The Thibaults (75 page)

Antoine gave her an unamiable look. He had come to a swift decision. Any serious conversation with this woman was out of the question; he would get rid of her at once and send an urgent summons to her husband. True, Huguette was not Battaincourt’s daughter, but Antoine remembered Jacques’s description of the man: “Deficient in grey matter, but a heart of gold.”

“Is your husband in Paris?” he asked.

At last, thought Mme. de Battaincourt, he means the interview to take a more sociable turn. About time, too! She had a favour to ask of Antoine and, to that end, wanted to be in his good books. She burst out laughing and called the English girl to witness.

“Did you hear what he said, Mary? No, my dear doctor, there’s no escaping Touraine till February—the shooting keeps us there. It was all I could do to get away this week, between two house-parties. On Saturday I’m expecting another houseful.”

Antoine made no comment; his silence gave the final touch to her vexation. Really there was nothing to be done with such a boor! How ridiculous he looked with that absent-minded air of his; ill-mannered, too!

She crossed the room to get her coat.

“Yes,” Antoine was saying to himself. “I’ll wire to Battaincourt at once; I’ve got his address… . He’ll be in Paris tomorrow or the day after at the latest. X-ray examination on Thursday. And, to make sure, a consultation with the chief. We’ll have her in plaster by Saturday.”

Huguette, seated in a chair, was demurely putting on her gloves while her mother, resplendent in a vast fur-coat, settled her little casque of golden pheasant’s plumage, shaped like a Valkyrie’s helmet. There was an undertone of rancour in her voice when she spoke again.

“Well, doctor, what about it? So there’s no prescription? What’s your advice for her this time? Anyhow, I suppose you won’t say no to her attending some meets with Mary, in the dog-cart? …”

AFTER seeing
Mme.
de Battaincourt off, Antoine returned to the consulting-room and once again opened the curtained door. Rumelles entered with the brisk alacrity of a man who has never a minute to spare.

“I fear I kept you waiting,” Antoine suggested politely.

With an urbane gesture the visitor waved the apology aside and cordially held out his hand, as though to imply: “Here I am merely one of the common herd of patients.”

“Hallo!” Antoine exclaimed quizzingly. “You look as if you’d just been visiting the President of the Republic, to say the least!”

Rumelles gave a self-satisfied laugh. He was wearing a silk-lined frock-coat and there was a top-hat in his hand. A well-set-up man, he carried the habit of officialdom with no mean success.

“Not quite that, my dear fellow. But I’ve just been at the Servian Embassy, where there was a luncheon in honour of the Janilozsky mission, who are visiting Paris this week. And I shall be on duty again presently; the minister has deputed me to receive Queen Elisabeth, who has had the lamentable notion of announcing that she will visit the Chrysanthemum Show at five-thirty. Luckily I know her; she’s quite simple, really, a delightful woman. She adores flowers as much as she detests ceremony, so I shall confine myself to a few quite informal words of welcome.”

He smiled to himself, and it struck Antoine that he was thinking out a neat conclusion for his speech, something gallant and respectful, with a spice of wit in it.

Rumelles was a man in the early forties, with a lion’s mane of shaggy, yellowish hair brushed back from his temples, the rather heavy features of a Roman emperor, a truculent, upcurled moustache, and clear blue eyes on which he studiously imposed a keen, alert expression. “But for the moustache,” Antoine sometimes reflected, “our lion would have the profile of a sheep.”

“And what a lunch it was, my dear fellow!” He paused, his eyes half closed, wagging his head in feigned dismay. “Twenty or twenty-five of us sat down to table, functionaries and front-rankers all; yet, with the best of good will, you couldn’t point to more than two or three intelligent men amongst them. Shocking, isn’t it? Still, I fancy I made rather a useful move. Happily the minister has no idea of it; whenever he gets onto anything, he’s like a dog with a bone, and he’d be sure to botch it.” His emphatic delivery and the subtle smile which rounded off his simplest phrases gave a distinct, if uniform, incisiveness to all he said.

“Excuse me a moment.” Antoine went to his desk. “I’ve an urgent telegram to write… . But I’m listening just the same. How are you feeling after your Servian beanfeast?”

But Rumelles, seeming to ignore the question, continued beating the air with words. Once he starts speechifying, thought Antoine, you’d never think him pressed for time. As he scribbled the telegram to Battaincourt, some scattered phrases caught his inattentive ear.

“Now that Germany is on the war-path … The Leipzig demonstrations at the unveiling of the memorial … They jump at any pretext … The hundredth anniversary of 1813 … It’s coming, my dear fellow, it’s coming like a house on fire. Just wait another two or three years, and you’ll see!”

“What’s coming?” Antoine asked, looking up with an amused glance at Rumelles. “A war, do you mean?”

“Yes, war.” Rumelles’s voice was earnest. “We’re heading straight for it.”

He had always had a harmless mania for predicting an impending European war. It sometimes looked as if he positively banked on it— a view which his next words bore out. “And that will be the moment for a man to show the stuff he’s made of.” An ambiguous remark, which might have meant: “to go on active service,” but Antoine had no doubt about his meaning: “to scramble into power.”

Rumelles, going up to the desk, leaned towards Antoine and instinctively lowered his voice.

“You’ve been following what’s going on in Austria?”

“Well … yes—like anyone else who’s not in the know.”

“Tisza is putting himself forward as Berchtold’s successor. Well, I had a close-up view of Tisza in 1910—he’s the deadliest of fire-eaters; he made that clear enough when he was President of the Hungarian Chamber. Did you read that speech of his in which he addressed an open threat to Russia?”

Antoine had finished writing and had risen from his chair.

“No,” he replied. “But ever since I’ve been old enough to read the papers, I’ve always seen Austria referred to as the danger-spot of Europe. Still, so far, that hasn’t led to much harm.”

“Because Germany was putting the brake on. But just at present, owing to the change which has come over Germany in the past month or so, the Austrian attitude is becoming definitely alarming. And of that change the general public has not the least idea.”

“Tell me about it.” Antoine could not repress his interest.

Rumelles glanced at the clock, then drew himself erect.

“I need hardly tell you that, in spite of the ostensible alliance and the fine speeches of the two emperors, relations between Germany and Austria during the last six or seven years-“

“Well,” Antoine broke in, “and if they’re strained, doesn’t that mean a guarantee of peace, so far as we’re concerned?”

“The best of guarantees. Indeed it
was
the only one.”

“ ‘
Was
,’ you say. Then …?”

“All that, my dear fellow, has gone to pot.” He looked at Antoine and, as though he were wondering how far he dare commit himself, muttered between his teeth: “And it’s our fault, perhaps.”

“Our fault?”

“Yes, I’m afraid so. But that’s another story. Supposing I were to tell you that the most clear-sighted people in Europe are convinced that we have bellicose projects at the back of our minds?”

“We? What nonsense!”

“The Frenchman doesn’t travel. The Frenchman, my dear fellow, has no conception how his flag-waving propensities may strike outsiders. Anyhow, the understanding which has been growing up between France, England, and Russia, their latest military pacts, all the diplomatic wire-pulling that has been going on for the last two years, are, righ’tly or wrongly, beginning seriously to alarm Berlin. Confronted with what she describes in quite good faith as the ‘menace’ of the Triple Entente powers, Germany is waking up to the possibility that she may find herself isolated. She knows that Italy is only in theory a member of the Triple Alliance. So she has only Austria to fall back on, and that is why in the last few weeks Germany has made it her business to tighten up the bond of amity between them. What was the price she paid—was it the offer of important concessions, or a deviation from her former line of policy? You catch the point? From that to a quick reshuffle of the cards, an acquiescence in, not to say the active championship of, Austria’s Balkan policy, it was only a step; and, so they say, that step has been taken. What makes it all the more serious is that Austria, seeing how the wind lies, has seized the occasion, as you have observed, to force the pace. So now we have Germany deliberately backing the wildcat ambitions of the Austrians, and heaven alone knows where those ambitions, backed by Germany, may land us at any moment! It can only mean that Europe will be drawn, drawn ineluctably, into the Balkan imbroglio. Now do you see why one can’t help being pessimistic, or, at the least, uneasy, if one is even a little in the know?”

Antoine maintained a sceptical silence. He knew from experience that experts in foreign politics have a way of predicting “inevitable” wars. He had rung for Léon and, standing near the door, waited for him to appear; after that, he would divert his visitor’s attention to serious topics. Meanwhile he watched Rumelles with an uncharitable eye as he paced to and fro before the fireplace, oblivious of the time, all for his verbiage, and obviously delighted with himself.

The late Senator Rumelles, his father, had been a friend of M. Thibault, and had died just in time to miss his son’s elevation to high official rank. Antoine had come across the younger Rumelles now and then in the past, but till a week ago had not seen much of him. His opinion of the man, never a favourable one, had gained in definition with each visit. He had observed that Rumelles’s incessant flow of talk, his premature adoption of a statesman-like urbanity, and his interest in world-problems always disclosed, sooner or later, a streak of meanness, a crude concern with personal advancement. Indeed, ambition seemed the only strong emotion known to Rumelles, an ambition aiming somewhat higher than his mental equipment (Antoine thought little of it) warranted. He was far from being well educated, timid though by no means modest, and unstable as water; but these defects were artfully concealed under the semblance of a “rising man.”

Meanwhile Léon had come and gone. “That’s enough of politics— and psychology,” Antoine said to himself, and stemmed the spate of words.

“Well, then? No improvement?”

Rumelles’s face fell.

One evening during the previous week—it was nearly nine o’clock—Rumelles had entered Antoine’s consulting-room, white with emotion. Two days previously he had discovered that he was suffering from a disease which he dared not disclose to his family doctor, still less to a total stranger. “You see, my dear fellow,” he explained, “I’m a married man, and something of a public figure too; for both these reasons I can’t afford to fall into the hands of a babbler, or a blackmailer.” He had remembered that old Thibault’s son was a doctor, and now begged Antoine to treat his case. After trying without success to induce him to consult a specialist, Antoine had consented; he was always ready to practise his art, and curious to see what kind of man this politician was.

“Really no improvement at all?”

Rumelles’s only answer was a tragic shake of the head. For all his loquacity he could not bring himself to talk about his ailment, or admit that at times he endured the tortures of the damned, and that just now, after the official lunch, he had been obliged to break off an important conversation and beat a hasty retreat from the smoking-room, so violent had been the spasms of pain.

Antoine thought it over.

“Then,” he announced in a firm voice, “we shall have to try the silver nitrate treatment.”

He opened the “surgery” door for Rumelles, whose flow of words had quite dried up, to enter. Then, turning his back on him, he prepared the solution and charged a syringe with cocaine. When he returned, his victim had doffed the ceremonial frock-coat; collarless and trouserless, he looked like any poor afflicted mortal—-a suffering, uneasy, shamefaced man, removing his soiled underlinen with awkward gestures.

But he would not own himself beaten yet. When Antoine came up he raised his head a little and forced his lips into a would-be casual smile. He suffered none the less, and in a myriad ways. Even his spiritual loneliness was preying on his mind. For, in his present plight, it was an added tragedy that he could never wholly lay aside the mask, could not impart to anyone his loathing for this grotesque misadventure, which galled not only his body, but his pride. For—in whom could he confide? Not in a friend, for he had none. For ten years his political career had forced him to lead a life apart, behind a barrage of feigned and dubious good-fellowship. He had not a single genuine affection to fall back on. Yes, there was one: his wife’s. She was, in fact, his only friend, the one person in the world who knew and loved him for what he really was, the only being to whom he could have unburdened his heart—and she, she was the one person in the world from whom, above all and at all costs, he must conceal this damnable mishap!

A stab of physical pain cut across his musings; the nitrate was beginning to take effect. Rumelles stifled his first cries of agony, but presently, despite the action of the sedative, he clenched his fists and teeth in vain, and could restrain himself no longer. Deep in his body coursed a stream of liquid fire, and he groaned like a woman in labour, while big tears rose and glistened in his blue eyes.

Antoine felt sorry for him.

“Bear up, old man; it’s over now. Painful, of course, but there was nothing else for it and it won’t last. Keep quite still; I’ll give you some more cocaine.”

But Rumelles was not listening. Stretched out on the table under the harsh light, he was jerking his legs spasmodically, like a frog on the dissecting-table.