“As for once in a way we’re alone,” she began—there was a hint of emphasis in her tone, as though she begged the girl’s forgiveness for the inroads Jerome’s return had made upon their intimacy— “there’s something I’d like to speak to you about, darling. I’m thinking of the Thibault boy, whom I met yesterday… .” She paused; after this frontal attack on her subject, she was puzzled how to proceed. But her anxious air as she bent towards the girl spoke for the unspoken words, pointed a tacit question.
Jenny said nothing and Mme. de Fontanin slowly drew herself up, fixing her eyes upon the darkening garden.
Five minutes passed. The breeze freshened and Mme. de Fontanin imagined she saw Jenny shiver.
“You’re catching cold. Let’s go in.”
Her voice had regained its normal intonation. A new idea had come to her: what was the use of insisting? Glad she had spoken out and sure she had been understood, she faced the future confidently.
Mother and daughter rose and crossed the hall without a word, then climbed the stairs in almost total darkness. Mme. de Fontanin, who was in front, waited on the landing at Jenny’s door to kiss her goodnight as usual. Though she could not see the girl’s face, she felt her body, as she kissed her, stiffening with revolt, and for a moment held the young cheek pressed to hers, in a movement of compassion which made Jenny recoil instinctively. Mme. de Fontanin gently released her, then moved away towards her own bedroom. But then she noticed that, instead of opening the door and entering her room, Jenny was following; just as she was about to turn she heard the girl’s excited voice behind her, exclaiming passionately, in one breath:
“You’ve only got to treat him a bit more stiffly, Mamma, if you think he comes here too often.”
“Treat whom?” Mme. de Fontanin stared at her daughter. “Jacques? If he comes too often? But he hasn’t shown up for a fortnight or more!”
(Jacques’s non-appearance was deliberate; learning from Daniel of M. de Fontanin’s return and the disturbing factor it had proved in their home-life, he had thought it more tactful to keep away altogether for the present. Jenny, too, went far less often to the club and, when she did so, avoided Jacques as much as possible, waiting till he was playing in a set to slip away before he had a chance of saying more than a casual word to her. The result was that the two young people had seen very little of each other during the past fortnight.) Jenny deliberately entered her mother’s bedroom; shutting the door, she stood there, unspeaking, in an attitude of resolute courage. Mme. de Fontanin’s heart thrilled with pity; her one thought was to make it easy for Jenny to speak out.
“I assure you, darling, I really can’t see what you mean.”
“Why did Daniel ever bring those Thibaults to our place?” Jenny broke out passionately. “Nothing would have happened if Daniel hadn’t, for some fantastic reason, taken such a liking for those people.”
“But what has happened, darling?” Mme. de Fontanin’s heart beat quicker.
Jenny flared up.
“Nothing! Nothing has happened! That’s not what I meant. But, if Daniel and you, too, Mamma, hadn’t always been pressing those Thibaults to come here, I, I wouldn’t …” Her voice gave way.
Mme. de Fontanin summoned up all her courage.
“Please, Jenny dear, tell me about it. Do you think you’ve noticed that … that … well, that he feels in a special way towards …?” She did not need to end her question, for Jenny had lowered her head in a gesture of mute assent. Once again the moonlit garden, the little door, her profile on the wall, and Jacques’s outrageous gesture rose before Jenny’s eyes; but she was firmly resolved to breathe no word about the dreadful incident whose memory still haunted her nights and days. It was as though, by keeping the secret locked in her breast, she reserved to herself the choice of treating it as a source of horror, or simply of emotion.
Mme. de Fontanin knew that the crucial moment had come; she must not let Jenny build up once again a wall of’ silence between them. Resting a trembling hand on the table behind her to steady herself, the poor woman bent towards Jenny, whose face she could just barely discern in the faint glimmer coming from the open window.
“Darling,” she said, “there’s no need to take it to heart unless you, too … unless you are …”
An emphatic gesture of denial, repeated several times, was her answer. Now that the agony of doubt was past, Mme. de Fontanin heaved a sigh of relief.
“I’ve always loathed the Thibaults!” Jenny suddenly exclaimed in a tone her mother had never heard from her before. “The elder one’s no better than a conceited lout, and the other …”
“That’s not true,” Mme. de Fontanin cut in, and in the darkness her cheeks glowed fiery red.
“And the other one has always been Daniel’s evil genius,” Jenny added, harking back to an early grievance which even she had long ago discarded as unjust. “No, Mamma, please don’t stick up for them. You can’t like them—they’re so utterly different from you. They are—I don’t know what! Even when they seem to think like us, we shouldn’t let ourselves be taken in; they always think differently, and from different motives. As a family, they’re …” She groped for an epithet. Then, “They’re loathsome!” she exclaimed. “Loathsome!” Her mind was in a turmoil which now she made no effort to control. “No, Mamma,” she continued in the same breath, “I don’t want to hide anything from you. Nothing! Well, when I was quite little, I think I had a nasty sort of feeling towards Jacques, a sort of jealousy. It upset me to see Daniel making such a fuss over him. ‘He’s not good enough for my brother,” I used to think. ‘He’s vain and selfish. A sulky, jeering, ill-bred schoolboy! Only to look at him—that mouth of this, the shape of his jaws!’ I tried to keep him out of my thoughts. But I couldn’t; he’d always let fly some cutting remark that made me furious, that rankled! Then he was always coming to our place-it looked as if he made a point of hanging round me. But that’s all ancient history. I can’t think why I’m always coming back to it. Since those days I’ve observed him more closely. This year, especially—this last month. I’ve come to see him in another way. I try to be fair. I’m not blind to his good points, such as they are. There’s something I must tell you, Mamma; sometimes I’ve imagined, yes, it’s struck me sometimes that I, too—without realizing it—I felt somehow … drawn towards him. No, that’s impossible! It isn’t true a bit! I loathe everything about him … almost everything.”
“About Jacques,” Mme. de Fontanin admitted, “I can’t be sure. You’ve had more opportunities than I of judging what he is. But, as far as Antoine’s concerned, I can assure you-“
“No,” the girl broke in impulsively.. “I never said that Jacques was … I mean, I’ve never denied that he’s got very fine qualities too.” Little by little her voice had changed and she now spoke calmly. “To begin with, you can tell that he’s extremely clever by everything he says. I admit that. I’ll go even further; his nature isn’t warped, he can be not merely sincere, but generous, noble-minded. So you see, Mamma, I’m not at all biased against him. What’s more, I firmly believe”—she spoke with such deep conviction that Mme. de Fontanin was taken aback and gazed at her intently—”I believe that a great future awaits him, perhaps a very great one indeed. So now you can’t say that I’m unjust to him. Why, I’m almost convinced that the driving force behind him is nothing less than what is known as ‘genius’; yes, just that, genius!” The word, as she repeated it, rang like a challenge, though her mother had shown no sign of contradicting her.
Then suddenly she cried out in a paroxysm of despair:
“But all that doesn’t change anything! He has a Thibault’s character—he is a Thibault! And I hate them all!”
Mme. de Fontanin was stupefied, bereft of speech.
“But … Jenny …!” at last she murmured.
Jenny perceived behind her mother’s exclamation the selfsame meaning as that which she had read so clearly on Daniel’s face. With childish impetuosity she darted forward and put
her hand over her mother’s mouth.
“No! No! It isn’t that. I tell you it isn’t that!”
Then as her mother clasped her to her breast, safe in the shelter of her mother’s arms, Jenny felt suddenly the stranglehold of sorrow loosening at her throat; now at last she could sob her heart out, repeating over and over again, in the small voice of her childhood when something had upset her:
“Mummy dear … oh, Mummy!”
And Mme. de Fontanin soothed her like a child upon her breast, murmuring vague consolations.
“Darling … don’t be frightened… . Don’t cry… . There’s nothing to worry about. No one’s going to force you to … Everything’s quite all right, so long as you don’t …” For a memory had flashed through her mind of the occasion when she had met M. Thibault, the morning after the two boys had run away from home; she seemed to see him again, big and burly, with the two priests on either side of him. And now she pictured him refusing to countenance Jacques’s love and desecrating Jenny’s with cruel scorn. “Oh, I’m so glad there’s nothing in it. And you mustn’t blame yourself the least little bit. I’ll talk to him myself; I’ll see the boy and make him understand. Don’t cry, darling. You’ll forget all about it. There, there, it’s all over… . Don’t cry any more.”
But Jenny sobbed more and more violently; each of her mother’s words dealt a new stab at her heart. For a long while they stayed thus in the darkness, closely enfolded; the girl nursing her sorrow in her mother’s arms, the mother murmuring cruel consolations, with staring, panic-stricken eyes. For, with her wonted prescience, she foresaw the path of destiny that Jenny must follow ineluctably; no fears of hers, not love, not even prayer could avert its menace from her child. For, as the whole creation moves on its slow upward progress to the spiritual plane—the thought appalled her!—each of us must make his way alone, from trial to trial—often enough from error to error—along the path which has been appointed him from all eternity.
At last the sound of the front-door closing and Jerome’s steps in the tiled hall startled them into movement. Jenny hurriedly let fall her arms and fled to her room, stumbling as though a load of grief were laid on her frail shoulders, a burden no one in the world could ever lighten.
XI
A GIGANTIC poster, flaunted on the boulevard, brought passers-by to a full stop before the picture-house.
IN DARKEST AFRICA
TRAVELS AMONGST THE SAVAGE TRIBES OF THE INTERIOR
“It doesn’t begin till half-past eight,” Rachel sighed.
“I told you so.”
Not without regret had Antoine forgone the privacy of the pink bedroom, and now, to console himself with an illusive isolation, he booked one of the shut-in boxes at the back of the amphitheatre.
While he was doing so, Rachel came back to him.
“I say, I’ve just spotted a real beauty!” she cried, and led him to the lobby, where stills from the film were being exhibited. “Look there!”
Antoine read the caption first: “A Mundang girl winnowing millet on the banks of the Mayo Kebbi.” Then his eyes rose to a bronzed body, stark naked but for a ribbon of plaited straw knotted round the loins. Intent upon her task, the girl, resting her weight on her right leg, her bust strained upwards, her right arm rising in a sweeping curve above her head, had the poised beauty of a statuette. In her right hand she held a tilted calabash filled with grain that she was pouring in a thin trickle, from as high as she could reach, into a wooden bowl below, clasped in her left hand at the level of her knee. Nothing was studied in her attitude; the poise of her head, flung back a little, the balanced harmony of her curving arms, the upward surge of the torso, tip-tilting the firm young breasts, the flexure of her waist and tension of her hip, the forward swing of the unweighted limb that lightly spurned the soil at its extremity—all breathed harmonious beauty, adjusted to the rhythms of toil, an artless counterpoint of movements.
“Look, what do you think of that?” She pointed to a file of ten young Negroes bearing on their shoulders a tapering pirogue. “Isn’t that little fellow lovely? He’s a Wolof, you know. That’s a grigri he has round his neck, and he’s wearing a blue boubou and a tarboosh.” Her voice was vibrant with unwonted excitement that evening and, when she smiled, her lips all but refused to part, as though the muscles of her face had stiffened unawares. Her eyes moved restlessly between the narrowed lids, fever-bright and lit with silvery gleams; never had Antoine seen them thus before.
“Let’s go in,” she suggested.
“But there’s a good quarter of an hour before it starts.”
“That doesn’t matter!” she insisted, like an impatient child. “Let’s go in now.”
The house was empty. In the orchestra pit some musicians were tuning up. As Antoine began to raise the lattice-window in front of the box Rachel pressed herself to his side.
“Do loosen your tie!” she pleaded laughingly. “You always look as if you’d just been trying to throttle yourself and dashed off with the rope round your neck.” Letting the window fall, Antoine made a vague gesture of petulance. “Yes,” she murmured in the same breath, “I’m ever so glad you’re with me to see this show.” Prisoning Antoine’s face between her hands, she drew it to her lips. “You’ve no idea how much I love you now that beard of yours is gone!”
She took off her hat, gloves, and cloak, and they sat down. Across the lattice which screened them from the public, they saw the theatre coming to life under their eyes; from a mute, dingy cavern, bathed in dim red light, whence here and there emerged a speck of human flotsam, it became a seething mass of life, a busy aviary whose twitterings were sometimes drowned by a chromatic scale from some wind instrument. The summer had been exceptionally hot, but the latter half of September had brought many Parisians home again perforce, and even now the Paris of high summer, which Rachel delighted in exploring like a new-found city year by year, had ceased to be.
“Listen!” she said. The orchestra had begun to play the spring-song from the Walküre. Antoine was sitting very close beside her, and her head drooped on his shoulder; from Rachel’s lips, through her closed lips, there came to him an echo as it were of the melody the violins were playing.
“Have you ever heard Zucco, the tenor?” she inquired casually.
“Yes. Why?”
Lost in a daydream, she did not reply at once; at last she whispered under her breath, as if a belated scruple forbade her keeping him in the dark:
“He was my lover once.”
Though in no way jealous, Antoine was keenly curious about Rachel’s past. He realized exactly what she meant by her remark: “My body has no memory.” All the same—that fellow Zucco! What a figure of fun he’d looked in his white satin doublet, perched on a sort of wooden crate, in the third act of the Meistersinger; a fat and stocky oaf who, for all his yellow wig, looked like a gipsy and, in the love-duets, splayed his fat fingers against his heart. Antoine was rather vexed that Rachel should have stooped so low as that!
“Have you heard him sing it?” she asked, while her fingers traced in air the sinuous curves of melody. “I never told you about Zucco, did I?”
“No.”
He was pressing Rachel’s hand against his breast and need only look down to observe her face. She had not the lively air habitual with her when she evoked the past; her eyebrows were a little knitted, her eyelids all but closed, and the corners of her mouth were drooping. “How well the cast of grief would fit her face!” he said to himself. Then, struck by her silence, and anxious once again to prove he took no umbrage at her past, he put a leading question:
“Well, what about your Signor Zucco?”
She started.
“Zucco?” she repeated with a faint smile. “Well, you know, there’s little enough to tell, really. He was number one, that’s all.”
“And where do I come on the list?” The question cost him a slight effort.
“Why, number three, of course,” she replied coolly.
A threesome,
Antoine mused: Zucco, Hirsch, and I. Only a threesome?
She seemed to wake up suddenly.
“You want to hear more? But there’s nothing in it, really. It was just after Papa’s death; my brother had a job at Hamburg. I was busy at the Opera all day and every day, but the nights I wasn’t dancing I felt rather lonely—you know how one is at eighteen. Zucco had been after me for ages. I didn’t think much of him; he was inclined to put on airs.” She hesitated. “A bit of an ass, really. Yes, I rather think that even then I found him rather maudlin. But I never guessed he was a brute as well!” she suddenly burst out.
The lights had just gone down; she glanced round the theatre.
“What comes first?”
“News-reels.”
“Then?”
“A Wild West film—rotten, I expect.”
“And Africa?”
“Last of all.”
“Oh, well,” she murmured, resting again her fragrant hair on Antoine’s shoulder, “you can tell me if there’s anything worth watching… . Sure I don’t tire you, Toine dear, like that? I’m ever so comfy.”
He saw her glistening, parted lips, and pressed his mouth to her mouth’s kiss.
But, when he mentioned Zucco’s name again, to his surprise the smile died from her face.
“Now I look back on it,” she said, “I can’t imagine how I ever stood the way he treated me—worse than a brutal drover treats his cattle! He’d been a muleteer, as it happens, in Oran. All the other girls were sorry for me; no one could make out why I put up with him; in fact I can’t understand it myself. Of course, so they say, some women like being knocked about… .” She was silent for a while, then added: “No; it must have been because I so dreaded being alone again.”
Never before within his memory had Antoine heard such sadness in Rachel’s voice. He drew his arms more closely round her, as if to shelter her from the rough world. But then his embrace grew weaker; he was thinking of his over-readiness to pity—a facet, doubtless, of his pride, and, perhaps, the secret of his devotion to his young brother. Indeed he had sometimes wondered—before Rachel crossed his path—if he were capable of any other form of love.
The Thibaults Page 49