The Thibaults (86 page)

“There!” he exclaimed petulantly. “I’ve gone and forgotten the rest. Mademoiselle knows that song, too, quite well. She used to sing it when Gise was little.”

He had ceased thinking of Jacques’s death, and of his own. And indefatigably, till Antoine left, he delved into his memories of Quilleboeuf, trying to piece together the old nursery song.

ALONE now with Sister Céline, M. Thibault had recovered his solemnity. He bade her bring his soup, and submitted, without a word, to being spoon-fed. After they had said the evening prayer together, he had her turn off the ceiling light.

“Sister, will you be kind enough to ask Mademoiselle to come? And send for the servants, please; I wish to speak to them.”

Though put out at being disturbed at such an hour, Mile, de Waize hobbled across to the bedroom at once and halted, out of breath, just inside the door. In vain she tried to raise her eyes towards the bed; her bent back made it impossible for her to see above the chair-legs and, in the zone of lamplight, the mended places in the carpet. When the nun brought up a chair for her, Mademoiselle recoiled in horror. She would rather have stayed like a water-fowl perched on one leg for ten consecutive hours than let her skirts come in contact with that germ-infested chair.

Ill at ease, the two maids kept as near each other as they could, two dark forms lit up, now and again, by the flickering firelight.

M. Thibault meditated for some moments. His conversation with Antoine had not been enough; he was torn by an irresistible desire to round off the evening with another dramatic scene.

“I feel”—he gave a slight cough—”I feel that my last hour is rapidly approaching, and I desire to take advantage of a brief respite from my pain, the cruel sufferings that are imposed on me, to bid you farewell.”

The sister, who was busy folding towels, stopped short in amazement; Mademoiselle and the two servants were too startled to say a word. For a moment M. Thibault fancied that the announcement of his death came as a surprise to no one, and a hideous fear gripped his heart. Fortunately, the sister had more presence of mind than the others, and exclaimed: “But, M. Thibault, you’re getting better every day! How can you talk about dying? What would the doctor say if he heard?”

At once M. Thibault felt his moral courage revive; and, frowning, made a feeble gesture, to impose silence on the babbler.

Then like a man reciting a set speech, he continued.

“On the eve of my appearance before the judgment seat of Heaven, I ask to be forgiven, forgiven by all. Too often I have lacked indulgence for others; I have been harsh, and perhaps wounded the feelings of my … of those who live under my roof. Now I acknowledge my … my debts … the debts I owe to all of you. To you, Clotilde and Adrienne, and, above all, to your good mother who is now confined to a bed of suffering, as I am. And lastly, to you, Mademoiselle, you who gave up …”

At this point Adrienne burst into tears so copious that M. Thibault all but broke down himself. He gulped a sob down, hiccuped; then, recovering his self-control, proceeded:

“… you who abandoned a quiet, unpretentious existence, to come and take your place in our bereaved home and … and tend the sacred flame, the flame of our family life. Who was there better qualified than you to … to look after the children, whose dear mother you had brought up from her earliest days?”

Whenever he halted to take breath, the women’s sobs could be heard in the dark background. The little spinster’s back was more hunched than ever, her head bobbed up and down, and in the pauses a faint sucking sound came from her quivering lips.

“We owe it to you, and to your constant care, that the family has been enabled to follow its appointed course, under the eye of Heaven. For this I thank you, Mademoiselle, in public; and it is to you, Mademoiselle, that I address a final request. When that last, dread moment comes …” The effect of the words was so devastating that to master his brief panic M. Thibault paused and took stock of his present state, the comfortable afterglow of the morphine injection, before continuing. “When the dread moment comes, I would ask you, Mademoiselle, to say aloud that noble prayer—you know the one I mean—the ‘Litany for a Happy Death,’ which I read with you at the deathbed of my … my poor wife, in this same room—do you remember?—under that crucifix.”

His dim eyes strove to pierce the shadows. Of the bedroom furniture, mahogany upholstered in blue rep, nothing had been changed. In this selfsame setting years ago, at Rouen, he had seen his parents die. Then, in his youth, he had brought it with him to Paris, and later, it had furnished the bedroom he had shared with his wife. In this bed Antoine had been born one cold March night, and nine years later, on another winter’s night, his wife had died in it, bringing Jacques into the world. A picture formed before his eyes of the white, wasted form laid out on the huge, violet-strewn bed.

His voice shook with emotion as he went on:

“And I trust that my dearly loved wife, that saintly soul, will befriend me when I meet my Maker … will inspire me with her courage, her resignation … yes, the courage she displayed in her last hour.” He closed his eyes, and with an awkward effort folded his hands. He seemed asleep.

Sister Céline signed to the maids to leave the room as quietly as possible. Before leaving their master, they gazed earnestly at his face, as if already taking their last leave of a body laid out for burial. The sound of Adrienne’s sobs and Clotilde’s subdued, flustered chatter—she had given the old lady an arm—receded down the corridor. At a loss where to turn, the three women with one accord took refuge in the kitchen, round the table. All were weeping. Clotilde decreed that none of them must go to bed, so as to be ready to go and fetch a priest at a moment’s notice. No sooner had she spoken than she began grinding coffee.

The nun was alone in knowing how things really were; she was used to such scenes. In her view, the serenity of a dying man was always a proof that deep within his heart he believed—often enough quite wrongly—that his life was in no immediate danger. So now, after tidying the room and banking up the fire, she opened the folding bed on which she slept. Ten minutes later, without having exchanged a word with her patient, the nurse slipped tranquilly from prayer to sleep, as she did each night.

M. Thibault, however, had not fallen asleep. The double dose of morphine, while continuing its anodyne effect, was keeping him awake, in a voluptuous lethargy peopled with a host of schemes and fancies. The act of spreading panic around him seemed to have definitively cast out of his mind his own alarms. True, the heavy breathing of the sleeping nurse was rather irritating, but he consoled himself by picturing the day when he would dismiss her with a word of thanks —and a handsome donation to her Order. How much? Well, that could be settled afterwards … very soon. He was fretting with impatience for a return to active life. What was becoming of his charitable societies now he could not attend to them?

A log collapsed into the embers, and he half opened a sleepy eye. A little, vacillating flame set the shadows dancing on the ceiling. And suddenly with his mind’s eye he saw himself, a lighted candle in his hand, groping his way along the corridor of Aunt Marie’s house at Quillebceuf, that musty old corridor which smelt year in year out of apples and saltpetre. There, too, great shadows had suddenly loomed before him and gone dancing up across the ceiling. And he remembered the terrifying black spiders that always lurked at night in the dark corners of the closet. In his mind just now there was so little difference between the timorous boy of many years ago and the old man of today that it cost him an effort to distinguish between them.

The clock struck ten. Then the half-hour … Quillebceuf. The rickety old wagon. The poultry-yard. Léontine …

All this jetsam of the past, which a chance play of light had stirred in the abyss of memory, kept floating up to the surface of his mind, refused to be thrust down again into the depths. And like a desultory burden to these evocations of his childhood, the tune of the old nursery song ran in his head. He could as yet recall hardly any of the words, except the first few lines, which he had gradually pieced together, and part of the refrain which had unexpectedly flashed up across the twilight of his thoughts.

“I have a little pony

And her name is Trilbytrot,

And I would not give my pony

For all the gold you’ve got.

So clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we go …”

The clock struck eleven.

“I have a little pony

And her name is Trilbytrot …”

AT ABOUT four on the following day, it happened that the journey from one professional call to another took Antoine so near home that he dropped in to hear the latest news. That morning his father had seemed to him considerably weaker; the fever showed no sign of abating. He wondered if some new complication was setting in; or was it merely symptomatic of the general progress of the disease?

Antoine did not want to be seen by the invalid, who might have been alarmed by this unexpected visit, and therefore entered the dressing-room directly from the hall.

There he found Sister Céline, who reassured him in an undertone. So far the patient had had a fairly good day. For the moment M. Thibault was under the influence of a morphine injection. These repeated doses of the drug were becoming imperative, to enable him to bear the pain.

The door leading into the bedroom was not completely closed and a vague murmur, a sound of singing, could be heard. Antoine listened. The nurse shrugged her shoulders.

“He went on at me till I had to go and fetch Mademoiselle; he wanted her to sing him some old song or other. It’s been running in his head all day; he can’t talk of anything else.”

Antoine tip-toed to the door. The little old lady’s quavering voice floated to him across the silence.

“I have a pretty pony

And her name is Trilbytrot,

And I would not give my pony

For all the gold you’ve got,

When clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we go

To where my lovely Lola

Is waiting for me now.”

Then Antoine heard his father’s voice like a wheezy bagpipe taking up the refrain.

“When clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we go …”

The quavering soprano broke in again.

“I’ll cull me yonder floweret

While Trilby browses near,

The fairest, rarest floweret

To deck my dark-eyed dear.”

“That’s it!” M. Thibault broke in triumphantly. “We have it! Aunt Marie could never get that right. She used to sing: ‘La-la-la-la, my dear!’ No words. ‘La-la-la-la!’ ”

They joined in the chorus together.

“Then clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we’ll go

To where my lovely Lola

Is waiting for me now.”

“Anyhow, he doesn’t complain while he’s at it,” the sister whispered.

Sad at heart, Antoine left the room.

As he was going out into the street, the concierge called to him from her doorstep. The postman had just delivered some letters for him. Antoine took them absent-mindedly. His thoughts were still on what was happening upstairs.

“Then clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we go …”

He was amazed to find himself so distressed by his father’s illness. When, a year earlier, he had realized that there was no hope of saving the old man, he had detected in himself a puzzling but indubitable affection for the father whom, as he had thought till now, he had never loved. It came to him then as a new-born impulse, and yet it somehow had the semblance of a very old, latent affection, which the approach of the irreparable had merely fanned to sudden flame. Moreover, as the malady dragged its course, natural emotion had been implemented by professional instinct; he felt a special interest in this patient, of whose death-sentence he alone was aware and whose last months it was his task to make as bearable as could be.

Antoine had begun walking down the street when his eyes fell on one of the letters in his hand. He stopped short.

M. Jacques Thibault

4A Rue de l’Université

Now and again a stray pamphlet or bookseller’s catalogue addressed to Jacques still came in; a letter was quite another matter… . The envelope was pale blue, the address was written in a tall, flowing, faintly supercilious hand, whether a man’s or a woman’s was hard to say. Antoine turned back. This needed thinking over. He shut himself up in his office. But before even sitting down, he had boldly, unhesitatingly, opened the envelope.