II
AS THE morning express did not stop at Crouy, Antoine had to get out at Venette, the last station before Compiègne. He alighted from the train in the highest spirits. Next week he had to sit for an examination, but throughout the journey he had been unable to apply his mind to the medical manuals he had brought with him. The decisive moment was near. For the past two days he had been picturing so vividly the triumphant climax of his crusade that he almost fancied he had already effected Jacques’s release, and the only problem troubling him was how he was to regain the boy’s affection.
He had a mile and a half to walk along a level, sunlit road. For the first time that year after weeks of rain there was a promise of spring in the dewy fragrance of the March morning. He feasted his eyes on the tender verdure already mantling the ploughlands. Wisps of vapour lingered on the bright horizon, and the hills along the Oise glittered in the young sunlight. For a moment he was weak enough to hope he was mistaken, so pure, so calm was the countryside around him. Could this be the setting of a convict prison?
He had to cross the entire village of Crouy before reaching the reformatory. Then, suddenly, as he came round the last houses, he had a shock. Though he had never seen it and distant though it was, he could not be mistaken. There, in the midst of a chalk-white plain, ringed round on all sides, like a new graveyard, by bare, bleak walls, rose the huge building with its tiled roof, its clock-face gleaming in the sun, and endless rows of small, barred windows. It would have been taken for an ordinary prison but for the gold lettering on the cornice over the first story:
THE OSCAR THIBAULT FOUNDATION
He walked up the treeless drive leading to the penitentiary. The little windows seemed watching from afar the visitor’s approach. Entering the portico, he pulled the bell-rope; a shrill clang jarred the Sabbath calm. The door opened. A brown watchdog, chained to its kennel, barked furiously. Antoine entered the courtyard, which consisted of a lawn surrounded by gravel paths and curved on the side facing the main ward. He had a feeling of being watched, but no living being was in sight except the dog, which, tugging at its chain, was barking lustily as ever. To the left of the entrance was a little chapel topped by a stone cross; on the right he saw a low building with the notice “Staff,” and turned towards it. The closed door opened the moment he set foot on the step. The dog went on barking. He stepped into a hall, with a tiled floor and yellow walls and furnished with new chairs; it reminded him of a convent parlour. The place was overheated. A life-sized plaster bust of M. Thibault, giving an impression of enormous bulk under the low ceiling, adorned the right-hand wall. On the opposite wall a humble black crucifix, garnished with a sprig of box, seemed to be playing second fiddle to it. Antoine remained standing, on the defensive. No, he had not been wrong! The whole place reeked of the prison-house.
At last, in the wall furthest from him, a hatch was opened and a guard put out his head. Antoine threw down his own card and one of his father’s, and curtly told the man he wished to see the superintendent.
Nearly five minutes passed.
Annoyed by the delay, Antoine was just about to start on a round of exploration, unaccompanied, when a light step sounded in the corridor and a bespectacled, plump, fair-haired young man ran up to him with little dancing steps. He was in brown flannel pyjamas and wearing Turkish slippers. All smiles, he held out both hands in welcome.
“Good morning, doctor. What a happy surprise! Your brother will be so delighted, so delighted to see you. Of course I know you well; your father, the Founder, often speaks of his grown-up doctor son. And besides there’s a family resemblance. Oh, yes,” he laughed, “I assure you there’s a likeness. But do come to my office, please. And forgive me for not introducing myself before; I’m Falsme, the superintendent here.”
He shepherded Antoine towards his office, shuffling his feet and following close behind with his arms extended and fingers spread, as if he expected Antoine to slip or stumble and wanted to be sure to catch him before he fell.
He made Antoine take a seat and himself sat at his desk.
“Is the Founder in good health?” he asked in a high-pitched voice. “What an extraordinary man he is—he never seems to get older! Such a pity he couldn’t come today as well!”
Antoine cast a mistrustful glance round the room, then scanned without amenity the young man’s face, which for all its pink-and-white complexion had a Chinese cast: behind the gold-rimmed spectacles the two small slanted eyes seemed twinkling and beaming with perpetual joy. The voluble welcome had taken him off his guard, and it upset his calculations to find that the stern prison warden he had pictured was a smiling young man in pyjamas instead of the grim-faced martinet—or, at best, the prim pedagogue—he had expected to confront. It was an effort for him to recover his composure.
“By Jove!” M. Faîsme suddenly exclaimed. “It’s just struck me: you’ve arrived in the middle of mass. All our youngsters are in chapel, including your brother, of course. What’s to be done?” He consulted his watch. “There’s another twenty minutes, half an hour, perhaps, if there are many communions—and that’s quite possible. The Founder must have told you; we are particularly fortunate in our confessor: he’s quite a young priest with go-ahead ideas and any amount of tact. Since he’s been here the religious tone of the institution has wonderfully improved. I’m so sorry to keep you waiting, but really I don’t see how it can be helped.”
Mindful of the investigation he proposed to carry out, Antoine made no show of friendliness.
“As the buildings are empty for the moment,” he said, standing up and fixing his eyes on the little man, “I presume there would be no objection to my having a look round the institution. I’ve heard it so much discussed ever since I was a boy that I’d like to have a nearer view of it.”
“Really?” The superintendent seemed surprised. “Nothing could be simpler, of course,” he added with a smile, but made no sign of moving. For a moment he seemed lost in thought, the smile still lingering on his lips. “Really, you know, the buildings aren’t particularly interesting; more like a miniature barracks than anything else. And when I’ve said that, you know as much about them as I do.”
Antoine remained on his feet.
“Still, it would interest me,” he repeated. The superintendent stared at him, his little slotted eyes twinkling with amused incredulity. “I mean what I say,” Antoine added in a determined voice.
“In that case, doctor, I’ll be delighted… . Please give me time to put on a coat and shoes and I’ll be with you.”
He went out. Antoine heard an electric bell ring. Then a big bell in the courtyard clanged five times. “Aha!” he thought. “That’s the alarm; the enemy is within the gates!” Unable to bring himself to sit down, he walked to the window; the glass was frosted. “Steady now!” he adjured himself. “And keep your eyes open. The first thing’s to make sure. Then to act. That’s the line to take.”
After a good while M. Faîsme returned.
They went out together.
“You see here our main quadrangle!” he said, turning the pompous nomenclature with a laugh. The watchdog started barking again; he ran up to it and gave it a violent kick in the ribs that sent it slinking back into the kennel.
“Are you anything of a gardener? But of course a doctor must know his way about in botany, eh?” He halted, beaming, in the middle of the little lawn. “Do give me your advice. How’m I to hide that bit of wall? What about ivy? Only it would take years, wouldn’t it?”
Ignoring the question, Antoine walked on to the main building. First they visited the ground floor. Antoine went in front; nothing escaped his observant eye, and he made a point of opening every door without exception. The upper half of the walls was whitewashed; up to the height of six feet they were tarred black. All the windows, like those in the office, had frosted glass, and here there were bars as well. Antoine tried to open a window, but a special key was necessary; the superintendent produced one from his pocket and turned
the latch. Antoine was struck by the dexterity of his short, .fat, yellow fingers. He cast a shrewd exploring glance into the inner court, which was quite empty—a large rectangle of dry, well-trodden mud without a single tree and enclosed by high walls topped with broken glass.
M. Faîsme described with gusto the uses of the different rooms: class-rooms and shops for carpentry, metalwork, electricity, and so forth. The rooms were small, clean, and tidy. In the refectory servants were just finishing clearing the deal tables; an acrid smell came from the sinks in the corners.
“Each boy goes to the sink after the meal to wash his bowl, mug, and spoon. They never have knives, of course, nor even forks.” When Antoine gave him a puzzled look, he added with a grin: “Nothing with a point, you know!”
On the first floor there were more class-rooms, more workshops, and a shower-bath which did not seem much used, but of which the superintendent was evidently particularly proud. He bustled from room to room, flapping his arms and prattling away. Now and then he would stop to push back a carpenter’s bench, pick up a nail from the floor, turn off a dripping tap, set perfect order in each room he entered.
On the second floor were the dormitories. They were of two sorts. The greater number contained ten low bedsteads, spread with grey blankets and arranged in rows; each was fitted with a kit-rack as in French military barracks, which these resembled, except that in the centre of each room was a sort of iron cage enclosed in fine-meshed wire netting.
“Do you shut them up in that?” Antoine inquired.
M. Faîsme flung up his arms in a gesture of comical dismay, then began laughing again.
“Certainly not! That’s where the watchman sleeps. It’s quite simple; he puts his bed plumb in the middle, at an equal distance from each wall. In that way he can see and hear everything that goes on, in perfect safety. And he has an alarm-bell, too; the wires go under the floor.”
The other sort of dormitory consisted of rows of adjoining cells, built of solid stone and barred like the animal-cages in a menagerie. M. Faîsme had stopped on the threshold. Now and then his smile had a pensive, disillusioned air which gave his doll-like features the melancholy that pervades the Buddha’s face in certain statues.
“Alas, doctor,” he said, “it’s in these cells we have to lodge our ‘hard cases.’ The boys, I mean, who come to us too late to be re-educated; I’m afraid there’s little to be said for them. Some boys have vice in the blood—don’t you agree? Well, there’s nothing for it but to shut them up by themselves at night.”
Antoine pressed his face to the bars and peered into the gloom of one of the cells. He could just make out an unmade pallet bed and walls covered with obscene drawings and inscriptions. Instinctively he drew back.
“Don’t look, it’s too distressing,” the superintendent sighed, drawing him away. “Here you have the central corridor where the watchman on duty patrols all night. The light isn’t put out here, and he doesn’t go to bed. Though they’re securely locked up, the little rascals would be quite capable of giving us a lot of trouble, take my word for it!” He shook his head mournfully, then suddenly started laughing; his slotted eyes grew narrower still and all trace of compunction had left his face. “Yes,” he added with an air of naivete, “it takes all sorts to make a world, you know.”
Antoine was so much interested in what he saw that he had forgotten most of the questions he had prepared in advance. One, however, he remembered now.
“How do you punish them? I’d like to see your punishment cells.”
M. Faîsme stepped back a pace, his eyes wide open, flapping his hands in consternation.
“Come, come, doctor, what do you take us for? This isn’t a convict prison. Punishment cells, indeed! We haven’t any, thank God! For one thing, the Founder would never tolerate such methods.”
Silenced and baffled, Antoine had to endure the irony that twinkled in the little narrow eyes, whose lashes flickered humorously behind the glasses. He was beginning to End the role he had assumed—of scrutiny and suspicion—rather irksome. Nothing he had seen encouraged him to maintain his attitude of hostility. Moreover, he had a feeling that the superintendent might have guessed the invidious motive that had brought him to Crouy. Still it was hard to know, so genuine seemed the little man’s simplicity despite the occasional flashes of mockery that glinted in the corners of his eyes.
He stopped laughing, came up to Antoine, and put his hand on his arm.
“You were joking, weren’t you? You know as well as I do what comes of overdoing discipline; it leads to rebellion or, what is still worse, hypocrisy. Our Founder made a fine speech on the subject at the Paris Congress, in the year of the Great Exhibition.”
He had lowered his voice and there was a look of special understanding on his face as he gazed at the young man, a look implying that he and Antoine belonged to an élite, capable of discussing such educational problems without falling into the errors of the common herd. Antoine felt flattered, and his favourable impressions grew stronger.
“It’s true that in the courtyard, just as in a military barracks, there’s a small shed that the architect described on his plan as ‘punishment cells.’ ”
“Yes?”
“But we only use it for storing coal and potatoes. What’s the use of punishment cells? You get so much more by persuasion.”
“Really?”
With a subtle smile the superintendent placed his hand on Antoine’s arm.
“Let’s get it clear,” he said. “What I call ‘persuasion,’ I prefer to tell you right away, is the deprivation of certain items of the daily diet. Our young folk are always greedy. That’s only natural at their age, isn’t it? Dry bread, doctor, has a persuasive power you’d never suspect; only you must know how to use it—it’s essential not to isolate the boy whom we’re trying to reform. That, by the way, shows you how little the solitary cell enters into our method. No, it’s in a corner of the dining-hall that the youngster eats his hunk of stale bread, at noon, when the best meal of the day is served, with the smell of a nice steaming dish of stew in his nostrils and with all the others tucking it away under his eyes. That’s our method, and it never fails. At that age they thin down in no time; in a fortnight or three weeks I’ve broken in even the most stubborn cases. Persuasion—there’s nothing like it!” His eyes were round with satisfaction. “And never have I had to take other measures; I’ve never lifted a finger against any of the young folk in my charge.”
His face was shining with pride and benevolence. He really seemed to love his youthful miscreants, even the toughest.
They went down the stairs again. M. Faîsme took out his watch.
“To finish up, let me show you a truly edifying spectacle. You’ll tell the Founder, I hope, and I’m sure he’ll be pleased to hear about it.”
They crossed the garden and entered the chapel. M. Faîsme sprinkled holy water. Antoine saw the backs of some sixty boys in grey overalls, kneeling in strict alignment on the stone floor, motionless. Four of the staff, stalwart figures in blue uniforms with red braid, marched up and down the aisle, keeping their eyes fixed on the boys. Attended by two acolytes, the priest at the altar was just concluding the service.
“Where’s Jacques?” Antoine whispered.
The superintendent pointed to the gallery beneath which they were standing and tip-toed back towards the porch.
“That’s where your brother always sits,” he said as soon as they were outside. “He’s alone there; that’s to say, only the young man who looks after him is with him. By the way, you might tell your father that a new servant, the man we spoke to him about, has been allotted to Jacques. He took up the post a week ago. Léon, the man whom Jacques had before, was getting too old for the job, and we’ve detailed him to supervise a workroom. The new man’s a young Lorrainer, a very, very decent fellow. He’s just ended his military service; used to be the colonel’s orderly, and his references were excellent. It’ll be less boring for your brother on his walks, don’t you
think so? Good heavens, here I am chattering away to you and the boys are coming out of the chapel.”
The dog began to bark furiously. M. Faîsme reduced it to silence, adjusted his glasses, and took his stand in the centre of the big quadrangle.
Both leaves of the chapel-door had been thrown open and, three by three, with the attendants beside them, the boys were filing out, keeping perfect step, like soldiers on parade. All were bare-headed and wearing rope-soled shoes, which gave them the noiseless step of gymnasts; their overalls were clean and held in at the waist by leather belts, the buckles of which flashed in the sun. The oldest were seventeen or eighteen, the youngest ten or eleven. Most had pale complexions, downcast eyes, and a look of calm quite out of keeping with their age. But Antoine, though he scrutinized them with the utmost attention, could not detect a single questionable glance, not one unsavoury smile, nor even any trace of sullenness. Those boys did not look “hard cases,” and, he could but own to himself, they did not look like oppressed victims either.
When the little procession had vanished into the building and the sound of muffled footsteps on the wooden stairs had died away, he turned to M. Faîsme, who seemed to be waiting for his comment on the scene.
“An excellent turn-out,” he said.
The little man said nothing, but gently rubbed one plump palm against the other, as if he were soaping them, while his eyes, sparkling with pride behind the glasses, conveyed his silent gratitude.
At last, when the quadrangle was quite empty, Jacques appeared outside the sunlit porch.
At first Antoine wondered if it was really he. He had changed so greatly, grown so much taller, that Antoine all but failed to recognize him. He was not wearing uniform but a lounge suit, a felt hat, and an overcoat thrown over his shoulders. He was followed by a fair-haired, thick-set young man of about twenty, who was not wearing the official uniform. They came down the steps together. Neither seemed to have noticed Antoine and the superintendent. Jacques was walking composedly, his eyes fixed on the ground, and it was not till he was within a few yards of M. Faîsme that, raising his head, he stopped, displayed astonishment, and briskly took off his hat. His demeanour was completely natural, yet Antoine had a suspicion that his surprise was simulated. Jacques’s expression remained calm and, though he was smiling, did not seem to convey any real pleasure. Antoine held out his hand; his pleasure, too, was feigned.
The Thibaults Page 13