The Thibaults (82 page)

Antoine made for a corner of the room, deposited his overcoat beside him, and sat down. He felt a mood of calm well-being gaining on him. Then all at once there rose before his eyes a very different scene: the nursery, the little body bathed in sweat and vainly struggling against its unseen foe. He seemed to hear the rhythmic cadence of the swaying cradle, like a tragic footfall marking time. A spasm of horror gripped him and he shrank together.

“Supper, sir?”

“Yes. Roast beef and black bread. And some whisky in a big tumbler; iced water, please, not soda.”

“Will you have some of our cheese-soup, sir?”

“Very well.”

On each table stood a generous bowl of potato-chips, spangled with salt-flakes, brittle and thin as “honesty” pods, infallible thirst-producers. The zest with which he crunched the chips gave Antoine the measure of his hunger as he waited for the gruyere-soup to come; simmering and cheese-scummed, stringy and crisped with shreds of onion, it was one of Zemm’s specialties.

At the cloak-room near his corner some people were calling for their coats. One of the noisy group, a girl, glanced covertly at Antoine and, as their eyes met, gave him a faint smile. Where was it he had seen that smooth, sleek face that brought to mind a Japanese print, with its etched-in eyebrows and tiny, slightly oblique eyes? He was amused by the clever way in which she had signalled to him without being noticed by the others. Why, of course, she was a model he had seen several times at Daniel de Fontanin’s place—his old studio in the Rue Mazarine. It all came back to him now quite clearly: the sweltering summer afternoon, the model on her “throne”; why, he could remember even the hour it was, the lighting of the room, the model’s pose—and then the emotion which had made him linger on, though he was pressed for time. His eyes followed her as she went out. What was it Daniel called her? Some name that sounded like a brand of tea. She looked back at him from the door. Yes, now he remembered how he had then been struck by the flatness of her body; an athlete’s body, clean-limbed and sinewy.

While, during the last few months, he fancied himself in love with Gise, other women had hardly counted in his life. In fact, since he had broken off with Mme. Javenne—the liaison had lasted two months and all but ended in a catastrophe—he had dispensed with mistresses. Now, for a few seconds, he bitterly regretted it. He took a few sips of the whisky which had just been brought; then, lifting the lid of the soup-tureen, relished its appetizing fumes.

Just then the page-boy brought him a crumpled fragment of a music-hall programme, folded envelope-wise, in the corner of which some words were scrawled in pencil:

Zemm’s tomorrow, 10 p.m.???

“Anybody waiting for an answer?” he asked with interest, but in some perplexity.

“No, sir. The lady’s gone.”

Antoine was determined to take no action on the assignation; all the same he slipped the note into his pocket before beginning his meal.

“What a damned fine thing life is!” he suddenly reflected as an unexpected rout of cheerful thoughts danced through his brain. “Yes, I’m in love with life!” He took a moment’s thought. “And, in reality, I don’t depend on anyone at all.” Once more a memory of Gise flitted across his mind. Now he was sure that life itself, even if love were lacking, sufficed to make him happy. He honestly admitted to himself that when Gise had been away in England he had not felt her absence in the least. Truth to tell, had any woman ever held a large place in his life or in his happiness? Rachel? Yes. But what would have been the outcome, had not Rachel gone away? Anyhow, he had said goodbye to passions of that order once and for all. No, as he saw things now, he would no longer dare to describe his feeling towards Gise as “love.” He tried to find another, apter word. “An attachment?” For a few moments yet Gise held the foreground of his thoughts and he resolved to clarify his feelings of the past few months. One thing was sure: he had imagined an ideal Gise, the mirror of his dreams, quite other than the flesh-and-blood Gise who, only this afternoon … But he declined to work out the comparison.

He took a pull of his whisky and water, tackled the roast beef, and told himself once more he was in love with life.

Life, as he saw it, was a vast, open arena into which the man of action has but to launch himself enthusiastically. By “love of life” he really meant self-love, self-confidence. Still, when he visualized his own life in particular, it presented itself as something far more definite than a wide field of action placed by some miracle at his disposal and offering an infinity of possible achievements; he saw it, rather, as a clean-cut track, a long, straight road leading infallibly towards a certain goal.

There was a familiar ring about the phrases he had just employed, but their sound was always welcome to his ears. “Thibault?” the inner voice went on. “He’s thirty-two: the very age when great careers begin. What of his body? Remarkably fit; he’s always in fine fettle, and strong as a cart-horse. And his mind? Quick in perception, adventurous, a pioneering intellect. His capacity for work? All but unlimited… . And comfortably off, into the bargain. All that a man can want, in fact! No vices, no bad habits, nothing to trammel his vocation… . On the crest of the wave!”

He stretched his limbs and lit a cigarette.

His vocation… . Since he was fifteen all things medical had always had a singular appeal for him. Even now it was his firm conviction that in the science of medicine we may see the fine flower of nil man’s intellectual efforts in the past, the most signal reward of twenty centuries’ research in every branch of knowledge, and the richest field available for human genius. It knew no limits on the speculative side, yet it was founded on the very bedrock of reality and kept in close and constant contact with humanity itself. He had a special leaning towards its human aspect. Never would he have consented to shut himself up in a laboratory and glue his eyes upon a microscopic field; no, what most delighted him was the doctor’s never-ending tussle with proteiform reality.

“What is needed,” the inner voice resumed, “is that Thibault should work more on his own account and not, like Terrignier or Boistelot, let himself be hamstrung by his practice. He should find time to organize and follow up experiments, collate results, and thus evolve the outlines of a system!’ For Antoine pictured for himself a career akin to those of the great masters of his profession; before he was fifty he would have a host of new discoveries to his credit and, above all, he would have laid the foundations of a system of his own, glimpses of which, vague though they were as yet, he seemed to have at certain moments. “Yes, soon, quite soon… .”

Leaping an interval of darkness, his father’s death, his thoughts came out again into the cheerful sunlight of the near future. Between two puffs at his cigarette he contemplated his father’s death from a new angle, without the least misgiving or distress. Rather, he saw it now as a prime condition of his long-awaited freedom, opening new horizons and favouring the swift ascension of his star. His brain teemed with new projects. “I’ll have to thin out my practice at once so as to get some spare time for myself. Then I shall need an assistant for my research-work, or a secretary, why not? Not a collaborator; no, quite a youngster, someone open to ideas whom I could train, who’d do the spade-work for me. Then I could really get down to it, put everything I’ve got into it! And make discoveries. Yes, one day, that’s certain, I’ll bring off something
big!
” The ghost of a smile hovered on his lips, an upcrop of the optimistic mood that buoyed him.

He threw his cigarette away, struck by a sudden thought. “That’s a queer thing, now that I think of it! The moral sense that I’ve cast out of my life, from which I felt only an hour ago that I’d escaped for good and all—why, here it is, all of a sudden, back again in its old place! Not skulking furtively in a dark byway of my awareness; no, on the contrary, solid and serene, and very much in evidence, standing up like a rock square in the centre of my active life—the nucleus of my professional career! No, it’s no use beating about the bush; as a doctor and a scientist I’ve an absolutely rigid code of right and wrong and, what’s more, I’m pretty certain I’ll stand by it, come what may. But then—how the devil is one to fit that in with …? Oh, after all,” he consoled himself, “why want to make every blessed thing ‘fit in’?” And very soon he gave up the attempt, letting his thoughts grow blurred, and indolently yielding to a mood of vague well-being mingled with fatigue, a comfortable lethargy.

Two motorists had just come in and settled down at a neighbouring table, depositing their bulky overcoats on the seat beside them. The man looked about twenty-five, the girl a year or two younger. A handsome couple, slim and athletic, dark-haired both, with forthright eyes, large mouths set with an array of valiant teeth, cheeks ruddied by the cold; a perfect match in age and health, in natural elegance and social standing, they shared, presumably, the same tastes. In any case their appetites ran neck and neck, for side by side and at exactly the same speed they munched their way through a pair of sandwiches as like as like could be; then, with the selfsame gesture, drained their beer-mugs, donned their fur-coats, and, keeping step together, moved springily away. Antoine watched them with interest, so typical they seemed of the ideal couple, of cordial entente.

Just then he noticed that the room was almost empty. His eyes lit on the dial of a clock above his head, reflected in a distant mirror. “Ten past ten. No, the wrong way on. Eh? Nearly two.”

Shaking off his lethargy, he rose. “A fine state I’ll be in tomorrow morning!” he ruefully bethought himself.

As he went up the narrow staircase, passing the page-boy drowsing on a step, a cheerful thought flashed through his mind; so realistic was the picture it evoked that he smiled furtively. “Tomorrow, 10 p.m.

He hailed a taxi, and was home five minutes later.

On the hall-table where the evening mail awaited him a slip of paper was laid out, well in view. He recognized Léon’s writing:

They rang up from Dr. Hequét’s about I a.m. The little girl is dead.

He held up the sheet between his hands for some moments, then read it over again. “One a.m.? Very soon after I left… . Studler? With the nurse looking on? No. Most decidedly, no. What then? My injection? Possibly. A minimal dose, however. Still, the pulse was so weak… .”

Once the shock had spent itself, his feeling was one of relief. Hard though the blow must be for Hequét and his wife, at least it had cut short their horrible suspense. He remembered Nicole’s face in sleep. Quite soon another little one would fill the absent place between them. So life is served, and every wound heals up at last. “Still, I’m sorry for them,” he thought with a tightening of the heart. “I’ll look them up on my way to the hospital.”

In the kitchen the cat was mewing plaintively. “She’ll keep me from sleeping, damn her!” Antoine grumbled. Then suddenly he remembered her kittens and opened the door. The cat flung herself across his legs and rubbed herself against him in a frenzy of caresses, with desperate importunity. Antoine stooped over her basket; it was empty.

“You’ll drown them all, of course.” Yes, those had been his words. Yet that too was life—why make a distinction? By what right—?

Shrugging his shoulders, he glanced at the clock, and yawned.

“Four hours’ sleep. No time for dawdling!”

Léon’s note was still in his hand; he rolled it into a ball and tossed it cheerfully onto the dresser.

“And now for a good cold shower. The Thibault system: Sluice away your tiredness before you go to bed!”

“ANSWER: ‘No!’ ” M. Thibault said peremptorily, without opening his eyes. He cleared his throat with the dry, rasping sound that members of the household called his “asthma cough”; his head, sunk in the pillow, hardly moved at all.

Instilled in a high chair beside a folding table, M. Chasle was just opening the morning mail, though it was well after two.

That day the one kidney which still was functioning had worked so badly and the pain had been so continuous that, throughout the forenoon, M. Thibault had not been able to receive his secretary. This had gone on till twelve o’clock, when Sister Céline had thought it best to find an excuse for making the hypodermic injection which she ordinarily deferred till much later in the day. The pain had subsided almost at once, but M. Thibault, whose sense of time was greatly impaired, had fumed and fretted at being obliged to wait till M. Chasle came back from lunch, to have his letters read to him.

“What next?” he said.

M. Chasle skimmed the contents of another letter.

“Aubry (Félicien), ex-sergeant in a Zouave regiment applies for a post as guard at the Crouy Penitentiary.”

“ ‘Penitentiary’? Why not say ‘prison’ right away? Put it in the wastepaper basket. Next.”

“Eh? ‘Why not say “prison”?“ ‘ M. Chasle repeated sotto voce in a puzzled tone. Then, giving up hope of understanding the remark, he settled his glasses on his nose and hastily opened another envelope.

“From the Villeneuve-Joubin Vicarage. Profound gratitude … thanks for the improvement in a boy’s character. There’s nothing in it.”

“Nothing in it? Read it, M. Chasle.”

“Dear Sir,

“My sacred calling gives me the opportunity of fulfilling a very welcome task. I am requested by one of my parishioners, Mme. Beslier, to express her profound gratitude …”

“Louder!” M. Thibault commanded.

“… her profound gratitude for the beneficial effects his stay at Crouy has had on young Alexis. When you were so good as to allow him to enter the Oscar Thibault Institution four years ago, we had all but given up hope of making anything of the unfortunate lad. His depraved instincts, evil ways, and propensity for violence boded ill for his future. But within three years a miracle, which we owe to you, has taken place. Alexis has now been back at home nine months. His mother, sisters, neighbours, and myself, as well as M. Jules Binot, the local carpenter, who employs him as an apprentice, can all speak highly of the lad’s docility, keenness for his work, and zeal in performing his religious duties.

“I pray Almighty God to grant His blessings to an institution which is capable of bringing about such moral reformations, and I would express my deep respect for its illustrious Founder, in whom the spirit of charity and generous vision of a Saint Vincent de Paul are once more incarnate in our midst.

“J. Rumel, P.P.”