The Thibaults (110 page)

“Still a touch of fever?”

“No, it’s gone down.”

She glanced towards the door, which he had left open as if to show that he had dropped in only for a moment.

“Feeling cold?” he asked. “Shall I shut it?”

“No. Well … if you don’t mind… .”

He acquiesced good-naturedly. Now, with the door closed, they were safe from intrusion.

She thanked him with a smile, then let her head sink back; her hair made a patch of velvety blackness upon the pillow. The rather low-cut nightdress yielded a glimpse of the young curve of her breast; she put her hand up to the collar to keep it closed. Jacques was struck by the graceful outline of the wrist and the colour of her dusky skin, which, against the whiteness, had the hue of moistened sand.

“What have you been doing all day?” she asked.

“Doing? Nothing at all. I’ve been lying low, dodging the callers.”

Then she remembered M. Thibault’s death, Jacques’s bereavement. She was vexed with herself for feeling so little grief. Was Jacques feeling sad? she wondered. She could not find the words of affection that perhaps she ought to have addressed to him. Her only thought was that, now the father was no more, the son was completely free. In that case, she reflected, there’ll be no need for him to leave home again.

“You should go out a bit, you know,” she said.

“Yes? Well, as a matter of fact today, as I was feeling rather muzzy, I took a stroll.” He hesitated, then added: “Just to buy some papers.”

It had not been so simple, however, as he put it; at four, chafing against these empty hours of waiting, and prompted by obscure motives of which he was not aware till later, he had gone out to buy some Swiss newspapers, and then, without fully realizing where he was going …

“I suppose you were out of doors a lot over there, weren’t you?” she asked after another silence.

“Yes.”

Her “over there” had taken him by surprise and involuntarily he had answered in an ungracious, almost cutting tone—which he instantly regretted. And it struck him now that ever since he had set foot in this place everything he did and said, even his thoughts, rang false.

His eyes kept straying back to the bed on which the shaded lamp cast a pale lure of light, bringing out, under the white coverlet, every graceful line of the young body: the long lithe limbs, the full curve of the flanks, and the two small round knolls of the slightly parted knees. He was feeling more and more ill at ease, and in vain tried to assume a natural air and speak in casual tones.

She wanted to say: “Do sit down!” but could not catch his eye, and dared not speak.

To keep himself in countenance, he was examining the furniture, the tiny altar faceted with glints of gold, the little decorative objects in the room. He remembered the morning of his homecoming, when he had taken refuge in it.

“What a pretty room this is!” he said pleasantly. “You didn’t use to have that arm-chair, did you?”

“Your father gave it to me, for my eighteenth birthday. Don’t you remember it? It used to be on the top landing at Maisons-Laffitte, under the cuckoo-clock.”

Maisons! Suddenly it came back to him, that third-floor landing, the sunlight flooding through the dormer window, the flies that swarmed there all the summer and, when the sun was setting, filled the air with the buzz of a hive of angry bees. He remembered the cuckoo-clock with its dangling chains; he heard again along the silent staircase the little wooden bird cooing the quarter-hours. So, all the time he had been away, life for them had gone on just the same. And now he thought of it, was not he too “just the same,” or nearly so? Ever since he was back, had he not at every instant, in each spontaneous gesture, been acting as his old self would have acted? The special way he had of rubbing his shoes on the doormat, for instance, then shutting the hall-door with a bang; his trick of hanging his overcoat on the same two pegs before switching on the light. And, when he walked up and down his room, was not each movement little more than a latent memory revived in action?

Meanwhile Gise was quietly taking stock of his appearance: his stubborn jaw, his sturdy neck, his hands, and his expression of alert unrest.

“How big and strong you’ve got!” she murmured.

He turned to her, smiling. Inwardly he was all the prouder of his robustness because, throughout childhood, his puniness had galled him. Suddenly, unthinkingly—yet another reflex!—to his own surprise he solemnly declaimed:

“ ‘Major Van der Cuyp was a man of exceptional strength.’ ”

Gise’s face lit up. How often had she and Jacques read those magic words together, poring over the picture underneath which they were printed! It was in their favourite adventure-book, a tale of the Sumatra jungle, and the picture showed a Dutch officer laying out, with the utmost ease, an immense gorilla.

“ ‘Major Van der Cuyp had been rash enough to go to sleep under the baobab-tree,’ ” she capped him merrily. Then throwing her head back, she closed her eyes and opened her mouth wide—for in the picture the rash Major was shown thus, snoring lustily.

Laughing, they watched each other laugh—forgetting all the present, as they delved in that quaint treasury of old memories, to which they alone had access.

“Do you remember the picture of the tiger?” she smiled. “And how you tore it up one day, when you were in a temper?”

“Yes … why was I?”

“Oh, because we’d had a laughing fit when Abbé Vécard was there.”

“What a memory you have, Gise!”

“I wanted later on, like the man in the book, to have a baby tiger of my own. When I went to sleep at night I used to fancy I was nursing it in my arms.”

There was a pause. Both were smiling at their childish fancies. Gise was the first to come back to seriousness.

“Still,” she said, “when I think of those days, almost all I seem to remember is dreary, never-ending boredom. What about you?”

Fever and fatigue, and now these memories of the past, had given her a look of melancholy languor that went well with her melting eyes and the warm, exotic colour of her skin.

“Yes,” she went on, noticing that Jacques merely knitted his brows without replying, “it’s terrible being bored with life when one’s a child. And then, when I was fourteen or fifteen, quite suddenly, it came to an end. I can’t think why. Something changed inside me. Nowadays I’ve never got the blues. Even when” (she was thinking: “Even when you make me unhappy”) “even when things go badly.”

His hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes fixed on the carpet, Jacques kept silent. Such evocations of the past sent waves of fury racing through him. Nothing in his earlier life found favour in his eyes. Nowhere, at no stage of his career, had he felt at home, settled down for good in his vocation—as Antoine felt. Always, everywhere, a misfit. In Africa, and Italy, and Germany. At Lausanne, even, almost as much as elsewhere. And not merely homeless, but at bay— hounded down by society, by family and friends, by the very conditions of life, and also by something else, something he could not define, which seemed to come from within himself.

“ ‘Major Van der Cuyp …’ ” Gise began. She was lingering on these echoes of their childhood because she dared not breathe a word of the more recent memories haunting her mind. But she did not continue; she had learned her lesson: nothing now could fan those dead ashes into flame.

Silently watching Jacques, she tried in vain to solve the dark enigma. Why had he gone away, despite what had passed between them? Some vague remarks Antoine had let fall had disturbed her without explaining anything. What could have been the message the red roses sent from London were meant to convey?

Suddenly she thought: “How different he is from my ‘Jacquot’ of the past!”

With an emotion that now she could not hide she said aloud:

“How you’ve changed, Jacquot!”

From the evasive smile, the brief glance Jacques cast her, she guessed that her emotion had displeased him. With a quick change of tone and expression, she launched forth gaily into a description of her experiences in the English convent.

“It’s so nice, the healthy, well-regulated life one leads. You simply can’t imagine how fit one feels for work after gymnastics in the open air and a hearty English breakfast.”

She did not say that, while she was in London, the one thing that had buoyed her up was the hope of finding him again. She did not tell him how that early-morning energy evaporated hour by hour, of the sombre moods that settled on her nightly in the dormitory bed.

“English life’s so different from ours, and so fascinating.” A commonplace, but to have hit on it was a relief, and to stave off the menace of another silence she kept to the theme. “In England everybody laughs, on purpose, on the least pretext. They simply won’t hear of life being treated as ‘a vale of tears.’ So, you see, they think as little as possible; they play. They make a game of everything—beginning with life!”

Jacques listened to her chatter, without interrupting. He too would go to England. To Russia and America. He had all his future before him—for travelling, for seeking … He smiled approvingly, nodding assent now and then. Gise was no fool, and those three years seemed to have ripened her wits considerably. Made her prettier, too, and daintier. His eyes roved back over the counterpane to the slim, frail body which seemed, as it were, relaxed in its own warmth. And suddenly, crudely, it all came back—that gust of passion, their embrace under the great trees in the park. A chaste embrace; and yet even after all those years, after all he had gone through since, he still could feel that vibrant body swaying in his arms; under his mouth’s kiss those inexperienced lips. And in a flash all thoughts of prudence, self-restraint, were dust before a fiery wind… . Why not? He went so far as to ask himself again, as in his maddest moments: “Why not marry her, make her mine?” But no sooner thought than he came up against some dark, dimly apprehended obstacle sundering him from her; somewhere in his inmost being lay an invincible impediment.

Then, as his gaze rested once more on the lithe, living form before him on the bed, his imagination, already rich with so many memories, cast across the screen the picture of another bed, and such another glimpse of slim, rounded flanks outlined under the bedclothes; and the desire that had just thrilled him melted into remembered pity. He saw again, laid out on her small iron bedstead, that little prostitute at Reichenhall, a girl of seventeen, who had been so stubbornly resolved to die, that she had been discovered squatting on the floor, strangled by a noose tied to the cupboard lock. Jacques had been one of the first to enter the room; he still remembered the smell of sizzling fat that pervaded it, but, clearest of all, the flat, enigmatic face of the woman, still fairly young, who stood breaking eggs over a frying-pan in a corner of the room. A mark or two had loosened her tongue and she even gave some curious details. And on Jacques’s asking her if she had known the dead girl well, she had exclaimed with a look of unforgettable sincerity: “
Ach, nein! Ich bin die Mutter
!”

Strange answer! “Oh, no! I’m her mother!” He was on the point of telling Gise the story, but thought better of it. To mention his life “over there” would open the door to questions.

Snug in her bed, with half-closed eyes, Gise was observing him hungrily. She was feeling desperate, on the brink of blurting out: “Speak to me, Jacques! What’s become of you? What of me? Have you forgotten—everything?”

He was pacing the room, bringing his weight down on one foot then upon the other, in a brown study. Whenever his eyes met hers, he grew aware how hopelessly their minds worked at cross purposes, and at once feigned an extreme aloofness. There was not the faintest hint of his real feelings—how thrilled he was by her childish charm, and the innocence he glimpsed in her, as naive as the young throat shyly revealed between folds of filmy whiteness. He felt all the affection of an elder brother for this suffering little girl. But what a horde of impure memories kept forcing their unwelcome way between them! Bitterly he regretted feeling so old, so worn out … so soiled… .

“I guess you’re awfully good at tennis now, aren’t you?” he asked evasively; he had just noticed a racket on the top of the wardrobe.

Her moods changed quickly; now she could not repress a smile of childish triumph.

“You’ll see for yourself!”

At once she felt dismayed. When would he see—and where? What a silly reply to make!

But Jacques did not seem to have noticed. His thoughts were far from Gise. The tennis-courts at Maisons-Lafhtte, a white dress… that brisk way she had of jumping off her bicycle at the club entrance. What was the meaning of the closed shutters of their flat in the Avenue de l’Observatoire? (For that afternoon when he had taken a stroll, uncertain where to go, he had walked oil to the Luxembourg Gardens, and down their street. The sun was just setting. He had walked rapidly, with his collar up. He always made haste to yield to a temptation, so as to be through with it the sooner. Then suddenly he had halted, looked up. All the windows were shuttered. Of course Antoine had told him Daniel was at Luneville, doing his military service. But what of
them
? It was not late enough to account for the closed shutters… . What did it matter anyhow? What could it matter? He had turned on his heel, and walked home by the shortest way.)

Perhaps she realized how far from her Jacques’s thoughts had drifted. Unconsciously she stretched out an arm, as though to touch him, clasp him, draw him back.

“What a wind!” His voice was cheerful; he did not seem to have noticed her gesture. “Gise, doesn’t it worry you, that rattle in your fireplace? Wait a bit!”

He went down on his knees and wedged an old newspaper between the loose iron slats of the fire-screen. Worn out by emotions, by thoughts she dared not utter, Gise watched him at work.

“That’s better!” he exclaimed as he got up. Then he sighed and, for the first time, spoke without much weighing his words. “Yes, this fierce wind—how it makes one wish the winter was over, and spring returning!”

Obviously his mind was busy with the springtimes he had spent abroad. And she could guess what he was thinking: “Next May I’ll be doing this, I’ll be going there …”