The Thibaults (91 page)

In those days he had found it impossible to talk about Jacques to his father, who obstinately clung to his theory of the boy’s suicide; or to Mademoiselle, immersed day in, day out, in her prayers and religious exercises. But Gise had been different; her fervour for the quest had brought her very near him. Daily after dinner she had come down to hear the latest news. He had enjoyed imparting to her his hopes, and the steps he was taking. And it was in the course of those long, intimate talks that he had began to feel drawn towards the high-strung little girl, whose secret love was the keynote of her existence. Unknowingly, perhaps, he had yielded to the heady lure of the young body already bespoken to another. He recalled her sudden outbursts of affection, the little coaxing ways that reminded him of a suffering child’s. Annetta! Yes, she had tricked him well! Of course, in his utter sentimental isolation after Rachel’s eclipse, he had been only too ready to imagine—things. He shrugged his shoulders angrily. Damned fool! He had been taken with Gise, only because his emotions had been at a loose end. And he had fancied Gise was drawn to him, merely because, in the throes of her frustrated passion, she had clung to him as the one person capable of finding her lost lover.

Distasteful ideas! Antoine tried to brush them aside. He reminded himself that he had found nothing so far to explain Jacques’s hasty flight from home.

With an effort he turned back to “
La Sorellina
.”

Leaving the roses scattered on the grass, the young people walked back to the Palazzo.

Homewards. Giuseppe helps Annetta on her way. What lies before them? That brief ecstasy can have been but a prelude. The long night towards which they are walking, their night together in the big, lonely house— what will it bring?

Antoine could hardly bear to read further. Again he felt the blood rising to his cheeks.

Yet of moral disapproval there was little in his mood. When confronted with a passion running its course, he gave short shrift to moral codes. But he was unable to repress a feeling of outraged surprise, touched with rancour; he could not forget the day when Gise had so indignantly repulsed his timid advances. Almost “La Sorellina” rekindled his desire for her—a purely physical, unequivocal craving. So much so that, to fix his attention on what he was reading, he had deliberately to banish from his mind the haunting picture of a young, lithe, nut-brown body.

… that night together in the big, lonely house—what will it bring?

Love bows them to its yoke. Silent, possessed, in an enchanted dream, they walk, escorted by the intermittent moon. Moonlight is playing on the Palazzo, picking out of the shadow the stuccoed pillars. They cross the first terrace. As they walk, cheek brushes cheek. Annetta’s cheeks are burning. Already, in that childish body, what natural hardihood for sin!

Abruptly they draw apart. A shadow has loomed up between the pillars.

The father is there. Awaiting them. He has returned unexpectedly. “Where can the children be?” He has dined alone in the great hall; ever since then paced to and fro on the marble terrace. “Where can the children be?”

His voice jars the silence.

“Where have you been?”

No time to think out a lie. A brief flash of revolt. Giuseppe cries:

“With the Powells.”

Antoine gave a start. Then had his father known …?

“With the Powells.”

Annetta slips away between the pillars, crosses the vestibule, runs up the stairs to her bedroom, locks herself in, and flings herself, in the dark, upon her narrow, virginal bed.

Downstairs, for the first time, the son confronts his father. And—strangest thing of all—for the sheer joy of bravado he affirms that other, wraithlike love in which he believes no more. “I took Annetta to see Mrs. Powell.” He pauses, then adds in a clear, emphatic tone: “I am engaged to Sybil.”

The father bursts out laughing. A terrifying laugh. Extended by the shadow that prolongs it, the massive form looks more imposing still, of more than human stature, a Titan haloed with moonlight. Laughing. Giuseppe wrings his hands. The laugh ends. Silence. “You shall come back with me to Naples, both of you, tomorrow.” “No!” “Giuseppe!” “I do not belong to you. I am engaged to Sybil Powell.”

Never yet has the father met a resistance that he has not crushed. He feigns calmness. “Be silent, boy! They come here to eat our bread, to buy our land. To take our sons as well—that’s too much. Did you imagine a heretic could ever bear our name?” “My name.” “Fool! Never. A Huguenot intrigue … The salvation of a soul … Honour of the Seregnos. But they reckoned without me. I can defend my own.” “Father!” “I’ll break your will. I’ll cut you off. I’ll have you enlisted in the Piedmont regiment.” “Father!” “Yes, I’ll break you. Go to your room. You shall leave this place tomorrow.”

Giuseppe clenches his fists. He wants his father to …

Antoine drew a deep breath.

… to die.

Somehow he brings himself to laugh: the last affront. “You’re comic!”

He walks past his father. His head high, mouth twisted in a mocking laugh, he goes down the steps.

“Where are you going?”

The boy stops. What poisoned barb shall he launch before he disappears for ever? Instinct gives him the words that will tell most. “I am going to kill myself.”

With a quick movement he is down the steps. The father has raised his arm. “Go away, you shameless son.” For the last time the father’s voice is heard, shouting in imprecation. “My curse on you!”

Giuseppe runs across the terrace, out into the night.

Antoine had half a mind to pause again, and ponder; but only a few pages remained and impatience got the better of him.

Giuseppe runs blindly forward. Then stops, breathless, perplexed, all at sea. In the distance a thin, plaintive melody rising, falling; mandolins on some hotel veranda. Melting languor. How blissful death, veins opened, in the soft warmth of a bath!

Sybil does not like the music of Neapolitan mandolins. Sybil, a foreigner. Remote, unreal as the heroine one has loved madly—in a book.

Annetta. The memory of a bare arm nestling in his hand, enough! A buzzing in the ears. Dry lips.

Giuseppe has planned it all. Fie will come back at daybreak, carry off Annetta, flee with her. He will steal into ber room; she will jump out of bed, bare-limbed, welcoming. Ah, sweetness of her embrace, smooth, yielding sinews, the warm fragrance of her body! Almost he feels her now, straining to him, with lightly parted lips, moist lips, Annetta!

Giuseppe plunges into a side-path. His heart beats wildly. At a bound he crosses a ridge of rock. Bracing airs, the countryside under the moon.

At the edge of a thicket he lies on his back, arms outspread. Passes his fingers through his open shirt-neck, strokes his heaving breast. Overhead, a milk-white sky, star-spangled. Peace, purity.

And Sybil?

Giuseppe jumps up. Strides hotfoot down the hillside. Sybil. For the last time; before daybreak.

Lunadoro. The wall, the curving gateway. On that newly whitewashed wall, the exact place of his shadow-kiss. His first avowal, here. On such a night, moon-enchanted. Sybil had come to see him off. Her shadow clean-cut on the white wall. He had taken courage, bent and kissed the shadow of her face. She had run away. On such a night as this.

Why have I come back to the little gate, Annetta? Sybil’s pale face, wilful, unyielding. Remote? No, near, and real, yet still all unknown. Can he give Sybil up? No, rather unlock that fast-shut heart, with love the key. Release her stifled soul. What is the secret sealing it? Ah, dream of purity, unsoiled by instinct, real love! His love of Sybil, real love.

Why those meek eyes and too submissive lips, Annetta! No flame leaps in your all-too-docile flesh. Short-lived desire. Love without mystery, depth, horizons. With no tomorrow.

Annetta, let us forget those kisses, lightly given, lightly taken; let’s be children again. Dear Annetta, little, lovely girl. Little sister!

Submissive lips, yes, but eager, too; moist, melting, clinging lips. Ah, fatal, criminal desire, who shall deliver us from this body of desire?

Annetta, Sybil. Love rent in twain. Which? Why have to choose? I meant no wrong. Dual attraction; necessary, hallowed equilibrium. Twin impulses, equally legitimate, for they spring from the depth of my being. Why, in reality, irreconcilable? How pure it might be, under the free, broad light of day! Why this ban, if in my heart all is harmony?

Only one solution: one of the three must drop out. Which?

Sybil? Ah, vision unbearable! Sybil in pain; not Sybil. Annetta, then?

Annetta,
sorellina
, forgive me.

Not one without the other; well, then—neither! Renunciation, oblivion, death. No, not death; death’s likeness. Eclipse. Here a curse lies on all, an interdiction; the prison-house.

Here life and love are impossible. Goodbye.

Lure of the unknown, lure of a wholly new tomorrow, ecstasy. The past forgotten, take to the open road.

Turn away. Hurry to the station. The first train to Rome. Rome, the first train to Genoa. Genoa, the first liner. To America, or to Australia.

Suddenly he laughs.

A woman, women? No, it’s life I love. Forward!

Jack Baulthy.

Antoine closed the magazine with a bang, crammed it into his pocket, and stood up. For a moment, dizzily, he blinked at the lights; then, feeling his head spinning, he sat down again.

While he was reading, the room had gradually emptied; the band had stopped, the billiard-players gone off to dinner. Alone in their corner, the Jew and the youth who had been reading
The Rights of Man
were finishing off a game of backgammon, under the pert eyes of the girl beside them. Her friend was puffing at a dead pipe, and each time he threw the dice the minx rubbed her head against the Jew’s shoulder with a little provocative giggle.

Antoine stretched his legs, lit a cigarette, and tried to set his thoughts in order. But for some minutes his mind kept wandering, like his gaze; there was no steadying it. The picture of Jacques and Gise kept rising before him; at last he thrust it aside, and regained some measure of calm.

The crucial problem was to draw a sharp dividing line between facts and fiction. That stormy interview between father and son, he was convinced, had actually taken place as Jacques described it. Some of the phrases used by the old judge, Seregno, rang obviously true: “Huguenot intrigues”; “I’ll break you”; “I’ll cut you off”; “I’ll have you enlisted.” And the remark about a heretic “bearing our name.” Antoine could almost hear the angry voice of his father as he stood there raging on the terrace, hurling his curse into the darkness. And true, undoubtedly, was Giuseppe’s threat: “I am going to kill myself”— which at last explained M. Thibault’s fixed idea. From the very start, he had always refused to believe that Jacques was still alive, and he had telephoned four times a day to the Morgue. That too explained his remorse, his half-disclosed admission that he had been to blame for Jacques’s disappearance. Quite conceivably this rankling self-reproach might have some connexion with the attack of albuminuria the old man had had just before the operation. In the light of these facts many events of the past three years took on a new complexion.

Antoine picked up the magazine and read again the dedication written in Jacques’s 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.

Evidently, he mused, that would account for many things—the tangle Jacques had got into with those two love-affairs. If Gise was Jacques’s mistress and, at the same time, he was so desperately in love with Jenny, life must have been infernally difficult for him. And yet …

Antoine could not help feeling that there remained something elusive and obscure which he so far had failed to grasp. Try as he might, he could not bring himself to think that Jacques’s departure was accounted for merely by what he had just learned of the boy’s emotional dilemma. That desperate resolve must have been enforced by other circumstances as well, some sudden impact of imponderable factors.

Then all at once it struck him that these problems could very well wait. The important thing now was to make the most of the clues he had just lit on, and to get on his brother’s track as soon as possible.

It would be an obvious blunder to write direcdy to the office of the review. That Jacques had given no sign of life proved that he was still determined to lie low. To risk letting him guess that his retreat had been detected involved the danger that he might be prompted to move on again, and be lost sight of irretrievably. Yes, Antoine mused, there was only one way to a successful issue and that was to launch a surprise attack, and in person—for he had no real confidence in anyone except himself.

Promptly he pictured himself alighting from the train at Geneva.

But what would he do, once there? Jacques might be living in London. No, the best thing would be first of all to send a detective to Switzerland, to ascertain Jacques’s whereabouts. “And then,” he murmured, rising from the table, “I’ll go and dig him out, wherever he is. If only I can take him by surprise, we’ll see if he escapes me!”

That evening he gave his instructions to a detective-bureau.

Four days later he received the following document:

Private and Confidential

M. Jack Baulthy is, as you surmised, resident in Switzerland. He is not living at Geneva, however, but at Lausanne, where, we learn, he has had several successive residences. Since April last he has been staying at the Pension Kammerzinn, 10 Rue des Escarliers-du-Marche.

We have not yet been able to verify the date on which he entered Swiss territory. Meanwhile, however, we have taken steps to discover his position as regards the military authorities.

From information elicited by private inquiries at the French Consulate we learn that M. Baulthy presented himself in January 1912, at the military bureau of the said consulate, bringing various identification and other papers in the name of Jacques Jean Paul Oscar-Thibault, of French nationality, born in Paris in 1890. We were unable to procure a copy of his description on the military registration form (this description is, however, identical with that already cited), but we would inform you that the said form shows that M. Baulthy was granted a provisional exemption from military service on the ground of functional disorder of the heart, in 1910, under an order of the Board of Military Examiners, in Paris; and an extension of the said exemption, in 1911, by virtue of a medical certificate submitted in 1911 to the French Consul at Vienna. He underwent another medical examination at Lausanne in February 1912; the decision of the Board was transmitted through the proper channels to the Recruiting Bureau of the Seine Department. A third extension was granted by the Bureau, and as a result he has nothing to apprehend from the French Authorities as regards the question of his military service.

We gather that M. Baulthy is leading a respectable life, and his friends are for the most part journalists and students. He is a registered member of the Swiss Press Club. The literary work he does for several daily papers and periodicals assures him an honest livelihood. We are told that M. Baulthy writes under several names besides his own, which we shall be pleased to ascertain if further advices are received from you to that effect.