The Thibaults (88 page)

“Yes,” Antoine put in. “
The Dawn of a Century
.”

“I think I’ve kept his letter. I was struck by its tone, and I answered it. In fact I asked him to come and see me. He did not do so, however; not just then. He waited till he had passed the entrance examination before visiting me. That began the second phase of our acquaintance; a brief phase—an hour’s conversation. Your brother dropped in quite unexpectedly, rather late in the evening, three years ago—a little before term began, in the first week of November.”

“Just before he went away.”

“I let him in;.my door is always open to young folk who want to see me. I haven’t forgotten the determined, passionate, almost feverish expression of his face that evening.” (As a matter of fact, Jacques had struck him as over-excited and rather conceited.) “He was torn between two projects, and came to ask my advice. Should he join the Ecole and complete his general education there in the usual way, or should he take another line altogether? He didn’t seem to have a clear notion of exactly what it should be, that ‘other line.’ But I gathered he meant to turn his back on the examinations, and start working as the spirit moved him—writing.”

“I had no idea,” Antoine murmured. His mind was full of memories of what his own life had been during that last month preceding Rachel’s departure. And he reproached himself for having left Jacques so completely to himself.

“I must confess,” Jalicourt went on with a touch of affectation that became him charmingly, “that I can’t remember very well what advice I gave him. Obviously I must have told him not to think of dropping the Ecole. For young men of his calibre, our curriculum is really quite harmless; they pick and choose by instinct, they have—how shall I put it?—a healthy intolerance of constraint, and refuse to be kept in leading-strings. The Ecole can damage only the timid, over-scrupulous type of mind. In any case it struck me that your brother had come to ask my advice merely as a matter of form; he had already made up his mind. And that’s the surest proof that a youngster has a real vocation—has it in the blood. Don’t you agree? He showed a rather—rather callow violence, when speaking to me of the ‘university mentality,’ of the discipline, of certain tutors—even, if I remember rightly, of his family life and social milieu. Does that surprise you? I have much affection for young people—they prevent me from ageing too quickly. They have an inkling that under the professor of literature I officially am there lurks an incorrigible old poet to whom they can open their hearts. Your brother, if my memory serves me, did not fail to do so. I must say that the intolerance of the young appeals to me. It’s a good sign when a youngster is temperamentally in revolt against the world in general. All those amongst my pupils who have gone far were natural rebels, born, as my teacher Renan puts it, ‘with an imprecation on their lips.’

“But let’s get back to your brother. I can’t recall exactly what our last words together were. All I know is that some days later—yes, a day or two later, I should say—I got a communication from him. I have it still. The instinct of the literary collector!”

Rising, he opened a cupboard and came back with a sheaf of papers, which he laid on the table.

“It’s not a letter; just the copy of a poem by Walt Whitman. No signature. But your brother writes the sort of hand that one never forgets. Fine handwriting, isn’t it?”

As he spoke, he was glancing over the sheet before him. He passed it to Antoine, who felt his heart beating faster as his eyes fell on it. Yes, that was Jacques’s writing, emodonal and simplified to excess, yet level, sinewy, rough-hewn.

“I’m afraid,” Jalicourt was saying, “I must have thrown away the envelope. I wonder from what place he sent it. Anyhow, it’s only today I realize exactly what he was driving at when he sent that poem.”

“My English isn’t up to understanding it right off, I fear,” Antoine confessed with a smile.

Jalicourt picked up the sheet, brought it near his eyeglass, and began reading the poem, translating it line by line:

“Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,

Healthy, free, the world before me,

The long brown path before me leading wherever I choose.

“Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am good-fortune,

Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing,

Done with indoor complaints, libraries, querulous criticisms,

Strong and content I travel the open road.”

When he had finished, Antoine gave a sigh. A short silence followed, which he was the first to break.

“And the short story?”

Jalicourt extracted from the file a foreign magazine.

“Here it is. It appeared in the September issue of
Calliope
, a ‘modernist’ review, brim-full of new ideas, which is published at Geneva.”

Antoine had reached forward at once and was turning the pages excitedly. Suddenly once again he was startled by the sight of his brother’s writing. Over the title of the story, “
La Sorellina
,” Jacques had written in his own hand:

Did you not say to me, on that famous November evening: “Everything is subject to the influence of two poles; the truth is always double-faced”? So, sometimes, is love.

Jack Baulthy.

“Meaning …?” Antoine asked himself. Oh, well, that could wait. A Swiss magazine; did that mean Jacques was in Switzerland? 
Calliope, 161 Rue du Rhône, Geneva
. Yes, it would be damnably bad luck if he could not trace Jacques now! All impatience, he rose from his seat.

“I received this magazine,” Jalicourt explained, “at the end of the vacation. I found no time to acknowledge it till yesterday. I nearly sent my letter to
Calliope
, as a matter of fact. Then it struck me that publishing in a Swiss magazine doesn’t necessarily mean the author has left Paris.” (He omitted to mention that his choice had been influenced as well by the cost of the postage-stamp.)

But Antoine was not listening. His eagerness to
know
had outrun his patience, his cheeks were flushed, and he was mechanically turning over the pages that were a token of Jacques’s return to life, catching here and there a baffling, enigmatic phrase. He was in such haste to be alone—as though the story were to give him some amazing revelation—that he took his leave rather curtly.

To an accompaniment of amiable phrases, Jalicourt escorted him to the door; all his remarks and gestures seemed part of a set ritual. In the hall he stopped and pointed with his forefinger at “
La Sorellina
,” which Antoine had tucked under his arm.

“You’ll see,” he said. “I fully recognize that quite a deal of talent has gone into that. But, personally, I must confess … No! I’m too old.” When Antoine made a politely deprecating gesture, he added: “Yes, I am. It’s no use burking the truth: I’ve lost the power of understanding the ultra-modern. Yes, one fossilizes. Music’s another story; there I’ve had the luck of being able to keep in step. After having been a fanatical Wagnerite, I managed to understand Debussy. But only in the nick of time; I very nearly missed Debussy! Well, M. Thibault, I’m certain that I’d miss a Debussy—in modern literature.”

He had straightened his shoulders again. Looking at him, Antoine could not withhold his admiration. There was no doubt about it; the old professor cut a stately figure. As he stood below the hanging lamp, his white hair gleamed silver, and the craggy brows beetled above two gulfs of shadow, one of which the heavy lens lit up at moments with a golden glow, like a window touched by the setting sun.

Antoine made a last effort to express his gratitude. But Jalicourt seemed determined to regard polite amenities as his own prerogative. He cut the young man short, and, raising his arm, proffered a nonchalant, wide-open hand.

“Please give my best wishes for his recovery to M. Thibault. And I hope you’ll be good enough to let me know what news you have of your brother.”

THE wind had fallen and a drizzle had set in; the street-lamps showed as blurs of light across the misty air. It was too late to think of taking any active steps, and Antoine’s only idea was to get home as soon as possible.

There were no taxis at the stand. He had to make his way on foot down the Rue Soufflot, hugging the magazine to his side. But his patience was flagging with every step, and he soon felt he could wait no longer. At a corner of the boulevard the lights of the Grande Brasserie offered, if not isolation, at least a convenient shelter. Antoine decided for it.

As he moved through the revolving door, he passed two beardless youths coming out, arm in arm, laughing and chattering—of their love-affairs, he surmised. Then he heard one of them remark: “No, old man, if the human mind could envisage a relation between those two concepts …” and realized he was in the heart of the Latin Quarter.

On the ground floor all the tables were occupied and he walked to the staircase through a haze of tepid smoke. The upper floor was set apart for games of various sorts. Round the billiard-tables young men were laughing, shouting, quarrelling. “13, 14, 15.” “No luck!” “Miscued again, damn it!” “Eugène, hurry up with that pint!” “Eugène, a Byrrh!” Light-hearted clamour fretted by the staccato, Morse-like click of billiard-balls. Everywhere youth in its first flush: pink cheeks glowing under the fledgeling down, bright eyes behind pince-nez, callow exuberance, eager smiles—everything told of the joy of breaking from the chrysalis, of hopes untrammelled, life for life’s sake.

Antoine threaded his way between the tables, looking for a quiet corner. The noisy gaiety of the youngsters round him took his mind for a moment off his own preoccupation; for the first time he felt his thirty-odd years of life weighing on him.

“The youth of 1913,” he mused. “An excellent vintage. Healthier and perhaps even more go-ahead than mine, their seniors by ten years.”

He had travelled little, and rarely thought about his country; that night he was conscious of a new feeling towards France and her future as a nation—a feeling of confidence and pride. But then a shadow fell on his mood; Jacques might have been one of these promising young men. Where was Jacques? What was he doing at this moment?

Antoine noticed at the far end of the room some unoccupied tables which had been used as a rack for overcoats and hats. There was a bracket-lamp above them, and it struck him that he might do worse than settle down there, behind the rampart of piled-up garments. The only people in that part of the room were a quiet-looking couple: a youngster, pipe in mouth, reading 
L’Humanité 
and oblivious of the girl beside him, who was sipping a glass of hot milk. She was whiling away the time by counting her small change, polishing her nails, and examining her teeth in a pocket-mirror, while watching from the corner of an eye the people coming in. An elderly, worried-looking student held her interest for a moment, till, without waiting to order a drink, he opened a book and became absorbed in it.

Antoine had started reading, too, but somehow could not fix his attention on the words before him. Absent-mindedly, he felt his pulse; it was too fast—rarely had he been so little master of his emotions. In any case the first lines he read were baffling enough.

The hottest hour. Odours of parched soil: dust. The path drives upwards. Sparks flash from the rock under the horse-hoofs. Sybil rides in front. Ten o’clock striking at San Paolo. A tattered foreshore ribboning the garish blue: gold and azure. On the right, endlessly, Golfo di Napoli. To the left a speck of solid gold, poised on liquid gold: Isola di Capri.

So Jacques was in Italy? Impatiently Antoine skipped some pages. What an odd jerky style of writing!

His father. Giuseppe’s feelings for his father. That secret corner of his heart, a prickly cactus, ingrowing spines. Years of unconscious, frantic, restive adulation. Every impulse of affection rebuffed. Twenty years before he brought himself to hate. Twenty years before realizing hatred was incumbent on him. Wholehearted hatred.

Antoine stopped short. He felt ill at ease. Who was this Giuseppe? He turned back to the opening pages, bidding himself keep cool.

The first scene described the two young people riding out together: Giuseppe, who seemed like Jacques, and Sybil, presumably an English girl, judging by her remarks.

“In England we do with tentative arrangements, when they’re called for. That gives us time to choose our line and act on it. You Italians want everything cut-and-dried from the start.” She was thinking: In this respect, anyhow, I’m Italian already; but no need for him to know it.

On the summit Sybil and Giuseppe dismount, to rest.

She alights before Giuseppe, flicks the scorched grass with her hunting-crop to drive the lizards away, sits down. On the furnace-hot soil.

“In the sun, Sybil?”

Giuseppe stretches himself on the fringe of shade along the wall. And rests his head on the warm bricks, watching her, thinking: All her movements cry out to be graceful, but never will she yield to herself.

Antoine was so carried away by his eagerness that he jumped from one paragraph to another, trying to understand before he had read the phrases out. His eye lit on a sentence.

She is English, Protestant.

He read the whole passage.

For him all in her is new and strange. Adorable and hateful. That charm of hers, to have been born, to have lived, to be living still in a world of which he knows almost nothing. Her sadness. Her purity. Her friendliness. Her smile. No, Sybil smiles with her eyes, never with her lips. And his feelings for her—harsh, intense, embittered. She wounds him. Wishing, it seems, to think him of a lower breed, and suffering by it. “You Italians,” she says. “You Southerners.” She is English, Protestant.