The Thibaults (8 page)

The first thing was to find somewhere to sleep. Opposite the station was a white globe of light inscribed “Hotel”; at the uninviting entrance the proprietor was on the watch for custom. Daniel, the more confident of the two, had boldly asked for two beds for the night. Mistrustful on principle, the man put them some questions. They had their story pat. At the Paris station their father had found he had forgotten a trunk, and had missed the train. He would be arriving in the morning, without a doubt, by the first train. The hotel-keeper hemmed and hawed, eyeing the youngsters. At last he opened a register.

“Write your names there.”

He addressed Daniel not only because he seemed the older of the two—he looked sixteen—but even more because there was something distinguished in his looks and general demeanour that compelled a certain respect. On entering the hotel he had taken off his hat, not out of timidity but because he had a way of taking off his hat and letting his arm drop to his side—a gesture that seemed to imply: “It isn’t specially for you I’m doing this, but because I believe in observing the customs of polite society.” His dark hair came down to a neat point in the exact centre of his forehead, the skin of which was white as a young girl’s. But there was nothing girlish in the firmly moulded chin, which, though quietly determined in its poise, had no suggestion of aggressiveness. His eyes had countered, without either weakness or bravado, the hotel-keeper’s scrutiny, and he had written without hesitation in the register: “Georges and Maurice Legrand.”

“The room will be seven francs. We always expect to be paid in advance. The night train gets in at 5:30. I’ll see you’re up in time for it.”

They did not dare to tell him they were faint with hunger.

The furniture of the room consisted of two beds, a chair, and a basin. As they entered, a like shyness came over them both—they would have to undress in front of each other! All desire for sleep had fled. To postpone the awkward moment, they sat down on the beds and began checking up their resources. Their joint savings came to one hundred and eighty-eight francs, which they shared equally between them. Jacques, on emptying his pockets, produced a little Corsican dagger, an ocarina, a twenty-five-centime edition of Dante, and, last of all, a rather sticky slab of chocolate, half of which he gave to Daniel. Then they sat on, wondering what next to do. To gain time, Daniel unlaced his shoes; Jacques followed his example. A vague feeling of apprehension made them feel still more embarrassed. At last Daniel made a move.

“I’ll blow out the candle,” he said.

When he had done so, they hastily undressed and climbed into bed, without speaking.

Next morning, before five o’clock, someone started banging loudly on their door. Wraithlike in the pale light of the breaking day, they slipped into their clothes. The proprietor had made some coffee for them, but they refused it for fear of having to talk to him. Hungry and shivering, they visited the station bar.

By noon they had made a thorough exploration of Marseille. With freedom and the broad daylight, their daring had come back to them. Jacques invested in a note-book in which to record his impressions; now and then he stopped to jot down a phrase, the light of inspiration in his eye. They bought some bread and sausages and, going to the harbour, settled down on a coil of rope in front of stolid, stationary liners and dancing yachts and smacks.

A sailor told them to get up; he needed the cable they were sitting on—

Jacques risked a question. Where were those boats going?

“That depends. Which of em?”

“That big one.”

“Her? She’s off to Madagascar.”

“Really? Shall we see her sail?”

“No, she ain’t sailing till Thursday next. But if you want to see a liner going out, you’d best come back here this afternoon. The
La Fayette
there is sailing for Tunis at five.”

At last they had the information they wanted.

Daniel, however, pointed out that Tunis was not Algeria.

“Anyhow it’s Africa,” Jacques said, biting off a mouthful of bread. Squatting against a heap of tarpaulins, with his shock of coarse red hair standing up, like a tuft of autumn grass, from his low forehead; with his angular head and protruding ears, his scraggy neck and queer-shaped little nose that kept on wrinkling, he brought to mind a squirrel nibbling beechnuts.

Daniel had stopped eating. He turned to Jacques.

“I say! Supposing we wrote to
them
from here, before we—!”

The glance the younger boy flashed at him cut him short.

“Are you mad?” he spluttered, his mouth half full of bread. “Just for them to have us arrested the moment we land?”

He scowled furiously at his friend. In the unprepossessing face, which a plentiful crop of freckles did nothing to improve, the blue, harsh, deep-set, imperious eyes had a curiously vivid sheen. Their expression changed so constantly as to make them seem inscrutable. Now earnest, and a moment later gay and mocking; now soft and almost coaxing, they would suddenly go hostile, almost cruel. And then, unexpectedly, they would grow dim with tears; though oftenest they were shrewd and ardent, seemingly incapable of gentleness.

On the brink of a retort Daniel checked himself. His face expressed a meek submission to Jacques’s outburst and, as if to excuse his last remark, he smiled. He had a special way of smiling: the small, pursed mouth would suddenly open on the left, showing his teeth, in a quaint, twisted grin that lent a charming air of gaiety to the pensive face.

On such occasions it seemed odd that the tall, mature-minded youngster did not rebel against the ascendancy of his childish friend. His education and experience, the liberty he had enjoyed, gave him an uncontestable advantage over Jacques. Not to mention that at the lycée where they had met Daniel had proved a good pupil, Jacques a slow-coach. Daniel’s nimble wits were always ahead of any demand that was made on them; Jacques, on the other hand, was a poor worker, or rather did not work at all. It was not that his intelligence was at fault. The trouble was that it was directed towards matters that had no connexion with his studies. Some demon of caprice was always prompting him to do the most ridiculous things. He had never been able to resist temptation and seemed quite irresponsible, seemed to follow only the promptings of that inner voice. But the oddest thing was that, though he was at the bottom of his class in most subjects, his fellow-pupils and even the masters could not help feeling a certain interest in him. Among the other youngsters, whose personalities were kept in somnolent abeyance by habit and discipline, among the sedulous masters, whose natural gifts seemed to have gone stale on them, this dunce with the unpromising face but given to outbursts of sudden candour and caprice, who seemed to live in a world of daydreams created by and for himself alone, who launched without a second thought into the most preposterous adventures—this odd little creature, while he thoroughly dismayed them, compelled their tacit admiration.

Daniel had been among the first to feel the attraction of Jacques’s mind, less developed than his own but so fertile, so lavish of surprises, and so remarkably instructive. Moreover, he too had in him a strain of waywardness, a like inclination towards independence and revolt. As for Jacques, a day-boarder in a Catholic school, the offspring of a family in which religious exercises bulked so largely—it had been for the sheer excitement of another evasion from the narrow life at home that he had gone out of his way to attract the Protestant boy’s attention; for even then Jacques had guessed that Daniel would reveal to him a world far different from his own. But in a few weeks their their comradeship had blazed up into an all-absorbing passion, and in it both had found a welcome relief from the moral solitude from which the two, unconsciously, had been ‘suffering so long. It was a chaste, almost a mystical love, in which the two young souls fused their common yearnings towards the future, and shared all the extravagant and contradictory feelings that can obsess the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy—from a passion for silkworms or secret codes to the most intimate heart-searchings, even to that feverish desire for Life which seemed to intensify with every day they lived through.

Daniel’s silent smile had calmed Jacques, and now he was munching away again at his bread. The lower part of his face was rather gross: he had the characteristic Thibault jaw, and an over-large mouth, with chapped, lips. But, though ugly, the mouth was expressive and suggested a strong-willed, sensual nature.

He looked up at his friend. “You’ll see, I know the ropes!” he boasted. “Life’s easy in Tunis. Anybody who applies is taken on for the rice-fields. You can chew betel—it’s delicious. You earn wages right away, and you get all the grub you want—dates and tangerines and so on … and, of course, lots of travelling.”

“We’ll write to them from there,” Daniel suggested.

“Perhaps,” Jacques corrected, with a toss of his red poll. “Once we’ve found our feet and they realize we can get on without them.”

They fell silent. Daniel had finished his meal and was gazing at the big black hulls, the busy scene on the sunlit wharves, and the luminous horizon glimpsed through a forest of masts. He was struggling against himself, trying to fix his mind on what he saw, so as not to think about his mother.

The main thing was somehow to get on board the
La Fayette
that evening.

A waiter pointed out to them the offices of the Messageries Line. The fares were posted up. Daniel went to the ticket-office window.

“Please, my father has sent me to get two third-class passages to Tunis.”

“Your father?” The old clerk went on placidly with his work. All that could be seen of him was the top of his forehead, rising above a pile of papers. He continued writing for a while. Then, without looking up, he said to Daniel: “Very well, go and tell him to come here himself— and to bring his identification papers with him, don’t forget!”

They grew aware that the other people in the office were staring at them, and fled without another word. Jacques, who was boiling with rage, thrust his hands deep into his pockets. His imagination was suggesting to him a series of expedients. They might get taken on as cabin-boys, or as cargo—in crates well stocked with food; or hire a row-boat and go by easy stages along the coast to Gibraltar and thence to Morocco, halting each night at a port where they would play the ocarina and pass the hat round on the terraces of the little inns:

Daniel was pondering; that inner voice had once again made itself heard, warning him. He had heard it thus several times since they had run away. But this time he could no longer turn a deaf ear; he had to take heed of it. And there was no mistaking the disapproval manifest in that still small voice.

“Why not lie low in Marseille for a bit?” he suggested.

“We’d be spotted before two days were out,” Jacques retorted scornfully. “Oh, yes, you can be sure the hunt is up already; they’re on our tracks all right”

Daniel pictured the scene at home: his mother’s anxiety as she plied Jenny with questions, and, after that, her visit to the principal to ask if he knew anything about her son.

“Listen,” he said. He was breathing with an effort. Then he noticed a bench near by and made Jacques sit beside him. Taking his courage in both hands, he went on: “Now or never, we’ve got to think things out. After all, when they’ve hunted for us high and low for two or three days, don’t you think they’ll have been punished enough?”

Jacques clenched his fists. “No, I tell you! No!” he shouted. “Have you forgotten everything so soon?” Such was the nervous tension of his body that he was no longer sitting on the bench, but lying propped against it, stiff as a board. His eyes were aflame with rage against the school, the Abbé, the lycée, the principal, his father, society, the world’s injustice. “Anyhow they’ll never believe us!” he cried. His voice went hoarse. “They’ve stolen our grey letter-book. They don’t understand and they can’t understand! If you’d seen the priest, the way he tried to make me confess things! His Jesuit tricks, of course. Just because you’re a Protestant, he said, there’s nothing you wouldn’t do, nothing …!”

Shame made him turn away. Daniel’s eyes dropped and a pang of grief shot through his heart at the hideous thought that their foul suspicions might have been imparted to his mother.

“Do you think they’ll tell Mother?” he muttered.

But Jacques was not listening.

“No!” he exclaimed again. “No, I won’t hear of it. You know what we agreed on. Nothing’s changed. We’ve gone through enough persecution. Goodbye to all that! When we’ve proved by deeds the stuff we’re made of, and that we don’t need them, you’ll see how they’ll respect us. There’s only one thing to do, and that’s to go abroad and earn our living without them. After that, yes, then we can write and say where we are, and state our terms, and tell them we intend to remain friends, and be free, because our friendship is for life and for death!” He stopped, steadied his nerves, and went on in a normal tone. “Otherwise, as I’ve told you, I shall kill myself.”

Daniel gazed at him with a scared expression. The small pale face, mottled with yellow blotches, had a look of deadly earnest, exempt from any bravado.

“I swear to you,” Jacques continued, “that I’m quite determined not to fall into their clutches again. Before that happens I’ll have shown them what I am. Either we win our freedom or—see that?” Raising the edge of his waistcoat, he let Daniel see the handle of the Corsican dagger that he had filched, on the Sunday morning, from his brother’s room. “Or this might be better.” He drew from his pocket a small bottle done up in paper. “If you dared to refuse, now, to embark with me, I’d … I’d make short work of it. Like this!” He made the gesture of drinking off the bottle. “And I’d drop down dead.”

“What … what is it?” Daniel murmured, terrified.

“Tincture of iodine,” Jacques replied, still watching Daniel’s face.

“Look here, Thibault! Do please give me that bottle!” Daniel pleaded.

Horrified though he was, he felt a thrill of love and admiration; once more he was carried away by his friend’s extraordinary charm. And again the project of adventure tempted him. Meanwhile Jacques had put the bottle back in his pocket.