She shifted her position a little so that Jacques’s hand could move, untrammelled, under the dress.
“Let’s pray together for Mother Friihling,” she murmured.
He felt no inclination to smile; almost he believed he was really praying, such was the fervour of his caresses.
Suddenly she gave a little moan, and shuffled free from his embrace. He supposed that he had hurt her finger, or else that she was about to leave him. But she only moved towards the lamp-switch; after turning off the light she came back to the sofa. Close beside his ear he heard her whisper: “Liebling!” and then again he felt her soft lips crushed on his, her feverish fingers on his clothes… .
Another clap of thunder woke him; rain was hissing on the cobbles in the courtyard. Lisbeth? Where was Lisbeth? All was darkness in the room. He had half a mind to get up, to go and look for her, and even made a tentative effort to rise, propping himself on his elbow; but then a flood of sleep swept over him, and he sank back amongst the cushions.
It was broad daylight when at last he opened his eyes.
First, he saw the tea-pot on the table, then his coat inexplicably sprawling on the floor. Now everything came back to him, and he got up at once. A sudden, urgent craving had come over him to take off what clothes he still had on and wash his limbs in good clean water. The cold bath seemed like a purifying rite, a baptism.
Still dripping, he began to walk about the room, throwing out his chest, testing his muscles, and patting the cool, firm skin; the odious associations of this cult of his own nakedness had been completely blotted from his memory. Reflected in a glass he saw his slim young body and for the first time since a very long while he found that he could gaze at every part of it coolly, with unruffled equanimity. Remembering certain lapses of the past, he merely shrugged his shoulders with an indulgent contempt. “All that was childish silliness!” That chapter of his life, he felt, was definitely closed; it seemed to him that certain energies, after a long spell of incomprehension and deviation from their natural course, had at last found their proper function. Though what had happened during the past twelve hours was only vaguely present in his consciousness, and though he did not even give a thought to Lisbeth, he felt light-hearted, clean, and sound in mind and body. He had not the least impression of having lit on something new; rather, it seemed to him he had recovered a long-lost equilibrium, like a convalescent who, though delighted by his return to health, finds nothing new in it.
Still naked, he moved into the hall, and held the door ajar. He fancied he could make out Lisbeth in the darkened room where the dead body lay, on her knees and swathed in the black veils she had worn the previous night. Men on ladders were festooning the street-entrance with black draperies. He remembered the funeral was fixed for nine, and dressed in eager haste, as if for a holiday. That morning every act was a delight.
He had just finished tidying his room when M. Thibault, who had made a point of returning from Maisons-Laffitte for the funeral, came to fetch him.
He walked beside his father in the cortege. He had a vague sense of almost patronizing superiority as at the church he filed in with the others, amongst all those people who did not know; and without much emotion he clasped Lisbeth’s hand.
All that day the concierge’s room was empty. Jacques counted the minutes, waiting for Lisbeth’s return; but he would not own to himself the reason for his impatience, the desire smouldering in the background of his mood.
At four o’clock the bell rang, but when he ran to open the door, it was his Latin tutor. He had quite forgotten he had a lesson that afternoon.
He was listening to his tutor’s explanations of a passage of Horace with an inattentive ear, when the bell rang again. This time it was she. From the threshold she could see the open door of Jacques’s room, and the tutor’s back bent over the table. For a few moments their eyes met, questioning. Jacques had no idea that she had come to say goodbye, that she was leaving by the six-o’clock train. She did not dare to speak, but a slight tremor ran through her body and her eyelids quivered. Raising her bandaged finger to her mouth, she came quite close to him and, as if she were already in the train that was to carry her away from him for ever, threw him a hasty kiss and fled.
The tutor went on with the interrupted lesson:
“Purpurarum usus means the same thing as purpura quâutuntur. But there’s a shade of difference. Do you feel it?”
Jacques smiled as if he felt it. He was telling himself Lisbeth would be back quite soon and a picture was hovering before his eyes of Lisbeth’s face in the dusk of the hall, and the raised veil, and the kiss she had seemed to snatch with her bandaged finger from her lips, to throw to him.
“Go on translating,” the tutor said.
Note: As regards Parts I and II of The Thibaults the present Translator wishes to acknowledge the assistance he has derived from the previous version by Mr. Stephen Haden Guest.
PART III
I
THE two brothers walked along by the Luxembourg railings. The Senate clock had just gone half-past five.
“Your nerves are on edge,” Antoine observed. Jacques had been forcing the pace for some time, and his brother was growing tired of it. “Sweltering, isn’t it? Looks like a storm brewing.”
Jacques slowed down and took off his hat, which was pinching his temples.
“Nerves on edge? Not a bit of it. Quite the contrary. You don’t believe me? Well, I’m amazed at my own calmness. Each of the last two nights I’ve slept like a log; so much so that, on awaking, I felt stiff all over. Cool as a cucumber, I assure you. But you shouldn’t have bothered to come with me, you’ve such heaps of things to do. All the more so as Daniel’s going to turn up. Amazing, isn’t it? He came all the way from Cabourg this morning just for me. He telephoned a moment ago to know when the results would be posted. Damned thoughtful he is about things like that. Battaincourt promised to come too. So, you see, I shan’t be alone.” He glanced at his watch. “Well, in half an hour …”
Yes, his nerves are on edge, all right, thought Antoine. Mine too, a bit. Still, as Favery swears he’s in the list … Antoine brushed aside, as in his own case he had always done, all thought of failure. Casting a paternal glance at the youngster beside him, he hummed through closed lips: In my heart, in my heart … What that girl Olga was singing this morning; can’t get it out of my head. By Duparc, I suppose. I only hope she doesn’t forget to remind Belin about tapping number seven. In my heart tra-la-la …
And if I’ve passed, Jacques mused, shall I be really, really pleased? Not so much as they, anyhow, he added to himself, thinking of Antoine and his father.
A memory flashed across his mind.
“Do you know,” he said, “the last time I dined at Maisons-Laflitte—I’d just got through the orals and my nerves were in rags—when we were at the dinner-table, Father suddenly addressed me, with that special look of his, you know: ‘And what shall we make of you, if you’re not passed?’ ”
The picture faded and another memory crossed his mind. What a state I’m in this afternoon! he thought and, smiling, took his brother’s arm.
“No, Antoine, there was nothing unusual about that, of course. It was next day, the following morning. Look here, I simply must tell you about it. As I had nothing to do, Father told me to attend M. Crespin’s funeral in his place. Remember? And it was then that something happened—something quite inexplicable. I got there too soon and, as it was raining, I went into the church. I was thoroughly sick, you know, at having my morning spoiled like that; all the same, as you’ll see, that doesn’t really explain it. Well, I entered the church and sat down in an empty row, when—what do you think?—a priest came up and took the chair beside me. Mind you, there were any number of empty chairs, yet this priest deliberately planted himself next to me. He was quite young, still at the seminary, no doubt, smooth-shaven and smelling clean, of good mouth-wash—but he had disgusting black gloves and, worst of all, a huge umbrella with a black handle that
reeked like a drenched dog. Don’t laugh, Antoine; wait and see! I simply couldn’t get that priest out of my mind. He had his nose buried in a prayerbook and I could just see his lips moving as he followed the service. So far, so good. But, at the elevation, instead of using the kneeling-desk in front of him—that, of course, I’d have understood—he knelt on the ground, prostrated himself on the bare stone slabs. I, meanwhile, remained standing. When he rose he saw me like that and caught my eye; perhaps my attitude may have struck him as provocative. Anyhow, I caught a look of pious disapproval on his face and h6 rolled his eyes upwards—it maddened me, his air of smug superiority. To such a pitch that—I can’t think what possessed me to do it, it’s a mystery to me yet—I drew a visiting-card from my pocket, scrawled a phrase on it, and handed it to him.” (As a matter of fact, all this was make-believe; Jacques had merely fancied at the moment that he might act thus. What prompted him to lie?) “He raised his nose from his book, and hesitated; yes, I had positively to force the card into his hand. He glanced at it, stared at me in consternation, and then, slipping his hat under his arm, quickly picked up his umbrella and—ran! You’d have thought he had a lunatic at large beside him. Well, for that matter, I was pretty mad at the moment; it was all I could do to keep a hold on myself. I went away without waiting for the service to end.”
“But what in the world did you write on the card?”
“Oh, yes, the card. It was so perfectly idiotic I hardly like to tell you. What I wrote was this: I do NOT believe! With an exclamation mark. Underlined. On a visiting-card. A monkey-trick, eh? I do NOT believe!” His eyes widened, staring ahead. “In the first place, can one ever affirm such a thing—positively?” He stopped speaking for a moment, to watch a smartly dressed young man in mourning who was crossing at the Médicis corner. When he spoke again his voice sounded brittle, as though he were forcing himself to an odious confession. “It’s absurd. Do you know what I’ve been thinking of for the last minute? I was thinking, Antoine, that if you died I’d like to have a close-fitting black suit like the one that fellow there has on. I even, for an instant, longed for your death— impatiently. Now, don’t you think I’ll end my days in a padded cell?”
Antoine merely shrugged his shoulders.
“It mightn’t be such a bad thing, perhaps,” Jacques continued. “I might try to analyse myself right up to the final stage of madness. Say, that’s an idea! I might write the story of a highly intelligent man who goes mad. Everything he did would be insane, yet he would act only after the most scrupulous deliberation and behave, on his own estimate, with perfect logic. Do you see? I’d install myself in the very centre of his mind, and I’d …”
Antoine kept silence. That was another pose he had essayed and it had become second nature with him. But there was such awareness in his silences that his companions’ thoughts, far from being paralysed, were stimulated by them.
“Oh, if only I had the time to work, to try out my ideas!” Jacques sighed. “One exam after another! And I’m twenty already; it’s ghastly!”
He lifted his hand to his neck, where the collar-edge -chafed the tip of a pimple. Another boil in the making, he mused dolefully; the iodine hasn’t stopped it.
He turned to his brother again.
“Listen, Antoine! When you were twenty, you weren’t childish, were you? I remember you quite well. But I’m different, I never change. Really, I feel exactly the same as I was ten years ago. Don’t you agree?”
“No.”
All the same, Antoine reflected, he’s right about that. Consciousness of continuity; or, better, the continuity of consciousness. Like the old fellow who says: “Personally, I was very keen on leapfrog.” Same feet, same hands, same old duffer. I, too, that night I had such a fright at Cotterets, that colic attack. Didn’t dare leave my room. Dr. Thibault it was, yes, the doctor himself and no other—our house-physician, a first-rate man, he added complacently, as though he overheard one of his subordinates describing him.
“Am I boring you?” asked Jacques, lifting his hat to mop his forehead.
“Why do you ask?”
“That’s what it looks like. You hardly answer a word, and listen to me as if I were a fever case.”
“Oh, no, I don’t.”
If, Antoine mused, the ear-douche doesn’t bring the temperature down … He was thinking of the boy they had brought to the hospital that morning, the look of agony on his face. In my heart … In my heart tra-la-la.
“You think I’m feeling nervous,” Jacques went on. “I tell you again, you’re mistaken. I may as well make a clean breast of it: there are moments when I’d almost rather hear I’d failed the entrance!”
“Why on earth—?”
“To escape.”
“To escape? Escape what?”
“Everything. The whole show. You, them, the whole bunch!”
Instead of uttering the comment that rose to his lips—”You’re talking nonsense”—Antoine turned to his brother and examined him thoughtfully.
“To burn my boats,” Jacques continued, “and go away. Oh, if only I could go right away, all by myself, anywhere on earth! Somewhere far away, where I’d have some peace and settle down to work.” Well knowing that he would never go, he yielded to his daydream with all the greater zest. He paused for a moment, then, with a wry smile, turned to his brother again.
“And there, there perhaps, but nowhere else, I might bring myself to forgive them.”
Antoine stopped short.
“Still harping on that, eh?”
“On what?”
“Forgive them, you say. Forgive whom, for what? The reformatory?”
Jacques cast a hostile glance at him, shrugged his shoulders, and walked on. A lot his stay at Crouy had to do with it! But what was the good of explanations? Antoine would never understand.
And, anyhow, what did this idea of “forgiveness” amount to? Jacques himself could not explain it satisfactorily, though he was always finding himself at grips with a dilemma: to forgive or, alternatively, to cultivate his rancour. To take things as they came, get his degree, become a cogwheel in the machine; or—the other way out—to give full rein to the destructive forces that surged within him and launch himself with the full impetus of his resentment against—against what, he could hardly say; against morality, the cut and dried life, the family, society. An ancient grievance, that, and harking back to childhood; a vague awareness that none had known him for what he was, a boy who needed to be properly treated, but, time and again, everyone had failed him. Yes, he was sure of it; had escape been feasible, he would have found that peace of mind which he accused “the others” of frustrating.
“Once I got there, Antoine, I’d work.”
“ ‘Got there.’ Where, exactly?”
“There you are—asking me ‘where?’! No, Antoine, you can’t understand. You’ve always felt in harmony with other people. You were always satisfied with the path of life you’d chosen.”
Jacques fell to summing up his grown-up brother in terms which usually he held taboo. He saw him as a diligent, contented man. He had energy, all right, but what about his brains? The brains of a zoologist. An intellect so positive and so realistic that it had found its natural field in scientific research. An intellect that based its theory of life on the one concept of activity, and with that was satisfied. And—this struck even deeper—an intellect which stripped things of their secret virtue, of all, in a word, that gave significance and beauty to the universe.
“I’m not a bit like you,” he burst out passionately and, swerving a little from his brother’s side, walked silently aloof along the kerb.
I’m stifled here, he mused; everything they make me do is loathsome, sickening. The tutors, my fellow-students—all alike! And the things they rave about, their favourite books! Their “great modern authors”! Oh, if only someone in the world could guess what I am, my real self—and what I’m out to do. No, no one has a notion of it, not even Daniel.
His raging mood ha
d passed. He did not listen to Antoine’s reply. To forget all that has been written up to now! he adjured himself. To get out of the rut and, looking inside oneself, say everything! No one’s ever had the nerve to say everything, as yet. But someone might; I might… .
It was hard going up the Rue Soufflot incline in such a temperature, and they slackened speed. Antoine talked on; Jacques was silent. Noticing the contrast, Jacques smiled to himself. After all, he thought, I can never argue with Antoine; either I stand up to him and lose my temper, or else I dig myself in before the arguments he methodically marches up, and hold my tongue. Now, for instance. It’s a sort of low cunning, really; I know that Antoine takes my silence for assent. But it’s not so. Far otherwise. I stick to my guns, my ideas. I don’t care if other people find them muddled; I’m sure, myself, of their soundness and I’ve only got to develop the knack of proving this to others—a matter of getting down to it one day, that’s all. Arguments—they’re easily found. But Antoine rattles on and on, never stops to wonder if there’s any sense in my ideas. All the same, how lonely I feel! … And once again the desire to go away flamed up in him. Wonderful it would be to give up everything, all at once. Rooms left behind! Wonders of setting forth! He smiled again and, throwing a teasing glance at his brother, began to declaim:
’ ”Families, I hate you! Closed circles round the hearth! Fast shut doors… .’ ” (NOTE: For this and for the other passages from Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres cited in this chapter, I have used the authorized translation by Mrs. Dorothy Bussy. Translator.)
“Who’s that by?”
“ ‘Nathanael, look at everything as you pass by and stop nowhere …’ ”
“By whom?”
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