The Thibaults (72 page)

When Antoine showed no sign of moving and went on lathering his hands above the basin, she took a timid step towards him.

“Talk to the sister, Antoine, do please give her a talking-to. She’ll listen to
you
, anyhow.”

He humoured her with a compliant “yes” and, paying no more attention to her, left the room. Her eyes glowed with affection as they followed his receding limbs, for (as she proclaimed) she had come to see in Antoine, since he so rarely answered her and never contradicted, “the light of her life.”

He went out into the passage so as to enter his father’s study from the hall, and seem to have just arrived.

M. Thibault was alone with the sister. “So Gise is in her bedroom,” Antoine murmured; “she must have heard me go by. She’s avoiding me.”

“Good afternoon, Father,” he said in the breezy manner that now he always assumed at his father’s bedside. “Afternoon, Sister.”

M. Thibault’s eyelids lifted.

“Ah, there you are.”

He was in his big arm-chair, upholstered in tapestry, which had been dragged beside the window. His head seemed to have become too heavy for his shoulders, his chin was squeezed against the napkin the sister had tucked round his neck, and the two black crutches, propped against the chair on either hand, seemed tall out of proportion with his hunched-up body. A stained-glass pseudo-Renaissance window lit with rainbow gleams the fluttering white wings of Sister Céline’s headdress, casting wine-red stains upon the tablecloth and a soup-plate of steaming milk and tapioca.

“Come along now!” the sister wheedled, and, lifting a spoonful of the liquid, drained off the drops along the edge of the plate; then, with a cheerful “Ups-a-daisy!” as if she were coaxing a child to take his pap, she tilted the spoon between the old man’s lips, and emptied it down before he had time to turn away. His fingers, splayed upon his knees, twitched with annoyance. It galled his self-respect to seem so helpless, unable to feed himself. He lunged forward to grasp the spoon the sister was holding, but his fingers, stiffened with the years and swollen now with dropsy, refused their service. The spoon slipped from his hand, clattered onto the floor. With an angry sweep of his arm he thrust them all aside—table, plate, and nurse.

“Not hungry. Won’t be forced to eat!” he cried, turning towards his son, as though to call for his protection. Antoine’s silence gave him heart, it seemed, for he cast a furious glance at the nurse. “Take all that mess away!” Unprotesting, the sister beat a hasty retreat out of the old man’s eyeshot.

He coughed. At frequent intervals he emitted a short, dry cough which, mechanical though it was and unaccompanied by loss of breath, made him clench his fists and pucker his tightly shut eyelids.

“Let me tell you”—M. Thibault spoke with asperity, as though to voice a rankling grievance—”last night and this morning again I’ve been having fits of vomiting.”

Antoine felt himself being stealthily observed, and assumed a detached air.

“Really?”

“That doesn’t surprise you, eh?”

“Well, to tell the truth, I half expected it,” Antoine rejoined smilingly. He had little trouble in playing his part. Never had he treated any other patient with such long-suffering compassion; he came every day, often twice a day, and at each visit, indefatigably—as though he were renewing the dressing on a wound—racked his brains to conjure up new arguments, logical, if insincere, and repeated in the same tone of certitude the selfsame words of comfort. “What can you expect, Father? Your digestive organs aren’t what they were when you were a young man, and they’ve been pestered for at least eight months with drugs and medicines. We may count ourselves lucky they didn’t show signs of revolt very much sooner.”

M. Thibault was silent, thinking it over. Already Antoine’s words had taken effect and given him new heart; moreover, it was a relief to be able to fix the blame on something or someone.

“Yes,” he said, clapping his large palms noiselessly together, “those idiots with their drugs, why, they’ve … Ow, my leg! … Yes, they’ve—they’ve ruined my digestion. Ow!”

The twinge was so acute and sudden that for a moment his features were convulsed. He let his body slip to one side; then, resting his weight on Antoine’s and the sister’s arms, he managed to stretch out his leg, halting the stream of liquid fire that was shooting down the limb.

“You told me that … that Thérivier’s injections would … do my sciatica good!” he shouted. “Well, now, out with the truth! Is it any better?”

“It is,” said Antoine coolly.

M. Thibault cast a bewildered look at his son.

“M. Thibault himself told me that he’d been having much less pain since Tuesday last,” the sister put in shrilly; she had formed a habit of pitching her voice as high as she could, to make herself heard. Seizing the auspicious moment, she slipped a spoonful of tapioca into her patient’s mouth.

“Since Tuesday?” the old man spluttered, making a valiant effort to remember. Then he held his peace.

In silent distress Antoine observed the symptoms of disease upon his father’s face; every mental effort loosened the muscles of his jaw and made his eyelids rise, his lashes flutter. The poor old man was only too eager to believe that he was getting better, and indeed, till now, had never doubted it. Once more, taken by surprise, he let himself be spoon-fed; then, in desperate disgust, he pushed the sister away so angrily that she thought better of it and began undoing the napkin round his neck.

“They’ve ru-ruined my digestion,” he mumbled, as the woman wiped his chin.

No sooner had she left the room with the tray than M. Thibault, who had, it seemed, been waiting for this chance of a heart-to-heart talk with Antoine, slewed himself round and, with a confidential smile, motioned him to come and sit beside him.

“Sister Céline,” he began in a tone of deep emotion, “is an excellent creature, yes, Antoine, a really saintly soul. We can never be too … too grateful to her. But there’s the convent to consider, and … Oh, I know that the Mother Superior is under obligations to me. And that’s just the point! I have scruples about it; I’m loath to take advantage of her devotion when there are more pressing calls, sick and suffering folk who need her help. Don’t you agree?”

Forestalling Antoine’s protest, he silenced him with a gesture; then, his chin thrust forward with an air of meek entreaty, he went on in phrases broken by fits of coughing.

“Needless to say, it isn’t today I’m thinking of, nor yet tomorrow. But … don’t you think that … that quite soon … well, as soon as I’m really on the mend … this excellent woman could be released from her duties here? You can’t imagine, my dear boy, how disagreeable it is always to have someone at one’s elbow. As soon as possible, then, do let’s … get rid of her.”

Antoine, lacking the heart to answer, made feeble gestures of approval. So that inflexible authority, against which all his youth had vainly struggled, had come to—this! In earlier days the old autocrat would have dismissed the offending nurse without a word of explanation; now he was growing weak, defenceless. At such moments his father’s physical decline struck Antoine as even more apparent than when he gauged, under his fingers, the wastage of the inner organs.

“What? Are you going already?” M. Thibault murmured, seeing Antoine rise. There was a note of protest in his voice, of pleading and regret; almost of tenderness. Antoine was touched.

“I’ve no choice,” he said with a smile. “My whole afternoon’s taken up with appointments. But I’ll try to look in again this evening.”

He went up to his father to kiss him, a habit he had recently formed. But the old man turned away his head.

“All right then, off you go, my boy! Have it your own way!”

Antoine went out without replying.

In the hall, perched on a chair, Mademoiselle was in wait for him.

“I’ve got to speak to you, Antoine. It’s about the sister… .”

But he could bear no more. He picked up his coat and hat, and closed the front-door behind him. On the landing he suddenly felt depressed; struggling into his overcoat, he was reminded of the jerk he used to give his shoulders in his soldiering days, to hoist the pack into position before he set out on the march again.

Out in the street the tides of traffic and the passers-by, struggling against an autumn gale, restored his spirits, and he hastened forward in quest of a taxi.

“JUST twenty to,” Antoine observed as the taxi passed the Madeleine clock. “Pretty close. The chief’s so infernally punctual—I’ll bet he’s getting ready for me now!”

As Antoine surmised, Dr. Philip was standing waiting for him at the door of his consulting-room.

“Afternoon, Thibault,” he rapped out. He always spoke in a curious Punch-and-Judyish staccato, with what sounded like an undertone of irony. “Exactly quarter to. Let’s be off.”

“Right, Chief,” Antoine cheerfully assented.

Antoine welcomed every occasion that placed him once again in Dr. Philip’s tutelage. For two consecutive years he had worked as his resident assistant and lived in constant intimacy with his senior. Though, after that, he had been transferred to another branch, he had never lost contact with his former teacher, and, in the years that followed, Dr. Philip, to the exclusion of all others, had remained for him the “chief.” Antoine was known as “Thibault, Philip’s pupil,” but he was more than that; he was his senior’s right-hand man, his spiritual son. Yet, often enough, his adversary, too—in the clash of youth with riper age, of adventurousness and a proclivity for taking risks, with prudence. The bond that had grown up between them during their seven years’ friendship and professional co-operation was proof against all rupture. No sooner was Antoine in Philip’s company than, insensibly, his personality underwent a change, dwindled, as it were, in bulk; the self-contained world-in-himself that he had been a moment before lapsed automatically into a satellite. But this circumstance, far from displeasing him, flattered his self-esteem and deepened his affection for his chief; for the professor’s unquestioned eminence, coupled with his reputation for being hard to satisfy where colleagues were concerned, conferred a special value on his attachment for Antoine. Whenever master and pupil were together, good humour was the order of the day; both were convinced that the common run of mortals consisted of numskulls and incapables; they themselves were lofty exceptions to the general rule. The manner in which the chief, so reticent by habit, spoke to Antoine, his confident expansiveness, the meaning smiles and winks which accompanied certain remarks, even the terms he used—comprehensible only to a few initiates—all seemed to prove that Antoine was the only person with whom Philip could talk freely, by whom he was assured of being precisely understood. On the occasions when they disagreed, the subject of dispute was always of the same order: Antoine accused Philip of hoodwinking himself and taking the brilliant sallies of his skeptical mind for reasoned conclusions. Or, it might be, after threshing out a problem with his junior and finding their views concur, Philip would suddenly sheer off on the opposite tack and ridicule all they had just been saying: “Viewed from another angle, you know, those ideas of ours are buncombe”—which was tantamount to saying: “It’s a waste of time pondering over things; one ‘truth’ is as true as another!” Antoine’s blood boiled; he could not stomach such an attitude, and it galled him like a physical infirmity. On such occasions he would bid his chief a prompt but courteous farewell and, flinging himself into his work, redress his mental balance in a wholesome burst of energy.

On the landing they met Thérivier who had come to seek urgent counsel from the chief. Thérivier, too, had worked under Philip; an older man than Antoine, he was now a general practitioner. M. Thibault was one of his patients.

The professor halted. Slightly stooping, motionless, with dangling arms, his garments floating round his tall, slight form, he looked like a gaunt marionette dangling from its unpulled strings. The man who was addressing him, plump and stocky, fidgeting and smiling, struck a comical contrast with him. They stood in the full light of the landing window and Antoine, posted in the background, amused himself watching his chief; he always relished such sudden glimpses from an unwonted angle of people he knew well. Just now Philip was observing Thérivier with his keen, pale eyes, truculent as ever under the beetling eyebrows, which had kept their blackness despite the grey streaks in his beard—a goat’s beard, almost too unsightly to be natural, and looking like an absurd fringe of straggling hair tacked onto his chin. Everything, indeed, about the man was disconcerting, not to say repellent: his general untidiness, his off-hand manner, and certain personal idiosyncrasies—a red and over-prominent nose, the hissing intake of his breath, his caustic grin and pendulous, moist lips whence a nasal drawl seemed to trickle out laboriously, rising now and then to a shrill falsetto when he let fly a shaft of satire or a scathing comment. At such moments his simian eyes twinkled behind their bushy thickets with a glint of secret exultation that asked no reciprocity.

But only novices and nonentities were estranged from Philip by their unfavourable first impression. As a matter of fact, as Antoine had observed, no other doctor was more popular with patients, no teacher more esteemed by his colleagues, more ardently sought after by the unruly youngsters training in the hospitals. His bitterest gibes were aimed at human folly, life’s absurdities; and only fools resented them. None could watch him at his professional task without admiring, not merely the bright activity of a master-mind devoid of pettiness or any real scorn, but, what was more, a sensitive, warm-hearted being who was genuinely distressed by his daily intercourse with suffering. It was obvious at such moments that that acid wit of his was only Philip’s way of fighting down depression, only another facet of his clear-visioned sympathy; obvious, too, that the cutting remarks which turned so many fools against him were, in the last analysis, part and parcel of his philosophy.

Antoine paid little attention to what the two doctors were saying. They were talking about one of Thérivier’s patients whom the chief had visited on the previous day. A serious case, it seemed. Thérivier stuck to his guns.