The Thibaults (41 page)

Hungry voices vociferated: “Dinner! Take your seats!”

Daniel returned to Jacques.

“Hasn’t your brother come yet? Anyhow let’s pick our seats.”

The long table was laid for twenty people; there was some hesitation as they chose their places. Daniel so manoeuvred that Jacques was placed beside Rinette, on her left; Ma Juju, who clung to her like a leech, sat on her right, as close as she could squeeze beside her. But just when everyone had picked his place and Jacques was about to take his own, Daniel forestalled him.

“Change with me!”

Without more ado he pulled Jacques to one side, gripping his arm so roughly that Jacques felt his fingers nipping his wrist and all but gave a squeal of pain.

Daniel was too preoccupied to think of excusing himself. He turned to Ma Juju.

“Isn’t it up to you, Ma Juju, to introduce me to my neighbour?”

“Ah, there you are!” muttered the old lady, who had just noticed Daniel’s ruse. Then she apostrophized the company at large:

“May I introduce Mile. Rinette to you all?” and added in menacing tones: “She’s under my wing.”

“Introduce us!” voices clamoured on all sides. “Introduce us to her!”

“Save us, what a to-do they’re making!” sighed Ma Juju, and with a bad grace she removed her hat and tossed it to one of the “nurses” waiting at table. She pointed to Daniel first of all.

“This is the Prophet,” she announced, “and a real bad egg!”

“How do you do?” said the girl amiably. Daniel took her hand and kissed it.

“Next, please!”

“His friend—I don’t know his name.” Ma Juju’s finger indicated Jacques.

“How do you do?” said Rinette.

“Next: Paule, Sylvia, Mme. Dolores—also a child unknown; the Wonder-Child, no doubt. Then Werff,
alias
‘Apricot,’ and Gaby. The Chump.”

“Thanks,” a sarcastic voice broke in; “I prefer the name of my forefathers. Favery, Mademoiselle, and one of your most ardent admirers.”

“Be my mascot, baby!” someone chirped ironically.

“Lily and Harmonica, or the Inseparables,” Ma Juju went on, steeled against interrupters. “The Colonel. Maud, Queen of the Garden. A gentleman I don’t know and with him two ladies whom I know very well, though I can’t recall their names. An empty chair. Ditto another. Then Battaincourt, otherwise ‘Little Batt.’ Marie-Josèphe, plus the pearls. Madame Packmell.” Then, with a bow, she added: “And Ma Juju, your humble servant.”

“How do you do? How do you do?” Rinette echoed herself in silvery cadences, smiling without a shadow of’ constraint.

“Rinette’s no sort of name for her,” Favery observed. “What about Miss Howd’youdo?”

“Why not?” the girl replied.

“Three cheers for Miss Howd’youdo!”

Smiling still, she seemed delighted by their noisy acclamations.

“And now, the soup!” The suggestion came from Mme. Packmell.

Jacques nudged Daniel with his elbow and showed him the bruise on his wrist.

“What ever came over you just now?”

His friend threw him a quizzing glance, without the least sign of contrition, a glance that was ardent to the point of fierceness.

“ ‘I am he that aches with amorous love,’ ” he quoted in English, lowering his voice.

Jacques leaned forward to examine Rinette, who happened to be looking towards him; he met her cool eyes, green-glistening like Marennes oysters.

Daniel continued in the same low voice:

“ ‘Does the earth gravitate? Does not all matter aching attract all matter?

“ ‘So the body of me to all I meet and know.’ ”

Jacques frowned slightly. This was not the first time he had chanced to witness one of these paroxysms of passion which carried Daniel off his feet in quest of pleasure, beyond all possibility of restraint. And each of them made a rift in Jacques’s affection despite his efforts to keep it whole. A comic detail shifted the trend of his thoughts; he had suddenly noticed that the inner surface of Daniel’s nose was lined with jet-black down, making his nostrils like the vent-holes of a mask. Then his eyes fell on-the “Prophet’s” hands, fine, tapering hands, shaded too with dusky down.
Vir pilosus
, he thought, repressing a smile.

Daniel leaned towards him again and continued in the same low tone, as though finishing the quotation from Whitman.

“Fill up your neighbour’s glass, my dear.”

“Mme. Packmell, the menu ith quite illegible thith. evening,” lisped a voice from the far end of the table.

“Two black marks against Mme. Packmell!” declared Favery severely.

“That ain’t nothing so long as you keep fit,” the comely blonde riposted philosophically.

Jacques was sitting next to Paule, the slightly tarnished angel with the snow-white skin. Beyond her sat a big-breasted girl who never spoke and applied her napkin to her lips after each spoonful. Further on, almost facing Jacques, beside a dark woman whose forehead rippled with tiny curls—Dolores, as Ma Juju called her—sat a little boy, seven or eight years old, dressed in rather shabby black; his eyes followed every movement of the others and, now and again, a smile lit up his face.

Jacques addressed the girl beside him:

“Why, they’ve forgotten your soup.”

“Thanks, I’m not taking any.”

She kept her eyes lowered and only raised them to look in Daniel’s direction. She had tried her best to get a seat beside him but at the last minute had seen him exchanging chairs with his friend; Jacques was to blame for this, she thought. Where had this fellow with the spotty face and a boil on his neck sprung from? Her pet aversion was redheads, and there was something in Jacques’s looks and in his auburn hair that put him in this category. Only to see the disorderly mat over his forehead, his jowl and loose-set ears, you knew him for a bit of a brute!

Mme. Dolores’s shrill voice broke in:

“Well, what’s come over you? Why don’t you put your napkin on?” She jerked the youngster to and fro, tucking the starched linen, which half submerged him in its folds, into his collar.

“When a woman owns to a certain age,” Favery was laying down the law to Marie-Josephè, “it means she’s past it. She got into the Conservatoire, I tell you, at the extreme age-limit exactly forty-five years ago, by producing her younger sister’s birth-certificate—which made her two years under her true age. So it comes to this …”

“That’s nobody’s business,” Ma Juju declared in a loud stage-whisper.

“Favery is one of those excellent folk who can never engage in a conversation without premising that the rate of velocity for falling bodies is 32 feet, 2 inches per second at Paris,” observed Werff, who once had crammed for the Polytechnic. He owed the nickname of Apricot to the hue of his skin; it had been burnt to a dull gold, spangled with freckles, by his practice of open-air sports. He cut a handsome figure, with his supple shoulders, strongly moulded face, and full, red lips; by night his sunburnt cheeks and blue eyes radiated hale well-being, a muscular gusto regaled by the day’s athletics.

“Nobody knows what he died of,” someone remarked, eliciting a jesting repartee. “The real mystery was what he lived on!”

“Hurry up now!” Mme. Dolores admonished the boy. “They serve dessert here, you know—but you shan’t have any.”

“Why?” the lad pleaded, turning his shining eyes towards her.

“Because you shan’t if I say no! Now do as you’re told, hurry up!” She saw that Jacques was watching and sped him a confidential smile. “He’s a fussy kid, you see. He shies off anything he’s not used to. Salmis of pigeon—you won’t see that every day, my pet! Gammon and greens came his way oftener than pigeon, I should say. He’s been spoilt. Fussed over, petted, like all only children. Especially as his mother was an invalid for so long. That’s what he is”—she stroked the child’s round, close-cropped head—”a spoilt child. A naughty, spoilt child. But, now his aunt’s in charge of him, there’ll be a change. Our young gentleman wanted to keep his lovelocks, like a little girl, eh? We’ll hear no more about those fads of his; no more pampering for him. Eat your dinner now. The gentleman’s looking. Be quick!” Delighted to have an audience, she cast another smile in the direction of Jacques and Paule. “He’s a little orphan,” she announced complacently. “He lost his mother only this week; she was married to my brother. She died in her village down in Lorraine—of consumption. Poor little kid,” she added, “it’s lucky for him that I am willing to look after him. He has no one in the world now except me. But I shall have my hands full!”

The little boy had ceased eating and was staring at his aunt. Did he understand? There was a curious intonation in his voice as he questioned her.

“Was it my mummy who died?”

“Don’t bother with questions. Eat your dinner!”

“Don’t want to now.”

“There you are! That’s how he is,” Mme. Dolores lamented. “Well, if you must know, it
was
your mummy who died. Now do as you’re told and go on eating, or you won’t have any ice-cream.”

Paule averted her eyes just then and, as their looks crossed, Jacques saw the image of his own distress. Her neck was slim and lithe and very pale, still paler than her cheeks; its slender grace invited thoughts of dalliance. As his gaze rested on her fine-grained skin, shaded with a slight down, a faint savour of sweetness rose to his lips. He groped for something to say, found nothing, and smiled. Watching him from the corner of an eye, she found him less uncouth. But a sudden twinge at her heart brought a deathly pallor to her face; resting her hands on the table edge, she let her head sink back a little, biting her tongue to save herself from fainting.

Seeing her thus, Jacques pictured a bird alighted on the tablecloth, there to die.

“What is it?” he whispered.

Her eyes were swimming and a line of white showed between her half-shut eyelids. Without moving she forced out two words:

“Say nothing!”

A lump had risen to his throat and, even had he wished, he could not have called out. In any case the others paid no heed to them. He looked at Paule’s hands; her rigid fingers, diaphanous like tiny tapers, had grown so livid that the nails showed up as patches of dark violet.

“My alarm goes off at six-thirty,” Favery was explaining to the girl beside him, with chuckles of self-satisfaction, “standing in a saucer poised precariously on a tumbler …”

Meanwhile Paule’s colour had returned a little and she opened her eyes again; turning, she weakly smiled her thanks to Jacques for his silence.

“It’s over,” she murmured breathlessly. “I’m liable to these attacks— my heart, you know.” Then she added ruefully, with lips that quivered still: “Have a nice sit-down, dearie, and you’ll get over it!”

He had an impulse to catch her in his arms and carry her far, far away from all this sordidness; in a daydream he devoted all his life to her and made her well. So potent was the love he felt within him for any weaker being who might claim, or merely accept, the refuge of his strength! He had half a mind to tell Daniel of his fantastic scheme, but Daniel’s thoughts were otherwise occupied.

Daniel was chatting with Ma Juju, across Rinette; a pretext for watching the girl beside him and feeling her warm nearness. Though all through the meal he had diplomatically refrained from addressing her in any but the briefest phrases, while paying court to her with delicate attentions, she obviously filled his thoughts. On several occasions she had noticed his eyes fixed on her and on each occasion, though she could not analyse the cause, his look, far from attracting her, evoked a feeling of estrangement; she was not blind to the virile charm of Daniel’s face, but it annoyed her.

Meanwhile a heated discussion was in progress at the far end of the table.

“Conceited ass!” Apricot apostrophized Favery, who pleaded guilty.

“That’s what I often say to myself!”

“But not loudly enough, I fear.”

Amidst the general laughter Werff kept the upper hand.

“My dear Favery,” he declared, deliberately raising his voice, “allow me to tell you something: what you’ve just said about women proves that you don’t know what to say to them.”

Daniel glanced at Favery. The young pedagogue was laughing and Daniel fancied he saw him glance towards Rinette, as though she had been the theme of the discussion. There was a certain effrontery, a lewdness, in Favery’s look which gave a fillip to Daniel’s antipathy for him. He knew stories about Favery which did him little credit, and felt a brutal impulse to retail them in Rinette’s hearing. And he never could resist impulses of that order. Lowering his voice so as to be heard by the two women only, he bent towards Ma Juju in such a way as to include Rinette in the conversation, and asked in a casual voice:

“Do you know that one about Favery and the woman taken in adultery?”

The old woman snapped at the bait.

“No, let’s hear it! And chuck us a cigarette’ This dinner seems likely to last all night.”

“One fine day—she’d been his mistress for a good spell then—the woman rolled up at his place with a valise in her hand. ‘I’ve had enough of it. I want to live with you,’ and the usual stuff. ‘But how about your husband?’ ‘Him? I’ve just written him this letter: “Dear Eugène, I have come to a turning-point in my life,” and so on … “I want, as I have the right, to bestow my affection on a heart that understands,” and so on and so forth… . “That heart—I have found it, and so I leave you.“ ‘

“And what a heart—I ask you!

“That was her lookout. But guess what happened next! Old Favery was in the devil of a stew. A woman on his hands and, what was worse, a woman who’d soon be divorced and free to insist on his marrying her. Then he brought off what he claims to be a stroke of genius. He sent this letter to the woman’s husband: ‘Dear Sir, I hereby inform you that your wife has left her home with the intention of coming to live with me. Faithfully yours . , .”

“Very decent of him,” Rinette remarked.

“So you think!” A malicious smile flitted across Daniel’s face. “But wait a bit! Favery’s astute; he was simply taking his precautions for the future. Her husband, he knew, would produce the letter in court. And the marriage of an unfaithful wife with her lover is forbidden by law. So Favery winds up his story with the maxim: Heaven helps those who know the Civil Code.”