The Thibaults (62 page)

At last the sound of the front-door closing and Jerome’s steps in the tiled hall startled them into movement. Jenny hurriedly let fall her arms and fled to her room, stumbling as though a load of grief were laid on her frail shoulders, a burden no one in the world could ever lighten.

A GIGANTIC poster, flaunted on the boulevard, brought passers-by to a full stop before the picture-house.

IN DARKEST AFRICA

TRAVELS AMONGST THE SAVAGE TRIBES OF THE INTERIOR

“It doesn’t begin till half-past eight,” Rachel sighed.

“I told you so.”

Not without regret had Antoine forgone the privacy of the pink bedroom, and now, to console himself with an illusive isolation, he booked one of the shut-in boxes at the back of the amphitheatre.

While he was doing so, Rachel came back to him.

“I say, I’ve just spotted a real beauty!” she cried, and led him to the lobby, where stills from the film were being exhibited. “Look there!”

Antoine read the caption first: “A Mundang girl winnowing millet on the banks of the Mayo Kebbi.” Then his eyes rose to a bronzed body, stark naked but for a ribbon of plaited straw knotted round the loins. Intent upon her task, the girl, resting her weight on her right leg, her bust strained upwards, her right arm rising in a sweeping curve above her head, had the poised beauty of a statuette. In her right hand she held a tilted calabash filled with grain that she was pouring in a thin trickle, from as high as she could reach, into a wooden bowl below, clasped in her left hand at the level of her knee. Nothing was studied in her attitude; the poise of her head, flung back a little, the balanced harmony of her curving arms, the upward surge of the torso, tip-tilting the firm young breasts, the flexure of her waist and tension of her hip, the forward swing of the unweighted limb that lightly spurned the soil at its extremity—all breathed harmonious beauty, adjusted to the rhythms of toil, an artless counterpoint of movements.

“Look, what do you think of that?” She pointed to a file of ten young Negroes bearing on their shoulders a tapering pirogue. “Isn’t that little fellow lovely? He’s a Wolof, you know. That’s a
grigri
he has round his neck, and he’s wearing a blue
boubou
and a tarboosh.” Her voice was vibrant with unwonted excitement that evening and, when she smiled, her lips all but refused to part, as though the muscles of her face had stiffened unawares. Her eyes moved restlessly between the narrowed lids, fever-bright and lit with silvery gleams; never had Antoine seen them thus before.

“Let’s go in,” she suggested.

“But there’s a good quarter of an hour before it starts.”

“That doesn’t matter!” she insisted, like an impatient child. “Let’s go in now.”

The house was empty. In the orchestra pit some musicians were tuning up. As Antoine began to raise the lattice-window in front of the box Rachel pressed herself to his side.

“Do loosen your tie!” she pleaded laughingly. “You always look as if you’d just been trying to throttle yourself and dashed off with the rope round your neck.” Letting the window fall, Antoine made a vague gesture of petulance. “Yes,” she murmured in the same breath, “I’m ever so glad you’re with me to see this show.” Prisoning Antoine’s face between her hands, she drew it to her lips. “You’ve no idea how much I love you now that beard of yours is gone!”

She took off her hat, gloves, and cloak, and they sat down. Across the lattice which screened them from the public, they saw the theatre coming to life under their eyes; from a mute, dingy cavern, bathed in dim red light, whence here and there emerged a speck of human flotsam, it became a seething mass of life, a busy aviary whose twitterings were sometimes drowned by a chromatic scale from some wind instrument. The summer had been exceptionally hot, but the latter half of September had brought many Parisians home again perforce, and even now the Paris of high summer, which Rachel delighted in exploring like a new-found city year by year, had ceased to be.

“Listen!” she said. The orchestra had begun to play the spring-song from the Walküre. Antoine was sitting very close beside her, and her head drooped on his shoulder; from Rachel’s lips, through her closed lips, there came to him an echo as it were of the melody the violins were playing.

“Have you ever heard Zucco, the tenor?” she inquired casually.

“Yes. Why?”

Lost in a daydream, she did not reply at once; at last she whispered under her breath, as if a belated scruple forbade her keeping him in the dark:

“He was my lover once.”

Though in no way jealous, Antoine was keenly curious about Rachel’s past. He realized exactly what she meant by her remark: “My body has no memory.” All the same—that fellow Zucco! What a figure of fun he’d looked in his white satin doublet, perched on a sort of wooden crate, in the third act of the
Meistersinger
; a fat and stocky oaf who, for all his yellow wig, looked like a gipsy and, in the love-duets, splayed his fat fingers against his heart. Antoine was rather vexed that Rachel should have stooped so low as that!

“Have you heard him sing it?” she asked, while her fingers traced in air the sinuous curves of melody. “I never told you about Zucco, did I?”

“No.”

He was pressing Rachel’s hand against his breast and need only look down to observe her face. She had not the lively air habitual with her when she evoked the past; her eyebrows were a little knitted, her eyelids all but closed, and the corners of her mouth were drooping. “How well the cast of grief would fit her face!” he said to himself. Then, struck by her silence, and anxious once again to prove he took no umbrage at her past, he put a leading question:

“Well, what about your Signor Zucco?”

She started.

“Zucco?” she repeated with a faint smile. “Well, you know, there’s little enough to tell, really. He was number one, that’s all.”

“And where do I come on the list?” The question cost him a slight effort.

“Why, number three, of course,” she replied coolly.

A threesome, Antoine mused: Zucco, Hirsch, and I. Only a threesome?

She seemed to wake up suddenly.

“You want to hear more? But there’s nothing in it, really. It was just after Papa’s death; my brother had a job at Hamburg. I was busy at the Opera all day and every day, but the nights I wasn’t dancing I felt rather lonely—you know how one is at eighteen. Zucco had been after me for ages. I didn’t think much of him; he was inclined to put on airs.” She hesitated. “A bit of an ass, really. Yes, I rather think that even then I found him rather maudlin. But I never guessed he was a brute as well!” she suddenly burst out.

The lights had just gone down; she glanced round the theatre.

“What comes first?”

“News-reels.”

“Then?”

“A Wild West film—rotten, I expect.”

“And Africa?”

“Last of all.”

“Oh, well,” she murmured, resting again her fragrant hair on Antoine’s shoulder, “you can tell me if there’s anything worth watching… . Sure I don’t tire you, Toine dear, like that? I’m ever so comfy.”

He saw her glistening, parted lips, and pressed his mouth to her mouth’s kiss.

But, when he mentioned Zucco’s name again, to his surprise the smile died from her face.

“Now I look back on it,” she said, “I can’t imagine how I ever stood the way he treated me—worse than a brutal drover treats his cattle! He’d been a muleteer, as it happens, in Oran. All the other girls were sorry for me; no one could make out why I put up with him; in fact I can’t understand it myself. Of course, so they say, some women like being knocked about… .” She was silent for a while, then added: “No; it must have been because I so dreaded being alone again.”

Never before within his memory had Antoine heard such sadness in Rachel’s voice. He drew his arms more closely round her, as if to shelter her from the rough world. But then his embrace grew weaker; he was thinking of his over-readiness to pity—a facet, doubtless, of his pride, and, perhaps, the secret of his devotion to his young brother. Indeed he had sometimes wondered—before Rachel crossed his path—if he were capable of any other form of love.

“And then?”

“Then it was he who dropped me… . Needless to say,” she added, without a trace of bitterness.

After an interval she continued in a lower voice, as though she wanted the avowal to pass in silence:

“I was going to have a baby.”

Antoine was dumbfounded. Rachel had been a mother! Impossible! Was it credible that he, a doctor, should have failed to note the signs …? Preposterous!

His eyes strayed, fretful and bemused, towards the captions reeling out before him:

THE ARMY MANCEUVRES

M. Fallieres converses with the German Military Attaché.

THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE OF THE FUTURE

Latham lands in his monoplane with important dispatches for the 
Commander-in-Chief.

The intrepid airman is greeted by the President of the Republic.

“Oh, that wasn’t his only reason for dropping me,” Rachel explained. “If I’d gone on paying his bills …”

Antoine suddenly remembered the photograph of a baby which he had seen at her place, and her words as she snatched it away from him: “It’s a little godchild, who died.”

He was less astonished by Rachel’s revelation than aggrieved at it, piqued in his professional self-esteem.

“Is that really so?” he murmured. “You had a child?” Then quickly added with a knowledgeable smile: “Of course I had guessed as much, some time ago.”

“Still, it doesn’t show a lot, does it? I took no end of trouble about myself—because of my job at the theatre.”

“But a doctor’s eyes, you know!” He gave a slight shrug.

She smiled. Antoine’s perspicacity made her still prouder of him. For some moments she was silent and when she spoke again her voice had the same languorous tone.

“When I think of those days, you know, Toine dear, I feel that the best of my life lies behind me. How proud I was about it! And when I was getting a bit ungainly and had to ask them at the Opera for a holiday, guess where I went! To Normandy. A little village at the back of beyond, where an old woman who’d been our nurse, my brother’s and mine, was living. What a fuss they made over me down there! I wouldn’t have minded settling there for good and all; and that’s what I should have done. Only the stage, you know, when once one’s got it in the blood … I acted for the best, as I thought, and left the kid there with the wet-nurse; I felt quite safe. Then, eight months later … Meanwhile I’d fallen ill, too,” she sighed after a moment’s pause. “The confinement had wrecked my health. I had to leave the Opera, say goodbye to everything. And there I was again-alone in the world!”

He scanned her face. She was not weeping; her eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling. But slowly, very slowly, tears were welling up beneath her eyelids. Abashed by her emotion, he dared not kiss her. He was thinking out what she had told him. Each day he fancied he had found a stable vantage-point whence to survey her life in its entirety and judge it whole; but the very next day some reminiscence or avowal, even a casual hint, sufficed to open unsuspected vistas which once again he could not get in focus.

Suddenly she drew herself up, raising an arm to set her hair straight; but, as abruptly, stayed the gesture.

“Look! Oh, look!” she cried, pointing to the screen.

Involuntarily, across a mist of tears, she gazed wide-eyed at a girl on horseback flying from pursuit, with a furious pack of Redskins at her heels. The fearless maiden and her steed whisked up a rocky slope, posed for a second statue-like upon the summit, then scudded down a dizzy gradient. Intrepidly she plunged into a torrent, and thirty horsemen splashed in after her, vanishing in clouds of spray. Now she was on the further bank, spurring her horse, galloping ahead. Vain hope! The kidnappers rode hell-for-leather on her track, closed in around their quarry. Lassos whipped the air above her, snaked round her head. An iron bridge hove into sight, beneath it an express in full career. In a flash she slipped from the saddle, vaulted the parapet, leapt into the void.

The audience gasped.

Brief panic. Now they saw her standing on the roof of a car, borne past at headlong speed, her hair awry, with flying skirts and arms akimbo, while, from the bridge, the Redskins discharged thirty guns at her in vain.

“Were you watching?” Her voice thrilled with delight. “I love it!”

He drew her towards him again, this time onto his knees, and rocked her like a child. He wanted to console her, make her forget everything, everything but their love. But he said nothing of it and began toying with her necklace. Inset between the honey-golden beads were little balls of leaden-hued ambergris which, as he fingered them, grew warm and fragrant; so clinging was the perfume that sometimes, two days later, he would catch a sudden tang of it in the hollow of his hands. Unfastening her blouse, he pressed his cheek upon her breast; she did not try to stop him. Then:

“Come in!” she cried.

A young attendant appeared; she had opened the door of their box by mistake and quickly closed it, but not before casting an interested glance at the half-undressed girl in Antoine’s arms. Antoine released Rachel in haste, but not in time—much to her amusement.

“How silly you are! Perhaps she wanted to … Anyway she looks nice… .”

The words and the way she said them were so astonishing that he tried to catch the look on her face, but she had buried her forehead on his shoulder and all he noticed was her laugh—an almost soundless, enigmatic chuckle that always made him ill at ease.

The element of mystery in Rachel that still was apt to baffle him always gave Antoine the impression of a yawning gulf between them. It roused in him a feeling of unrest, tinctured with curiosity, subtly obnoxious to his self-esteem. For hitherto it had been he who, as a man of science, by veiled allusions, sceptic smiles, set others in a quandary. Rachel had turned the tables on him; beside her Antoine felt atrociously small-boyish and (loath though he was to own to it) rather at sea where certain subjects were concerned. Once, to redress the balance, he had ventured to garnish his professional reminiscences with echoes from the students’ mess and even invented for her benefit a far-fetched amorous adventure in which, so he alleged, he had played a leading part. But she had shut him up with a burst of affectionate laughter.