The Thibaults (5 page)

Mme. de Fontanin drew back. “You’re talking like a prostitute.”

“Very well then, do you want to hear the truth?” Noémie retorted. “When a woman’s husband leaves her, it’s her own fault. If Jerome had found in your company what he gets elsewhere, you wouldn’t have to go running after him, my dear.”

Mme. de Fontanin could not help asking herself: Can it be true? Her nerves were at their breaking-point and she felt inclined to leave at once. But she could not face the prospect of being back at home again, without the address, without any means of getting in touch with Jerome. Her eyes softened once more.

“Noémie, please forget what I said just now and listen to me. Jenny’s ill, she’s had a temperature for two days, and I’m alone. You are a mother, you must know what it is to watch at the bedside of a child who’s starting an illness. For three weeks now Jerome hasn’t been home, not once. Where is he? What’s he doing? He
must
be told his daughter’s ill; he must come back. Do tell him that.” Noémie shook her head, wholly unmoved by the appeal. “Oh, Noémie, it’s not possible you’ve grown so heartless! Listen, I’m going to tell you everything; it’s true that Jenny’s ill and I’m dreadfully worried about her; but that’s not the worst.” Her voice was humbler yet. “Daniel has left me; he’s run away.”

“Run away?”

“Yes. Inquiries will have to be made. I simply can’t remain alone at such a time—with a sick child on my hands. Surely you understand that? Noémie, do please tell him he must come back.”

For a moment Mme. de Fontanin thought the younger woman was about to give way; there was a look of sympathy on her face. But then she turned abruptly away and cried, raising her arms to emphasize the words:

“But, good heavens, what do you expect me to do about it? Didn’t I tell you just now I can’t help you in any way?” And when Mme. de Fontanin disgustedly refrained from answering, she swung round on her with blazing cheeks. “You don’t believe me, Thérèse, eh? So much the worse for you; now you shall know everything. He’s let me down again—bolted, I don’t know where! Run away with another woman. So now you know! Well, do you believe me?”

All the colour had left Mme. de Fontanin’s face. Unthinking, she repeated: “Run away with another woman!”

Noémie had flung herself upon the sofa and buried her head among the cushions.

“Oh, if you only knew how he’s made me suffer! I’ve forgiven him too often, so he thinks I’ll go on forgiving him all the time. He’s greatly mistaken. Never again! The way he’s treated me is positively atrocious. Under my eyes, in my own house, he seduced a little slut of a maid I had here, a wretched brat of nineteen. She decamped, bag and baggage, a fortnight ago without giving notice or anything. And, would you believe it, he was waiting for her at the front door, with a cab!” Her voice grew shrill and she jumped up from the sofa. “In the street where I live, at my own door, in broad daylight, with my own servant. Did you ever hear of such a thing?”

Mme. de Fontanin had gone to the piano and was steadying herself against it; she was feeling on the verge of collapse. A picture was taking form before her, of Mariette as she had seen her a few months earlier, of all the little things she had noticed then, their furtive contacts as they brushed against each other in the hall, her husband’s surreptitious expeditions up to the sixth floor, where the maid’s bedroom was, until that day when it had become impossible to overlook what was going on, when she had had to dismiss the girl, who, overcome by remorse, had begged her mistress’s forgiveness. And she remembered the glimpse she had had of that little shop-girl in black, drying her eyes, beside the river bank. Now, looking up, she saw Noémie in front of her, and she averted her eyes. But her gaze drifted involuntarily back to the handsome woman sprawling across the sofa, the bare shoulder shaken by spasms of sobbing, and the gleam of white flesh under the filmy lace. And the picture that rose before her then was the most horrible of all.

Noémie’s voice was reaching her consciousness by fits and starts.

“But it’s over now! I’m through with him. He can come back, he can go down on his bended knees, I won’t give him a look. I hate and despise him. I’ve caught him lying time after time without the faintest reason, just to amuse himself, because he’s built that way. He can’t open his mouth without lying. He doesn’t know what it means to tell the truth.”

“You’re unjust to him, Noémie.”

The younger woman sprang up in amazement. “You of all people!
You
defend him!” But Mme. de Fontanin had regained her self-control; when she spoke again her voice had changed.

“You haven’t got the address of that … that maid?”

Noémie reflected for a moment, then, bending towards her, answered with a confidential air:

“No. But the concierge, perhaps …”

Thérèse cut her short with a quick gesture, and began to move towards the door. To hide her discomfiture Noémie buried her face amongst the cushions and made as if she did not see her going.

In the hall, as Mme. de Fontanin was drawing aside the front-door curtain, she suddenly felt Nicole’s arms hugging her passionately; the little girl’s face was wet with tears. She had no time to say anything to the child, who kissed her again, almost hysterically, and ran back into the apartment.

The concierge was only too glad to gossip. “Yes, Ma’am, I readdress her letters to the place in the country where she comes from. It’s Perros-Guirec, in Brittany; her folks send them on to her, I expect. If you’d like to know the address …” She opened a greasy, well-thumbed address-book.

On her way home Mme. de Fontanin entered a post-office, and filled in a telegraph-form.

Victorine Le Gad,

Place de l’Eglise,

Perros-Guirec, Côtes-du-Nord.

Please inform M. de Fontanin that his son Daniel disappeared last Sunday.

Then she asked for a postcard.

Pastor Gregory,

Christian Healers Group,

2A Boulevard Bineau,

Neuilly-sur-Seine.

Dear James,

Daniel left home two days ago without saying where he was going. I have had no news from him and I am terribly worried. To make things worse, Jenny is ill; she has a high temperature, but we don’t know yet what’s wrong. And I cannot let Jerome know, as I don’t know where he is.

I am feeling very lonely, my dear friend. Please come.

Thérèse de Fontanin.

TWO days later, Wednesday, at six o’clock in the evening, a tall, ungainly, grotesquely thin man, whose age it was impossible to guess, made his appearance at the building in which Mme. de Fontanin’s flat was situated.

The concierge shook her head. “The poor young lady’s dying, and the doctors are with her. They won’t let you see her.”

The pastor climbed the stairs. The door on the landing was open. The hall seemed full of men’s overcoats. A nurse came running up the hall.

“I am Pastor Gregory,” he said to her. “What’s wrong? Is Jenny …?”

The nurse stared at him, murmured: “She’s dying,” and turned off into one of the rooms.

He shook all over as if he had been dealt a blow. It seemed to him the air had suddenly become unbreathable, stifling. Going into the drawing-room, he opened both windows wide.

Ten minutes passed. People were moving to and fro in the passage, doors opening and shutting. There was a sound of voices. Mme. de Fontanin appeared, followed by two elderly men in black. When she saw Gregory she ran towards him.

“Oh, James! At last you’ve come! Please, please don’t leave me now.”

“I only got back from London today,” he explained.

She drew him aside, leaving the two doctors to their consultation. In the hall Antoine, in his shirt-sleeves, was plying a nail-brush over a basin the nurse was holding in front of him. Mme. de Fontanin grasped the pastor’s hands. She had changed out of recognition; her cheeks were pale and haggard, her lips were quivering.

“Please stay beside me, James. Don’t leave me alone. Jenny is …”

A sound of moaning came from the far end of the flat and, without ending the phrase, she hurried back to the bedroom.

The pastor went up to Antoine; his anxious look voiced an unspoken question.

Antoine shook his head. “I’m afraid there’s no hope.”

“Come, come! Why talk in that way?” Gregory sounded indignant.

“It’s meningitis,” Antoine said with a certain emphasis, raising his hand to his forehead. “What a queer bird!” he was thinking, as he looked at the English pastor.

Gregory’s face was peaked and sallow; his long black hair, lustreless as a dead man’s, straggled over a high, straight forehead. He had a long, pendulous nose flushed an unhealthy red, and the eyes, jet-black, almost without whites, deep-set beneath heavy brows, had an oddly phosphorescent glow. They brought to mind the eyes of certain monkeys; they had the same restlessness, the same melting softness combined with the same obduracy. Yet more unusual was the lower half of his face. He seemed to be perpetually laughing, but with a laugh that expressed no known emotion and twisted his mouth into all sorts of unexpected shapes. The chin was no less odd: it was hairless, and drawn skin-tight over the bones like a wrapper of old parchment.

“Was it sudden?” the pastor asked.

“The fever began on Sunday, but the symptoms became definite only yesterday morning. I arranged for a consultation at once. Everything possible has been done.” His face grew earnest. “We shall hear what my colleagues have to say, but in my opinion—well, I’m afraid the poor child is …”

“Don’t!” the pastor exclaimed in English, in a hoarse, harsh voice. His eyes were fixed on Antoine’s; their indignation contrasted quaintly with the laugh that never left his mouth. As though the air were stifling him, he raised an emaciated hand towards his collar, spreading out the fingers stiffly. The hand looked like some hideous spider resting on his throat.

Antoine was studying the pastor with a professional eye. “Remarkably asymmetrical, that face,” he was thinking, “what with that silent laugh, that vacant, maniacal grimace, and the rest of it.”

Gregory addressed him in a formal tone. “Might I know if Daniel has returned?”

“No, and there’s no news of him.”

His voice grew tender. “Poor, poor lady!” he murmured.

Just then the two doctors came out of the drawing-room. Antoine went up to them.

“She’s dying,” the elder of the two said in a nasal voice, placing his hand on Antoine’s shoulder. Antoine turned and glanced at the pastor.

The nurse came up and asked in a low voice: “Really, doctor, do you think there’s no …?”

Gregory moved away so as to hear no more. The oppression in the air was more than he could endure. Through the half-open door he saw the staircase; he hurried down it into the open air. Crossing the avenue he began to run straight ahead under the trees, his hair fluttering in disorder, his spidery fingers splayed across his chest. Eagerly he inhaled the cool evening air, his mouth still gaping in a preposterous laugh. “Those accursed doctors!”

He was as devoted to the Fontanins as if they had been his own family. When he had landed in Paris, sixteen years before, without a penny in his pocket, it was Pastor Perrier, Thérèse’s father, who had befriended him. And he had never forgotten. Later on, during his benefactor’s last illness, he had thrown qp his work to hasten to his bedside, and the old pastor had died with one hand in his daughter’s and the other in that of Gregory—his son, as the old man always called him. It all came back to him so poignantly at that moment that he turned on his heel and strode rapidly to the house. The doctors’ carriage was no longer standing in front of it. He ran upstairs.

The front door had been left ajar. A sound of moans guided him to Jenny’s room. In the semi-darkness he could hear the child whimpering, gasping for breath. It was all that Mme. de Fontanin, the nurse, and maid could do among them to keep the little body still. It was twisting convulsively like a fish dying on a river bank.

For a few moments Gregory did not speak, but watched them with a surly look on his face, pinching his chin between his fingers. At last he bent towards Mme. de Fontanin.

“They’ll kill your child between them!”

“Kill her? What ever do you mean!” she exclaimed, as she clutched at Jenny’s arm, which kept on slipping from her grasp.

“If you don’t drive them out”—he spoke with deep conviction— “they’ll kill Jenny.”

“Who will?”

“Every one of them!”

She stared at him blankly—could she believe her ears? His sallow face bending above her looked terrifying.

One of Jenny’s hands was fluttering outside the sheets; he gripped it and, stooping over the bed, began talking to her in a low, crooning voice.

“Jenny! Jenny darling! Don’t you know me?”

Her distraught eyes, which had been staring up at the ceiling, swung slowly round towards the pastor’s. Then, bending still nearer, he let his gaze sink deep into hers, and such was its insistence that the child ceased suddenly to whimper.

“Stop holding her!” he said to the three women, and, as none of them complied, he added, without moving his head, in a voice that admitted no denial: “Give me her other hand. All is well. Now, go!”

They moved away from the bed. Alone at the bedside, he bent over the dying child, mastering her with the hypnotic fixity of his eyes. The child’s arms struggled convulsively in his grip for a few moments, then gently sank towards the sheets. For a time the legs went on twitching, then they too relaxed. And, subdued at last, the tired eyes closed. Still bending over her, Gregory signed to Mme. de Fontanin to approach.

“Look,” he murmured, “she’s quiet now, she’s calmer. Drive them away, I tell you, drive away those sons of Belial. Error alone dominates them, and Error had all but killed your child.”

He laughed, with the soundless laugh of a mystic who is in sole possession of the eternal verities, for whom the rest of the world is composed of madmen. Without shifting his gaze, still fixed on Jenny’s eyes, he went on in a lower voice.

“Woman, I tell you
There is no Evil
! It’s you who bring it into being ‘and give it its baneful power—because you fear it, because you admit its existence. Now, for instance, those men have given up hope. They all say: ‘She is …’ And you think the same thing. You all but said it just now. ‘Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the door of my lips.’ Poor little one, when I entered this room, there was nothing round her but the void, nothing but the Negative… . But I deny the Negative; I say: ‘
She is not ill
!”