’ thoughts, far from being paralysed, were stimulated by them.

“Oh, if only I had the time to work, to try out my ideas!” Jacques sighed. “One exam after another! And I’m twenty already; it’s ghastly!”

He lifted his hand to his neck, where the collar-edge -chafed the tip of a pimple. Another boil in the making, he mused dolefully; the iodine hasn’t stopped it.

He turned to his brother again.

“Listen, Antoine! When you were twenty, you weren’t childish, were you? I remember you quite well. But I’m different, I never change. Really, I feel exactly the same as I was ten years ago. Don’t you agree?”

“No.”

All the same, Antoine reflected, he’s right about that. Consciousness of continuity; or, better, the continuity of consciousness. Like the old fellow who says: “Personally, I was very keen on leapfrog.” Same feet, same hands, same old duffer. I, too, that night I had such a fright at Cotterets, that colic attack. Didn’t dare leave my room. Dr. Thibault it was, yes, the doctor himself and no other—our house-physician, a first-rate man, he added complacently, as though he overheard one of his subordinates describing him.

“Am I boring you?” asked Jacques, lifting his hat to mop his forehead.

“Why do you ask?”

“That’s what it looks like. You hardly answer a word, and listen to me as if I were a fever case.”

“Oh, no, I don’t.”

If, Antoine mused, the ear-douche doesn’t bring the temperature down … He was thinking of the boy they had brought to the hospital that morning, the look of agony on his face.
In my heart … In my heart tra-la-la
.

“You think I’m feeling nervous,” Jacques went on. “I tell you again, you’re mistaken. I may as well make a clean breast of it: there are moments when I’d almost rather hear I’d failed the entrance!”

“Why on earth—?”

“To escape.”

“To escape? Escape what?”

“Everything. The whole show. You, them, the whole bunch!”

Instead of uttering the comment that rose to his lips—”You’re talking nonsense”—Antoine turned to his brother and examined him thoughtfully.

“To burn my boats,” Jacques continued, “and go away. Oh, if only I could go right away, all by myself, anywhere on earth! Somewhere far away, where I’d have some peace and settle down to work.” Well knowing that he would never go, he yielded to his daydream with all the greater zest. He paused for a moment, then, with a wry smile, turned to his brother again.

“And there, there perhaps, but nowhere else, I might bring myself to forgive them.”

Antoine stopped short.

“Still harping on that, eh?”

“On what?”

“Forgive them, you say. Forgive whom, for what? The reformatory?”

Jacques cast a hostile glance at him, shrugged his shoulders, and walked on. A lot his stay at Crouy had to do with it! But what was the good of explanations? Antoine would never understand.

And, anyhow, what did this idea of “forgiveness” amount to? Jacques himself could not explain it satisfactorily, though he was always finding himself at grips with a dilemma: to forgive or, alternatively, to cultivate his rancour. To take things as they came, get his degree, become a cogwheel in the machine; or—the other way out—to give full rein to the destructive forces that surged within him and launch himself with the full impetus of his resentment against—against what, he could hardly say; against morality, the cut and dried life, the family, society. An ancient grievance, that, and harking back to childhood; a vague awareness that none had known him for what he was, a boy who needed to be properly treated, but, time and again, everyone had failed him. Yes, he was sure of it; had escape been feasible, he would have found that peace of mind which he accused “the others” of frustrating.

“Once I got there, Antoine, I’d work.”

“ ‘Got there.’
Where, exactly
?”

“There you are—asking me ‘where?’! No, Antoine, you can’t understand. You’ve always felt in harmony with other people. You were always satisfied with the path of life you’d chosen.”

Jacques fell to summing up his grown-up brother in terms which usually he held taboo. He saw him as a diligent, contented man. He had energy, all right, but what about his brains? The brains of a zoologist. An intellect so positive and so realistic that it had found its natural field in scientific research. An intellect that based its theory of life on the one concept of activity, and with that was satisfied. And—this struck even deeper—an intellect which stripped things of their secret virtue, of all, in a word, that gave significance and beauty to the universe.

“I’m not a bit like you,” he burst out passionately and, swerving a little from his brother’s side, walked silently aloof along the kerb.

I’m stifled here, he mused; everything they make me do is loathsome, sickening. The tutors, my fellow-students—all alike! And the things they rave about, their favourite books! Their “great modern authors”! Oh, if only someone in the world could guess what I am, my real self—and what I’m out to do. No, no one has a notion of it, not even Daniel.

His raging mood had passed. He did not listen to Antoine’s reply. To forget all that has been written up to now! he adjured himself. To get out of the rut and, looking inside oneself, say
everything
! No one’s ever had the nerve to say everything, as yet. But someone might;
I
might… .

It was hard going up the Rue Soufflot incline in such a temperature, and they slackened speed. Antoine talked on; Jacques was silent. Noticing the contrast, Jacques smiled to himself. After all, he thought, I can never argue with Antoine; either I stand up to him and lose my temper, or else I dig myself in before the arguments he methodically marches up, and hold my tongue. Now, for instance. It’s a sort of low cunning, really; I know that Antoine takes my silence for assent. But it’s not so. Far otherwise. I stick to my guns, my ideas. I don’t care if other people find them muddled; I’m sure, myself, of their soundness and I’ve only got to develop the knack of proving this to others—a matter of getting down to it one day, that’s all. Arguments—they’re easily found. But Antoine rattles on and on, never stops to wonder if there’s any sense in my ideas. All the same, how lonely I feel! … And once again the desire to go away flamed up in him. Wonderful it would be to give up everything, all at once.
Rooms left behind! Wonders of setting forth
! He smiled again and, throwing a teasing glance at his brother, began to declaim:

’ ”Families, I hate you! Closed circles round the hearth! Fast shut doors… .’ ” 
(NOTE: For this and for the other passages from Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres cited in this chapter, I have used the authorized translation by Mrs. Dorothy Bussy. Translator.)

“Who’s that by?”

“ ‘Nathanael, look at everything as you pass by and stop nowhere …’ ”

“By whom?”

“Oh,” Jacques exclaimed—the smile had left his lips and he was walking faster—”that comes from a book that’s blamed for everything, a book in which Daniel has found every sort of excuse—far worse, a panegyric!—for his—his ruthlessness. He’s got it off by heart, while I… . No”—his voice trembled—”no, I can’t say I loathe it, but—don’t you see, Antoine?—it’s a book that burns your fingers while you read, and somehow I can never feel at ease with it, so dangerous do I think it.” With grudging appreciation he repeated: “ ‘Rooms left behind! Wonders of setting forth!’ ” When, after a moment’s silence, he spoke again, his voice was changed, had suddenly grown harsh, staccato. “I may talk about it—going away. But it’s too late. I shall never be able to get
really
away.”

“You talk about ‘going away,’ ” Antoine replied, “as if it meant leaving home for good. And that, obviously, is easier said than done. But why not travel a bit? If you’ve passed the entrance exam, Father will be quite agreeable to your going away during the summer.”

Jacques shook his head.

“Too late.”

What did he mean by that?

“Surely you don’t propose to spend the two months’ holidays at Maisons-Laffitte, with only Father and Mademoiselle?”

“I do.”

He made an evasive gesture and, now they had crossed the Place du Pantheon and entered the Rue d’Ulm, he pointed to the groups collecting outside the Ecole Normale. His face darkened.

“What a queer character he has!” Antoine reflected. He had often made the same observation—indulgently and with unconscious pride. Much as he hated the unforeseen, and despite Jacques’s habit of constantly springing surprises on him, he was for ever trying to make his brother out. Round and about the incoherent phrases Jacques let fall, Antoine’s nimble wits were busy with intellectual gymnastics which not only amused him but enabled him (so he imagined) to read the riddle of the boy’s personality. Unfortunately, no sooner did Antoine see himself adding the crowning touch to his diagnosis of the boy’s mind, than Jacques would utter some new remark that upset all his inferences. A fresh start had to be made, leading him more often than not towards entirely different conclusions. The result was that, for Antoine, every conversation with his brother involved a sequence of improvised and incompatible deductions, the last of which he always took to be decisive.

The grim facade of the Ecole Normale was looming above them, and Antoine, turning to Jacques, cast a long, meditative look at him. Reading between the lines, he reassured himself: you can see the youngster appreciates family life far better than he imagines.

The gate was open now, and the quadrangle crowded. At the vestibule entrance Daniel de Fontanin was talking to a blond young man.

“If it’s Daniel who spots us first,” Jacques murmured to himself, “that means I’ve passed.” But Fontanin and Battaincourt turned simultaneously when Antoine hailed them.

“Not too nervous?” Daniel inquired.

“Not in the least.”

(If, thought Jacques, he mentions Jenny’s name, it means I’ve passed.)

“This quarter of an hour’s suspense before the results are posted,” Antoine observed, “is simply damnable.”

“I wonder now!” Daniel demurred. He took a childish delight in contradicting Antoine, whom he addressed as “doctor” and whose precocious gravity amused him. “There’s always a spice of pleasure in suspense.”

Antoine shrugged his shoulders and turned towards his brother.

“Hear what he says? … Personally,” he continued, “I’ve been through this sort of suspense fourteen or fifteen times, but I’ve never managed to get used to it. What’s more, I’ve noticed that the fellows who put on an air of stoicism on such occasions are nearly always the second-raters, weaklings.”

“The joys of hope deferred are not for everyone,” Daniel oracled. When he addressed the doctor there was a glint of mockery in his eyes that softened to tenderness as they turned to Jacques.

Antoine insisted.

“I’m speaking in earnest. A strong man finds uncertainty intolerable. True courage isn’t just a matter of facing events with coolness; it’s going out to meet them half-way, so as to take their bearings at the earliest moment, and act accordingly. Isn’t that so, Jacques?”

“No, I’m more inclined to agree with Daniel,” Jacques replied, though he had not been listening. And, as Daniel went on talking to Antoine, he slipped in a leading question, aware that he was cheating destiny.

“Are your mother and sister still at Maisons-Laffitte?”

Daniel did not hear, and, in the act of dinning the thought, “I failed,” into his head, Jacques realized how solid was his faith in his success. Father’ll be delighted, he thought, and, smiling at the prospect, bestowed the smile on Battaincourt.

“Very decent of you to come today, Simon.”

Battaincourt glanced towards him affectionately; he made no secret of his fervent cult of Daniel’s friend, an adoration which sometimes irritated Jacques, since he could not respond to it with a friendship of equal warmth… .

The hubbub in the quadrangle ceased abruptly. A roll of white paper had flashed into view at one of the windows. Jacques had a vague impression of being swept off his feet, borne by a wave towards the fateful scroll.

A buzzing in his ears; then Antoine’s voice:

“Passed! Third on the list!”

Warm, vibrant with life, the voice rang for a moment in his ears, but he did not grasp the meaning of the words till, looking timidly round, he saw the jubilation on his brother’s face. Then, lifdng a clammy hand, he fumbled with his hat; sweat was pouring down his forehead. Daniel and Battaincourt were edging round the crowd towards him. Daniel’s eyes were on him and, scanning his friend as he approached, Jacques noticed how his raised upper lip bared his teeth, though no other feature showed the least trace of a smile.