The Thibaults (104 page)

Antoine ran out after her. An involuntary hope, of which he was frankly conscious, spurred him on.

Jacques, too, had risen, moved by the same hope. After a moment’s hesitation he followed his brother out.

No, it was not the end; only another attack, but a sudden and very acute one.

The dying man’s jaws were clenched so tightly that, from the door, Jacques could hear the grinding teeth. The face had turned a purplish crimson and the whites of the eyes showed between the slotted lids. His breathing was uneven and occasionally ceased altogether; the stoppages seemed never ending and, while they lasted, Jacques felt his own heart stop and, himself unable to draw breath, turned desperately towards his brother. The bodily spasm was already such that only the back of the old man’s head and his heels touched the bed; yet every moment his body grew more steeply arched. Only when the muscular tension had reached its maximum intensity did it become stabilized in a vibrant equilibrium which, more than any movement, conveyed the tremendous strain to which the body was subjected.

“A whiff of ether,” Antoine said. The calmness of his voice struck Jacques with wonder.

The attack was running its course. At intervals hoarse, roaring grunts, louder and louder, issued from the twisted lips. Then the head began lolling from side to side; a confused tremor set in along the limbs.

“Grasp his arm,” Antoine whispered, while he seized the other wrist and the nuns struggled to hold down the legs, which now were threshing to and fro, tearing off the sheets.

The struggle went on for several minutes. Then the violence of the spasms diminished and the epileptiform convulsions grew less frequent. The head ceased rolling from side to side, the limbs relaxed, and at last the exhausted body lay flat and still upon the bed.

Then the moans began again. “Ah! Aah! Aaah! … Ah! Aah! Aaah!”

Jacques laid back on the bed the arm that he was holding. He noticed that his fingers had left their marks on it. The sleeve of the nightshirt was torn and one of the collar buttons had snapped. Jacques could not take his eyes off the wet, swollen lips incessantly moaning that dreadful “Ah! Aah! Aaah!” And suddenly everything seemed to take effect at once: his emotion, the interrupted lunch, the fumes of ether. He felt himself retching, his cheeks turning green. With a great effort he brought himself to turn away, stumble hastily out of the bedroom.

As Sister Céline, helped by the old nun, was about to tuck in the sheets, she suddenly turned to Antoine. Holding up the top sheet, she pointed to a large moist patch, at the place where the old man had been struggling.

Antoine betrayed no feeling. But, after a moment, he moved away from the bed and leaned against the mantelpiece. Now that the functions of the kidney had been temporarily restored, the effects of the poisoning were staved off—for how long, it was impossible to say. Antoine knew very well that nothing could avert the fatal issue; it had merely been postponed. Two or three days’ reprieve, perhaps. He pulled himself together; he did not believe in brooding over distasteful facts. Well, the fight would last longer than foreseen; there was no getting around it. And the longer it was to last, the greater the need for good staff-work. The energies of his helpers must be husbanded.

He decided to organize two shifts of nurses, with fixed periods on and off duty. Léon could be enlisted. He, Antoine, would be on duty in both shifts; he was determined not to quit the sick-room. Fortunately, before leaving for Switzerland, he had cancelled his engagements for some days ahead. If some emergency call came in from any of his patients, he would send Thérivier. What else was there? Ah, yes; warn Philip. And ring up the hospital. What else? He was conscious of forgetting something important. (“A symptom of fatigue. Have some cold tea on tap,” he noted.) Why, of course! Gise must be told. He must write to her this afternoon. Lucky that old Mademoiselle hadn’t yet spoken of sending for her niece!

He was standing in front of the fire, his hands resting on the marble mantelpiece, mechanically stretching first one foot, then the other, towards the warmth. For him planning was the equivalent of action; he had recovered his poise.

At the other end of the room, M. Thibault’s groans were growing louder; the pain was setting in again, fiercely as ever. The two nuns were seated. A chance, this, not to be missed of putting through some telephone calls. But when Antoine reached the door, something made him walk back to the bed for a closer view of the dying man. It looked as if, already, another attack was coming on; M. Thibault’s face was becoming more and more darkly flushed, his breath was failing… . Where had Jacques gone?

Then he heard voices in the corridor. The door opened and, followed by Jacques, the Abbé Vécard entered. Antoine noticed his brother’s sullen expression; but the priest’s eyes were sparkling, though his face was impassive as ever. M. Thibault’s groans were coming faster; suddenly he jerked his arm forward and the finger-joints contracted with the brittle sound of cracking nuts.

“Jacques!” Antoine called, as he reached towards the ether.

The priest hesitated, then, after crossing himself discreetly, retired without a word.

ALL that afternoon, all night, and throughout the following morning the two shifts organized by Antoine took turns every three hours at M. Thibault’s bedside. The first group consisted of Jacques, the maid, and the older nun; the second of Sister Céline, Léon, and Clotilde, the cook. Antoine so far had not taken a moment’s rest.

The attacks were growing more and more frequent, and so terrific was their vehemence that, after each, those who had been holding down the sufferer were as worn out as he was, and fell back, gasping for breath, onto their chairs. After that they had to watch him suffer, with folded hands; there was nothing to be done. In the intervals between attacks the neuralgic pains returned with increased violence, distributed over almost every portion of the body; the ears of the watchers had not a moment’s respite from the groans and screams of agony. The old man’s brain was too exhausted now to grasp what was happening; sometimes, indeed, he passed into a state of raving delirium. But his nervous responses were cruelly intact and he kept on indicating by gestures each place where he felt pain. Antoine was dumbfounded by the strength that remained in the old body, bedridden for so many months. And so were the two nuns, though long experience had inured them to the vagaries of disease. They were so convinced that the uraemic intoxication could not but get the better of this extraordinary resistance that they inspected the bed several times an hour to see if it was still dry, and the kidney had not resumed its functions.

On the first day the concierge had come to ask that, if possible, the shutters as well as the windows might be closed, so as to deaden the groans, which echoed across the courtyard and spread consternation in the building. The tenant of the flat above, a young woman with child, whose bedroom was just over M. Thibault’s, had been so upset as to be obliged to leave the house in the middle of the night and take shelter with her parents. So all the windows had to be kept shut. The only light was the small bedside lamp. Despite the wood-fire kept constantly burning to carry off the noxious odours, the atmosphere in the room was unpleasant to a degree. The emotions of the past three days had taxed Jacques severely, and now under the stupefying effects of the foul air and semi-darkness, he kept on dropping off to sleep for a few seconds at a time, standing, his arm in air, then waking up with a start, and completing the unfinished gesture.

Whenever he was off duty in the sick-room, Jacques went downstairs to Antoine’s flat, the key of which he had got back; there he was sure of being alone. He hurried at once to his old room and flung himself fully dressed onto the sofa-bed. But rest eluded him. Across the flimsy window-curtains he saw the snow-flakes eddying, blurring the outlines of the houses and deadening all the noises of the street. And then pictures rose before him of Lausanne, the Pension Kammerzinn, Sophia, his friends. All grew confounded in his thoughts, the present and the past, snows of Paris and Swiss winters, the warmth of the room where he was now and that of his little stove, the smell of ether clinging to his clothes and the tang of resin from his pitchpine floor. He got up to try a change of atmosphere, dragged himself across to Antoine’s study, and, dizzy with exhaustion, sank into an easy chair. He felt sick of everything, as if he had been kept in suspense eternally and to no purpose, torn by sterile longings that nothing could assuage, and haunted by the feeling that nowhere, nowhere on earth, was there a place where he could feel at home.

From noon onwards there were virtually no intervals between the attacks, and it was obvious that M. Thibault’s condition had taken a turn for the worse. When Jacques came with his shift for his spell of duty at the bedside, he was horrified by the changes that had taken place since the forenoon. The ceaseless convulsions of the facial muscles and, most of all, the swelling caused by the toxic condition had blotted out the features. The face of the dying man had become almost unrecognizable.

Jacques would have liked to put some questions to his brother, but their several tasks gave them no respite. Besides, he was far too exhausted, too weary in mind and body, to make the effort of framing intelligible phrases to express his thoughts. Sometimes, between two attacks, racked by compassion for this never-ending agony, he would gaze at his brother with haggard, questioning eyes; but always Antoine gritted his teeth and looked away.

After a series of convulsions that seized the old man with increasing violence, Jacques’s nerves gave way, and a fit of blind rage came over him. His forehead dripping with sweat, he strode towards his brother, gripped his arm, and dragged him to the far end of the room.

“Look here, Antoine! This has got to stop, you can’t let it go on.” His voice was vibrant with reproach.

Antoine turned his head, with a slight shrug signifying helplessness.

“But,
do
something!” Jacques shook his brother’s arm. “Find some way of stopping the pain. There must be something that can be done. Do it!”

Antoine’s eyebrows lifted a shade contemptuously; then he gazed towards the bed, whence long-drawn, agonizing screams of pain were rising. Perhaps a hot bath might be tried; obviously that idea had crossed his mind several times already. Was it feasible? The bathroom was at the other end of the flat, next to the kitchen; the last door in a corridor which had a right-angled turn. A difficult undertaking. Still …

In a few seconds he had weighed the pros and cons, formed his decision, and was mapping out a plan of campaign. He must take advantage of one of those periods of prostration, lasting two or three minutes, which usually followed each attack. To bring it off, everything must be made ready in advance. He looked towards the nurse.

“Sister, stop what you’re doing now, please, and fetch Léon. Sister Céline, too. Tell her to bring me two sheets. Two, you understand. Adrienne, will you go to the bathroom and turn on the hot water. Get the water to a hundred degrees and see it stays at that temperature till we come. Then tell Clotilde to warm some towels in the oven. And to fill the warming-pan with charcoal. Be quick, please.”

Sister Céline and Léon, who had been resting, entered just in time to take Adrienne’s place at the bedside. Ail attack was just beginning; it was violent, but brief.

When it was over, and a rapid but calmer respiration had followed the stertorous breathing that now accompanied the periods of convulsion, Antoine cast a rapid glance over the helpers he had mustered.

“Now’s the time,” he said, and added, turning to Jacques: “No hurrying, please—but there’s not a second to lose.”

The nuns had already begun untucking the bed; a cloud of powder rose from the sheets, and an odour of mortifying flesh filled the room.

“Get off his nightshirt quickly,” Antoine commanded; then turned to Léon. “Two more logs on the fire, in readiness.”

There was a feeble moaning from the bed. “Ah! Aah! Aaah!” Daily the bed-sores spread and deepened; the shoulder-blades, buttocks, and heels were an angry mass of sores which, though powdered with talc and bandaged, stuck to the sheets.

“Wait,” Antoine said. With his penknife he slit the nightshirt from end to end. As the blade hissed through the cloth Jacques could not repress a slight shudder.

The whole body lay before him, naked. Huge, flaccid, sickly white, it gave the impression of being at once enormously distended, and emaciated. The swollen hands hung like boxing-gloves on the wizened arms. The queerly elongated legs had the look of bones coated with hair. A patch of coarse grey stubble mantled the chest… .

Jacques looked away. Many a time in after years he was to recall that moment, and the strange thoughts that crowded in on his brain, as for the first time he looked on the nakedness of the man who had begotten him. Then, in a flash, he saw himself back in Tunisia, reporter’s note-book in hand, looking at another body, naked like this, and like this bloated, blotched with grey—the body of an old Italian, a huge, obscene monster of a man who had just hanged himself. It had been lying in the street out in the sun, and a motley horde of brats from neighbouring streets was scampering and squalling round it. And Jacques had seen the dead man’s daughter, little more than a child, rush across the courtyard weeping bitterly, drive away the children with kicks and cuffs, then sprinkle handfuls of dry grass over the corpse. Out of modesty, perhaps—or because of the flies?

“Now, Jacques!” Antoine whispered.

He would have to slip his hand under the body to catch an end of the sheet which Antoine and the sister had worked underneath the hips.

Jacques obeyed. And suddenly the contact of the clammy flesh produced an extraordinary, quite unforeseen effect on him—a starkly physical emotion, far more potent than any gust of pity or affection: the self-regarding love of man for man.

“Get him in the middle of the sheet,” Antoine ordered. “Right. Not so much that way, Léon; give a tug at this end. Now take away the pillow. You, Sister, lift his legs. A bit. more. Mind the bed-sores! Jacques, take your corner of the sheet, beside his head; I’ll take the other. Sister Céline and Léon will hold the lower ends. Got it? Right. Let’s lift him now, just to try. One, two, three—hoist!”