The Thibaults (105 page)

Hauled energetically by the four corners, the sheet bellied and rose clear of the mattress; but the weight was almost too much for them.

“Good work!” Antoine sounded almost cheerful. All of them were just then feeling the joy of action.

Antoine turned to the older nun.

“Sister, put the blanket over him. And please go in front, to open the doors for us… . Everyone ready? … Go!”

Staggering, they filed out and entered the narrow corridor. M. Thibault was screaming. For a moment M. Chasle’s face showed, peeping from the kitchen-door.

“A little lower, please, at his feet,” Antoine panted. “That’s better. Shall we stop a bit? No? Then, carry on. Mind that closet key, you’ll get caught on it. Stick it out, we’re almost there. Mind the turning now.” He had a glimpse of Mademoiselle and the two servants crowding up the bathroom. “Out of it, all of you!” he yelled. “There’s barely room for the five of us. Adrienne, Clotilde! Now’s the time to go and make the bed. Heat it with the warming-pan. Steady, now! We’ve got to turn, for the door. That’s right. No, damn it, don’t put him on the floor. Raise him! Up! More than that! We must get him over the bathtub first. Then we’ll lower him gently. In the sheet, of course. One more effort! Easy does it. Lower a little. More. Yes, like that. She’s filled it too full, confound her! We’ll be deluged. Now lower away, everyone!”

As the bulky mass, slung within the sheet, gently descended into the bath, the water it displaced splashed over on all sides, drenching everyone and flooding the whole floor.

“Well, that’s that!” Antoine panted. “Ten minutes’ breathing space, thank goodness!”

For a moment M. Thibault’s screams had ceased—an effect, doubtless, of the shock of the hot water; but now they started again, and shriller than ever. He began struggling convulsively; fortunately the folds of the sheet hampered the movements of his arms and legs.

In any case his restlessness gradually declined; the screams sank to a low, whimpered “Ah! Aah! Aaah!” and soon he ceased to whimper. It was obvious that he was feeling a vast relief. The little “Ah’s!” sounded like grunts of satisfaction.

The five of them stood round the bath, their feet in water, thinking with dismay of the task that still lay before them.

Suddenly M. Thibault opened his eyes and began speaking.

“Ah, so it’s you? No, not today …” His eyes wandered round the room, but obviously he had no idea where he was. “Let me be,” he added. (These were the first intelligible words he had uttered for forty-eight hours.) Then he fell silent, but his lips went on moving as if he were saying a prayer. Now and again a weak sound issued from them. Bending his ear, Antoine caught a word here and there. “Saint Joseph … friend of the dying.” And a moment later: “Miserable sinner.”

The eyelids had dropped again. The face was calm, the breathing rapid but regular. It was an incredible relief to them all not to hear those screams of agony any more.

Suddenly the old man gave a little laugh, like a child’s laugh, strangely crystalline. Antoine and Jacques stared at each other. What thought was stirring in the dying brain? The eyes were still closed. Then in a voice roughened by days of screaming, yet fairly clear, he sang once more the refrain of the old song, the words of which he had learned again from Mademoiselle:

“Then clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we go

To where my lovely Lola

Is waiting for me now.”

Like an echo he muttered: “Clankety … clinkety and clankety …” Then the voice ceased.

Antoine dared not meet his brother’s eyes. “My lovely Lola!” It distressed him to hear such words at such a moment on his father’s lips. What must Jacques be thinking?

Jacques had exactly the same feeling; his discomfort came not from what he had heard but from the fact that he had not been alone to hear it. Each of them felt embarrassed, not for himself but for the other… .

The ten minutes were up.

While watching the bath, Antoine had been planning the return journey.

“It’s out of the question shifting him in that wet sheet,” he said in an undertone. “Léon, fetch the mattress belonging to the folding bed. And ask Clotilde to bring the towels she has in the oven.”

They laid the mattress on the wet tiles of the floor. Then, under Antoine’s directions, they grasped the four corners of the sheet, heaved the heavy body out of the bath and lowered it, dripping, onto the mattress.

“Sponge him—quickly!” Antoine said. “Right. Now wrap him up in the blanket and slip the dry sheet under. Hurry up, or he’ll catch cold!”

No sooner spoken than he thought: “And what matter if he does catch cold?”

He glanced round the bathroom. There was not a dry spot anywhere; mattress, sheets, and towels sprawled in pools of water. In a corner a chair lay upside-down. The little room looked as if a free-for-all had taken place in it during a flood.

“Back to your places now, and—hoist!” he ordered.

The dry sheet bulged, and the body swayed for a moment as if suspended in a hammock; then staggering, floundering through pools of water, the little procession started on its way, and slowly receded round the corner of the passage, leaving in its wake a trail of sodden footprints.

Some minutes later M. Thibault was lying pale and motionless in his new-made bed, his head in the centre of the pillow, his arms stretched limp upon the counterpane. For the first time in many days he seemed not to be in pain.

The respite was short-lived. It was striking four and Jacques had just left the bedroom, intending to go down to the “ground-floor flat and snatch a few hours’ rest, when Antoine caught him up in the hall.

“Quick! He’s suffocating. Ring up Coutrot. Fleurus 5402. Coutrot, Rue de Sevres. Tell him to send some oxygen at once, three or four containers. Fleurus 5402. Got it?”

“Hadn’t I better take a taxi?”

“No, they’ve a delivery car. Hurry up. I need your help.”

The telephone was in M. Thibault’s study. Jacques dashed into it with such haste that M. Chasle jumped from his chair.

“Father is suffocating!” Jacques cried to him as he unhooked the receiver.

“Hallo! Are you Coutrot the pharmacist? What? Isn’t this Fleurus 5402? …
Hallo!
Please connect me at once; it’s urgent, a dying man. Fleurus 5402… . That Coutrot’s? Hallo. Dr. Thibault speaking. Yes. Please send …”

Bending above the shelf on which the telephone stood, he had his back to the room. As he spoke, he looked up vaguely at the mirror on the wall. Reflected in it was an open door and, framed in the doorway, Gise stood gazing at him, mute with wonder.

THE day before, in London, Gise had received the cablegram which Clotilde, with Mademoiselle’s approval, had taken on herself to dispatch while Antoine was away at Lausanne. She had travelled by the early boat-train and arrived in Paris without warning anyone of her coming, had driven directly to the house, and, not daring to question the concierge, had gone, with a wildly beating heart, straight up to the flat.

Léon had opened the door. Alarmed at seeing him on this floor, she had murmured:

“And … how is …?”

“Not yet, Mademoiselle.”

Someone was shouting into the telephone in the next room. “What? Isn’t this Fleurus 5402?”

A tremor ran through her body. Had her ears deceived her?

“
Hallo
! Please connect me at once; it’s urgent.”

The valise dropped from her hand. Her limbs seemed giving way under her. Not knowing what she did, she stumbled across the hall and with both hands pushed open the study door.

Leaning on the shelf, Jacques had his back to her. Dimly she saw, or seemed to see, the outlines of his face, the half-closed eyes, wraithlike in the green depths of the tarnished mirror. So Jacques had been found again—she had never believed him dead—and he had come back to his dying father.

“Hallo! Dr. Thibault speaking. Yes. Please send …”

Slowly her gaze fastened on his, his eyes sank into hers. Then Jacques swung quickly round, still holding the receiver, from which came a drone of words.

“Please send …” he repeated. His throat was choked. With a violent effort he gulped back saliva; all he would get out was a strangled cry: “Hallo!” He had lost all notion of where he was, why he was telephoning. It cost him a prodigious struggle to reconstruct it all—Antoine, the deathbed, oxygen. “Father’s suffocating,” he told himself. Shrill reverberations were jarring in his brain.

“Go on! I’m listening!” An impatient voice at the other end.

Suddenly he felt a blind rage sweep over him, rage against the intruder. What was she after? What did she want of him? Why remind him of her existence? Wasn’t everything over, dead and done with?

Gisèle had not moved. In the brown face, the big black melting eyes, luminous with dog-like devotion, had a tender glow, intensified by wonder. She had grown much thinner. An impression crossed Jacques’s mind—so fleeting that he hardly noticed it—that she had become quite pretty.

Into the silence burst M. Chasle’s voice, like a belated bomb.

“Ah, so it’s you,” he said with a half-witted grin.

Jacques was pressing the receiver nervously to his cheek. He could not bring himself to take his eyes off the charming figure in the doorway, but they had gone blank and betrayed nothing of his seething rage. He stammered into the telephone:

“Please send me at—at once some oxygen. Yes, by a—a delivery car. What? In rubber containers, of course. For a patient who’s suffocating.”

Rooted to the spot, Gise watched him, without a flicker of her eyelids. She had pictured to herself a hundred times this moment—the moment when, after the years of waiting, she would see him again, let herself sink into his arms. Well, she was living out that moment here and now. He was there, only a few yards away, but taken up by others; not hers—a stranger. And in Jacques’s eyes her eyes had met a hardness, a presage of rebuff. The reality confronting her, so different from her dreams, had given her an intuition—though she was hardly conscious of it yet—that she was still to suffer by him.

He, too, while speaking, had his eyes fixed on her all the time; they seemed linked together by that mutual, unfaltering gaze. Meanwhile Jacques had straightened up; his voice became assured again, over-assured.

“Yes, three or four containers.
At once!
”

Higher-pitched than usual, his voice had an unwonted vibrancy, almost a nasal twang, a bluffness that was unlike him. “Ah, yes, so sorry, the address! Dr. Thibault, 4A Rue de l’Université. No. 4A, I said. Come straight up to the third floor. And be quick, please; it’s extremely urgent.”

Without haste but with an unsteady hand he hung up the receiver. Neither he nor Gise felt able to make a move.

“Hallo, Gise!” he said at last.

A tremor ran through her body. Her lips half parted in an answering smile. Then as if he had suddenly awakened to reality, Jacques moved abruptly forward.

“Antoine’s waiting for me,” he explained, as he hurried across the room. “M. Chasle will tell you all about it.
He
… he’s suffocating. You’ve come at the worst possible moment… .”

“Yes,” she said, drawing aside as he passed close in front of her. “Go at once, at once!”

Her eyes filled with tears. She had no clear thought, no definite regret; only an aching sense of weakness and disheartenment. Her eyes followed Jacques along the hall. Now that she saw him moving he seemed more alive, more as he used to be. When he was out of sight she clasped her hands impulsively, murmuring: “Jacquot!”

Stolid as a piece of furniture, M. Chasle had watched the whole scene and had noticed nothing. Left by himself with Gise, he felt called on to make conversation.

“Well, Mile. Gise, here I am, such as I am, at my post.” He patted the chair on which he was perched. Gise turned her head, to hide her tears. After a moment he added: “We’re waiting to begin.”

His tone was so impressive that Gise was taken aback.

“Begin what?” she inquired.

The little man’s eyes flickered behind the glasses; he pursed his lips confidentially.

This time Jacques had fled to his father’s room as to a place of refuge.

The ceiling-lamp was on. M. Thibault, who was being propped up in the sitting position, was a terrifying sight; his head flung back, his mouth agape, he seemed to have lost consciousness. The wide-open eyes, starting out of their sockets, were glazing. Leaning over the bed, Antoine was holding his father in his arms while Sister Céline was shoring up his back with cushions the older nun was passing to her.

“Open the window!” Antoine shouted when he saw his brother.

Cold air poured in, bathing the trance-bound face. And now the nostrils began to flutter; a little air was penetrating to the lungs. The inhalations were feeble and jerky, the expirations interminably protracted; it seemed with each slow sigh that it must be the last.

Jacques had gone up to Antoine. He whispered in his ear: “Gise has just come.”

Only a slight lift of the eyebrows betrayed Antoine’s surprise. Not for a second would he let his attention be diverted from the duel he was fighting with death. The least inadvertence, and that feeble breath might fail for ever. Like a boxer with his eyes riveted on his opponent, brain alert and every muscle set for action, he kept watch. Not for a moment did he pause to think that for the past two days he would have welcomed as a deliverer that last enemy whose onset he was now resisting with all his might. He had even forgotten, or all but forgotten, that the life in peril was his father’s.

“The oxygen’s on its way,” he was thinking. “We can hold out five minutes more, perhaps ten. Once it’s here … But I’ll have to have my arms free, so will the sister.”

He called to his brother. “Jacques, go and fetch someone else. Adrienne, Clotilde—anyone. Two will be enough to hold him up.”