The Thibaults (94 page)

Antoine was going on with his anecdote.

One day, Jacques gathered, being pressed for time, his brother had dropped in at Faubois’s shop for a shave. The brothers had always refused to give their patronage to Faubois, because this hairdresser had for twenty years had their father’s custom, trimming his beard each Saturday. The old man, who knew Antoine well by sight, had at once begun talking to him about M. Thibault. And, little by little, Antoine, as he listened absent-mindedly, a towel round his neck, found, to his amazement, the old barber’s gossip blocking out a portrait of his father far different from any he had anticipated. “For instance,” Antoine said, “he was always talking about us to Faubois. About you, especially. Faubois well remembers the day when ‘M. Thibault’s boy’—that’s you—passed his ‘matric.’ As he was going by, Father pushed the shop-door open and announced: ‘M. Faubois, my boy’s‘ got through his exam.’ ‘Pleased as Punch, your old dad was that day; it did one good to see it!’ That’s how Faubois put it. Surprising, isn’t it? But what staggers me most is what’s been happening—the change—in these last three years.”

A slight frown had settled on Jacques’s face; Antoine wondered if he were not blundering. Still, he had gone too far to stop.

“Yes. Ever since you left. I discovered finally that Father had never let the truth leak out, that he’d made up a whole yarn to hoodwink everybody. Here’s the sort of thing Faubois said to me that day: ‘There’s nothing like foreign travel. Your father did well to send his young son abroad, seeing he had the money to pay for it. Why, with the mails, there ain’t no trouble nowadays getting letters from anywhere on earth, and your father, he told me he got a letter each week from his boy, regular as clockwork.’ ”

Antoine refrained from looking at Jacques, and decided to sheer off these memories that touched him too nearly.

“Father used to talk to him about me, too. ‘My elder boy will be a professor at the Medical School one of these days.’ About Mademoiselle, too, and the maids. Faubois knows all about the household. About Gise, as well. By the way, that’s a curious thing; it seems that Father talked quite a lot about Gise. I gathered that Faubois used to have a daughter of about the same age; I believe she’s dead. He wbuld say to Father: ‘My girl does so and so,’ and Father’d cap it with: ‘My girl does so and so.’ Would you believe it? Faubois reminded me of a great many things I’d forgotten and Father’d told’ him of—childish pranks, things Gise said when she was little. Arid; there’s something else. I can quote the exact words Faubois used:’ ‘Your dad was always sorry he hadn’t had a daughter. “But,” he says to me, “this little girl she’s just like a daughter to me.“ ‘ Exactly that! Well, I tell you I was simply staggered! Yes, under all his gruffness Father had a heart—shy, perhaps, and over-sensitive—that no one ever dreamt of.”

Without a word, without once looking up, Jacques was still walking to and fro; though he rarely glanced in his brother’s direction,: none of Antoine’s movements escaped him. He was not stirred emotionally, but he was torn by violent, contradictory impulses. What: was most painful to him by far was the feeling that the past was breaking into his life inevitably, whether by force or with his fred consent.

Confronted by Jacques’s silence, Antoirie was losing heart; it seemed quite futile trying to get a conversation under way. He kept a. close; watch on his brother’s face, hoping against hope to catch some gleam of a responsive thought. But all he saw was gloomy, stubborn indifference. And yet he could not bring himself to feel resentful. Even with its aloofness from him, for all its dourness, that was the face he loved more than all other faces, his brother’s. And once again, though he; dared not betray it by word or gesture, a wave of deep affection swept over him.

But now. silence had set in again, oppressive, ineluctable. The only sounds were the ripple of water in the gutters, the crackling of the fire, and now and then the creak of a loose board as Jacques stepped on it.

Going up to the stove, he opened it and put in two logs: as he crouched before it, almost on his knees, he turned to his brother, who was following him with his eyes, and muttered in a surly tone:

“You judge me harshly. But I don’t care; you’re wrong.”

“But I don’t judge you, Jacques,”. Antoine hastened to put in.

“I’ve a perfect right to be happy in my own way,” Jacques went on. He drew himself up with a quick jerk, was silent for a moment, then added through his clenched teeth: “And here I’ve been completely happy.”

Antoine bent forward. “Do you really mean that?”

“Yes. Completely.”

After each remark they gazed intently at each other for a moment. In their eyes was curiosity, but behind it loyalty, the deeper for its reticence.

“I believe you,” Antoine said. “In any case, your leaving home … Still, there are so many things that I … well, that puzzle me.” He made haste to add: “Don’t think I want to blame you in the least, my dear Jacques. . , .”

Then for the first time Jacques noticed his brother’s smile. The Antoine he remembered had been so painfully strenuous, so aggressively die man of action, that the charm of the changed smile came as a surprise. Perhaps fearing to yield to his emotion, he clenched his fists and made a gesture of annoyance.

“Oh, Antoine, stop it! Don’t talk about that any more!” Then, as if to qualify his outburst, added: “For the present.” A look of real distress passed over his face; turning towards a dark corner of the room, he said in a low, veiled voice: “You don’t, you can’t possibly understand… .”

They were silent again, but the oppressiveness had lifted from the air.

Antoine rose and, in a casual tone which he was none the less careful not to overdo, inquired: “Don’t you smoke? I’m dying for a cigarette, if you don’t mind.” He felt it necessary to keep the situation on an undramatic level; gradually, by cordiality and easy manners, to wean his brother from his churlishness.

He took a few puffs at his cigarette, then went to the window. Below him he saw the roofs of old Lausanne cataracting down towards the lake in an inextricable tangle of black humps and ridges, the outlines of which blurred into the vapour steaming off them. Coated with lichen, the tiled roofs looked sodden as rain-drenched felt. A range of mountains with the light behind them fretted the far horizon, their snow-caps gleaming white against the drab grey sky, and long pale streaks trailing down the leaden-hued slopes. It was as if a range of black volcanoes had erupted milk, depositing a creamy lava.

Jacques went up to him.

“Those are the Dents d’Oche,” he said, pointing towards the snow-caps.

Falling away in tiers, the city masked the nearer bank, and against the light the further shore loomed through the veil of rain like a sheer cliff of darkness.

“So much for your charming lake!” Antoine remarked. “Today it looks more like the Channel in a squall.”

Jacques vouchsafed a fleeting smile. He stayed at the window, unmoving, unable to take his eyes off the far bank; lost in a daydream, he was picturing its green woods and villages, the fleets of little boats moored along the piers, the winding paths leading to rustic inns perched on the mountainside. There he had wandered, lived adventurously, and now he was to leave it all—for how long? he wondered.

Antoine tried to divert his attention. “I’m sure you’ve heaps to do this morning. Especially if …” He was going to say: “… if we’re to leave tonight,” but thought better of it.

Jacques shook his head pettishly. “No, I’ve nothing to do. I tell you I’m quite independent. Everything’s as simple as daylight when one lives alone, when one keeps … free.” The word seemed to linger on the air after he had spoken it. Then the cheerfulness went out of his voice; gazing fixedly at his brother, he sighed: “But of course you can’t understand.”

Antoine wondered what sort of life Jacques might be leading at Lausanne. “There’s his writing, obviously. But what does he live on?” He made some guesses at it, then by way of giving expression to his thoughts, remarked in a careless tone:

“Really, now that you’ve come of age, you might have claimed your share of what Mother left us.”

A gleam of amusement lit Jacques’s eyes. He all but put a question. For a moment he felt a slight regret; yes, on occasion, there’d been jobs he would have gladly forgone! At the Tunis docks, in the Adriatica basement at Trieste, in the Deutsche Buchdruckerei at Innsbruck. But the feeling passed at once, and the thought that M. Thibault’s death would make him definitely well off did not even cross his mind. No! He did not need them, or their money. He could stand on his own feet.

“How do you manage?” Antoine ventured to ask. “Have you any trouble in earning enough to live on?”

Jacques cast a glance round the room. “You can see for yourself,” he said.

Antoine could not refrain from asking a direct question: “But what exactly do you do?”

The stubborn, secretive look came back to Jacques’s face. His brows knitted, then grew smooth again.

“Don’t imagine,” Antoine hastened to explain, “that I’m trying to poke my nose into your affairs. There’s only one thing I want, old man, and that’s for you to make the most of your life, to be happy.”

“Happy!” Jacques sounded almost startled. It was as if he had said: “I—happy? What an idea!” Then hastily he added in an exasperated tone: “Oh, please drop it, Antoine. You’d never really understand.” He tried to smile, took a few uncertain steps, then went back to the window and stared vaguely out across the lake. Seemingly unconscious that it contradicted his exclamation of a moment past, he murmured: “I’ve been completely happy here. Completely!”

He glanced at his watch and, without giving Antoine time to put in another word, remarked:

“I’d better introduce you to old Kammerzinn. And to his daughter, if she’s in. Then we’ll go and have lunch. Not here; somewhere outside.” He had opened the stove again and was replenishing it as he spoke. “He used to be a tailor. Now he’s a town-councillor. A keen trade-unionist too. He has started a weekly paper, which he runs almost single-handed. A very decent old fellow, you’ll see.”

They found Kammerzinn sitting in his overheated office. He was in his shirt-sleeves, busy correcting proofs. The old man wore curious rectangular glasses with gold stems, supple as hairs, coiling round his small, fleshy ears. Sharp-witted for all his air of guilelessness, inclined to rant, but with a redeeming twinkle in his eye, he had a way of looking his interlocutor full in the face, above the gold-rimmed lenses, chuckling to himself the while. He sent for beer at once. He started by addressing Antoine as “My dear sir”; a moment later it was “My dear boy.”

Jacques informed him briefly that his father’s health obliged him to absent himself “for some time”; he was leaving that night, but would keep his room, paying the month’s rent in advance, and would leave “all his things” in it. Antoine heard without moving a muscle.

Waving in the air the sheets he was correcting, old Kammerzinn launched into a voluble harangue about a project for co-operative printing of the various party newspapers. Jacques seemed interested and put in suggestions. Antoine listened. It looked as if Jacques were in no hurry to be alone with him again. Or was he waiting for someone who did not appear?

At last he made a move.

OUT in the street a bitter wind was blowing, driving before it flurries of melting snow.

“It’s turned to sleet,” Jacques said.

He was trying to be less taciturn. As they walked down a flight of wide stone steps flanking a public building, he volunteered the information that this was the university. His tone implied a certain pride in the city of his choice. Antoine duly admired. But the alternating blasts of icy rain and snow made them little inclined to linger out of doors.

At the junction of two narrow streets, thronged with pedestrians and cyclists, Jacques made straight for a row of large windows along the sidewalk; the only indication of the nature of the premises was an inscription on the glass entrance-door in white capitals: 

GASTRONOMICA.

Panelled in old oak, the interior gleamed everywhere with beeswax. The proprietor—a fat, active, red-faced man, puffing and blowing but obviously well pleased with himself, his health, his staff and cheer—was fussing round his customers, treating them all like unexpected guests. The walls were covered with gothic letter inscriptions such as
Our motto: Honest Food, not Chemicals, and At Gastronomica, no dry Mustard on the Rims of Mustard-Pots.

Jacques, who since the interview with Kammerzinn and his walk in the rain had been seeming less on edge, smiled amiably at his brother’s amused interest. It was quite a surprise to him to find Antoine so eager to observe the world around him, taking stock so zestfully of every little touch of “local colour,” so avid of peculiarities.

In earlier days, when the brothers happened to dine together in the restaurants of the Latin Quarter, Antoine had never noticed anything; the first thing he had always done was to prop some medical journal against the water bottle on the table.

Antoine was conscious that Jacques was watching him.

“Do you find me changed?” he asked.

Jacques made an evasive gesture. As a matter of fact Antoine seemed to him greatly changed. But how? Most likely during the past three years he had forgotten many of his brother’s traits; now he was rediscovering them one by one. The way Antoine squared his shoulders, spread his fingers out when he was making an explanation, the flicker of his eyelids—each little movement suddenly came back to him; it was like coming on a once familiar picture the memory of which had vanished with the years. But there were other characteristics that baffled him, for they did not fit in with anything remembered: the general expression of his face, his attitude, his calmness and conciliatory disposition, the absence of hardness and impatience in his eyes. All that was new to Jacques. He tried to explain it in a few stumbling phrases. Antoine smiled. That was Rachel’s doing. For several months that passionate adventure had stamped his face—till now inapt for any show of happiness—with a kind of gay self-confidence, even, perhaps, the complacence of the favoured lover; and those months had left their trace for good.