The Thibaults (64 page)

Daniel took another look at Antoine, then smiled towards the girl, as though congratulating her on her handiwork.

“Yes, by Jove!” he exclaimed. “It’s a vast improvement.”

“Yes, I dare say it is, as long as one’s alive!” Antoine affected the tone of a facetious medical student. “But if you’d seen as many ‘stiffs’ as I have …! After two days—!”

Rachel rapped on the table to make him stop. She often forgot that Antoine was a doctor. Turning to him, she scanned him for a moment, then murmured tenderly:

“My medicine-man!”

Could it be possible this face she knew so well was the same face as that which she had watched during the operation under the garish lamplight—a hero’s face and terrible in beauty, superbly inaccessible? How well she knew it—better than ever, now she saw it unconcealed, with all its contours, its smallest details visible! The razor had exposed a slight hollow in the cheeks—a certain slackness of the tissues—giving them a milder air that somewhat redeemed the sternness of the jaw. She had learned by touch, as blind men learn their world, under the nightly pressure of her palms, the squareness of his jawbones, the squat curve of his chin, so oddly flattened on its under surface that she had exclaimed: “Why, your under-jaw’s almost exactly like a snake’s!” But now his beard had gone, what she found most perplexing in his face was the long, sinuous line of his mouth—so rigid was it, yet so plastic; its corners hardly ever lifted and seldom drooped—cut short abruptly on either side by a straight line, a trait of more than human will-power, such as is sometimes found on the faces of ancient statutes. “Is his will
really
so strong as that?” she asked herself. Bending forward, she scrutinized him rather mischievously from the corner of an eye, and a brief glint of gold flickered along her eyelashes.

Antoine suffered her scrutiny with the pleased smile of a man who knows himself beloved. Since shaving off his beard, he had come to take a rather different view of himself; he set less store by his hypnotic gaze, for he detected in himself new possibilities, new and eminently agreeable ones. Moreover, for some weeks past, he had felt a thoroughgoing change coming over him; so drastic was it that the events in his life which preceded his meeting with Rachel were falling away into obscurity—they had taken place before. Before what? Before his transformation. A vicious circle; but he let it go at that. Yes, his temperament had changed, had grown more supple; more mature and, at the same time, younger. He liked to tell himself that he had also gained in strength of mind, and he was not far wrong. True, less reflection lay behind his forcefulness; but its very spontaneity made it more telling, more authentic in its exercise. The change that had come over him had affected even his life’s work; at first his love-affair had tended to divert it from its course, but, of a sudden, it had gathered strength, till his life brimmed over with it, like a river in spate.

“Don’t take so much interest in my appearance,” Antoine protested, waving Daniel into a chair. “We’ve just come from the movies.
In Darkest Africa
; do you know it?”

“Have you ever been outside Europe?” Rachel suddenly inquired.

The resonance of her voice took Daniel by surprise.

“No, never.”

“Well,” she said, drawing towards her the glass that had just arrived, and greedily plunging two fresh straws into the cold, green depths, “it’s a film you should see. That view, for instance, of a string of porters on the trek at sunset. Don’t you think so, Antoine? And the kids playing in the sand while the women are unloading the canoes.”

“Certainly I’ll go and see it,” Daniel replied, his eyes intent on her. Then, after a short pause, he added: “Do you know Anita?”

She shook her head.

“She’s a coloured girl from America, who is usually to be seen at the bar. Yes, there she is, you can see her now, just behind Marie-Josephe—the tall woman, you know, with all the pearls.”

Drawing herself up, Rachel discerned, across the throng of dancers, a fawn-coloured face half hidden in the shadow of a massive hat.

“That’s not a Negress!” Rachel made no attempt to hide her disappointment. “She’s only a Creole.”

Daniel smiled faintly.

“So sorry!” he murmured, then turned to Antoine. “Do you come here often?”

Antoine was about to answer yes, but Rachel’s presence checked the impulse.

“Hardly ever.”

Rachel’s eyes were following Anita, who now was dancing with Marie-Josephe. The supple body of the American girl showed to advantage in a close-fitting white satin dress, lustrous as a bird’s plumage and glittering at every movement of her long, lithe limbs, with gleams of pearly light.

“Will you be going to Maisons tomorrow?” Antoine asked.

“I’ve only just come from there,” Daniel replied. He was about to speak of Jacques when his eyes fell on a Spanish-looking girl, with a saffron shawl draped round her, who seemed to be hunting for someone. “Excuse me,” he murmured hastily and made off. Slipping a practised arm beneath the shawl, he danced the girl away, to the strains of a boston, towards the corner where the band was playing.

Anita had stopped dancing and Rachel watched her breasting the flood of dancers with a swan’s easy grace, steering a course, as chance would have it, towards the table where she and Antoine sat. The Creole brushed against the young man’s chair and, coming to the settle where Rachel was seated, took out of her bag an object which she kept hidden in the hollow of her hand, then, thinking herself unobserved—indifferent, perhaps, to being seen—placed her foot on the settle and, whisking up her skirt, punctured her thigh. Rachel caught a fleeting glimpse of chocolate skin showing between two waves of silken whiteness, and her eyelids twitched involuntarily. Letting her skirt drop back, Anita drew herself erect with a slow, languid movement that set the crystal, dangling from a pearl in her earlobe, sparkling with sudden fires. Then she went back to her friend.

Rachel rested her elbows on the table, her eyes half closed, and slowly drew into her mouth the iced liqueur. The violins’ caress, the passionate insistence of their throbbing strings, worked on her mood of sensuous languor till it was almost unendurable.

Antoine looked at her.

“Lulu …!” he murmured.

Raising her eyes to his, she drew away the last faint tinge of green from the crushed ice in her glass. The look she gave him came as a surprise; a laughing, almost saucy look.

“You, I suppose, you’ve never … seen a black woman?”

“No,” Antoine unblushingly confessed.

She made no comment. A cryptic smile flickered on her lips.

“Come along then!” she suddenly commanded.

Rising at once, she wrapped her coat of shining black about her as if it were a domino for some nocturnal masquerade. As she went out by the revolving-door with Antoine at her heels, he heard once more, behind her close-set lips, the husky little laugh that always so dismayed him.

IN THE days when Jerome was still living in Paris, his concierge in the Avenue de l’Observatoire had standing orders to keep his mail for him, and he called periodically to collect his letters. Then his visits had abruptly ceased. He had left no address and for two consecutive years a mass of correspondence had been accumulating. Now that the concierge had heard of M. de Fontanin’s return to Maisons-Laffitte, he requested Daniel to deliver it in person to its rightful owner.

Buried in a pile of circulars, two letters came as a surprise to Jerome.

One of them, eight months old, announced that an ill-starred enterprise from which he had long ceased to expect returns had been wound up, and his share of the assets—six thousand francs and some odd hundreds—was lying to his credit. His face brightened. The remittance was a godsend; now at last he could shake off the vague discomfort which had been oppressing him ever since he had settled down at Maisons—a feeling due not only to his presence in a home where he now felt out of place but also to a lack of ready money, which piqued his pride.

(Five years previously his share of the family fortunes had passed out of his hands. Without applying for a divorce Mme. de Fontanin had sequestrated the modest inheritance left her by her father, the clergyman. This sum, though by no means intact at the time of their separation, had enabled her to live so far in some degree of comfort, and to keep up her flat without stinting her outlay on the children’s education. Jerome had not yet squandered all the money left him by his parents and still kept up his business activities; even when, dancing attendance on Noémie, he had settled down in Holland or in Belgium, he had dabbled in the stock-markets, speculated, and promoted new inventions. For all his lack of ballast, he was quick to see an opening, and this ability, coupled with his fondness for taking risks, enabled him, now and again, to back a winning venture. Fat years and lean, he had lived them through, oftener than not upon a lavish scale; sometimes indeed, for conscience’ sake, he had even contrived to remit a thousand francs or so to his wife’s account, by way of contribution to the children’s maintenance. But, during the last few months of his sojourn abroad, things had taken a turn for the worse and, for the moment, he had no means of drawing on his capital. He could see no way of refunding the money Thérèse had brought to Amsterdam and, worse still, he was now obliged to live at his wife’s expense. This was bitter enough; but bitterer still was the thought that she might misinterpret his motives, might imagine it was lack of money that had brought the wanderer home.)

Thanks to this windfall, then, Jerome felt his dignity slightly restored. He would be able now to discharge his obligations.

So eager was he to impart the news to his wife that he began to move towards the door, opening as he went the other envelope, inscribed in an illiterate hand, which conveyed nothing to him. Suddenly he stopped, aghast.

Dear Sir,

I take up my pen to tell you something has happened to me which I am not put out about at all not in the least in fact I am quite happy about it as I have been so awfull lonely, but I have been dismissed from my place because of it and I dont know what to do, but I am sure you will not go on leaving me without any money at such a time because this is it I cant get another place people can see it to much, and I have only 30 francs fifty and nothing more to keep the baby after and I do so want to feed it myself as everybody ought to.

I dont blame you one bit only I hope that when you get this you will do the right thing by me, you must bring me the needfull tomorrow or the day after or thursday at the latest as I dont know what will become of me if you dont.

With all my true love

V. Le Gad.

At first he could make nothing of it. “Le Gad—who’s that?” Then suddenly he remembered. “Victorine! Why, it’s Cricri!”

Retracing his steps, he sat down, rolling the sheet of note-paper between his fingers. “Tomorrow or the day after.” He could just decipher the date on the postmark; the letter had been awaiting him for two whole years! Poor Cricri! What had become of her? What meaning had she read into his silence? And—the child? No genuine emotion touched him as he asked himself these questions; the commiserating air that unawares he had put on was a tribute to convention. Yet, all the while, a young, shy, tremulous body, two ingenuous eyes, a girlish mouth, were taking shape in his memory and stirring his senses more and more definitely.

Cricri? Where had he come across her? Ah, yes, at Noémie’s place; Noémie had brought the girl back with her from Brittany. And after that? His memories of the suburban hotel where he had kept her hidden for a fortnight were rather blurred. Why had he left her then? Much clearer was the picture of another meeting two years after, during one of Noémie’s escapades. Every detail of the servant’s attic bedroom which he used to toil up to at nightfall came back to him clearly, and then the furnished rooms somewhere in the Rue de Richepanse where he had set her up later, during that second lease of passion which had lasted two or three months—or was it longer? He read the letter again, noted the date. A familiar warmth flooded his brain and clouded his eyes. Rising, he drank a glass of water, slipped Cricri’s note into his pocket, and, with the business letter in his hand, went out to find his wife.

An hour later he was stepping into the Paris train.

It was striking ten o’clock when, in a delightful state of excitement, he left the Saint-Lazare station under a genial September sun. He drove to his bank and, simmering with impatience, waited at the counter; only when he had signed the receipt, had slipped the notes into his pocket-book and flung himself triumphantly into the waiting taxi—only then he felt that the shadow which had darkened his life for all these recent weeks had lifted; he had risen from the dead!

The arduous quest on which he now embarked took him all over Paris, from one concierge to another; indeed it promised to be fruitless till at about two in the afternoon—he had forgone luncheon—it led him to the home of a certain Mme. Barbin,
alias
Mme. Juju. The mistress of the house was out, but the maid, who was youthful and loquacious, informed him that she knew the young lady, Mile. Le Gad—”Rinette, they all call her”—quite well.

“Only,” she went on, “she never goes to her room at the hotel except Wednesdays; that’s her day off.”

Jerome blushed; but with a flash of understanding.

“Yes, of course.” His smile conveyed that he was in the know. “But, you see, it’s her other address I’m after.”

By this time they were on the best of terms. “A nice little thing,” Jerome suddenly said to himself. But he was quite decided to keep his mind exclusively on Cricri.

“It’s in the Rue de Stockholm,” the maid at last informed him with a smile.

Jerome had the taxi take him there, alighted, and was not long in finding the house described by the maid. An insidious melancholy which he would not avow—though for some time he had been trying to shake it off—was ousting his high spirits of the early hours.

The swift transition from the sunlit streets to the meretricious twilight of the establishment he now entered made him feel uneasier than ever. He was shown into the “Japanese” room, where the sole touch of local colour was a cheap Japanese fan pinned to the wall above the bed. He waited, hat in hand, affecting an unembarrassed air; but, wherever he turned his eyes, a mocking mirror presented him with his reflected self, till he could endure it no longer and seated himself at the extreme end of the sofa.