“And then?”
“Then it was he who dropped me… . Needless to say,” she added, without a trace of bitterness.
After an interval she continued in a lower voice, as though she wanted the avowal to pass in silence:
“I was going to have a baby.”
Antoine was dumbfounded. Rachel had been a mother! Impossible! Was it credible that he, a doctor, should have failed to note the signs …? Preposterous!
His eyes strayed, fretful and bemused, towards the captions reeling out before him:
THE ARMY MANCEUVRES
M. Fallieres converses with the German Military Attaché.
THE INTELLIGENCE SERVICE OF THE FUTURE
Latham lands in his monoplane with important dispatches for the Commander-in-Chief.
The intrepid airman is greeted by the President of the Republic.
“Oh, that wasn’t his only reason for dropping me,” Rachel explained. “If I’d gone on paying his bills …”
Antoine suddenly remembered the photograph of a baby which he had seen at her place, and her words as she snatched it away from him: “It’s a little godchild, who died.”
He was less astonished by Rachel’s revelation than aggrieved at it, piqued in his professional self-esteem.
“Is that really so?” he murmured. “You had a child?” Then quickly added with a knowledgeable smile: “Of course I had guessed as much, some time ago.”
“Still, it doesn’t show a lot, does it? I took no end of trouble about myself—because of my job at the theatre.”
“But a doctor’s eyes, you know!” He gave a slight shrug.
She smiled. Antoine’s perspicacity made her still prouder of him. For some moments she was silent and when she spoke again her voice had the same languorous tone.
“When I think of those days, you know, Toine dear, I feel that the best of my life lies behind me. How proud I was about it! And when I was getting a bit ungainly and had to ask them at the Opera for a holiday, guess where I went! To Normandy. A little village at the back of beyond, where an old woman who’d been our nurse, my brother’s and mine, was living. What a fuss they made over me down there! I wouldn’t have minded settling there for good and all; and that’s what I should have done. Only the stage, you know, when once one’s got it in the blood … I acted for the best, as I thought, and left the kid there with the wet-nurse; I felt quite safe. Then, eight months later … Meanwhile I’d fallen ill, too,” she sighed after a moment’s pause. “The confinement had wrecked my health. I had to leave the Opera, say goodbye to everything. And there I was again-alone in the world!”
He scanned her face. She was not weeping; her eyes were wide open, staring up at the ceiling. But slowly, very slowly, tears were welling up beneath her eyelids. Abashed by her emotion, he dared not kiss her. He was thinking out what she had told him. Each day he fancied he had found a stable vantage-point whence to survey her life in its entirety and judge it whole; but the very next day some reminiscence or avowal, even a casual hint, sufficed to open unsuspected vistas which once again he could not get in focus.
Suddenly she drew herself up, raising an arm to set her hair straight; but, as abruptly, stayed the gesture.
“Look! Oh, look!” she cried, pointing to the screen.
Involuntarily, across a mist of tears, she gazed wide-eyed at a girl on horseback flying from pursuit, with a furious pack of Redskins at her heels. The fearless maiden and her steed whisked up a rocky slope, posed for a second statue-like upon the summit, then scudded down a dizzy gradient. Intrepidly she plunged into a torrent, and thirty horsemen splashed in after her, vanishing in clouds of spray. Now she was on the further bank, spurring her horse, galloping ahead. Vain hope! The kidnappers rode hell-for-leather on her track, closed in around their quarry. Lassos whipped the air above her, snaked round her head. An iron bridge hove into sight, beneath it an express in full career. In a flash she slipped from the saddle, vaulted the parapet, leapt into the void.
The audience gasped.
Brief panic. Now they saw her standing on the roof of a car, borne past at headlong speed, her hair awry, with flying skirts and arms akimbo, while, from the bridge, the Redskins discharged thirty guns at her in vain.
“Were you watching?” Her voice thrilled with delight. “I love it!”
He drew her towards him again, this time onto his knees, and rocked her like a child. He wanted to console her, make her forget everything, everything but their love. But he said nothing of it and began toying with her necklace. Inset between the honey-golden beads were little balls of leaden-hued ambergris which, as he fingered them, grew warm and fragrant; so clinging was the perfume that sometimes, two days later, he would catch a sudden tang of it in the hollow of his hands. Unfastening her blouse, he pressed his cheek upon her breast; she did not try to stop him. Then:
“Come in!” she cried.
A young attendant appeared; she had opened the door of their box by mistake and quickly closed it, but not before casting an interested glance at the half-undressed girl in Antoine’s arms. Antoine released Rachel in haste, but not in time—much to her amusement.
“How silly you are! Perhaps she wanted to … Anyway she looks nice… .”
The words and the way she said them were so astonishing that he tried to catch the look on her face, but she had buried her forehead on his shoulder and all he noticed was her laugh—an almost soundless, enigmatic chuckle that always made him ill at ease.
The element of mystery in Rachel that still was apt to baffle him always gave Antoine the impression of a yawning gulf between them. It roused in him a feeling of unrest, tinctured with curiosity, subtly obnoxious to his self-esteem. For hitherto it had been he who, as a man of science, by veiled allusions, sceptic smiles, set others in a quandary. Rachel had turned the tables on him; beside her Antoine felt atrociously small-boyish and (loath though he was to own to it) rather at sea where certain subjects were concerned. Once, to redress the balance, he had ventured to garnish his professional reminiscences with echoes from the students’ mess and even invented for her benefit a far-fetched amorous adventure in which, so he alleged, he had played a leading part. But she had shut him up with a burst of affectionate laughter.
“Drop it, my dear! Whom do you take me for? Don’t I love you just as you are?”
He had reddened with annoyance; and he had learned his lesson.
Neither had felt inclined to speak during the interval which was just ending. The film of Africa was announced and the lights went down. The band struck up a Negro melody. Rachel moved to a seat in front of the box.
“Let’s hope they’ve made a good job of it.”
Landscapes began to flicker across the screen. A stagnant river under enormous trees tethered to the soil by a network of lianas. A hippo’s back, like the corpse of a drowned bull, bulged on the surface of the water. Little black monkeys, white-bearded, like ancient mariners, frolicked on the sand. Then came a village: an empty space of beaten soil fissured by the heat, and, in the background, rows of stockaded huts. Next, a compound where some young Peuhl girls, naked to the waist, the muscles of their hips working beneath the loin-cloths, were busily pounding grain in high wooden mortars, surrounded by pickaninnies sprawling in the sun. Then more women, carrying large baskets; then a group of spinners, squatting cross-legged on the ground; each grasped a distaff in her right hand, while the left twirled inside a wooden trough the bobbin, shaped like a peg-top, which took the yarn.
Leaning well forward, Rachel gazed intently at the screen, her elbow resting on her crossed knees, her chin cupped in her hand.
Antoine could hear the rapid intake of her breath. Sometimes, without turning, she spoke to him in a hushed whisper.
“Toine dear! Look! Just look!”
The film ended with a barbaric dance to the sound of tomtoms in a clearing ringed with palm-trees. Night was falling and a crowd of Negroes, their faces tense, their bodies squirming with delight, had formed a circle r
ound a couple of their fellow-tribesmen. The dancers, two jet-black but extremely handsome males, were almost naked; their bodies shone with sweat. They flew at each other, collided, bounded back, and crashed together again, gnashing their teeth, or, now and again, circled in the love-chase, rubbing their bodies together, varying the rhythms of their frenzy as they portrayed the rage of battle or the spasms of sensual desire. Panting, capering with excitement, the dark crowd closed in round the frenzied couple; faster and faster they clapped their hands and faster drummed upon the tomtoms, goading the dancers on and on towards a climax of delirium. The picture-house band had stopped playing; a clapping of hands in the wings kept time with the gestures of the Negroes, restoring a fantastic semblance of life to the dark figures and infecting the audience with something of the fierce pleasure, strung to the pitch of pain, that convulsed the savage faces on the screen… .
The show was over, the audience filing out. Attendants were beginning to sheet the empty seats.
Silent and exhausted, Rachel could hardly bring herself to move. When Antoine, who was already on his feet, held up her evening-cloak she rose and pressed her lips to his. They were the last to go; neither of them spoke. As they left the cinema they found themselves caught in a crowd of people flocking out together from all the amusement places on the boulevards. The warm, soft darkness shimmered with twinkling lights and already some autumn leaves were slowly spinning down. Antoine took her arm, whispering in her ear: “Let’s go back to your place now.”
“Oh, not yet, please,” she protested. “Let’s go somewhere first. I’m thirsty.” Then the posters outside the theatre caught her eye and she swerved aside to examine once more the photograph of the young Negro. “It’s extraordinary,” she remarked, “how he’s like a boy who once came down the Casamance with us. A Wolof boy: Mamadou Dieng.”
“Where shall we go?” he asked, concealing his disappointment.
“Oh, any old place! The Britannic? No, what about Packmell’s? Let’s walk there. That’s it: an iced chartreuse at Packmell’s, and then we’ll go home.” She nestled up to him with a sudden tenderness that seemed like an earnest of better things to come.
“It’s upset me a bit, you know, thinking of poor little Mamadou this evening, just after seeing that film. You remember the photo I showed you, with Hirsch sitting in the stern of the jolly-boat? You said he looked like a Buddha in a sola topee. Well, the boy on whom he’s leaning, a real blackamoor in a little white shift—do you remember?—that’s Mamadou.”
“And how do you know it wasn’t he in the film?” he asked, to humour her.
After a moment’s silence she shuddered slightly.
“Poor kid, I saw him eaten alive under my eyes, some days later. He was bathing in a stream. No, it was really Hirsch who … You see, Hirsch bet Mamadou he wouldn’t swim a tributary of the river to get an egret that I’d just brought down—and how often I’ve wished I’d missed it! The boy said he’d have a try, and dived in. We watched him swimming across, when suddenly—! Oh, it was like a nightmare! It all happened in a flash, you know. We saw him suddenly standing up out of the water; he’d been nipped below the waist, you see. I shall never forget his scream. Hirsch always rose to the occasion at such moments. He knew at once that the boy was a goner, and would endure agonies. He brought his gun to his shoulder and— bang!—the child’s head crumpled up like a calabash. The best way out, wasn’t it? But I felt like being sick.”
She paused and pressed herself to Antoine’s shoulder.
“Next day I went to take a snapshot of the place. The water was calm, so calm, you’d never have dreamt …”
Her voice shook. There was a longer pause before she spoke again.
“With Hirsch, you see, one life more or less simply doesn’t count. Still, he liked that boy of his. Well, he didn’t turn a hair. That’s how he was. Even after the accident, he stuck to his idea; he promised an alarm-clock to anyone who’d retrieve my egret. I tried to stop him, but he shut me up. He always insisted on being obeyed. Well, in the end I got it. One of the porters fetched it; he had better luck than the boy.” She was smiling now. “I’ve got it still. I wore it last winter on a little brown velvet toque; a dinky little hat it was, too!”
Antoine made no comment.
“Oh, you old stay-at-home!” she burst out, and petulantly drew away from him. “A trip to Africa’d have been the making of you!”
Then, in swift contrition, she came back and took his arm again.
“Don’t take any notice of me, Toine dear; a show like tonight’s works me up till I’m positively ill. I’m sure I’ve got a touch of fever—haven’t I? One stifles here in France. It’s only over there one can really live. You can’t imagine what it means—the white man’s freedom among all those blacks. Not a soul on this side has the faintest notion how far it goes. No laws, nothing to tie you down! You needn’t even bother what other people think of you. See what I mean? Can you even imagine what it’s like? You have the right to be yourself everywhere and all the time. You’re just as free amongst those black folk as you are at home with only your dog to watch you. And, what’s more, they’re really charming people to live among. You’d never believe how tactful, how quick to understand, they can be. Just fancy having only cheerful, smiling faces round you, and keen young eyes that can read your least desire. Why, I remember … Sure I’m not boring you, dear? I remember one day when we pitched camp out in the desert and Hirsch was chatting with a headman near the spring where the women used to draw water; it was getting dark—that’s the time they always come—and we saw two darling little girls come up, carrying a huge oxhide waterskin between them. ‘They my girls,’ the Cadi explained to us. That was all. But the old fellow had guessed… . That night when I was with Hirsch in the dar, the mat slid up without a sound, and lo and behold our two little girls, smiling all over their faces!” She walked a few paces in silence before continuing. “As I said … your least desire. And … yes, I remember, another time—it’s such a relief to have someone to tell about it! At Lomé, it was. At the pictures, too, as it happens; everybody there goes to the pictures in the evening. It’s just a cafe terrace, very brightly lit, with evergreens in tubs all round it. Suddenly the lights go out and the show begins. You sip iced drinks while you watch it—see the idea? The Europeans, dressed up in their white ducks, sit in front, with the light reflected from the screen falling on their faces; behind them it’s pitch-dark, no, blue-dark—you’d never believe how blue—and I’ve never seen the stars so bright anywhere else. That’s where the natives sit and watch, youngsters and girls. You can hardly see their faces for shadows, but their eyes glow like the eyes of cats—such lovely eyes! Well, you needn’t even make a sign. Your eyes just linger on one of the smooth, dark faces, meet his eyes for a second—and that’s all. But it’s enough. A few minutes later you get up and go, without a glance behind, to your hotel; all the doors are left open on purpose. I had a room on the second floor. I’d hardly had time to undress when I heard someone scratching at the shutter. I put out the light and opened the window. There he was! He’d slithered up the wall like a lizard. Without a word he let his one and only garment slide off his little body. I shall never forget it. His mouth was moist and cool so cool!”
“Good God!” Antoine could not help exclaiming to himself. “A nigger—and not even vetted beforehand to make sure!”
“They’ve such wonderful skins,” Rachel went on. “Fine-grained like the rind of a fruit. None of you over here have an idea of what it’s really like. It’s smooth as satin, their skin; dry and sleek as if it had just been dusted with talcum powder, without a single blemish or trace of unevenness or moisture, but hot as fire under the surface; hot, like a feverish arm across a muslin sleeve—see what I mean?— or a bird’s body underneath the feathers. And when you look at it under the glaring African sun and the light’s splashing all over their shoulders, that gold-brown skin of theirs looks like shot silk, speckled with blue flashes—oh, I simply can’
t describe it!—like little specks of powdered steel, or a shower of broken moonbeams. Such eyes they have, too! Surely you’ve noticed how their glance hovers over you like a caress; it’s the white of their eyes, you know, a trifle browned, with the pupils swimming about in it, never quite at rest. Then—I can hardly explain it—love-making in those parts isn’t a bit like yours, over here. It’s all done without words—like a sacrament, but the most natural thing in the world. There’s not an atom of thought goes into it. Over here people are bound to keep it more or less dark when they’re out for pleasures of that kind, but there—why, it’s as normal as life itself, and just as sacred as life and love. Do you see what I mean, Toine dear? ‘In Europe,’ Hirsch always said, ‘you have what you deserve. Happily there are other countries for people like ourselves, free-minded people.’ He simply adores the black man.” She started laughing. “Do you know how I first discovered that about him? Surely I’ve told you? No? It was at a restaurant, in Bordeaux. He was sitting opposite me and we were talking. Suddenly I noticed him staring hard at something behind me; it only lasted a second, but there was a curious glitter in his eyes. … It was so striking that I swung round at once. I saw a little Negro, a lad of about fifteen, near a side-table, carrying a bowl of oranges.” In a soft, brooding voice, she added: “It was that day, most likely, I too began to hanker after going over there.”
They took some steps in silence.
“My ambition,” she suddenly exclaimed, “my dream for when I’m old is to—to run a brothel. Don’t look so shocked! There are brothels and brothels, and naturally I’d keep a high-class one. I’d loathe growing old amongst old people. I’d like to be sure of having young folk round me, fine young bodies; free, sensual bodies. Can’t you understand that, dear?”
The Thibaults Page 50