The Thibaults

  A ring at the telephone; Léon’s voice in the hall. “No, Madame, the doctor is engaged. Not this afternoon, it’s the doctor’s consulting-day. Oh, hardly before dinner-time. Very good, Madame, thank you.”

  “Yes, a gauze drain, to make sure,” Antoine murmured. “Right. And the bandage pretty firm, that’s essential… . Now you, big boy, listen to what I say. You’ll take your brother home at once and seethat he’s put to bed, to be sure he doesn’t move his arm. Whom do you live with? Surely there’s someone who looks after your little brother?”

  “I do.”

  There was a glow of honest self-assurance in his eyes, and in his look such dignity that it was quite impossible to smile at the emphatic declaration. Antoine glanced at the clock and once more had to repress his curiosity.

  “What number in the Rue de Verneuil?”

  “37B.”

  “Robert what?”

  “Robert Bonnard.”

  When he had jotted down the address Antoine looked up and saw the two boys side by side, gazing at him with candid eyes in which he read no trace of gratitude, but only self-surrender, illimitable confidence.

  “Now then, young men, off you go! I’m in a hurry. I’ll look in some time between six and eight to change the drain. Got that?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the elder boy, who seemed to take it quite as a matter of course. “It’s the top floor, room 3, opposite the stairs.”

  No sooner were the children gone than Antoine told Léon to serve luncheon. Then he went to the telephone.

  “Hallo, Elysées 0132.” On the hall table, beside the telephone, his engagement-book lay open. Holding the receiver to his ear, Antoine bent over it and read the entries: 1913. October 13. Monday. 2:30 p.m., Mme. de Battaincourt. I shan’t be back; she can wait, 3:30. Rumelles, yes, Lioutin, right! Mme. Ernst, don’t know her. Vianzoni … de Fayelles… . Right! Hallo, 0132? Is Professor Philip back yet? Dr. Thibault speaking.” There was a pause. “Hallo! Good morning, Chief. Hope I’m not taking you from your lunch. It’s about a consultation. Very urgent. Hequét’s child. Yes, Hequét, the surgeon. … In a very bad way, I fear, hopeless; an otitis that’s been neglected, all sorts of complications. I’ll explain. … A bad business… . No, Chief, it’s you he wants, he’s set on seeing you. You surely can’t refuse him that. … Of course, as soon as possible, immediately. I’m in the same boat, Monday’s my consulting-day… . Right, that’s settled then; I call for you at a quarter to. Thanks, Chief.”

  Hanging up the receiver, he went over the day’s appointments once again. “Whew! What a day!” But the sigh was mere convention and his contented look belied it.

  Léon stood before him, a rather fatuous grin rippling his clean-shaven cheeks.

  “Do you know, sir, the cat had her kittens this morning?”

  “Really?”

  Smiling, Antoine followed his servant to the kitchen. Snug in a cosy nest of rags, the cat lay on her side amid a writhing mass of small black lumps of sticky fur which she was scrubbing vigorously with her rasp-like tongue.

  “How many are there?”

  “Seven. My sister-in-law would like one kept for her.”

  Léon was the concierge’s brother. For the two years and more that he had been in Antoine’s service he had performed his duties with ritual assiduity. He was a man of few words and uncertain age; his skin was colourless and on his elongated head straggled a scanty growth of pale, downy hair; his overlong, drooping nose and his trick of lowering his eyelids gave him an air of sheepishness, which his smile accentuated. But all this was only a convenient mask, even, perhaps, a studied pose; behind it lay a keen intelligence, shrewd common sense, and a natural gift of humour.

  “How about the other six?” Antoine asked. “You’ll drown them all, of course.”

  “Well, sir,” Léon placidly replied, “do you wish me to keep them?”

  Antoine smiled, turned on his heel, and hastened to the room which once was occupied by Jacques and now served as a dining-room.

  His meal was all laid out ready on the table: an omelet, veal cutlets on spinach, and fruit; for Antoine could not endure waiting between courses. The omelet smelt deliciously of melted butter and the frying-pan… . Brief interlude of fifteen restful minutes between a morning at the hospital and the afternoon’s engagements.

  “No message from upstairs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Did Mme. Franklin telephone?”

  “Yes, sir. She made an appointment for Friday. It’s down in the book.”

  There was a ring at the telephone. “No, Madame,” Léon answered, “he will not be free at five-thirty. Nor at six. Thank you, Madame.”

  “Who?”

  “Mme. Stockney.” He made bold to shrug his shoulders slightly. “About a friend’s little boy. She will write.”

  “Who is this Mme. Ernst, at five?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on. “Will you ask Mme. de Battaincourt to excuse me? I shall be at least twenty minutes late. The newspapers, please. Thank you.” He glanced at the clock. “They should have finished upstairs, eh? Give them a ring, please. Ask for Mile. Gisèle and bring the receiver here. At once, along with the coffee.”

  As he picked up the receiver his features relaxed and he smiled towards an unseen face, almost as though he had taken wings and been transported to the other end of the wire.

  “Hallo! Yes, it’s I. Yes, I’ve almost done… .” He began laughing. “No, grapes; a present from a patient, and very good they are! … And how are things upstairs?” As he spoke a shadow fell upon his face. “What? Before or after the injection? Anyhow the main thing is to convince him that it’s quite normal.” Another pause, and now his face brightened up again. “I say, Gise, are you by yourself at the phone? Look here, I must see you today. I’ve something to say to you. Something important. Why, here, of course. Any time you like after half-past three. Léon will see you don’t have to wait… . Good. I’ll just finish my coffee and come upstairs.”

  II

  ANTOINE had the key of his father’s flat; he entered without ringing, and went directly to the linen-room.

  “The master has been taken to the study,” Adrienne informed him.

  He made his way on tip-toe down a passage reeking like a pharmacy, to M. Thibault’s dressing-room. “Curious the sort of oppression I always feel the moment I set foot inside this flat,” he said to himself. “For a doctor, you’d think … But here, of course, it isn’t the same for me as in other people’s houses.”

  His eyes went straight to the temperature-chart pinned to the wall. The dressing-room looked like a laboratory; table and whatnot were littered with phials, china recipients, and packets of cotton-wool. “Let’s have a look at the bottle,” he said to himself. “Yes, it’s as I thought; kidneys … the analysis will bring that out. And the morphine-—how much is gone?” He opened the box of ampoules whose labels he had camouflaged to keep the patient from suspecting anything. “Half a grain in twenty-four hours. Already! Let’s see, where’s the sister put—ah, here it is—the graduate.”

  With brisk, almost light-hearted gestures he set about the analysis; just as he was heating a test-tube over the alcohol-lamp the door creaked on its hinges; the sound made his heart beat faster and he turned hastily to see who had come in. But it was not Gise. It was Mademoiselle, bent double, like an old witch, who was ambling towards him; nowadays her stoop was so pronounced that, even when she craned her neck, she could hardly lift her eyes (which still shone bright as ever behind the smoked-glass spectacles) to the level of Antoine’s hands. Were she in the least upset or frightened, her tiny forehead, yellow as old ivory between the snowy bandeaux, started swaying like a pendulum.

  “Ah, so you’ve come, Antoine,” she sighed and, in a voice that quavered with each wobble of her head, plunged into her subject: “Really, since yesterday, things have been going from bad to worse. Sister Céline took it into her head to waste two jars of broth and a quart of milk quite needlessly. She’s always
peeling bananas for him to eat—they cost a pretty penny, too—and then he won’t touch them. And the things he leaves can’t be used, because of the microbes. Oh, I’ve nothing against her, or anyone; she’s a good, religious young woman. But do speak to her, Antoine, do tell her to stop! What’s the good of pressing food on an invalid? Much better wait till he asks for it. But she’s always trying to foist things on him. This morning it was an ice—just think! Imagine offering him an ice—why, the chill of it might make his heart stop! And where’s Clotilde to find the time to go running round to the ice-man, with all the household to cook for? Tell me that!”

  Antoine was patiently completing the test, giving her only non-committal grunts by way of answer. “She’s had to put up with the old fellow’s harangues,” he said to himself, “for a quarter of a century without saying a word, and now she’s getting even!”

  “Do you know,” the old lady went on, “how many mouths I have to feed—how many they come to with the nursing sister and Gise as well? Three in the kitchen, three of us, and then your father. Work it out for yourself! And really, considering I’ve turned seventy-five, and the state of my—“

  She drew aside abruptly; Antoine had stepped back from the table and was on his way to the basin. She was still as terrified as ever of infection and disease; for a year past she had been obliged to live in the shadow of a serious illness, to rub shoulders with doctors and nurses and breathe a sick-room atmosphere; the experience had affected her like a slow poison taken in daily doses, and was hastening the general decline that had set in three years before. Moreover, she was not wholly unaware of her decrepitude. “Since it was His will,” she would lament, “to take Jacques out of my life, I’m only the ghost of what I used to be.”

  When Antoine showed no sign of moving and went on lathering his hands above the basin, she took a timid step towards him.

  “Talk to the sister, Antoine, do please give her a talking-to. She’ll listen to you, anyhow.”

  He humoured her with a compliant “yes” and, paying no more attention to her, left the room. Her eyes glowed with affection as they followed his receding limbs, for (as she proclaimed) she had come to see in Antoine, since he so rarely answered her and never contradicted, “the light of her life.”

  He went out into the passage so as to enter his father’s study from the hall, and seem to have just arrived.

  M. Thibault was alone with the sister. “So Gise is in her bedroom,” Antoine murmured; “she must have heard me go by. She’s avoiding me.”

  “Good afternoon, Father,” he said in the breezy manner that now he always assumed at his father’s bedside. “Afternoon, Sister.”

  M. Thibault’s eyelids lifted.

  “Ah, there you are.”

  He was in his big arm-chair, upholstered in tapestry, which had been dragged beside the window. His head seemed to have become too heavy for his shoulders, his chin was squeezed against the napkin the sister had tucked round his neck, and the two black crutches, propped against the chair on either hand, seemed tall out of proportion with his hunched-up body. A stained-glass pseudo-Renaissance window lit with rainbow gleams the fluttering white wings of Sister Céline’s headdress, casting wine-red stains upon the tablecloth and a soup-plate of steaming milk and tapioca.

  “Come along now!” the sister wheedled, and, lifting a spoonful of the liquid, drained off the drops along the edge of the plate; then, with a cheerful “Ups-a-daisy!” as if she were coaxing a child to take his pap, she tilted the spoon between the old man’s lips, and emptied it down before he had time to turn away. His fingers, splayed upon his knees, twitched with annoyance. It galled his self-respect to seem so helpless, unable to feed himself. He lunged forward to grasp the spoon the sister was holding, but his fingers, stiffened with the years and swollen now with dropsy, refused their service. The spoon slipped from his hand, clattered onto the floor. With an angry sweep of his arm he thrust them all aside—table, plate, and nurse.

  “Not hungry. Won’t be forced to eat!” he cried, turning towards his son, as though to call for his protection. Antoine’s silence gave him heart, it seemed, for he cast a furious glance at the nurse. “Take all that mess away!” Unprotesting, the sister beat a hasty retreat out of the old man’s eyeshot.

  He coughed. At frequent intervals he emitted a short, dry cough which, mechanical though it was and unaccompanied by loss of breath, made him clench his fists and pucker his tightly shut eyelids.

  “Let me tell you”—M. Thibault spoke with asperity, as though to voice a rankling grievance—”last night and this morning again I’ve been having fits of vomiting.”

  Antoine felt himself being stealthily observed, and assumed a detached air.

  “Really?”

  “That doesn’t surprise you, eh?”

  “Well, to tell the truth, I half expected it,” Antoine rejoined smilingly. He had little trouble in playing his part. Never had he treated any other patient with such long-suffering compassion; he came every day, often twice a day, and at each visit, indefatigably—as though he were renewing the dressing on a wound—racked his brains to conjure up new arguments, logical, if insincere, and repeated in the same tone of certitude the selfsame words of comfort. “What can you expect, Father? Your digestive organs aren’t what they were when you were a young man, and they’ve been pestered for at least eight months with drugs and medicines. We may count ourselves lucky they didn’t show signs of revolt very much sooner.”

  M. Thibault was silent, thinking it over. Already Antoine’s words had taken effect and given him new heart; moreover, it was a relief to be able to fix the blame on something or someone.

  “Yes,” he said, clapping his large palms noiselessly together, “those idiots with their drugs, why, they’ve … Ow, my leg! … Yes, they’ve—they’ve ruined my digestion. Ow!”

  The twinge was so acute and sudden that for a moment his features were convulsed. He let his body slip to one side; then, resting his weight on Antoine’s and the sister’s arms, he managed to stretch out his leg, halting the stream of liquid fire that was shooting down the limb.

  “You told me that … that Thérivier’s injections would … do my sciatica good!” he shouted. “Well, now, out with the truth! Is it any better?”

  “It is,” said Antoine coolly.

  M. Thibault cast a bewildered look at his son.

  “M. Thibault himself told me that he’d been having much less pain since Tuesday last,” the sister put in shrilly; she had formed a habit of pitching her voice as high as she could, to make herself heard. Seizing the auspicious moment, she slipped a spoonful of tapioca into her patient’s mouth.

  “Since Tuesday?” the old man spluttered, making a valiant effort to remember. Then he held his peace.

  In silent distress Antoine observed the symptoms of disease upon his father’s face; every mental effort loosened the muscles of his jaw and made his eyelids rise, his lashes flutter. The poor old man was only too eager to believe that he was getting better, and indeed, till now, had never doubted it. Once more, taken by surprise, he let himself be spoon-fed; then, in desperate disgust, he pushed the sister away so angrily that she thought better of it and began undoing the napkin round his neck.

  “They’ve ru-ruined my digestion,” he mumbled, as the woman wiped his chin.

  No sooner had she left the room with the tray than M. Thibault, who had, it seemed, been waiting for this chance of a heart-to-heart talk with Antoine, slewed himself round and, with a confidential smile, motioned him to come and sit beside him.

  “Sister Céline,” he began in a tone of deep emotion, “is an excellent creature, yes, Antoine, a really saintly soul. We can never be too … too grateful to her. But there’s the convent to consider, and … Oh, I know that the Mother Superior is under obligations to me. And that’s just the point! I have scruples about it; I’m loath to take advantage of her devotion when there are more pressing calls, sick and suffering folk who need her help. Don’t you agree?”


  Forestalling Antoine’s protest, he silenced him with a gesture; then, his chin thrust forward with an air of meek entreaty, he went on in phrases broken by fits of coughing.

  “Needless to say, it isn’t today I’m thinking of, nor yet tomorrow. But … don’t you think that … that quite soon … well, as soon as I’m really on the mend … this excellent woman could be released from her duties here? You can’t imagine, my dear boy, how disagreeable it is always to have someone at one’s elbow. As soon as possible, then, do let’s … get rid of her.”

  Antoine, lacking the heart to answer, made feeble gestures of approval. So that inflexible authority, against which all his youth had vainly struggled, had come to—this! In earlier days the old autocrat would have dismissed the offending nurse without a word of explanation; now he was growing weak, defenceless. At such moments his father’s physical decline struck Antoine as even more apparent than when he gauged, under his fingers, the wastage of the inner organs.

  “What? Are you going already?” M. Thibault murmured, seeing Antoine rise. There was a note of protest in his voice, of pleading and regret; almost of tenderness. Antoine was touched.

  “I’ve no choice,” he said with a smile. “My whole afternoon’s taken up with appointments. But I’ll try to look in again this evening.”

  He went up to his father to kiss him, a habit he had recently formed. But the old man turned away his head.

  “All right then, off you go, my boy! Have it your own way!”

  Antoine went out without replying.

  In the hall, perched on a chair, Mademoiselle was in wait for him.

  “I’ve got to speak to you, Antoine. It’s about the sister… .”

  But he could bear no more. He picked up his coat and hat, and closed the front-door behind him. On the landing he suddenly felt depressed; struggling into his overcoat, he was reminded of the jerk he used to give his shoulders in his soldiering days, to hoist the pack into position before he set out on the march again.