“ ‘So the body of me to all I meet and know.’ ”
Jacques frowned slightly. This was not the first time he had chanced to witness one of these paroxysms of passion which carried Daniel off his feet in quest of pleasure, beyond all possibility of restraint. And each of them made a rift in Jacques’s affection despite his efforts to keep it whole. A comic detail shifted the trend of his thoughts; he had suddenly noticed that the inner surface of Daniel’s nose was lined with jet-black down, making his nostrils like the vent-holes of a mask. Then his eyes fell on-the “Prophet’s” hands, fine, tapering hands, shaded too with dusky down. Vir pilosus, he thought, repressing a smile.
Daniel leaned towards him again and continued in the same low tone, as though finishing the quotation from Whitman.
“Fill up your neighbour’s glass, my dear.”
“Mme. Packmell, the menu ith quite illegible thith. evening,” lisped a voice from the far end of the table.
“Two black marks against Mme. Packmell!” declared Favery severely.
“That ain’t nothing so long as you keep fit,” the comely blonde riposted philosophically.
Jacques was sitting next to Paule, the slightly tarnished angel with the snow-white skin. Beyond her sat a big-breasted girl who never spoke and applied her napkin to her lips after each spoonful. Further on, almost facing Jacques, beside a dark woman whose forehead rippled with tiny curls—Dolores, as Ma Juju called her—sat a little boy, seven or eight years old, dressed in rather shabby black; his eyes followed every movement of the others and, now and again, a smile lit up his face.
Jacques addressed the girl beside him:
“Why, they’ve forgotten your soup.”
“Thanks, I’m not taking any.”
She kept her eyes lowered and only raised them to look in Daniel’s direction. She had tried her best to get a seat beside him but at the last minute had seen him exchanging chairs with his friend; Jacques was to blame for this, she thought. Where had this fellow with the spotty face and a boil on his neck sprung from? Her pet aversion was redheads, and there was something in Jacques’s looks and in his auburn hair that put him in this category. Only to see the disorderly mat over his forehead, his jowl and loose-set ears, you knew him for a bit of a brute!
Mme. Dolores’s shrill voice broke in:
“Well, what’s come over you? Why don’t you put your napkin on?” She jerked the youngster to and fro, tucking the starched linen, which half submerged him in its folds, into his collar.
“When a woman owns to a certain age,” Favery was laying down the law to Marie-Josephè, “it means she’s past it. She got into the Conservatoire, I tell you, at the extreme age-limit exactly forty-five years ago, by producing her younger sister’s birth-certificate—which made her two years under her true age. So it comes to this …”
“That’s nobody’s business,” Ma Juju declared in a loud stage-whisper.
“Favery is one of those excellent folk who can never engage in a conversation without premising that the rate of velocity for falling bodies is 32 feet, 2 inches per second at Paris,” observed Werff, who once had crammed for the Polytechnic. He owed the nickname of Apricot to the hue of his skin; it had been burnt to a dull gold, spangled with freckles, by his practice of open-air sports. He cut a handsome figure, with his supple shoulders, strongly moulded face, and full, red lips; by night his sunburnt cheeks and blue eyes radiated hale well-being, a muscular gusto regaled by the day’s athletics.
“Nobody knows what he died of,” someone remarked, eliciting a jesting repartee. “The real mystery was what he lived on!”
“Hurry up now!” Mme. Dolores admonished the boy. “They serve dessert here, you know—but you shan’t have any.”
“Why?” the lad pleaded, turning his shining eyes towards her.
“Because you shan’t if I say no! Now do as you’re told, hurry up!” She saw that Jacques was watching and sped him a confidential smile. “He’s a fussy kid, you see. He shies off anything he’s not used to. Salmis of pigeon—you won’t see that every day, my pet! Gammon and greens came his way oftener than pigeon, I should say. He’s been spoilt. Fussed over, petted, like all only children. Especially as his mother was an invalid for so long. That’s what he is”—she stroked the child’s round, close-cropped head—”a spoilt child. A naughty, spoilt child. But, now his aunt’s in charge of him, there’ll be a change. Our young gentleman wanted to keep his lovelocks, like a little girl, eh? We’ll hear no more about those fads of his; no more pampering for him. Eat your dinner now. The gentleman’s looking. Be quick!” Delighted to have an audience, she cast another smile in the direction of Jacques and Paule. “He’s a little orphan,” she announced complacently. “He lost his mother only this week; she was married to my brother. She died in her village down in Lorraine—of consumption. Poor little kid,” she added, “it’s lucky for him that I am willing to look after him. He has no one in the world now except me. But I shall have my hands full!”
The little boy had ceased eating and was staring at his aunt. Did he understand? There was a curious intonation in his voice as he questioned her.
“Was it my mummy who died?”
“Don’t bother with questions. Eat your dinner!”
“Don’t want to now.”
“There you are! That’s how he is,” Mme. Dolores lamented. “Well, if you must know, it was your mummy who died. Now do as you’re told and go on eating, or you won’t have any ice-cream.”
Paule averted her eyes just then and, as their looks crossed, Jacques saw the image of his own distress. Her neck was slim and lithe and very pale, still paler than her cheeks; its slender grace invited thoughts of dalliance. As his gaze rested on her fine-grained skin, shaded with a slight down, a faint savour of sweetness rose to his lips. He groped for something to say, found nothing, and smiled. Watching him from the corner of an eye, she found him less uncouth. But a sudden twinge at her heart brought a deathly pallor to her face; resting her hands on the table edge, she let her head sink back a little, biting her tongue to save herself from fainting.
Seeing her thus, Jacques pictured a bird alighted on the tablecloth, there to die.
“What is it?” he whispered.
Her eyes were swimming and a line of white showed between her half-shut eyelids. Without moving she forced out two words:
“Say nothing!”
A lump had risen to his throat and, even had he wished, he could not have called out. In any case the others paid no heed to them. He looked at Paule’s hands; her rigid fingers, diaphanous like tiny tapers, had grown so livid that the nails showed up as patches of dark violet.
“My alarm goes off at six-thirty,” Favery was explaining to the girl beside him, with chuckles of self-satisfaction, “standing in a saucer poised precariously on a tumbler …”
Meanwhile Paule’s colour had returned a little and she opened her eyes again; turning, she weakly smiled her thanks to Jacques for his silence.
“It’s over,” she murmured breathlessly. “I’m liable to these attacks— my heart, you know.” Then she added ruefully, with lips that quivered still: “Have a nice sit-down, dearie, and you’ll get over it!”
He had an impulse to catch her in his arms and carry her far, far away from all this sordidness; in a daydream he devoted all his life to her and made her well. So potent was the love he felt within him for any weaker being who might claim, or merely accept, the refuge of his strength! He had half a mind to tell Daniel of his fantastic scheme, but Daniel’s thoughts were otherwise occupied.
Daniel was chatting with Ma Juju, across Rinette; a pretext for watching the girl beside him and feeling her warm nearness. Though all through the meal he had diplomatically refrained from addressing her in any but the briefest phrases, while paying court to her with delicate attentions, she obviously filled his thoughts. On several occasions she had noticed his eyes fixed on her and on each occasion, though she could not analyse the cause, his look, far from attracting her, evoked a feelin
g of estrangement; she was not blind to the virile charm of Daniel’s face, but it annoyed her.
Meanwhile a heated discussion was in progress at the far end of the table.
“Conceited ass!” Apricot apostrophized Favery, who pleaded guilty.
“That’s what I often say to myself!”
“But not loudly enough, I fear.”
Amidst the general laughter Werff kept the upper hand.
“My dear Favery,” he declared, deliberately raising his voice, “allow me to tell you something: what you’ve just said about women proves that you don’t know what to say to them.”
Daniel glanced at Favery. The young pedagogue was laughing and Daniel fancied he saw him glance towards Rinette, as though she had been the theme of the discussion. There was a certain effrontery, a lewdness, in Favery’s look which gave a fillip to Daniel’s antipathy for him. He knew stories about Favery which did him little credit, and felt a brutal impulse to retail them in Rinette’s hearing. And he never could resist impulses of that order. Lowering his voice so as to be heard by the two women only, he bent towards Ma Juju in such a way as to include Rinette in the conversation, and asked in a casual voice:
“Do you know that one about Favery and the woman taken in adultery?”
The old woman snapped at the bait.
“No, let’s hear it! And chuck us a cigarette’ This dinner seems likely to last all night.”
“One fine day—she’d been his mistress for a good spell then—the woman rolled up at his place with a valise in her hand. ‘I’ve had enough of it. I want to live with you,’ and the usual stuff. ‘But how about your husband?’ ‘Him? I’ve just written him this letter: “Dear Eugène, I have come to a turning-point in my life,” and so on … “I want, as I have the right, to bestow my affection on a heart that understands,” and so on and so forth… . “That heart—I have found it, and so I leave you.“ ‘
“And what a heart—I ask you!
“That was her lookout. But guess what happened next! Old Favery was in the devil of a stew. A woman on his hands and, what was worse, a woman who’d soon be divorced and free to insist on his marrying her. Then he brought off what he claims to be a stroke of genius. He sent this letter to the woman’s husband: ‘Dear Sir, I hereby inform you that your wife has left her home with the intention of coming to live with me. Faithfully yours . , .”
“Very decent of him,” Rinette remarked.
“So you think!” A malicious smile flitted across Daniel’s face. “But wait a bit! Favery’s astute; he was simply taking his precautions for the future. Her husband, he knew, would produce the letter in court. And the marriage of an unfaithful wife with her lover is forbidden by law. So Favery winds up his story with the maxim: Heaven helps those who know the Civil Code.”
Rinette pondered a while; then it dawned on her.
“A dirty trick!”
Daniel, as he bent towards her, felt her breath hover on his face and lips, and he took a deep breath, almost closing his eyes.
“So he let her drop, eh?” the old woman inquired.
Daniel did not reply. Rinette looked towards him. He kept his eyes lowered now, for he felt powerless to hide their frenzy of desire. Close to her eyes she saw the smoothness of his skin, the savage line of his mouth, his quivering lashes, and, as though she long had known and tested their dark treacheries, something within her, urgent as an instinct, turned her suddenly against him.
“But what became of the woman?” Ma Juju asked again.
“They say she killed herself. His version is that she was consumptive.” With a forced smile he passed his fingers across his forehead.
Rinette drew herself up, shrinking against the back of her chair, so as to keep as far apart as possible from Daniel. What was the cause of this revulsion that had come over her so suddenly? His face, his smile, his expression—all about this handsome youth repelled her; his way of leaning forward, the grace of his gestures, and most of all, his long, sensitive hands. Never had she dreamt there slumbered in her heart, biding their time but so far held in leash, such potencies of loathing for a total stranger.
“So, in other words, I’m a flirt!” exclaimed Marie-Josephè, calling the company to witness.
Battaincourt smiled ingenuously.
“Am I to blame if our language has no other word to describe that most charming of traits: the desire to fascinate?”
“Oh, how disgusting!” Mme. Dolores’s shrill voice broke in.
All eyes turned in her direction, only to find that the little boy had spilt a spoonful of cream on his black coat and was being hauled away by his aunt towards the lavatory.
Jacques profited by her eclipse to question Paule, glad of this chance of breaking the ice.
“You know her?”
“Slightly.”
Paule’s impulse was to stop there; she was naturally reserved, and felt depressed. But, as Jacques had been so nice to her just now, she continued. “She’s not a bad sort, you know. And she’s well off. She was once, for quite a long while, the mistress of a fellow who writes plays. Then she married a pharmacist. He’s dead now and his patent medicines bring her in a tidy income still—the ‘Dolores Corn-Cure,’ you must have heard of it. No? Better tell her so, she always carries samples in her bag. A striking woman, you’ll see; quite a character. She keeps a dozen cats picked up here, there, and everywhere, and a large aquarium of fishes in her bedroom. She loves animals.”
“But not children.”
Paule shook her head.
“That’s the sort she is,” she concluded.
Jacques noticed that after speaking she breathed with difficulty. All the same he wanted to prolong their talk. The reminder that she had heart-disease brought to his lips, somewhat inaptly, a familiar phrase: “The heart has its reasons which reason does not know.”
She reflected a moment, then, strumming on the table with her fingers, corrected him:
“It should be: ‘The heart its reasons has …’ The first way it didn’t sound like poetry.”
His longing for her persisted, but he now felt less disposed to devote his life to her. No sooner, he thought, am I allowed the smallest glimpse into another’s soul than I am half in love already! He recalled the first occasion when he noticed this habit of his: one day during the previous summer he had gone for a walk with some of Antoine’s friends in the Viroflay woods; a Swedish girl, studying medicine at Paris, had leaned on his arm and chattered to him of her childhood. …
Suddenly he realized that it was half-past nine and Antoine had not yet come. A panic fear came over him and, forgetting everything else, he clutched Daniel’s arm and shook it.
“I’m positive something’s happened to him!”
“What …?”
“To Antoine.”
Dinner had just ended and people were leaving their seats. Jacques rose to his feet. Daniel was standing too and, while manoeuvring to keep in touch with Rinette, tried to reassure his friend.
“Don’t be an ass, Jacques! He’s a doctor. An urgent call …”
But Jacques was already out of earshot. Unable to collect his wits or master his forebodings, he had hurried off to the cloak-room. Without saying goodbye to anyone or giving a thought to Paule, he ran outside. “It’s my fault,” horror-stricken, he admonished himself. “I’ve brought Antoine bad luck. My fault! My fault! And all to have a black suit, like that fellow at the Medicis crossing!”
The three-piece band had just struck up a waltz and a few couples had started dancing near the bar. Daniel saw Favery’s chin uptilted, as if he sniffed the air, his twinkling eyes fixed on Rinette, and, by a quick move, forestalled him.
“Shall we …?”
She had noticed his approach and met it with a hostile look. She gave him time enough to bend a little towards her before replying.
“No.”
He masked his surprise with a smile.
“ ‘No.’ Why ‘no’?” he said, mimicking her intonation. So sure was he
of getting his way that he took a step towards her. “Come along!” The touch of over-confidence in his gesture clinched her distaste.
“No, not with you,” she said pointedly.
“No?” he repeated; but there was a challenging gleam in his dark eyes that seemed to say: “My time will come!”
She turned away and, noticing Favery’s hesitant approach, went up to him as if he had already asked her for the dance. They danced together in silence.
Ludwigson had just arrived. Wearing a dinner-jacket and an incongruous straw hat, he stood beside the bar, chatting with Mother Packmell and Marie-Josephè, whose necklace he was fingering complacently. But stealthily his slow eyes, slotted between reptilian lids, would alight, like a blow from a loaded cane, on something or someone present, summing up the company.
Ma Juju steered a course between the dancers, in quest of Rinette. When she had found the girl, she nudged her with her elbow,
“Hurry up! And remember what I said!”
Paule had buttonholed Daniel in a corner of the room and he was listening to her with a faraway smile. He watched Ma Juju proceeding with the most natural air in the world to join Marie-Josephè’s group, while Rinette, ceasing to dance, went and sat down alone at a distant table in the far room. A moment later Ludwigson and Ma Juju crossed both rooms and joined her there. Ludwigson always— and especially when he knew he was being looked at—stiffened his back, like an old-time cabby, as he walked. He knew only too well that nature had cursed him with a houri’s hind parts and that whenever he moved fast his hips were apt to sway from side to side; so he stepped delicately. He pressed his thick lips on Rinette’s proffered hand. As he made the gesture Daniel noted his somewhat receding skull, plastered with black and skilfully dekinked hair. “The fellow’s got a distinction of his own all the same,” he said to himself. “There’s a touch of the coolie in our Levantine mountebank—but something of the Grand Turk, too.”
As Ludwigson slowly drew off his gloves his expert, appraising gaze was sizing up Rinette. He sat down facing her, Ma Juju beside him. Drinks were served at once, though Ludwigson had given no order; they knew his ways. He never drank champagne, but always Asti—a still variety—not iced or even cool, but slightly warmed. “Tepid,” he explained, “like the yuice of frucht in sunshine.”
The Thibaults Page 33