The Thibaults (80 page)

Turning away, he tip-toed soundlessly from the room. Though the doors were shut the child’s hoarse, incessant wailing come to his ears as he proceeded down the passage. With an effort he nerved himself to turn the handle, cross the threshold, and renew contact with the dark powers at work within.

The child’s cradle had been placed in the middle of the room and Hequét was seated beside it, his hands resting on the edge, rocking it slowly, intently, to and fro. On the far side of the cradle the night-nurse, her hands pressed tight against her apron, her veiled grey forehead bent above the child, sat waiting like an effigy of disciplined, indomitable patience. Isaac Studler, ungainly as ever in his white linen coat, was leaning against the mantelpiece, with folded arms, stroking his jet-black beard.

The nurse rose as the doctor came in. But Hequét, his eyes fixed on the child, did not seem to notice anything. Not till Antoine went up to the cradle did Hequét raise his head towards him, with a sigh. Antoine had hastily grasped the burning little hand that fluttered on the coverlet, and, as he did so, the child’s body seemed to shrink away, like some tiny insect trying to wriggle back into its hole. The child’s face was red and mottled, almost the colour of the ice-bag placed behind her ear; her curls, as fair as Nicole’s, clammy with sweat or wetted by the compresses, were smeared across her cheeks and forehead. Her eyes were half shut and between the eyelids the swimming pupils had a dull metallic lustre, like the eyes of butchered animals. The movement of the cradle rocked her head slowly to and fro, giving a rhythmic cadence to the moans that issued from the little parched throat.

The nurse made as if to fetch the stethoscope, but Antoine signed to her he did not need it.

“It’s an idea of Nicole’s,” Hequét suddenly remarked in an unnatural, almost high-pitched tone. Then, seeing Antoine’s puzzled look, he explained in a studiously level voice: “The cradle. Yes. It’s Nicole’s idea.” He smiled uncertainly; across the twilight of his mind such details seemed to loom out in preternatural relief. “Yes,” he added almost in the same breath, “we went and fetched it from the attic. Covered with dust. It’s the only thing that calms her a bit, you see, being rocked like that.”

Antoine gazed at him compassionately and, as he did so, realized how very far his pity, for all its deep sincerity, fell short of such a sorrow. He placed his hand on Hequét’s arm.

“You’re utterly fagged out, old man. You’d much better go and lie down for a while. What’s the use of wearing yourself out?”

Studler put in a word.

“Yes, it’s the third night you haven’t slept.”

“Do be reasonable now,” Antoine insisted, bending towards his friend. “You’ll be needing all the strength you have—very soon.” He felt an almost physical impulsion to drag the unhappy man away from contact with the cradle, to plunge as soon as might be all that unavailing anguish in the anodynes of sleep.

Hequét did not answer, but went on rocking the cradle. His shoulders sagged more and more, as though Antoine’s “very soon” had laid on them a burden not to be endured. Then, of his own accord, he rose, beckoned to the nurse to take his place beside the cradle, and, without waiting to dry his tear-stained cheeks, moved his head slowly round as if in search of something. At last he went up to Antoine and tried to look him in the face. Antoine was struck by the changed expression of his near-sighted eyes; their look of keen alertness had lost its edge, they seemed to move stiffly in their sockets, tending to settle down into a heavy, torpid stare.

Hequét gazed at Antoine and his lips moved before the words came out.

“Something—something
must
be done,” he murmured. “She’s in great pain, you know that. Why let her go on suffering? Don’t … don’t you agree? We must have the courage to … to do something.” He paused, seeming to look to Studler for support; then once again his heavy gaze rested on Antoine. “Look here, Thibault, you must do something.” Then, as though to elude Antoine’s answer, he let his head fall, shambled across the room, and left the two men to themselves.

For some moments Antoine seemed incapable of movement; a sudden blush darkened his cheeks. His mind was a ferment of conflicting thoughts.

Studler tapped him on the shoulder.

“Well?” he asked in a low tone, watching Antoine’s face. Studler’s eyes resembled those of certain horses—over-large and elongated eyes, with languid pupils slackly floating in pools of watery whiteness. Just now, however, his look, like Hequét’s, was searching, masterful.

“Well, what are you going to do about it?” he whispered.

In the brief silence that ensued each felt the impact of the other’s thought.

“What will I do?” Antoine echoed evasively. But he knew that Studler would not let him off without an explanation. “Damn it!” he broke out. “Of course I realize… . But when he says ‘do something’ one daren’t even appear to understand!”

“Hush!” Studler whispered, glancing towards the nurse; then he led Antoine into the passage and closed the door.

“You’re convinced, aren’t you, that nothing can be done?” he asked.

“Quite convinced.”

“And that there’s not the least, not the very faintest hope?”

“Not the faintest.”

“Well, then?”

Antoine felt a mood of tense excitement gaining on him, and took refuge in an acrimonious silence.

“Well, then?” Studler insisted. “There’s no use beating about the bush; the sooner it’s ended, the better.”

“And I assure you I want it to end quite as much as you do.”

“Wanting’s not enough.”

Antoine raised his head and answered resolutely:

“That, unfortunately, is all that can be done.”

“No!”

“Yes!”

The dialogue had grown so vehement that Studler kept silence for some seconds.

“Those injections,” he presently observed. “I wonder now… . Supposing the doses were doubled? …”

Antoine cut him short.

“Hold your tongue, damn it!”

His mind was seething with exasperation. Studler watched him without speaking. Antoine’s eyebrows stood out like an iron bar, in an almost straight line across his forehead, the muscles of his face twitched uncontrollably, dragging his mouth awry, and now and then a little stream of ripples fretted the tight-drawn skin, as though the nervous system just below the surface were in a state of violent commotion.

A minute passed.

“Hold your tongue!” Antoine repeated, but less harshly, stammering a little with excitement. “I know what you feel. We’ve all f-felt like that, wanted to cut things short; but that’s just a beg-beginner’s weakness. Only one consideration counts: the sanctity of human life. Yes. The sanctity of life. If you’d gone on with medicine, you’d see things in the same light as every other doctor. The necessity for certain fixed principles. A limit to our powers. Otherwise …”

“A limit? If a man’s a man at all, the only limit is-—his conscience.”

“Exactly! His conscience; his professional conscience. But just think, man! Supposing doctors were to claim the right to … Anyhow, Isaac, there isn’t one who would, not one… .”

“In that case—” Studler hissed the words out. Antoine cut him short.

“Hequét has dealt with cases every bit as hopeless, as pit-pitiful as this one, dozens of times. But he’s never once deliberately … Never. Nor has Philip, nor Rigaud, nor Treuillard. No doctor worthy of the name would dream of it, do you hear me? Never!”

“In that case,” Studler broke out, “you doctors may set up to be the high priests of the world today, but to my mind you’re just a pack of scrimshankers!”

As he moved back a step the light from the hanging lamp fell on his face. Its look conveyed more than his words had said; not only scorn and indignation but a sort of challenge, almost a threat—a secret will to act.

“That being so,” Antoine said to himself, “I’ll stay here till eleven and make the injection myself.” He said no more but, with a shrug of his shoulders, went back to the bedroom and sat down.

The rain drummed on the shutters an endless monotone, and drippings from the eaves pattered incessantly upon the sill while, in the room, the swaying cradle timed the moaning of the dying child to its slow rhythm; and, across the hush of night, tense with death’s immanence, all the sounds blended in a sad, persistent counterpoint.

“I stammered once or twice just now,” Antoine, whose nerves were still on edge, muttered to himself. He was not often taken that way; it happened only when he had to keep up a distasteful pose—when, for example, he was forced to tell a complicated lie to some over-perspicacious patient, or when in conversation he was led to bolster up some conventional idea regarding which he had so far no personal convictions. “It’s all the Caliph’s fault!” With the corner of his eye he saw the “Caliph” back at his old place, leaning against the mantelpiece. He remembered Isaac Studler in his student days, when he had met him for the first time, ten years ago, in the neighbourhood of the School of Medicine. Bearded like a Persian king, with his silky voice and Rabelaisian laugh, the Caliph had been a familiar figure in the Latin Quarter of those days; then, too, there had been a truculent, subversive, and fanatical side to his character; half-measures were not the Caliph’s way. An exceptionally brilliant future was predicted for him. Then one day the news went round that he had dropped his studies and set to earning his living; it was said that he had taken under his wing the wife and children of one of his brothers who had just killed himself after embezzling money from the bank where he was employed.

A shriller cry from the child cut short his musings. Antoine fixed his eyes for a moment on the writhing little body, trying to estimate the frequency of certain spasms, but there was nothing to be made of them; the movements were as incalculable as the palpitations of a chicken that is being bled. Then suddenly the feeling of unrest against which Antoine had been struggling ever since his passage of words with Studler grew to an acute distress. Ready though he always was to take the utmost risks when a patient’s life was in danger, it was more than he could bear thus to come up against a hopeless situation, to feel so utterly at a loss for any form of action, condemned to watch the unseen enemy’s triumphant progress with folded hands. And tonight the child’s interminable struggle, her inarticulate cries, were working on Antoine’s nerves with a peculiar urgency. Yet the sight of suffering, even the agony of little children, was nothing new to him. How was it that tonight he could not hold his feelings in? Confronted with the element of mystery and horror that attends a death-agony, he found himself tonight as impotent to curb his anguish as if he were the veriest novice. He was stirred to the depths of his being; his self-confidence was shaken—and, with it, his confidence in science, in activity, in life itself. Like a great wave, despair broke over him, dragging him down into the depths. In a ghastly pageant they streamed before his eyes, all the patients he had written down as “hopeless cases.” Why, taking only those whom he had seen on this one day, the list was formidable in all conscience! Four or five hospital patients, Huguette, the Ernst boy, the blind baby, and now the child before him. And, doubtless, others too. Yes, his father; an old man with thick, milk-sodden lips, prisoned in an arm-chair. In a few weeks, after some days and nights of pain, the robust old veteran, too, would go their way. The way they all must go, one following the other. And in all this world-wide suffering there was no sense, no meaning… . “No, life’s absurd, a beastly thing!” he adjured himself furiously, as though to argue down some quite incorrigible optimist; and who was that confirmed, pig-headed optimist if not—himself, his normal self?

The nurse rose soundlessly. Antoine glanced at his watch; it was time for the injection. The pretext for moving, doing something, came as a vast relief; he felt almost cheerful, too, at the prospect of being able to get away from this room in a few minutes.

The nurse brought all he needed on a tray. Clipping off the tip of the ampoule, he plunged the needle in, filled the syringe to the prescribed level, then tipped out the contents of the ampoule (still three-quarters full) into the slop-pail. He could feel Studler’s gaze intent on him.

After making the injection he sat down again; it seemed to have eased the pain a little. He bent over the child, took her pulse once more—it was terribly weak—and whispered some instructions to the nurse. Then he rose without haste, washed at the basin, shook Studler’s hand without a word, and left the room.

He made his way out on tip-toe. The lights were on but no one was visible; Nicole’s door was shut. As he moved away the sound of wailing seemed to grow fainter. He opened and shut the hall-door noiselessly. Outside, on the landing, he paused and listened. Not a sound. With a deep sigh of relief he sped briskly down the stairs.

Out in the street he could not refrain from gazing up towards the dark facade cut by a string of lighted windows as though a party were being given in the Hequéts’ flat.

The rain had just stopped and the pavements were streaming after the downpour. As far as eye could reach the empty streets shimmered with liquid light.

Antoine felt a sudden chill; turning up the collar of his coat, he quickened his steps.

A SOUND of water dripping; rain-drenched pavements. Suddenly the picture rose before him of a face streaming with tears, of Hequét standing there, Hequét’s insistent gaze. “Look here, Thibault, you
must
do something!” For all his efforts to dispel it, the harrowing vision held his eyes a while. “A father’s love,” he mused; “yes, that’s a feeling utterly unknown to me, however much I try to picture it.” Suddenly the thought of Gise leapt to his mind. “A home. Children.” An idle dream, all that, and, happily, unrealizable. That idea of marriage, why, now it struck him as more than premature; grotesque! “Am I an egoist?” he wondered. “Or is it simply cowardice?” His thoughts turned a new corner. “Anyhow, there’s someone damns me for a coward just now, and that’s the Caliph!” He remembered disgustedly the way Studler had cornered him in the passage, the man’s hot, vulgar face and stubborn eyes. He struggled to brush away the swarm of ideas which ever since that moment had been buzzing in his brain. “A coward?” Rather an obnoxious word, that! “Over-cautious,” perhaps. “Studler thought me over-cautious. The damned fool!”