The Thibaults (44 page)

“To leave?” Antoine faced round, uncomfortably aware that he was losing the thread yet again.

“Good heavens, she won’t stay there three weeks! Is it really worth it, do you think? She’s getting on for seventy-seven, you see. And it’s odds on she won’t have time to spend all that at home, ten thousand francs. What do you think?”

“Seventy-seven,” Antoine echoed, involuntarily working out the dismal reckoning.

He had lost track of the time. The moment you deflect your attention to other people, he had observed, you find a “case.” Despite his professional training, his attention always centred so instinctively on himself that, whenever he directed it to others, he had a feeling of its being deflected. This fool is certainly a case, he said to himself; “the Chasle case.” He remembered the time when he first met M. Chasle; on a recommendation from the priests at the boys’ school, M. Thibault had engaged him for the holidays as the children’s tutor. After their return to Paris, enchanted by the tutor’s punctuality, he had given him the post of secretary. For eighteen years, Antoine mused, I’ve seen the little man day after day and yet I know nothing about him!

“My mother is a splendid woman,” M. Chasle continued, avoiding his eyes. “You must not think, M. Antoine, that as a family we’re nobodies. I may be one—but Mother, not she! She was born to be a great lady, not to the humble life we lead. Still, as the gentlemen at Saint-Roch so often say, and they’ve been true friends to us, not forgetting the Cure, who knows M. Thibault by name quite well— ‘Every life has its cross,’ they say, and it’s quite true. It isn’t as if I didn’t want to do it. I do. If only one could be sure… . Ten thousand francs! … And then I’d have a quiet little life, as I like it! But, there, she wouldn’t stay! And they wouldn’t give me back the money. They see to that all right. When you go there they make you sign a long rigmarole, with an official stamp on it, a sort of affidavit. Like at your police-station. But they’re cannier than your policemen: they don’t write to you after a year, they give nothing back. Not a sou,” he repeated with a harsh guffaw. Then, in the same tone, he continued: “And your friend—what did he do? Did he go and get it?”

“The ivory rattle? No, he didn’t.”

M. Chasle seemed to ponder deeply.

“A child’s rattle, well, yes… . But money, that’s another story. People who lose money in the street are off like a flash to claim it at every police-station in Paris. Shouldn’t wonder if some people put in for more than they lost. But what about proving it, eh?”

Antoine did not reply. M. Chasle fixed him with an inquisitorial eye and chuckled. “How about proving it, I’m asking.”

“Proving it?” Antoine sounded annoyed. “What about all the particulars they have to specify—how the money was lost, if it was in notes or coin, if-“

“No, not that,” M. Chasle broke in excitedly. “They surely wouldn’t ask if it was in notes or coin. Details, I grant you. But, anyhow, not that one!” He murmured bemusedly. “No, not that one, most certainly not!”

Antoine glanced at the clock.

“Look here, I don’t want to hurry you away but I really must be going.”

M. Chasle seemed to waken from a trance and slipped off the chair-arm.

“Many thanks, doctor, for the consultation. I’ll go home and put a bandage on … and a wad of cotton-wool in my ear. It’ll pass off, I’m sure.”

Antoine could not help smiling as he watched the little man hopping warily across the polished hall floor. M. Chasle’s shoes always creaked, and this was one of the “crosses” of his life. He had consulted a host of bootmakers, tried every shape of click and upper, every kind of sole— leather, felt, and rubber; he had visited pedicures and even (on tbe advice of a floor-polisher who, on occasion, acted as a waiter) taken his chance with the inventor of an elastic shoe, known as the “Sleuth,” specially built for waiters and domestics. But all in vain. Thus he had acquired a habit of walking on tip-toe and, with his beady eyes set in a tiny head and coat-tails flapping on his hips, looked like a wing-clipped magpie.

“There now, I was forgetting!” he exclaimed as he reached the door. “All the shops are shut. Have you any change?”

“For …?”

“For a thousand francs.”

“Might have,” said Antoine, opening a drawer.

“I don’t care to carry such big notes on me,” M. Chasle explained. “And, as you happened to speak of people losing money … Could you give me ten hundred-franc notes? Or twenty fifties? The fatter the wad is, the safer, so to speak.”

“No, I’ve only two five-hundreds,” Antoine said, making as if to close the drawer.

“Better than nothing,” said M. Chasle, approaching him. “Quite different, anyhow.” He handed Antoine the note which he had just extracted from the lining of his coat, and was about to slip the other two into the same recess when the door-bell rang so stridently that both men jumped and M. Chasle, who had not yet inserted the money in his cache, stammered: “Wait! Wait a bit!”

His features twitched convulsively when he knew the voice for that of his concierge; the man was hammering on the door and shouting:

“Is M. Chasle there?”

Antoine hastily opened to him.

“Is he there?” the man panted. “It’s urgent. An accident. The little girl’s been run over.”

M. Chasle, who had heard the man’s words, staggered, and Antoine returned to the room just in time to catch him as he fell. Laying him on the floor, he fanned his face with a wet towel. The old man opened his eyes and tried to stand up.

“Do come quickly, M. Jules,” said the man at the door. “I’ve a taxi waiting.”

“Is she dead?” Antoine asked, without pausing to wonder who the little girl might be.

“As near as may be,” the man replied under his breath.

Antoine took from a shelf the first-aid kit which he had handy for such emergencies and, suddenly remembering that he had lent Jacques his bottle of iodine, ran to his brother’s room, shouting to the concierge :

“Get him into the taxi! Wait for me! I’ll come with you.”

When the taxi pulled up near the Tuileries in front of the house in the Rue d’Alger where the Chasles lived, Antoine had pieced together, from the concierge’s flustered explanations, an outline of the accident. The victim was a little girl who used to meet “M. Jules” each evening on his way back. Had she tried to cross the Rue de Rivoli on this occasion, as M. Jules was late in coming home? A delivery tri-car had knocked her down and passed over her body. A crowd had gathered and a newspaper-vender who was present had recognized the child by her plaited hair, and furnished her address. She had been carried unconscious to the flat.

M. Chasle, crouching in a corner of the taxi, shed no tears, but each new detail drew from him a racking sob, half muffled by the hand he pressed against his mouth.

A crowd still lingered round the doorway. They made way for M. Chasle, who had to be helped up the stairs as far as the top landing by his two companions. A door stood open at the end of a corridor, down which M. Chasle made his way on stumbling feet. The concierge stood back to let Antoine pass, and touched him on the arm.

“My wife, who’s got a head on her shoulders, ran off to fetch the young doctor who dines at the restaurant next door. I hope she found him there.”

Antoine nodded approval and followed M. Chasle. They crossed a sort of anteroom, redolent of musty cupboards, then two low rooms with tiled floors; the light was dim and the atmosphere stifling despite the open windows giving on a courtyard. In the further room Antoine had to edge round a circular table where a meal for four was laid on a strip of dingy oilcloth. M. Chasle opened a door and, entering a brightly lit room, stumbled forward with a piteous cry:

“Dédette! Dédette!”

“Now, Jules!” a raucous voice protested.

The first thing Antoine noticed was the lamp which a woman in a pink dressing-gown was lifting with both hands; her ruddy hair, her throat and forehead were flooded with the lamplight. Then he observed the bed on which the light fell, and shadowy forms bending above it. Dregs of the sunset, filtering through the window, merged in the halo of the lamp, and the room was bathed in a half-light where all things took the semblance of a dream. Antoine helped M. Chasle to a chair and approached the bed. A young man wearing pince-nez, with his hat still on, was bending forward and slitting up with a pair of scissors the blood-stained garments of the little girl. Her face, ringed with matted hair, lay buried in the bolster. An old woman on her knees was helping the doctor.

“Is she alive?” Antoine asked.

The doctor turned, looked at him, and hesitated; then mopped his forehead.

“Yes.” His tone lacked assurance.

“I was with M. Chasle when he was sent for,” Antoine explained, “and I’ve brought my first-aid kit. I’m Dr. Thibault,” he added in a whisper, “house-physician at the Children’s Hospital.”

The young doctor rose and was about to make way for Antoine.

“Carry on! Carry on!” Antoine drew back a step. “Pulse?”

“Almost imperceptible,” the doctor replied, intent once more on his task.

Antoine raised his eyes towards the red-haired young woman, saw the anxiety in her face, and made a suggestion.

“Wouldn’t it be best to telephone for an ambulance and have your child taken at once to my hospital?”

“No!” an imperious voice answered him.

Then Antoine descried an old woman standing at the head of the bed—was it the child’s grandmother?—and scanning him intently with eyes limpid as water, a peasant’s eyes. Her pointed nose and resolute features were half submerged in a vast sea of fat that heaved in billowy folds upon her neck.

“I know we look like paupers,” she continued in a resigned tone, “but, believe me, even folk like us would rather die at home in our own beds. Dédette shan’t go to the hospital.”

“But why not, Madame?” Antoine protested.

She straightened up her back, thrust out her chin, and sadly but sternly rebuked him.

“We prefer not,” was all she said.

Antoine tried to catch the eye of the younger woman, but she was busy brushing off the flies that obstinately settled on her glowing cheeks, and seemed of no opinion. He decided to appeal to M. Chasle. The old fellow had fallen on his knees in front of the chair to which Antoine had led him; his head was buried on his folded arms as though to shut out all sights from his eyes, and, from his ears, all sounds. The old lady, who was keenly watching Antoine’s movements, guessed his intention and forestalled him.

“Isn’t that so, Jules?”

M. Chasle started.

“Yes, Mother.”

She looked at him approvingly and her voice grew mothering.

“Don’t stay there, Jules. You’d be much better in your room.”

A pallid forehead rose into view, eyes tremulous behind their spectacles; then, without a protest, the poor old fellow stood up and tip-toed from the room.

Antoine bit his lips. Meanwhile, pending an occasion further to insist, he took off his coat and rolled up his sleeves above the elbows, Then he knelt at the bedside. He seldom took thought without at the same time beginning to take action—such was his incapacity for long deliberation on any issue raised, and such his keenness to be up and doing. The avoidance of mistakes counted less with him than bold decision and prompt activity. Thought, as he used it, was merely the lever that set an act in motion—premature though it might be.

Aided by the doctor and the old woman’s trembling hands, he had soon stripped of? the child’s clothing; pale, almost grey, her body lay beneath their eyes in its frail nakedness. The impact of the car must have been very violent, for she was covered with bruises, and a black streak crossed her thigh transversely from hip to knee.

“It’s the right leg,” Antoine’s colleague observed. Her right foot was twisted, bent inwards, and the whole leg was spattered with blood and deformed, shorter than the other one.

“Fracture of the femur?” suggested the doctor.

Antoine did not answer. He was thinking. “That’s not all,” he said to himself; “the shock is too great for that. But what can it be?” He tapped her knee-cap, then ran his fingers slowly up her thigh; suddenly there spurted through an almost imperceptible lesion on the inner side of the thigh, some inches above the knee, a jet of blood.

“That’s it,” he said.

“The femoral artery!” the other exclaimed.

Antoine rose quickly to his feet. The need to make, unaided, a decision gave him a new access of energy and, as ever when others were present, his sense of power intensified. A surgeon? he speculated. No, we’d never get her alive to the hospital. Then who? I? Why not? And, anyhow, there’s no alternative.

“Will you try a ligature?” asked the doctor, piqued by Antoine’s silence.

But Antoine did not heed his question. It must be done, he was thinking, and without a moment’s delay; it may be too late already, who knows? He threw a quick glance round him. A ligature. What can be used? Let’s see. The redheaded girl hasn’t a belt; no loops on the curtains. Something elastic. Ah, I have it! In a twinkling he had thrown off his waistcoat and unfastened his braces. Snapping them with a jerk, he knelt down again, made with them a tourniquet, and clamped it tightly round the child’s groin.

“Good! Two minutes’ breathing-time,” he said as he rose. Sweat was pouring down his cheeks. He knew that every eye was fixed on him. “Only an immediate operation,” he said decisively, “can save her life. Let’s try!”

The others moved away at once from the bed—even the woman with the lamp, even the young doctor, whose face had paled.

Antoine clenched his teeth, his eyes narrowed and grew hard, he seemed to peer into himself. Must keep calm, he mused. A table? That round table I saw, coming in.

“Bring the lamp!” he cried to the young woman, then turned to the doctor. “You there—come with me!” He strode quickly into the next room. Good, he said to himself; here’s our operating-theatre. With a quick gesture he cleared the table, stacked the plates in a pile. “That’s for my lamp.” Like a general in charge of a campaign, he allotted each thing its place. “Now for our little patient.” He went back to the bedroom. The doctor and the young woman hung on his every gesture and followed close behind him. Addressing the doctor, he pointed to the child: