The Thibaults (57 page)

“Yes. Well, I mean … not so very often. Do you?”

“Personally, I’m almost always thinking about it. Most of my thoughts bring me back to the idea of death. But”—he sounded discouraged—”however often one comes back to it, it’s only a notion of the mind… .” And there he left it. For the moment he looked almost handsome, his face aglow with fervour, a zest for life mingled with dread of death.

They walked a little way before she broke the silence.

“I can’t think what’s brought it into my head—really it has nothing to do with what you were saying,” she began in a hesitating voice. “But I’ve just remembered something … the first time I saw the sea. But perhaps Daniel’s told you already?”

“No. Tell me about it.”

“It’s ancient history, you know—when I was fourteen or fifteen. It was near the end of the holidays and Mamma and I were going to join Daniel at Treport. He’d asked us to get out at some station or other on the way, and met us there with a farm-cart. As he didn’t want to spoil my first impression of the sea by casual glimpses at the bends of the road, he blindfolded me—a silly idea, wasn’t it? After a while he told me to get down and led me by the hand. I followed him, stumbling at every step. A terrific gale lashed my face and there was a perfectly fiendish din roaring and shrieking in my ears. I was scared to death and begged him not to take me any further. At last we came to the summit of the cliff, and Daniel slipped behind me and untied the handkerchief. Before my eyes lay the open sea and far beneath, where the cliff fell sheer, the waves were breaking on the rocks. On every side was sea, sea everywhere as far as eye could reach. I stopped breathing and collapsed into Daniel’s arms. It took me some minutes to come to, and then I started sobbing, sobbing. They had to take me home and put me to bed; I had a temperature. Mamma was terribly upset. But now—do you know?—I don’t regret it one bit; I feel I really know the sea.”

Jacques had never seen her thus; no trace of melancholy on her face, her look unclouded, almost ecstatic. Then, suddenly, the fervour died from her face.

Little by little Jacques was discovering an unknown Jenny. Her abrupt changes of mood, from reticence to sudden outbursts, brought to his mind a choked but copious spring, which flowed only in sudden gushes. Here lay, he guessed, the secret of that innate sadness which gave her face its contemplative air and lent such charm to her rare, transient smiles. And suddenly the thought appalled him, that such a walk as this must have an end.

“No need to hurry, is there?” he tentatively suggested, now they had passed beneath the arch of the old forest gate. “Let’s take the long way round. I’ll bet you’ve never tried that lane.”

A sandy track, soft underfoot, led down into the darkness of a glen. Flanked at first by wide strips of grass, it narrowed as it went on. Here the trees thrived ill; their meagre leafage let the sunlight through on every side.

They walked on, not in the least troubled by their silence.

What’s come over me? Jenny was wondering. He’s so different from what I thought. Yes, he’s … he’s … But she could not find the word she wanted. How alike we are! she thought, with a strange thrill of certitude and joy. But then she grew anxious. What thoughts were in his mind?

But Jacques’s mind was empty, lulled by a bliss devoid of thoughts. He walked beside her and asked nothing more of life.

“I’m afraid I’m taking you into one of the ugliest parts of the forest,” he murmured at last.

She started at the sound of his voice and the same thought flashed across the minds of both: that their brief silence had been of crucial import for the vague dream that haunted both alike.

“Yes, I agree with you,” she replied.

“Why, it isn’t even real grass!” Jacques prodded the ground with his toecap. “It’s a sort of dog-grass.”

“Well, Puce certainly seems to take to it—just look!”

They spoke at random; common words seemed to have completely changed their sense and value for them.

That’s a charming blue, thought Jacques, looking at her dress. How is it that a soft, greyish blue is so exactly her colour? Then his thoughts flew off at a tangent.

“I want to tell you something!” he exclaimed. “What makes me so dense is that I never can switch my attention off what’s going on in my mind.”

“I’m just the same.” Jenny fancied she was capping his remark. “I’m nearly always daydreaming. I like it awfully; so do you, don’t you? The things I dream are quite my own and I like to feel I needn’t share them with anyone. Do you see what I mean?”

“Yes, absolutely!”

A sweet-brier grew beside the lane; some branches were in flower and on one the tiny hips were forming, Jacques was in half a mind to proffer them to her and quote: “I bring thee flowers and fruit and leafy boughs. And with them all … my heart!” Then he would pause, observing her. But his courage failed him. When they had passed the bush, he said to himself: “What a litterateur I am!”

“Do you like Verlaine?” he asked.

“Yes.
Sagesse
, which Daniel used to like so much, is my favourite.”

He murmured:

“Beauté des jemmes, lew faiblesse, et ces mains pâles

Qui font souvent le bien et peuvent tout le mal …

“And how about Mallarme?” he continued, after a pause. “I’ve quite a decent anthology of modern poets. Would you like me to bring it?”

“Yes.”

“Do you care for Baudelaire?”

“Not so much. He’s rather like Whitman. Anyhow, I don’t know much of Baudelaire.”

“Have you read Whitman?”

“Daniel read me some of his poems last winter. I can quite understand Whitman’s appeal for him. But, as for me—” Again the word “impurity,” which they had used a little while ago, rose to their minds. How like me she is! Jacques thought.

“As for you,” he went on, “that’s just the reason why you don’t like Whitman so much as he does, isn’t it?”

She nodded, grateful to him for uttering her unsaid thought.

The pathway, wider now, debouched into a clearing where a bench was set between two oak-trees stripped of their foliage by caterpillars. Jenny threw her wide-brimmed hat of supple straw onto the grass, and sat down.

“There are times,” she exclaimed impulsively, as though she were thinking aloud, “when I almost wonder how it is you’re such a bosom friend of Daniel’s!”

“Why?” He smiled. “Do I strike you as being so very different from him?”

“Very different indeed—today.”

He lay down on a grassy bank a little way from her.

“My bosom friend …” he repeated musingly. “Does he ever talk to you about me?”

“No. I mean, yes. Now and then.”

She blushed; but he was not looking her way.

“Yes,” he continued, nibbling a blade of grass, “nowadays there’s a solid bond of affection between us; it’s calm and tolerant. But we weren’t always like that.” Pausing, he pointed to a snail, translucent as an agate, which, clinging to a grass-haulm, timidly probed the sunlight with its viscid horns. “When I was working for the exam, you know,” he added inconsequently, “I often used to think for weeks on end that I was going off my head; my brain was seething with such a ferment of ideas. And then—I was so lonely!”

“But you were living with your brother, weren’t you?”

“Yes, luckily enough. And I was quite free—that, too, was a stroke of luck. Otherwise I think I’d have gone mad, really mad. Or else run away.”

For the first time in her life she recalled the Marseille escapade with something like indulgence.

“I felt misunderstood.” His voice grew sombre. “Misunderstood by everyone, even by my brother; often enough even by Daniel, too.”

Just as I did! was her unspoken comment.

“When I was in those moods I couldn’t summon up the faintest interest in my studies. I doped myself with reading—everything in Antoine’s library, all the books Daniel could supply. I must have sampled nearly every modern novelist, French, English, and Russian. You simply can’t imagine the thrills I got from books! And, afterwards, everything else seemed so deadly dull—my tutors, all their pedantic fumbling with texts, their precious cult of respectability. No, most decidedly that wasn’t in my line at all!” He talked about himself without a trace of self-conceit; like all young people he was full of himself and could imagine no keener pleasure than to dissect his personality under attentive eyes; and his pleasure was infectious. “Those were the days,” he continued, “when I used to write Daniel thirty-page letters that I’d spent all night concocting. Letters where I poured out all my day’s enthusiasms and, most of all, disgusts. I suppose I ought to laugh at all that, now. But, no, I can’t.” He pressed his hand against his forehead. “The life I led in those days made me suffer far too intensely for me to make my peace with it, as yet. I had Daniel give me back my letters and I read them over again! They read like the confessions of a madman in his lucid intervals. Sometimes there were several days between them, sometimes only a few hours. Each was a sort of volcanic outburst, the eruption of a mental crisis, and, often as not, in flat contradiction with the one that went before it. A religious crisis, really, for I’d just been soaking myself in the Gospels or the Old Testament—or else in Comte and positivism. What a letter I wrote just after reading Emerson! I’d been through all the usual maladies of youth; a galloping ‘Baudelairitis,’ a sharp attack of Vinci. But none of them was chronic; they came and went! One day I rose a classicist and went to bed romantic, and made a secret holocaust of my Boileau and Malherbe in Antoine’s laboratory. I performed the rite in solitude, laughing like a fiend. Next day everything that had to do with literature seemed to me utterly stale and unprofitable. I started delving into geometry, from the primers on; I’d set my heart on unearthing new laws that would turn all previous theories inside out. Then I had a spell of poetizing. I wrote odes for Daniel, Horatian epistles of two hundred lines, dashed off with hardly one erasure. The oddest thing of all”—his voice had suddenly grown calm—”was a pamphlet I composed in English, yes entirely in English, and entitled ‘The Emancipation of the Individual in Relation to Society.’ I gave it a preface, a short one, I grant, in—would you believe it?—modern Greek!” (The last detail was untrue; he remembered merely his intention to compose such a preface.) He burst out laughing. “No, I’m not really so mad as I seem!” he exclaimed after a pause. Then he fell silent again and, half laughingly, but without the least trace of vanity, declared: “Anyhow, I was quite different from the rest of them.”

Jenny was in a brown study, stroking her little dog. How often in the past had she pictured Jacques as a disturbing, almost a dangerous personality! Now, however, she could not but admit her views had changed; he had ceased to be alarming.

Jacques was stretched out on the grass, staring in front of him, glad to have unburdened his heart so freely.

“Isn’t it pleasant here under the trees?” he murmured lazily.

“Yes. What’s the time?”

Neither of them had a watch. Anyhow, they were at the confines of the park and need not hurry. From the bench Jenny could see the tops of two familiar chestnut-trees and, further on, the cedar beside the forester’s lodge, a tracery of palm-like foliage etched in black against the blue.

She bent towards the dog, which was crouching against her skirt, and took care not to look in Jacques’s direction when next she spoke.

“Daniel has read me some of your poems.”

His silence was so portentous that now she could not help stealing a glance at him. A blush had mounted from cheeks to brow, to the peak-point of his hair, and he was glaring angrily about him. She, too, began to blush.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have told you that!” she exclaimed,

But already Jacques regretted his annoyance and was trying to overcome it; yet he could not bear to think that someone—and that someone, Jenny—should choose to judge him by his fumbling first attempts; he was all the more touchy on this count because he knew only too well that he had never done himself justice—a thought that never ceased to rankle in his mind.

“My poetry, why, it’s—rubbish!” he exclaimed brutally. She did not protest or stir a finger; he was grateful for her reticence. “You must have a very poor opinion of me, if you … If anyone …” He broke off, then passionately exclaimed: “Oh, if anyone could guess the things I mean to do!” The all-absorbing topic, the woodland peace, Jenny’s proximity, stirred him to such emotion that his voice faltered and his eyes began to smart as if he were on the brink of tears. “Take, for instance,” he went on after a pause, “take the people who congratulate me on getting into the Ecole Normale. You can’t imagine how I feel about all that! I’m ashamed of it. Yes, positively ashamed. Not merely ashamed of having got in at all, but of having bowed to … to the opinions of all those … If you knew what they really are, those people! All shaped in the same mould, by the same books. Books and books and books! And to think I had to cringe to them! I! That I gave in to their … Just imagine it!” Words failed him yet again. He fully realized that he had given no plausible motive for his aversion; the true and valid arguments for it had sunk their roots too deeply into his being to be dragged forth to order and paraded on the surface. “Yes, I despise the whole crowd of them!” he exclaimed. “And myself still more for having had any truck with them. No, I shall never, never—yes, it’s unforgivable, all that!”

She kept her self-control the better for seeing him so uncontrolled. Though she had no clear insight into Jacques’s mind, she had noticed that he often gave vent to a vague rancour of this sort, and his reluctance to forgive. How he must have suffered! Yet—and this was the difference between them—his faith in the future and happiness in store was unmistakable. A ceaseless undertone of hope and confidence pervaded his invectives; boundless as his ambition might seem, it was untouched by doubt. Hitherto Jenny had never speculated on Jacques’s future, yet she was not surprised to learn that he aimed high, very high indeed; even in the days when she had thought of Jacques as a brutal, oafish schoolboy, she never failed to recognize that his was a force to be reckoned with. Today his feverish outburst and her glimpse of the dark fires that preyed upon his heart made her feel dizzy; it was as if she too were being drawn against her will into a maelstrom of emotions. So vivid was the sense of insecurity it gave her that she stood up to go.