The Thibaults (42 page)

Rinette pondered a while; then it dawned on her.

“A dirty trick!”

Daniel, as he bent towards her, felt her breath hover on his face and lips, and he took a deep breath, almost closing his eyes.

“So he let her drop, eh?” the old woman inquired.

Daniel did not reply. Rinette looked towards him. He kept his eyes lowered now, for he felt powerless to hide their frenzy of desire. Close to her eyes she saw the smoothness of his skin, the savage line of his mouth, his quivering lashes, and, as though she long had known and tested their dark treacheries, something within her, urgent as an instinct, turned her suddenly against him.

“But what became of the woman?” Ma Juju asked again.

“They say she killed herself. His version is that she was consumptive.” With a forced smile he passed his fingers across his forehead.

Rinette drew herself up, shrinking against the back of her chair, so as to keep as far apart as possible from Daniel. What was the cause of this revulsion that had come over her so suddenly? His face, his smile, his expression—all about this handsome youth repelled her; his way of leaning forward, the grace of his gestures, and most of all, his long, sensitive hands. Never had she dreamt there slumbered in her heart, biding their time but so far held in leash, such potencies of loathing for a total stranger.

“So, in other words, I’m a flirt!” exclaimed Marie-Josephè, calling the company to witness.

Battaincourt smiled ingenuously.

“Am I to blame if our language has no other word to describe that most charming of traits: the desire to fascinate?”

“Oh, how disgusting!” Mme. Dolores’s shrill voice broke in.

All eyes turned in her direction, only to find that the little boy had spilt a spoonful of cream on his black coat and was being hauled away by his aunt towards the lavatory.

Jacques profited by her eclipse to question Paule, glad of this chance of breaking the ice.

“You know her?”

“Slightly.”

Paule’s impulse was to stop there; she was naturally reserved, and felt depressed. But, as Jacques had been so nice to her just now, she continued. “She’s not a bad sort, you know. And she’s well off. She was once, for quite a long while, the mistress of a fellow who writes plays. Then she married a pharmacist. He’s dead now and his patent medicines bring her in a tidy income still—the ‘Dolores Corn-Cure,’ you must have heard of it. No? Better tell her so, she always carries samples in her bag. A striking woman, you’ll see; quite a character. She keeps a dozen cats picked up here, there, and everywhere, and a large aquarium of fishes in her bedroom. She loves animals.”

“But not children.”

Paule shook her head.

“That’s the sort she is,” she concluded.

Jacques noticed that after speaking she breathed with difficulty. All the same he wanted to prolong their talk. The reminder that she had heart-disease brought to his lips, somewhat inaptly, a familiar phrase: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”

She reflected a moment, then, strumming on the table with her fingers, corrected him:

“It should be: ‘The heart its reasons has …’ The first way it didn’t sound like poetry.”

His longing for her persisted, but he now felt less disposed to devote his life to her. No sooner, he thought, am I allowed the smallest glimpse into another’s soul than I am half in love already! He recalled the first occasion when he noticed this habit of his: one day during the previous summer he had gone for a walk with some of Antoine’s friends in the Viroflay woods; a Swedish girl, studying medicine at Paris, had leaned on his arm and chattered to him of her childhood. …

Suddenly he realized that it was half-past nine and Antoine had not yet come. A panic fear came over him and, forgetting everything else, he clutched Daniel’s arm and shook it.

“I’m positive something’s happened to him!”

“What …?”

“To Antoine.”

Dinner had just ended and people were leaving their seats. Jacques rose to his feet. Daniel was standing too and, while manoeuvring to keep in touch with Rinette, tried to reassure his friend.

“Don’t be an ass, Jacques! He’s a doctor. An urgent call …”

But Jacques was already out of earshot. Unable to collect his wits or master his forebodings, he had hurried off to the cloak-room. Without saying goodbye to anyone or giving a thought to Paule, he ran outside. “It’s my fault,” horror-stricken, he admonished himself. “I’ve brought Antoine bad luck. My fault! My fault! And all to have a black suit, like that fellow at the Medicis crossing!”

The three-piece band had just struck up a waltz and a few couples had started dancing near the bar. Daniel saw Favery’s chin uptilted, as if he sniffed the air, his twinkling eyes fixed on Rinette, and, by a quick move, forestalled him.

“Shall we …?”

She had noticed his approach and met it with a hostile look. She gave him time enough to bend a little towards her before replying.

“No.”

He masked his surprise with a smile.

“ ‘No.’ Why ‘no’?” he said, mimicking her intonation. So sure was he of getting his way that he took a step towards her. “Come along!” The touch of over-confidence in his gesture clinched her distaste.

“No, not with you,” she said pointedly.

“No?” he repeated; but there was a challenging gleam in his dark eyes that seemed to say: “My time will come!”

She turned away and, noticing Favery’s hesitant approach, went up to him as if he had already asked her for the dance. They danced together in silence.

Ludwigson had just arrived. Wearing a dinner-jacket and an incongruous straw hat, he stood beside the bar, chatting with Mother Packmell and Marie-Josephè, whose necklace he was fingering complacently. But stealthily his slow eyes, slotted between reptilian lids, would alight, like a blow from a loaded cane, on something or someone present, summing up the company.

Ma Juju steered a course between the dancers, in quest of Rinette. When she had found the girl, she nudged her with her elbow,

“Hurry up! And remember what I said!”

Paule had buttonholed Daniel in a corner of the room and he was listening to her with a faraway smile. He watched Ma Juju proceeding with the most natural air in the world to join Marie-Josephè’s group, while Rinette, ceasing to dance, went and sat down alone at a distant table in the far room. A moment later Ludwigson and Ma Juju crossed both rooms and joined her there. Ludwigson always— and especially when he knew he was being looked at—stiffened his back, like an old-time cabby, as he walked. He knew only too well that nature had cursed him with a houri’s hind parts and that whenever he moved fast his hips were apt to sway from side to side; so he stepped delicately. He pressed his thick lips on Rinette’s proffered hand. As he made the gesture Daniel noted his somewhat receding skull, plastered with black and skilfully dekinked hair. “The fellow’s got a distinction of his own all the same,” he said to himself. “There’s a touch of the coolie in our Levantine mountebank—but something of the Grand Turk, too.”

As Ludwigson slowly drew off his gloves his expert, appraising gaze was sizing up Rinette. He sat down facing her, Ma Juju beside him. Drinks were served at once, though Ludwigson had given no order; they knew his ways. He never drank champagne, but always Asti—a still variety—not iced or even cool, but slightly warmed. “Tepid,” he explained, “like the yuice of frucht in sunshine.”

Daniel left Paule and, lighting a cigarette, strolled round the bar, greeting his friends; then he returned and settled down in the further room. Ludwigson and Ma Juju had their backs to him, but he was directly opposite Rinette, though the full width of the room lay between them. A breezy conversation had sprung up all at once around the glasses of Asti. Rinette was smiling at Ludwigson’s sallies; leaning towards her, he made no secret of his admiration and spared no pains to please her. When she saw Daniel watching she put on an even gayer air.

The two rooms adjoined, and dancing couples kept coming and going through the opening between them. A little rosy-cheeked “professional,” who might have stepped out of a Lawrence canvas, had perched herself on the first step of the tiny white staircase behind the bar, and, with both hands on the banisters and standing on one leg, she swung the other to and fro in time with the music, and yelled, her face uptilted, a meaningless refrain that everyone that summer knew by heart:

“Timmyloo, lammylod, pan, pan, timmylahl”

Daniel, a cigarette between his lips, rested his head on his hands; his eyes were riveted on Rinette. He had ceased smiling; his features had grown rigid, his lips pinched. “Where have I seen him before?” the girl asked herself. She laughed over-noisily, studiously evading Daniel’s gaze. But evasion grew more and more difficult; oftener and oftener, like a lark lured towards a mirror, she found her attention caught and held by his unswerving eyes. Shadowed yet clear, they seemed precisely focused on a point in space far beyond Rinette; keen, burning eyes and never faltering; twin magnets from whose pull she managed to break free each time, but each time found it harder.

Suddenly Daniel felt something moving almost at his side. Such was the tension of his nerves that he could not help starting. It was the little orphan who had gone to sleep on the settle, curled up in Dolores’s silky mantle, one finger near his mouth, and eyelashes still moist with half-dried tears.

The band had ceased playing while the violinist went his round in quest of tips. When he came to Daniel the latter slipped a banknote under the napkin.

“The next boston—make it last a quarter of an hour, non-stop,” he whispered. The musician’s dusky eyelashes fluttered in assent.

Daniel felt that Rinette was watching him and, raising his eyes, he took possession of her gaze. And now he knew that it was in his thrall; once or twice—to amuse himself—he played at cat-and-mouse, pouncing on it and letting it go, to test his power. And then … he let it go no more.

Ludwigson, greatly smitten, waxed more and more insistent in his wooing, while the attention Rinette paid him grew more and more perfunctory and vacillating. When the violin struck up another waltz, from the first touch of the bow upon the strings, she knew by the thrill his tense features gave her that things were coming to a head. Yes, there was Daniel getting up! Coolly, with eyes fixed on his prey, he crossed the room, came straight up to her. It flashed across him that he was risking his post with Ludwigson and the thought was like a rowel to his passion. Rinette watched him come, and in her glassy stare there was something so abnormal that Ludwigson and Ma Juju both swung round at once. Ludwigson, imagining that Daniel meant to greet him, made a tentative gesture in his direction. But Daniel did not seem even to know him. As he leaned forward his look bored into the girl’s sea-green eyes, bright with mingled terror and consent. Subdued, she rose. Without a word he slipped his arm around her, drew her close, and disappeared with her into the further room where the band was playing.

For a second or two Ludwigson and Ma Juju sat in stony silence, blankly staring at their retreating backs. Then their eyes met.

“Well, of all the damned cheek …!” Ma Juju could heardly speak and her double chin quivered with fury.

Ludwigson’s eyebrows lifted, but he did not answer. He was naturally so pale that he could not grow paler. The nails of his huge fingers glowed darkly like cornelians as he reached for his glass and raised the Asti to his lips.

Ma Juju was panting like a winded sprinter. “Anyhow,” she ventured, with the dry chuckle of a woman getting her revenge, “that means the sack for the young scallawag, I guess, as far as you’re concerned.”

Ludwigson looked surprised.

“M. de Fontanin? But why should you think that?”

His smile implied that a man of breeding does not stoop to such acts of petty spite. Cool and collected, he drew on his gloves. Perhaps, indeed, he was genuinely tickled at the situation. Taking a note from his pocket-book, he tossed it onto the table and rose with a courteous gesture of farewell to Ma Juju. Then he went to the room where dancing was in progress and halted on the threshold till the couple came round to where he stood. Daniel caught his drowsy gaze, in which a spice of malice mingled with jealousy and admiration; then he saw him sidling past the settles towards the exit and vanish through the swinging-door, which seemed to swish him round in its wake, into the outer darkness.

Daniel waltzed slowly; his body did not seem to move, and he held his head erect. There was a certain coolness in his deportment, partly ease and partly stiffness; he danced on the tips of his toes and his feet never left the ground. Rinette, lost to her surroundings—whether spellbound or outraged, she could not decide—followed so perfectly Daniel’s least movements that it was as if they had always danced together. After ten minutes they were the last couple left in; the others, whose energy had failed them long before, formed a circle round them. Five more minutes passed and left them dancing still. Then, after a last repeat, the band cried quarter. They danced on till the final chord—the girl half swooning on his shoulder, Daniel self-possessed, veiling with closed eyelids the burning gaze which now and again he let fall on her, thrilling her by turns with loathing and desire.

To the accompaniment of clapping hands Daniel led Rinette back to Ludwigson’s table, quite composedly took the vacant chair, asked for another glass, and, filling it with Asti, gaily lifted it to Ma Juju and drained it at a draught.

“Faugh!” he exclaimed. “What syrup!”

Rinette broke into a nervous laugh and her eyes filled with tears.

Ma Juju stared at Daniel, big-eyed with wonder; her anger had evaporated. She rose and, shrugging her shoulders, sighed comically.

“Well, that ain’t nothing so long as you keep fit!”

Half an hour later Daniel and Rinette left Packmell’s together.

Rain had fallen.

“A taxi?” the page inquired.

“Let’s walk a bit first,” Rinette proposed. There was a soft fall in her voice that Daniel found charming.

Despite the rain, the air was still sultry. The ill-lit streets Were empty. They went slowly on along the rain-bright sidewalk.