“My congratulations!” His voice was shrill with vexation. “The whole roll’s ruined.”
“I’m quite ready to stay,” she said composedly. “In fact I want to talk to you. Only, please unlatch the door.”
“No; Jenny will come in.”
After a momentary hesitation she said: “Then promise me on your honour that you won’t touch me again.”
He felt like flinging himself on her, gagging her with his hand, ripping up her blouse; but, at the same time, knew that he was beaten.
“All right. I promise.”
“Good! Now listen to me, Daniel. I was very silly this morning; I let you go too far, much too far. But this time I say definitely no! I didn’t run away from home just to get involved in this sort of thing.” She spoke the last words hurriedly, to herself. Then she addressed Daniel again: “Yes, I’ll trust you with my secret. I ran away from Mother’s place. Oh, there’s nothing really to be said against her —only that she’s very unhappy … and very weak. That’s all I can tell you.” She paused. That face she loathed above all, Jerome’s face, still hovered before her eyes; his son might bring her to the state to which Jerome had brought her mother. Alarmed by Daniel’s silence, she went on hastily: “You don’t understand me a bit. Of course that’s my fault, really; I’ve not been my real self with you. With Jenny, yes. With you I’ve gone on in a silly way, and you’ve imagined all sorts of things. But, underneath, I’m not like that, not in the least. I don’t want the sort of life that—that begins that way. What would have been the point of coming to live with someone like Aunt Thérèse? No! I want—you’ll laugh at me, but I don’t care—I want to be able later on to deserve the respect of a man who’ll love me truly, for always; a man who—who takes it seriously.”
“But I do take it seriously!” From the tone she guessed the smile of naive self-pity hovering on his lips, and knew at once that she had no more to fear from him.
“No, you don’t!” She sounded almost cheerful. “And you mustn’t be angry, Daniel, if I tell you straight out—you don’t love me.”
“Not love you? Oh, Nicole …!”
“No, it’s not me you love, it’s … something else. And I don’t love you either. Now listen, I’m going to be quite frank; I don’t think I could ever love a man like you.”
“Like me?”
“I mean, a man like all the rest. It isn’t that I don’t want to love someone, one day. I do. But it’s got to be someone, well, someone who’s pure, and who’ll have approached me in a very different way, and for … for other reasons. Oh, I don’t know how to express it! Anyhow, a man quite different from you.”
“Thanks very much!”
His desire for her was dead, and all he wanted now was to escape seeming ridiculous.
“Now then,” she said, “let’s make peace, and forget all about it.” She began to open the door; this time he did not try to stop her. “Is it ‘friends’?” she asked, holding out her hand. He made no answer. He was looking at her eyes, her cheeks, the young face that seemed proffered like a ripe fruit. He forced a smile onto his lips; his eyelashes were fluttering. She took his hand and grasped it tightly.
“Don’t spoil my life as well!” she murmured in a coaxing voice, and suddenly her eyebrows took a humorous inflexion. “Isn’t a roll of films quite enough damage for one day?”
Good-naturedly he laughed. She had not expected that much of him, and felt a little chagrined. Still, all in all, she was well satisfied with her victory and with the opinion he would have of her henceforward.
“Well?” Jenny asked when they appeared together in the dining-room.
“No go,” Daniel said gruffly.
Jacques felt a thrill of spiteful satisfaction. Nicole’s eyes twinkled as she repeated slowly, emphatically:
“Ab-so-lutely no go!”
Then she noticed that Jenny’s cheeks were quivering, her eyes blurred with sudden tears, and, running up to her, she kissed her.
From the moment his friend had come into the room, Jacques had stopped thinking about himself; he could not keep his eyes off Daniel. A change had come over Daniel’s features, a change that was painful to observe. It was as if the upper and lower halves of his face no longer matched; the enigmatic, troubled, almost sinister expression of his eyes was out of keeping with the smile that lifted one side of his mouth and screwed the lower portion of his face round to the left.
Their eyes met. Daniel frowned slightly and moved uneasily away.
This indication of mistrust grieved Jacques more than all the rest. All the time, from the very start, Daniel had been obscurely disappointing him; now at last he was consciously aware of it. There had not been a moment of real intimacy between them; why, he had not even been able to tell Lisbeth’s name to his friend!
For a while he fancied that the cause of his distress was his disillusionment regarding Daniel. But the real reason, though he had only a vague inkling of it, was that now for the first time he was viewing his love from a critical angle and, by the same token, eliminating it from his system. Like all young people, he lived only for the present; the past lapsed so swiftly into oblivion, and thoughts of the future merely whetted his impatience. And today, the present, every moment of it, seemed to have a bitter savour; as the afternoon drew to a close, he felt more and more hopelessly depressed. When Antoine signed to him to get ready to go, he felt actually relieved.
Daniel had noticed Antoine’s gesture. He went up to Jacques at once.
“You’re not going yet?”
“Yes, we must.”
“So soon?” Then he added in a lower tone: “But we’ve seen hardly anything of each other.”
He, too, had got nothing but disappointment from the day. And now, to make things worse, he began to feel remorseful for the way he had treated Jacques and—what grieved him even more—their friendship.
“Please forgive me,” he said suddenly, leading Jacques towards the window-recess. And there was such humility, such genuine solicitude, in his manner that Jacques, forgetting all his disappointments, felt carried away by an access of the old affection. “It’s been a rotten day,” Daniel continued. “Everything went wrong. When shall I see you again?” His tone grew pressing. “Look here, I’ve got to see you alone and have a good long talk. We’ve got out of touch with each other somehow. Of course, there’s nothing odd in that—why, we haven’t seen each other for a whole year! But we can’t let that go on.”
He suddenly wondered what future lay before their friendship, which so long had had nothing to thrive on except an almost mystical sentiment of loyalty, the fragility of which had just been shown to them. No, they must not let it wither. True, Jacques struck him now as rather childish; but his affection remained intact and, for all he knew, the keener for his feeling so much older than his friend.
“We’re always at home on Sunday,” Mme. de Fontanin was saying just then to Antoine. “We shan’t leave Paris till after the school prize-day.” Her eyes lit up. “Daniel has won several prizes,” she said in a low voice, but with evident pride. “Wait!” she added hastily, after making sure her son had his back to her and was not listening. “Before you go, I’d like to show you my treasures.” She hastened light-heartedly to her room, Antoine following, and led him to a desk. In one of the drawers, in a neat row, lay twenty laurel crowns in painted cardboard. She shut the drawer almost immediately and began laughing, a little flustered at having yielded to a sentimental impulse.
“Don’t tell him,” she said. “He hasn’t the least idea I keep them all.”
They returned in silence to the hall.
“Hallo, Jacques!” Antoine called.
“Today doesn’t count,” Mme. de Fontanin said, holding out both hands to Jacques and giving him a keen glance, as if she had guessed everything. “You’re amongst friends here, Jacques dear, and any time you feel like coming you’ll always be welcome. And your big brother, too, I needn’t say,” she added with a graceful gesture for Antoine.
Mme. de Fontanin went back to the dining-room to clear the table. Daniel followed her pensively, then leaned against the doorway and, without speaking, lit a cigarette. He was turning over in his mind what Nicole had told him. Why had they concealed from him the fact that his cousin had run away from home and come to them for refuge? Refuge against what?
Mme. de Fontanin was moving to and fro with the supple movements that gave her still the easy grace of a much younger woman. She was thinking of what Antoine had said, of all he had told her about himself, his studies, and his plans for the future, and about his father. “What a noble character!” she was saying to herself. “And I do like that forehead of his. It’s so” —she groped for an epithet— “yes, so earnest,” she added with a little thrill of pleasure.
Then she recalled the idle fancy that had crossed her mind; for an instant had not she, too, sinned in thought? Gregory’s words came back to her. And all at once, for no definite reason, she felt her heart full of such abounding joy that she put down the plate she was holding so as to pass her fingers over her face and feel under her hand the imprint of that sudden ecstasy. She went up to her son and startled him from his reverie, gaily clapping her hands on his shoulders. Then she gazed deep into his eyes, kissed him, and, without a word, went quickly out of the room.
She went straight to her desk and began writing in her large, childish, rather wavering hand.
My dear James,
I have behaved too arrogantly towards you. Who of us has the right to judge another? I thank God for having enlightened me once again. Tell Jerome I will not press for a divorce. Tell him …
Through her tears the words seemed dancing on the paper.
XII
A FEW days later Antoine was awakened by a sound of hammering on the shutters. The garbage collector had failed to get the street door opened for him, though the bell was in order—he could hear it ringing in the concierge’s room—and suspected that something was wrong.
Something was wrong, indeed: old Mme. Fruhling was dead. She had had another seizure, a fatal one, in the course of the night, and had dropped dead on the floor.
Jacques came in just as the body was being laid out on the mattress. The old woman’s mouth was gaping, showing some yellow teeth. What was it—something horrible—it reminded him of? Yes, that dead grey horse lying on the Toulon road. Then suddenly it Struck him very likely Lisbeth would be coming for the funeral.
Two days passed and she did not appear; it seemed she was not coming at all. Jacques caught himself thinking: so much the better! He could not make out his real feelings just now. Even after his visit to the Fontanins, he had gone on tinkering with a poem in which he glorified his heart’s beloved and lamented her absence. But somehow he had no real wish to see her again.
None the less he walked past the concierge’s room ten times a day, and each time glanced eagerly inside, only to turn away each time, reassured, yet dissatisfied.
On the day before the funeral, as he was coming in after dining alone in the little restaurant where he and Antoine had been having their meals since M. Thibault’s departure to Maisons-Laffitte, the first thing to meet his eye was a valise in the entrance-hall, just outside the concierge’s door. He felt himself trembling, his forehead damp with sweat. In the light from the candles round the bier he saw a girlish form, swathed in heavy mourning veils, kneeling beside it. He entered the room at once. The two nuns glanced round at him without interest; but Lisbeth did not turn. The night was sultry, and a warm, sickly sweet odour filled the room: the flowers on the coffin were wilting. Jacques remained standing, feeling sorry he had ventured in; the deathbed and everything connected with it had given him a sensation of discomfort that he was unable to vanquish. Lisbeth had passed out of his mind and all he wanted now was a pretext to get away. When a nun rose to snuff a candle, he slipped out of the room.
It seemed as if Lisbeth had intuitively felt his presence, or perhaps she had recognized his step, for she caught him up before he had reached the door of the flat. Hearing her step behind him, Jacques turned. For a few seconds they stood gazing at each other in a dark corner of the entrance-hall. Under the black veil her eyes were clouded with tears, and she did not see the hand he was holding out to her. He would have liked to weep in sympathy, but he was conscious of no emotion, on4y a vague boredom and a certain shyness.
A door banged on one of the upper landings. Fearing they might be caught outside his door, Jacques took out his keys. But what with his confusion and the darkness, he was unable to find the keyhole.
“Sure it’s the right key?” she murmured. He was profoundly moved by the slow cadence of her voice. When at last the door was open, she hesitated. Footsteps could be heard coming down the stairs from one of the upper flats.
“Antoine’s on duty at the hospital,” Jacques whispered, to persuade
her. Then, without the least sign of embarrassment, she crossed the threshold.
As he shut the door and switched on the lights, he saw her walking straight to his room. When she sat down on the sofa, each of her movements reminded him exactly of the past. Through the crape veil he saw her eyes swollen with weeping; grief had perhaps taken away some of the prettiness of her features, but it had added pathos. He noticed that she had a bandaged finger. He did not dare to sit down; he could not take his mind off the bereavement that had led to her return.
“How close it is tonight!” she said. “I’m sure there’s going to be a storm.”
She moved a little on the sofa; and the movement seemed an invitation to him to take the place beside her, his usual place. Jacques sat down and at once, without a word, without even taking off her veil, but simply drawing it aside, she pressed her cheek against his, exactly as before. The crape veil had an odour of dye and starch, and he found the contact of her moist skin disagreeable. He felt at a loss what to do or say. When he took her hand in his she gave a little cry.
“Have you hurt yourself?”
“Ach, it’s only a—a whitlow,” she sighed.
The sigh seemed to be for all her troubles at once: her sore finger, her bereavement, and the baffled tenderness fretting her heart. Without thinking, she began unwinding the bandage. When the finger was laid bare—livid and misshapen, with the nail displaced by the abscess—Jacques felt his breath stop short and for a moment his senses reeled as if she had suddenly exposed some secret place of her body.
Meanwhile he was beginning to feel, through his clothes, the warmth of the young body touching his. She turned her china-blue eyes towards him, plaintive eyes that always seemed entreating him not to be unkind. And then he had an impulse, stronger than his repugnance, to press his lips on the disfigured finger and make it well again.
She rose and with a dejected air started winding the gauze again round her finger.
“I’ll have to be going back now.”
She looked so worn out that he made a suggestion.
“Oh, let me make you a cup of tea. Shall I?”
She gave him a curious look, and only afterwards smiled.
“Thank you, I’d like a nice cup of tea. I’ll run across and say a little prayer; then I’ll come back.”
In a few minutes he had the water boiled, the tea made, and was bringing it back to his room. Lisbeth was not yet there. He sat down. Now he was all eagerness for her return. He felt his nerves on edge, but did not try to ascertain the reason. Why was she delaying like this? He could not bring himself to call to her; it would be like an affront to the dead woman. But what could be keeping her all this time? As the minutes passed he kept on going up to the tea-pot, feeling its declining warmth. At last it was stone-cold and, having no pretext for getting up, he stayed unmoving in his chair. His eyes were smarting with staring at the lamp and, with his exasperation, he felt the fever rising in his blood.
A sudden glare of lightning between the slats of the closed shutters jarred his nerves to breaking-point. Was she never coming back? He felt half asleep, so weary of everything he would have liked to die.
There was a low rumble, a black crash. That was the tea-pot bursting. Let it burst! The tea was pouring down in rain, lashing the shutters. Lisbeth was soaked through, water was streaming down her cheeks, down the black crape, washing the colour out of it till it was snow-white, white and translucent, a bridal veil.
Jacques gave a violent start. She had just sat down beside him again, pressing her cheek to his.
“Were you asleep, Jacques dear?”
Never before had she called him by his Christian name. She had taken off her veil and, in a half-dream, he seemed to see once more the well-beloved face of the Lisbeth he had known, though now there were dark rings round her eyes and the corners of her lips were drooping. She made a gesture of weary resignation.
“Now,” she said, “my uncle will marry me.”
Her head was bowed, and Jacques could not see if she was crying.
There had been sadness in her voice, but acquiescence too; perhaps her regret was touched with curiosity about the new life opening before her. But Jacques was not disposed to press such speculations too far. He wanted to believe her unhappy, to revel in the thrill of pitying her. Putting his arms round her, he pressed her body against his with all his might, as if he were trying to merge them into one. Her lips found his, and passionately he gave his mouth to her mouth’s kiss. Never in his life had he felt such an ecstasy of emotion. Evidently she had unfastened her blouse before coming in, for suddenly, almost without a movement on his part, the warmth of her young breast was nestling in his hand.
The Thibaults Page 28