The Thibaults (35 page)

Daniel and Nicole had been together in the dark-room for more than a quarter of an hour. Daniel had shot the bolt the moment he entered, then taken the films out of the camera, and unrolled them.

“Don’t meddle with the door,” he said. “The least speck of light will fog the whole roll.”

Nicole’s first impression was one of total obscurity, but after a while she began to see what looked like incandescent shadows moving in the red glow of the lantern close beside her. Gradually they took form, and she saw two long, delicate hands, cut off at the wrists, tilting a long dish. Those two disembodied hands were all she could make out of Daniel, but there was so little space in the dark-room that she was as conscious of his every movement as if he were actually in contact with her. They held their breath, each haunted by a vivid memory of the kiss exchanged that morning in the bedroom.

“Can you see anything?” she whispered.

But he would not answer her at once; the silence had an exquisite suspense that thrilled his senses and, now that darkness was doing away with the restraints of normal life, he had turned towards her and was inhaling eagerly the perfume floating round her.

At last he brought himself to speak. “No, there’s nothing yet.”

Again there was silence. Then suddenly the dish on which Nicole’s eyes were fixed ceased moving. The two spectral hands had left the zone of the lamplight. The moment seemed never-ending. All at once Nicole felt his arms encircling her, closely, passionately. She experienced no surprise, rather a vague sense of relief that the suspense was over. But she drew her shoulders back as far as she could, twisting and turning, to elude the lips whose impact she both dreaded and desired. At last their faces touched.-Daniel’s burning forehead came in contact with something cold, slippery, and pliant; it was Nicole’s hair, the long, glossy plait she wore coiled round her head. He could not help giving a start, and drawing back a little. For a moment her lips were free, and she had just time to utter a strangled cry: “Jenny!”

Roughly his hand closed her lips; then, leaning against her with the full weight of his body, he crushed her against the door. His voice came in quick gasps through his clenched teeth; there was a note almost of madness in it.

“Keep quiet! Stop! Nicole darling, dear little girl, I want—I want to tell you …”

She had almost ceased struggling and he thought she was giving way to him. She had slipped her arm behind her and was feeling for the latch. The door fell open abruptly, letting in a flood of light. He released her, and shut the door again at once. But in the sudden light she had seen his face, and it was unrecognizable, like a livid Chinese mask, with great blotches of red round the eyes that seemed to slew them up towards the temples. The pupils, shrunk to pinpoints, were expressionless, and the thin, tight lips of a few minutes past were puffy now, clumsily agape. A thought of Jerome flashed through her mind. There was hardly any likeness between Daniel and his father, yet in that harsh, revealing beam of light, it was Jerome’s face she had seen!

“My congratulations!” His voice was shrill with vexation. “The whole roll’s ruined.”

“I’m quite ready to stay,” she said composedly. “In fact I want to talk to you. Only, please unlatch the door.”

“No; Jenny will come in.”

After a momentary hesitation she said: “Then promise me on your honour that you won’t touch me again.”

He felt like flinging himself on her, gagging her with his hand, ripping up her blouse; but, at the same time, knew that he was beaten.

“All right. I promise.”

“Good! Now listen to me, Daniel. I was very silly this morning; I let you go too far, much too far. But this time I say definitely no! I didn’t run away from home just to get involved in this sort of thing.” She spoke the last words hurriedly, to herself. Then she addressed Daniel again: “Yes, I’ll trust you with my secret. I ran away from Mother’s place. Oh, there’s nothing really to be said against her —only that she’s very unhappy … and very weak. That’s all I can tell you.” She paused. That face she loathed above all, Jerome’s face, still hovered before her eyes; his son might bring her to the state to which Jerome had brought her mother. Alarmed by Daniel’s silence, she went on hastily: “You don’t understand me a bit. Of course that’s my fault, really; I’ve not been my real self with you. With Jenny, yes. With you I’ve gone on in a silly way, and you’ve imagined all sorts of things. But, underneath, I’m not like that, not in the least. I don’t want the sort of life that—that begins that way. What would have been the point of coming to live with someone like Aunt Thérèse? No! I want—you’ll laugh at me, but I don’t care—I want to be able later on to deserve the respect of a man who’ll love me truly, for always; a man who—who takes it seriously.”

“But I
do
take it seriously!” From the tone she guessed the smile of naive self-pity hovering on his lips, and knew at once that she had no more to fear from him.

“No, you don’t!” She sounded almost cheerful. “And you mustn’t be angry, Daniel, if I tell you straight out—you don’t love me.”

“Not love you? Oh, Nicole …!”

“No, it’s not me you love, it’s … something else. And I don’t love you either. Now listen, I’m going to be quite frank; I don’t think I could ever love a man like you.”

“Like me?”

“I mean, a man like all the rest. It isn’t that I don’t want to love someone, one day. I do. But it’s got to be someone, well, someone who’s pure, and who’ll have approached me in a very different way, and for … for other reasons. Oh, I don’t know how to express it! Anyhow, a man quite different from you.”

“Thanks very much!”

His desire for her was dead, and all he wanted now was to escape seeming ridiculous.

“Now then,” she said, “let’s make peace, and forget all about it.” She began to open the door; this time he did not try to stop her. “Is it ‘friends’?” she asked, holding out her hand. He made no answer. He was looking at her eyes, her cheeks, the young face that seemed proffered like a ripe fruit. He forced a smile onto his lips; his eyelashes were fluttering. She took his hand and grasped it tightly.

“Don’t spoil my life as well!” she murmured in a coaxing voice, and suddenly her eyebrows took a humorous inflexion. “Isn’t a roll of films quite enough damage for one day?”

Good-naturedly he laughed. She had not expected that much of him, and felt a little chagrined. Still, all in all, she was well satisfied with her victory and with the opinion he would have of her henceforward.

“Well?” Jenny asked when they appeared together in the dining-room.

“No go,” Daniel said gruffly.

Jacques felt a thrill of spiteful satisfaction. Nicole’s eyes twinkled as she repeated slowly, emphatically:

“Ab-so-lutely no go!”

Then she noticed that Jenny’s cheeks were quivering, her eyes blurred with sudden tears, and, running up to her, she kissed her.

From the moment his friend had come into the room, Jacques had stopped thinking about himself; he could not keep his eyes off Daniel. A change had come over Daniel’s features, a change that was painful to observe. It was as if the upper and lower halves of his face no longer matched; the enigmatic, troubled, almost sinister expression of his eyes was out of keeping with the smile that lifted one side of his mouth and screwed the lower portion of his face round to the left.

Their eyes met. Daniel frowned slightly and moved uneasily away.

This indication of mistrust grieved Jacques more than all the rest. All the time, from the very start, Daniel had been obscurely disappointing him; now at last he was consciously aware of it. There had not been a moment of real intimacy between them; why, he had not even been able to tell Lisbeth’s name to his friend!

For a while he fancied that the cause of his distress was his disillusionment regarding Daniel. But the real reason, though he had only a vague inkling of it, was that now for the first time he was viewing his love from a critical angle and, by the same token, eliminating it from his system. Like all young people, he lived only for the present; the past lapsed so swiftly into oblivion, and thoughts of the future merely whetted his impatience. And today, the present, every moment of it, seemed to have a bitter savour; as the afternoon drew to a close, he felt more and more hopelessly depressed. When Antoine signed to him to get ready to go, he felt actually relieved.

Daniel had noticed Antoine’s gesture. He went up to Jacques at once.

“You’re not going yet?”

“Yes, we must.”

“So soon?” Then he added in a lower tone: “But we’ve seen hardly anything of each other.”

He, too, had got nothing but disappointment from the day. And now, to make things worse, he began to feel remorseful for the way he had treated Jacques and—what grieved him even more—their friendship.

“Please forgive me,” he said suddenly, leading Jacques towards the window-recess. And there was such humility, such genuine solicitude, in his manner that Jacques, forgetting all his disappointments, felt carried away by an access of the old affection. “It’s been a rotten day,” Daniel continued. “Everything went wrong. When shall I see you again?” His tone grew pressing. “Look here, I’ve got to see you alone and have a good long talk. We’ve got out of touch with each other somehow. Of course, there’s nothing odd in that—why, we haven’t seen each other for a whole year! But we can’t let that go on.”

He suddenly wondered what future lay before their friendship, which so long had had nothing to thrive on except an almost mystical sentiment of loyalty, the fragility of which had just been shown to them. No, they must not let it wither. True, Jacques struck him now as rather childish; but his affection remained intact and, for all he knew, the keener for his feeling so much older than his friend.

“We’re always at home on Sunday,” Mme. de Fontanin was saying just then to Antoine. “We shan’t leave Paris till after the school prize-day.” Her eyes lit up. “Daniel has won several prizes,” she said in a low voice, but with evident pride. “Wait!” she added hastily, after making sure her son had his back to her and was not listening. “Before you go, I’d like to show you my treasures.” She hastened light-heartedly to her room, Antoine following, and led him to a desk. In one of the drawers, in a neat row, lay twenty laurel crowns in painted cardboard. She shut the drawer almost immediately and began laughing, a little flustered at having yielded to a sentimental impulse.

“Don’t tell him,” she said. “He hasn’t the least idea I keep them all.”

They returned in silence to the hall.

“Hallo, Jacques!” Antoine called.

“Today doesn’t count,” Mme. de Fontanin said, holding out both hands to Jacques and giving him a keen glance, as if she had guessed everything. “You’re amongst friends here, Jacques dear, and any time you feel like coming you’ll always be welcome. And your big brother, too, I needn’t say,” she added with a graceful gesture for Antoine.

Jacques turned round to see if Jenny was there; but she had gone off with her cousin. Bending over the little dog, he kissed its sleek, smooth forehead… .

Mme. de Fontanin went back to the dining-room to clear the table. Daniel followed her pensively, then leaned against the doorway and, without speaking, lit a cigarette. He was turning over in his mind what Nicole had told him. Why had they concealed from him the fact that his cousin had run away from home and come to them for refuge? Refuge against what?

Mme. de Fontanin was moving to and fro with the supple movements that gave her still the easy grace of a much younger woman. She was thinking of what Antoine had said, of all he had told her about himself, his studies, and his plans for the future, and about his father. “What a noble character!” she was saying to herself. “And I do like that forehead of his. It’s so” —she groped for an epithet— “yes, so earnest,” she added with a little thrill of pleasure.

Then she recalled the idle fancy that had crossed her mind; for an instant had not she, too, sinned in thought? Gregory’s words came back to her. And all at once, for no definite reason, she felt her heart full of such abounding joy that she put down the plate she was holding so as to pass her fingers over her face and feel under her hand the imprint of that sudden ecstasy. She went up to her son and startled him from his reverie, gaily clapping her hands on his shoulders. Then she gazed deep into his eyes, kissed him, and, without a word, went quickly out of the room.

She went straight to her desk and began writing in her large, childish, rather wavering hand.

My dear James,

I have behaved too arrogantly towards you. Who of us has the right to judge another? I thank God for having enlightened me once again. Tell Jerome I will not press for a divorce. Tell him …

Through her tears the words seemed dancing on the paper.

A FEW days later Antoine was awakened by a sound of hammering on the shutters. The garbage collector had failed to get the street door opened for him, though the bell was in order—he could hear it ringing in the concierge’s room—and suspected that something was wrong.

Something was wrong, indeed: old Mme. Fruhling was dead. She had had another seizure, a fatal one, in the course of the night, and had dropped dead on the floor.

Jacques came in just as the body was being laid out on the mattress. The old woman’s mouth was gaping, showing some yellow teeth. What was it—something horrible—it reminded him of? Yes, that dead grey horse lying on the Toulon road. Then suddenly it Struck him very likely Lisbeth would be coming for the funeral.

Two days passed and she did not appear; it seemed she was not coming at all. Jacques caught himself thinking: so much the better! He could not make out his real feelings just now. Even after his visit to the Fontanins, he had gone on tinkering with a poem in which he glorified his heart’s beloved and lamented her absence. But somehow he had no real wish to see her again.

None the less he walked past the concierge’s room ten times a day, and each time glanced eagerly inside, only to turn away each time, reassured, yet dissatisfied.

On the day before the funeral, as he was coming in after dining alone in the little restaurant where he and Antoine had been having their meals since M. Thibault’s departure to Maisons-Laffitte, the first thing to meet his eye was a valise in the entrance-hall, just outside the concierge’s door. He felt himself trembling, his forehead damp with sweat. In the light from the candles round the bier he saw a girlish form, swathed in heavy mourning veils, kneeling beside it. He entered the room at once. The two nuns glanced round at him without interest; but Lisbeth did not turn. The night was sultry, and a warm, sickly sweet odour filled the room: the flowers on the coffin were wilting. Jacques remained standing, feeling sorry he had ventured in; the deathbed and everything connected with it had given him a sensation of discomfort that he was unable to vanquish. Lisbeth had passed out of his mind and all he wanted now was a pretext to get away. When a nun rose to snuff a candle, he slipped out of the room.