The Thibaults (70 page)

They dressed in silence, with studied calmness, giving each other now and then a helping hand, keeping up to the bitter end the habits of their life in common. He helped her to close a recalcitrant suitcase, kneeling on it with all his weight while, squatting on the floor, she turned the key. When at last everything was ready and the time past for commonplace remarks, when she had strapped her rugs together, put on her hat, pinned her veil, slipped on her gloves, and buttoned up the cover of her dressing-case, there were still some minutes to go before the cab arrived. She sank into a low chair near the door. A shivering fit came on her and, setting her jaws to stop her teeth from chattering, she crouched there, her hands clasped round her knees. Equally at a loss for anything to say or do, Antoine perched himself on a pile of trunks, with dangling arms, not daring to approach her. The moments dragged by in an agonizing silence, dark with forebodings, each moment charged with suffering so keen that, under its strain, they must have broken down, had they not known that in a few more seconds the end would come. A memory flashed through Rachel’s mind—the custom of certain Slav tribes who, when someone they love is setting forth on a long journey, form a circle and sit around the pilgrim for a while, in silent meditation. She all but spoke her thought aloud, but feared her voice might fail her.

When she heard, outside the door, the footsteps of the men coming to take her luggage, she suddenly raised her head and swung her body round towards him. Such love shone in her eyes, such sheer despair and terror, that he flung out his arms towards her.

“My dearest!”

The door opened and the men streamed into the room. Rachel rose. She had waited for others to be present before she said goodbye. She moved towards Antoine, stood beside him. He dared not put his arms around her lest he should never let her go. For the last time, the last, he felt under his lips the warm, soft pressure of her trembling mouth. He heard, or seemed to hear, a whisper:

“Goodbye, goodbye … my darling.”

With a swift movement she drew away, vanished without a look behind into the passage. He stared towards the open door, twisting his hands together, and his only feeling was a dull amazement.

She had made him promise not to escort her to the steamer, but it was understood between them that he would go to the far end of the northern jetty and, standing at the foot of the lighthouse, watch the
Romania
putting out to sea. The moment he heard the cab drive away, he rang and gave instructions for his luggage to be carried to the cloak-room; he did not wish to have to see this room again. Then he flung out into the darkness.

Shrouded in dripping mist, the town looked like a city of the dead. Overhead an angry wrack of storm still lowered, while another cloud-bank rose on the horizon, and, as the masses drew together, the zone of limpid sky between them seemed to melt away.

After walking blindly ahead for a while, Antoine halted under a street-lamp and, struggling against the serried impact of wind and rain, unfolded a map of the city. Fog blinded his eyes, but the sound of breakers and a distant wail of sirens gave him his direction. At last, groping his way across an expanse of slippery mud, in the teeth of a sea-wind that slapped his overcoat against his legs, he reached a rough-hewn quay and struggled on along it.

The breakwater narrowed as it advanced into the waves. On his right the open sea thundered in massive cadences; leftwards he heard the waters of the harbour lapping in restless undertones. Louder and louder in his ears, though he could not locate the sound, a fog-horn bellowed through the darkness. Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!

After he had tramped ahead for ten minutes without meeting a soul on the way, Antoine suddenly perceived almost above his head the beam of the lighthouse, which till now the fog had veiled. He had come to the end of the breakwater.

He halted at the foot of the steps leading up to the platform and tried to take his bearings, cut off from the world in a wild turmoil of wind and waves. Just before his eyes a streak of livid light proclaimed the east, where over other lands a wintry dawn was rising. At his feet a flight of steps, hewn in the granite, descended to the water’s edge, but, though he peered into the dark abyss, he could not see the waves fretting against the sea-wall; he could only hear their measured breathing, almost at his feet, a long-drawn sigh, ending in a muted sob.

The minutes passed, but he was unaware of their passing. Little by little the canopy of vapour that screened him from the world of living men grew less opaque. Now he could perceive an intermittent glow upon the southern jetty, and dared not lift his eyes from the pale void between him and the further lighthouse, for there it was, along that silvery expanse between the harbour-lights, that she would pass.

Suddenly, to the left of where his eyes were fixed, a dark mass hove into sight, framed in the aureole of golden haze heralding the dawn. Tall and slender, slowly taking form against the white effulgence, it became a ship, a huge and hueless hull stippled with lights and drawing in its wake a low, dark ribbon of smoke.

The Romania was swinging round to make the fairway.

His hands clenched on the iron rail, his cheeks lashed by the rain, Antoine, unknowing what he did, began to count the decks and masts and funnels… . Suddenly he awakened from his trance. Rachel—Rachel was there, only a few hundred yards away, straining towards him as now he strained towards her, watching him with unseeing eyes, blinded with tears; and all their ruined love that urged them for the last time each to each was powerless to grant that final consolation, a gesture of farewell. Only the shaft of light, veering in radiant circles over Antoine’s head, touched with a fugitive caress the blind, dark mass that was passing, out of the mist into the mist, bearing hence its secret, this last precarious meeting of their eyes.

For a long time Antoine stood there with no mind to go, tearless and void of thoughts. His ears had grown accustomed to the fog-horn and no longer heard its piercing blasts. At last he glanced at his watch, and started back to the town. Hardly knowing what he was doing, he splashed his way ahead through pools of water, without seeing them. The dockyards on the sea-front were ablaze with violet light and the thudding of hammers set up dull vibrations in the fogbound air. Beyond the beach, on which a flood-tide beat, the city glimmered like the fabric of a dream. Long trains of trucks clattered across the gravel to an accompaniment of shouts and cracking whips. It was a relief to Antoine to regain the world of human sounds, and he paused to listen to the iron rims grinding upon the stones.

Suddenly it occurred to him that his train did not leave till ten; not once so far had he bethought himself of the three hours of waiting. Rachel’s departure had meant the beginning and the end of his preoccupations. What was to be done about it? The hateful prospect of those three empty hours was the last straw; he yielded to his grief and, leaning against the paling beside him, broke down and wept.

Unconsciously he started on again, walking straight ahead. Life was returning to the streets, and hordes of draggled children were wrangling for first turn at the street-fountains. Huge vans, spanning the roadway, thundered down towards the docks. Presently he grew aware that it was broad daylight and he was standing amongst the flower-stalls in the market-square facing their hotel; here it was that yesterday, just before dinner, he had been on the point of buying a sheaf of chrysanthemums for Rachel. But then the same motive had deterred him as that which had led them to refrain, till it was time to part, from any gesture, any word, that might weaken their fixed resolve, open the flood-gates of a grief they strove their hardest to repress.

He suddenly remembered that he had his cloak-room ticket to pick up at the office of the hotel, and he was seized by a desire once more to see their room. But it was no longer free; two women had just engaged it.

In a mood of blank despair he walked down the steps and drifted aimlessly across another square; then, recognizing a street in which they had walked together, he retraced his steps to the cafe where the Neapolitans had given their performance. An impulse to enter it came over him.

He tried to discover the table where they had dined, the waiter who had served them; but somehow everything seemed changed. A garish light flowed in through the glazed roof, transforming the scene of nightly revelry into a place of squalor, like a bleak, abandoned warehouse. Chairs were stacked upon the tables and, with its prostrate music-stands, a ‘cello cribbed in its black coffin, the piano draped in oilcloth like the scaly hide of some dead pachyderm, the bandsmen’s platform might have been a raft piled high with corpses, adrift on a sea of dust.

“By your leave, sir!”

A waiter was preparing to sweep the floor under the table. Antoine swung his legs up onto the seat and idly watched the busy broom at work. A cork, two matches, a scrap of orange-peel—no, a tangerine, more likely. A gust of wind drove through, the room, fanning the dusty litter into movement. The waiter coughed. Antoine woke from his trance; had he missed the train? He sprang from his seat, spied out a clock; no, he had been here only seven miserable minutes.

He decided against sitting down again, and went out. Haunted by the notion that, were he once seated in the train, his grief would be allayed, he jumped into a cab and set out for the station, as to a haven of refuge.

But, when he had booked his luggage through, he still had time and to spare. Over an hour to go! He set to walking up and down the platform with hurried strides, as though an enemy were at his heels. “What the hell do
you
want with me?” he muttered, glaring at an engineer who was eyeing him from the running-board of his locomotive. Turning round, he noticed a group of railway hands observing him curiously.

Then, stiffening his back, he retraced his steps, opened the door of the waiting-room, and sank into a chair. The room was bleak and gloomy; he had it to himself. Outside an old woman was squatting against the glass door with her back to him; he could see her grey hair bobbing up and down as she dandled a child in her arms, crooning in a toneless, yet almost girlish voice the old song with its sickly-sweet refrain that Mademoiselle so often sang to Gisèle in the past:

“We’ll go no more afishing,

Afishing in the sea …”

His eyes filled with tears. Ah, if only he could never hear another sound, see nothing, nothing more for ever!

He buried his face between his palms. And, in a flash, Rachel was -in his arms again! Last night his hands had toyed with her necklace and its fragrance clung about them still. He could feel the smooth curve of her shoulder against his chest; under his lips the warm, soft texture of her skin. So violent was the shock it gave him that he jerked his head back, tautening every sinew; his fingers stiffened round the chair-arms and he thrust his head back violently into the thick upholstery. Something Rachel had said came back to him. “I thought of killing myself.” Yes, to have done with it all! Suicide: for such despair as this, the one way out. An unpremeditated, almost involuntary death; simply to make an end, no matter how, of this intolerable spasm of anguish that gripped him like a vice, tightening across his temples—to cut it short before its unbearable climax!

Suddenly he started up from his seat; someone had approached him unawares and tapped him on the arm. He all but yielded to a blind impulse to lash out at the intruder, hurl him away.

“Here! Watcher gettin’ at?” It proved to be a venerable ticket-collector, going his rounds.

“The … the Paris train?” Antoine stammered.

“Platform Number 3.”

Antoine stared blindly at him, like a sleep-walker, then moved away unsteadily towards the platform.

“There ain’t no hurry,” the old man shouted after him. “Train’s not in yet.” His eyes followed Antoine as he left the waiting-room, observed him stagger, colliding with the door.

“And these young ‘uns think they’re somebody!” he muttered under his breath, shrugging his shoulders disdainfully.

THE clocks were striking the half-hour after noon when the taxi halted in the Rue de l’Université. Antoine sprang out and plunged below the portico. “It’s Monday,” he reminded himself; “my consulting-day.”

“Morning, sir!”

He swung round; in a corner of the lobby two little boys had taken shelter, apparently, from the wind, and the bigger of the two, cap in hand, perked up to Antoine a little bird-like face, round and restless as a sparrow’s, but without a trace of shyness. Antoine halted.

“It’s like this, sir; we want to know if you’ll give some medicine to this kid here, what’s ill.”

Antoine went up to the “kid,” who was hovering in the background.

“What’s the trouble, my boy?”

A gust of wind, lifting the little boy’s cape, revealed an arm in a sling.

“It isn’t much,” the older boy asserted confidently. “Not even an accident at his job, though he did get that ugly lump on his arm at the printing plant. It gives him twinges right up to his shoulder.”

Antoine was pressed for time.

“Has he a temperature?”

“A what, sir?”

“Fever. Has he any fever?”

“Yes, that’s what it must be,” the elder boy agreed, wagging his head gravely and watching Antoine’s face with an anxious eye.

“You’d better tell your parents to take him to the Charite at two and have him seen to—the big hospital over there on the left, you know.”

A twitching of the little bird-like face, quickly controlled, betrayed the youngster’s disappointment; then his lips half parted in a coaxing smile.

“I thought maybe you’d be nice enough …”

But he checked himself at once and went on in the tone of one who long has learned to bow to the inevitable:

“That’s all right, sir. We’ll fix it up somehow. Thank you, sir. Come along, Eddie!”

With a frank, good-humoured smile and a flick of his cap to Antoine, he began to move away towards the street.

Antoine’s curiosity was aroused; he hesitated for a moment.