The Counterfeiters (42 page)

“I am glad you didn’t sign, but what prevented you?”

“No doubt some secret instinct.… ” Bernard reflected a few moments, and then added, laughing: “I think it was chiefly the looks of the audience—starting with my brother, whom I recognized among them. It seemed to me all the young men I saw there, were animated by the best of sentiments, and that they were doing quite right to abdicate their initiative (for it wouldn’t have led them far) and their judgment (for it was inadequate) and their independence of mind (for it was still-born). I said to myself too, that it was a good thing for the country to count among its citizens a large number of these well-intentioned individuals with subservient wills, but that my will would never be of that kind. It was then that I began to ask myself how to establish a rule, since I did not accept life without a rule and yet would not accept a rule from anyone else.”

“The answer seems to me simple: to find the rule in oneself; to have for goal the development of oneself.”

“Yes … that, as a matter of fact, is what I said to myself. But I wasn’t much further on. If I were certain of preferring what is best in myself, I might develop that rather than the rest. But I can’t even find
out what
is
best in myself.… I wrestled over it all night, I tell you. Towards morning I was so tired that I thought of enlisting—before I was called up.”

“Running away from the question doesn’t solve it.”

“That’s what I said to myself, and that even if I put the question off now, it would come up again more seriously than ever after my service. So I came to ask you your advice.”

“I have none to give you. You can only find counsel in yourself; you can only learn how you ought to live by living.”

“And if I live badly, whilst I’m waiting to decide how to live?”

“That in itself will teach you. It’s a good thing to follow one’s inclination, provided it leads up hill.”

“Are you joking?… No; I think I understand you, and I accept your formula. But while I am developing myself, as you say, I shall have to earn my living. What do you say to an alluring advertisement in the papers: ‘Young man of great promise requires a job. Could be employed in any capacity’?”

Edouard laughed.

“No job is so difficult to find as any job. Better be a little more explicit.”

“Perhaps one of the innumerable little wheels in the organization of a big newspaper would do? Oh! I’d accept any post however subordinate—proof-reader—printer’s devil—anything. I need so little.”

He spoke with hesitation. In reality, it was a secretaryship he wanted; but he did not dare say so to Edouard, because of their mutual dissatisfaction with each other on this score. After all, it wasn’t his, Bernard’s, fault, that this trial of theirs had failed so lamentably.

“I might perhaps,” said Edouard, “get you into the
Grand Journal;
I know the editor.… ”

•    •    •

While Bernard and Edouard were conversing in this manner, Sarah was having an extremely painful explanation with Rachel. Sarah had suddenly understood that Rachel’s remonstrances were the cause of Bernard’s abrupt departure; and she was indignant with her sister, who, she said, was a kill-joy. She had no right to impose upon others a virtue which her example was enough to render odious.

Rachel, who was terribly upset by these accusations, for she had always sacrificed herself, turned very white, and protested with trembling lips:

“I can’t let you go to perdition.”

But Sarah sobbed and cried out:

“I don’t believe in your heaven. I don’t want to be saved.”

She decided on the spot to return to England, where she would go and stay with her friend. For, after all, she was free and claimed the right to live in any way she pleased. This melancholy quarrel left Rachel shattered.

Edouard took care to arrive at the pension before the boys came in. He had not seen La Pérouse since the beginning of the term and it was to him that he wanted to speak first. The old music master carried out his new duties as well as he could—that is to say, very badly. He had at first tried to make himself liked, but he had no authority; the boys took advantage of him; his indulgence passed for weakness, and they began to take strange liberties. La Pérouse tried to be severe, but too late; his exhortations, his threats, his reprimands finally set the boys against him. If he raised his voice, they laughed; if he thumped his first resoundingly on his desk, they shrieked in pretended terror; they mimicked him; they called him by absurd nicknames; caricatures of him circulated from bench to bench; he—so kind and courteous—was portrayed armed with a pistol (the pistol which Ghéridanisol, George and Phiphi had found one day in the course of an indiscreet investigation of his room), ferociously massacring the boys; or else on his knees before them, with hands clasped, imploring, as he had done at first, for “a little quiet, for pity’s sake.” He was like a poor old stag at bay among a savage pack of hounds. Edouard knew nothing of all this.

EDOUARD’S JOURNAL

La Pérouse received me in a small class-room on the ground floor, which I recognized as the most uncomfortable one in the school. Its only furniture consisted
of four benches attached to four desks, a blackboard and a straw chair, on which La Pérouse forced me to sit down, while he screwed himself up slantwise on to one of the benches, after vain endeavours to get his long legs under the desk.

“No, no. I’m perfectly comfortable, I assure you,” he declared, while the tone of his voice and the expression of his face said:

“I am horribly uncomfortable, and I hope it’s obvious; but I prefer to be so; and the more uncomfortable I am, the less you will hear me complain.”

I tried to make a joke, but could not succeed in getting him to smile. His manner was ceremonious and stiff, as if he wished to keep me at a distance and imply: “I owe it to you that I am here.”

At the same time he declared himself perfectly satisfied with everything, though all the while eluding my questions and seeming vexed at my insisting. I asked him, however, where his room was.

“Rather too far from the kitchen,” he suddenly exclaimed; and as I expressed my astonishment: “Sometimes during the night, I want something to eat … when I can’t sleep.”

I was near him; I came nearer still and put my hand gently on his arm. He went on in a more natural tone:

“I must tell you that I sleep very badly. When I do go to sleep, I never lose the feeling that I am asleep. That’s not proper sleep, is it? A person who is properly asleep, doesn’t feel that he is asleep. When he wakes up, he just knows that he has been asleep.”

Then, leaning towards me, he went on with a kind of finicky insistence:

“Sometimes I’m inclined to think that it’s an illusion and that, all the same, I
am
properly asleep, when I think I’m not asleep. But the proof that I’m not properly asleep is that if I want to open my eyes, I
open them. As a rule, I don’t want to. You understand, don’t you, that there’s no object in it? What’s the use of proving to myself that I’m not asleep? I always go on hoping that I shall go to sleep by persuading myself that I’m asleep already.… ”

He bent still nearer and went on in a whisper:

“And then there’s something that disturbs me. Don’t tell anyone.… I haven’t complained, because there’s nothing to do about it; and if a thing can’t be altered, there’s no good complaining, is there?… Well, just imagine, in the wall, right against my bed and exactly on a level with my head, there’s something that makes a noise.”

He had grown excited as he spoke. I suggested that he should take me to his room.

“Yes! Yes!” he said getting up suddenly. “You might be able to tell me what it is … I can’t succeed in making out. Come along.”

We went up two stories and then down a longish passage. I had never been into that part of the house before.

La Pérouse’s room looked on to the street. It was small but decent. On the bedside table, I noticed, next to a prayer book, the case of pistols, which he had insisted on taking with him. He seized me by the arm, and pushing aside the bed a little:

“There! Now!… Put your ear to the wall.… Can you hear it?”

I listened for a long time with the greatest attention. But notwithstanding the best will in the world, I could not succeed in hearing anything. La Pérouse grew vexed. Just then a van drove by, shaking the house and making the windows rattle.

“At this time of day,” I said, in the hopes of pacifying him, “the little noise that irritates you is drowned by the noise of the street.… ”

“Drowned for you, because you can’t distinguish
it from the other noises,” he exclaimed with vehemence. “As for me, I hear it all the same. In spite of everything, I go on hearing it. Sometimes I am so exasperated by it that I make up my mind to speak to Azaïs or to the landlord.… Oh, I don’t suppose I shall get it to stop.… But, at any rate, I should like to know what it is.”

He seemed to reflect for a few moments, then went on: “It sounds something like a nibbling. I’ve done everything I can think of not to hear it. I pull my bed away from the wall. I put cotton wool in my ears. I hang my watch (you see, I’ve put a little nail there) just at the place where the pipe (I suppose) passes, so that its ticking may prevent my hearing the other noise.… But then it’s even more fatiguing, because I have to make an effort to distinguish it. Absurd, isn’t it? But I really prefer to hear it without any disguise, since I know it’s there all the same.… Oh! I oughtn’t to talk to you in this way. You see, I’m nothing but an old man now.”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, and stayed for some time, as though sunk in a kind of dull misery. The sinister degradation of age is not so much attacking La Pérouse’s intelligence as the innermost depths of his nature. The worm lodges itself in the fruit’s core, I thought, as I saw him give way to his childish despair, and remembered him as he used to be, so firm—so proud. I tried to rouse him by speaking of Boris.

“Yes, his room is near mine,” said he, raising his head. “I’ll show it to you. Come along.”

He preceded me along the passage and opened a neighbouring door.

“The other bed you see there is young Bernard Profitendieu’s.” (I judged it useless to tell him that Bernard had left that very day, and would not be coming back to sleep in it.) He went on: “Boris likes having him as a companion and I think he gets on with him. But, you know, he doesn’t talk to me much. He’s very
reserved.… I am afraid the child is rather unfeeling.”

He said this so sadly that I took upon myself to protest and to say that I could answer for his grandson’s warmheartedness.

“In that case, he might show it a little more,” went on La Pérouse.

“For instance, in the mornings, when he goes off to the
lycée
with the others, I lean out of my window to see him go by. He knows I do.… Well, he never turns round.”

I wanted to explain to him that no doubt Boris was afraid of making a spectacle of himself before his schoolfellows and dreaded being laughed at; but at that moment a clamour arose from the courtyard below.

La Pérouse seized me by the arm and, in an altered, agitated voice:

“Listen! Listen!” he cried, “they are coming in.”

I looked at him. He had begun to tremble all over.

“Do the little wretches frighten you?” I asked.

“No, no,” he said in some confusion; “how could you think such a thing? …” Then, very quickly: “I must go down. Recreation only lasts a few minutes and you know I take preparation. Good-bye. Good-bye.”

He darted into the passage, without even shaking my hand. A moment later I heard him stumbling downstairs. I stayed for a few moments to listen, as I had no wish to go past the boys. I could hear them shouting, laughing and singing. Then a bell rang and silence was abruptly restored.

I went to see Azaïs and obtained permission for George to leave school in order to come and speak to me. He soon joined me in the same small room in which La Pérouse had received me a little while before.

As soon as he was in my presence, George thought fit to assume a jocular air. It was his way of concealing his embarrassment. But I wouldn’t swear that he was
the more embarrassed of the two. He was on the defensive; for no doubt he expected to be sermonized. He seemed trying as hastily as possible to lay hold of anything he could use as a weapon against me, for, before I had opened my mouth, he enquired after Olivier, in such a bantering tone of voice, that I should have had the greatest pleasure in boxing his ears. He was in a position to score off me. His ironical eyes, the mocking curl of his lips all seemed to say: “I’m not afraid of you, you know.” I at once lost all my self-assurance and my one anxiety was to conceal the fact. The speech I had prepared suddenly struck me as inappropriate. I had not the prestige necessary to play the censor. At bottom, George amused me too much.

“I have not come to scold you,” I said at last; “I only want to warn you.” (And, in spite of myself, my whole face was smiling.)

“Tell me first whether it’s Mamma who has sent you?”

“Yes and no. I have spoken about you to your mother; but that was some days ago. Yesterday I had a very important conversation about you with a very important person, whom you don’t know. He came to see me on purpose to talk about you. A
juge d’instruction
. It’s from him I’ve come. Do you know what a
juge d’instruction
is?”

George had turned suddenly pale, and no doubt his heart had stopped beating for a moment. He shrugged his shoulders, it is true, but his voice trembled a little:

“Oh! all right! Out with it! What did old Profitendieu say?”

The youngster’s coolness took me aback. No doubt it would have been simpler to go straight to the point; but going straight to the point is a thing particularly foreign to my nature, whose irresistible bent is towards moving obliquely. In order to explain my conduct,
which, though it afterwards appeared absurd to me, was quite spontaneous at the time, I must say that my last conversation with Pauline had greatly exercised me. I had immediately inserted the reflections it had suggested to me into my novel, putting them into the form of a dialogue, which exactly fitted in with certain of my characters. It very rarely happens that I make direct use of what occurs to me in real life, but for once I was able to take advantage of this affair of George’s; it was as though my book had been waiting for it, it came in so pat; I hardly had to alter one or two details.