The Thibaults

by Roger Martin Du Gard

  “Still,” she said, “when I think of those days, almost all I seem to remember is dreary, never-ending boredom. What about you?”

  Fever and fatigue, and now these memories of the past, had given her a look of melancholy languor that went well with her melting eyes and the warm, exotic colour of her skin.

  “Yes,” she went on, noticing that Jacques merely knitted his brows without replying, “it’s terrible being bored with life when one’s a child. And then, when I was fourteen or fifteen, quite suddenly, it came to an end. I can’t think why. Something changed inside me. Nowadays I’ve never got the blues. Even when” (she was thinking: “Even when you make me unhappy”) “even when things go badly.”

  His hands thrust into his pockets, his eyes fixed on the carpet, Jacques kept silent. Such evocations of the past sent waves of fury racing through him. Nothing in his earlier life found favour in his eyes. Nowhere, at no stage of his career, had he felt at home, settled down for good in his vocation—as Antoine felt. Always, everywhere, a misfit. In Africa, and Italy, and Germany. At Lausanne, even, almost as much as elsewhere. And not merely homeless, but at bay— hounded down by society, by family and friends, by the very conditions of life, and also by something else, something he could not define, which seemed to come from within himself.

  “ ‘Major Van der Cuyp …’ ” Gise began. She was lingering on these echoes of their childhood because she dared not breathe a word of the more recent memories haunting her mind. But she did not continue; she had learned her lesson: nothing now could fan those dead ashes into flame.

  Silently watching Jacques, she tried in vain to solve the dark enigma. Why had he gone away, despite what had passed between them? Some vague remarks Antoine had let fall had disturbed her without explaining anything. What could have been the message the red roses sent from London were meant to convey?

  Suddenly she thought: “How different he is from my ‘Jacquot’ of the past!”

  With an emotion that now she could not hide she said aloud:

  “How you’ve changed, Jacquot!”

  From the evasive smile, the brief glance Jacques cast her, she guessed that her emotion had displeased him. With a quick change of tone and expression, she launched forth gaily into a description of her experiences in the English convent.

  “It’s so nice, the healthy, well-regulated life one leads. You simply can’t imagine how fit one feels for work after gymnastics in the open air and a hearty English breakfast.”

  She did not say that, while she was in London, the one thing that had buoyed her up was the hope of finding him again. She did not tell him how that early-morning energy evaporated hour by hour, of the sombre moods that settled on her nightly in the dormitory bed.

  “English life’s so different from ours, and so fascinating.” A commonplace, but to have hit on it was a relief, and to stave off the menace of another silence she kept to the theme. “In England everybody laughs, on purpose, on the least pretext. They simply won’t hear of life being treated as ‘a vale of tears.’ So, you see, they think as little as possible; they play. They make a game of everything—beginning with life!”

  Jacques listened to her chatter, without interrupting. He too would go to England. To Russia and America. He had all his future before him—for travelling, for seeking … He smiled approvingly, nodding assent now and then. Gise was no fool, and those three years seemed to have ripened her wits considerably. Made her prettier, too, and daintier. His eyes roved back over the counterpane to the slim, frail body which seemed, as it were, relaxed in its own warmth. And suddenly, crudely, it all came back—that gust of passion, their embrace under the great trees in the park. A chaste embrace; and yet even after all those years, after all he had gone through since, he still could feel that vibrant body swaying in his arms; under his mouth’s kiss those inexperienced lips. And in a flash all thoughts of prudence, self-restraint, were dust before a fiery wind… . Why not? He went so far as to ask himself again, as in his maddest moments: “Why not marry her, make her mine?” But no sooner thought than he came up against some dark, dimly apprehended obstacle sundering him from her; somewhere in his inmost being lay an invincible impediment.

  Then, as his gaze rested once more on the lithe, living form before him on the bed, his imagination, already rich with so many memories, cast across the screen the picture of another bed, and such another glimpse of slim, rounded flanks outlined under the bedclothes; and the desire that had just thrilled him melted into remembered pity. He saw again, laid out on her small iron bedstead, that little prostitute at Reichenhall, a girl of seventeen, who had been so stubbornly resolved to die, that she had been discovered squatting on the floor, strangled by a noose tied to the cupboard lock. Jacques had been one of the first to enter the room; he still remembered the smell of sizzling fat that pervaded it, but, clearest of all, the flat, enigmatic face of the woman, still fairly young, who stood breaking eggs over a frying-pan in a corner of the room. A mark or two had loosened her tongue and she even gave some curious details. And on Jacques’s asking her if she had known the dead girl well, she had exclaimed with a look of unforgettable sincerity: “Ach, nein! Ich bin die Mutter!”

  Strange answer! “Oh, no! I’m her mother!” He was on the point of telling Gise the story, but thought better of it. To mention his life “over there” would open the door to questions.

  Snug in her bed, with half-closed eyes, Gise was observing him hungrily. She was feeling desperate, on the brink of blurting out: “Speak to me, Jacques! What’s become of you? What of me? Have you forgotten—everything?”

  He was pacing the room, bringing his weight down on one foot then upon the other, in a brown study. Whenever his eyes met hers, he grew aware how hopelessly their minds worked at cross purposes, and at once feigned an extreme aloofness. There was not the faintest hint of his real feelings—how thrilled he was by her childish charm, and the innocence he glimpsed in her, as naive as the young throat shyly revealed between folds of filmy whiteness. He felt all the affection of an elder brother for this suffering little girl. But what a horde of impure memories kept forcing their unwelcome way between them! Bitterly he regretted feeling so old, so worn out … so soiled… .

  “I guess you’re awfully good at tennis now, aren’t you?” he asked evasively; he had just noticed a racket on the top of the wardrobe.

  Her moods changed quickly; now she could not repress a smile of childish triumph.

  “You’ll see for yourself!”

  At once she felt dismayed. When would he see—and where? What a silly reply to make!

  But Jacques did not seem to have noticed. His thoughts were far from Gise. The tennis-courts at Maisons-Lafhtte, a white dress… that brisk way she had of jumping off her bicycle at the club entrance. What was the meaning of the closed shutters of their flat in the Avenue de l’Observatoire? (For that afternoon when he had taken a stroll, uncertain where to go, he had walked oil to the Luxembourg Gardens, and down their street. The sun was just setting. He had walked rapidly, with his collar up. He always made haste to yield to a temptation, so as to be through with it the sooner. Then suddenly he had halted, looked up. All the windows were shuttered. Of course Antoine had told him Daniel was at Luneville, doing his military service. But what of them? It was not late enough to account for the closed shutters… . What did it matter anyhow? What could it matter? He had turned on his heel, and walked home by the shortest way.)

  Perhaps she realized how far from her Jacques’s thoughts had drifted. Unconsciously she stretched out an arm, as though to touch him, clasp him, draw him back.

  “What a wind!” His voice was cheerful; he did not seem to have noticed her gesture. “Gise, doesn’t it worry you, that rattle in your fireplace? Wait a bit!”

  He went down on his knees and wedged an old newspaper between the loose iron slats of the fire-screen. Worn out by emotions, by thoughts she dared not utter, Gise watched him at work.

  “That’s better!” he exclaimed as he
got up. Then he sighed and, for the first time, spoke without much weighing his words. “Yes, this fierce wind—how it makes one wish the winter was over, and spring returning!”

  Obviously his mind was busy with the springtimes he had spent abroad. And she could guess what he was thinking: “Next May I’ll be doing this, I’ll be going there …”

  “And in this coming spring,” she mused, “what place does he allow for me?”

  A clock had just struck.

  “Why, it’s nine!” Jacques said. His tone suggested it was time to go.

  Gise, too, had heard the clock strike. “How many nights,” she thought, “have I spent here, with this lamp beside me, waiting, hoping! Hearing that hour strike as it struck now—and Jacques far away, lost. Now he is here, beside me. He is with me tonight. Hearing, with me, the clock strike… .”

  Jacques had come back to the bed.

  “Well, well,” he said, “it’s high time I let you go to sleep.”

  “He is with me!” she was repeating to herself, her eyes half closed to watch him better. “And yet life, the outside world, everything round us is going on exactly as if nothing had happened, nothing changed.” And she had an impression, bitter as remorse, that, truth to tell, she had not changed either—had not changed enough.

  Not wishing to seem in too much haste to leave her, Jacques had remained standing at the bedside. Without the least flicker of emotion he lightly clasped the small brown hand lying on the counterpane. He could smell the odour of the cretonne curtains, mingled tonight with a faint acid tang, which he rather disliked so long as he attributed it to her fever, but cheerfully inhaled when he saw a sliced lemon in a saucer on the bedside table.

  Gise did not move. Her eyes, wide open, were brimming with the bright tears that she was keeping back.

  He made as if he noticed nothing.

  “Good night, then! Tomorrow you’ll be quite well.”

  “Quite well? Oh, I’m not so keen about it, really!” she sighed, with a wan smile.

  She hardly knew why she had spoken thus. Her indifference about recovering expressed her lassitude, her lack of courage to face life again—and, most of all, her sadness for the ending of this long-awaited hour, so disappointing, yet so sweet. Tense with emotion, her lips would hardly move, but somehow she managed to cry gaily:

  “Thank you for having come to see me, Jacquot.”

  Once more she was on the point of holding out her hand to him; but he had reached the door. Turning, he nodded to her cheerfully and went out.

  She turned off the light and snuggled down between the sheets. Her heart was thudding violently. She crossed her arms, hugging her sorrow to her breast, as long ago she used to hug the “baby tiger.” Mechanically she murmured: “Holy Virgin, my guide and sovereign Queen, into thy dear hands I commend my hopes and comforts, my griefs and sorrows… .” She prayed in fervent haste, trying to lull her brain to rest with the sing-song cadences. Never did she feel so happy as when she was praying, praying her heart out, in a limbo of no thought. Her arms were tightly locked upon her breast. Everything was growing vague, merging into an insubstantial dream-world, till presently it seemed to her that she was clasping to her heart’s warmth a real baby, hers and hers alone; and, bending a little forward so as to enfold this phantom gift of love in a soft, safe nest, she strained him to her bosom, weeping over him, as she fell asleep.

  X

  ANTOINE was waiting for his brother to leave Gise’s room and come downstairs to bed; he proposed that night to sort out in a rough-and-ready way the personal papers left by M. Thibault, and he preferred to be alone when doing this. Not that he wished to keep Jacques in the dark with regard to any of his father’s affairs, but on the day following the old man’s death, when he was rummaging for the will, his eyes had chanced to fall on a sheet of paper headed “Jacques,” and though he had then lacked time to give it more than a brief glance, he had seen enough to realize it would make painful reading for his brother. Very likely there were other documents of the same order; it was undesirable for Jacques to light on them—for the present, anyhow.

  Before going to the study, Antoine crossed the dining-room to see what progress M. Chasle was making with his task. The table had all its extra leaves in, and on it were stacked some thousands of envelopes and the printed notices of M. Thibault’s death to be sent out to friends and acquaintances. Instead of getting on with his job of addressing the envelopes, M. Chasle seemed absorbed in checking up the packets of notices which he was ripping open one after the other.

  Puzzled by the sight, Antoine approached him.

  “Ah, there’s a lot of dishonest folk in the world,” the old fellow grumbled, peering up at Antoine. “Each package ought to contain five hundred. Well, here’s one with five hundred and three in it, and another with five hundred and one.” As he spoke, he was tearing up the notices in excess of the round five hundred. “Of course, it’s nothing very serious,” he allowed indulgently, “but all the same, if we kept them, we’d soon be snowed under by these notices over and above …”

  “Over and above … what?” Antoine was completely flabbergasted.

  M. Chasle raised a monitory finger, with a little knowing cackle of laughter.

  “Exactly. That’s the point.”

  Antoine turned on his heel, leaving it at that. He was smiling to himself. “The oddest thing, is that when one talks to that old loon, one always gets the impression, for a moment, that one’s even loonier than he!”

  Once in the study, he turned on all the lights, drew the curtains, and closed the door.

  M. Thibault’s papers were arranged methodically. “Charities” had a cupboard to themselves. In the safe were a few stock certificates, but mostly old ledgers and documents relating to the administration of the Thibault property. As for the desk, the left-hand drawers contained deeds, contracts, and business papers; those on the right—the ones in which Antoine was interested just now—seemed reserved for personal and private matters. In one of them he had found the will and, under the same cover, the paper relative to Jacques.

  He knew where he had replaced it. It turned out to be merely an excerpt from the Bible. Deuteronomy xxi, 18-21.

  If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother …

  Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

  And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious …

  And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear.

  The sheet was headed “Jacques,” and underneath was written: “Stubborn and rebellious.”

  Antoine read it with emotion. There were signs it had been written fairly recently. The verses had been carefully copied; each letter was neatly rounded off. The whole document seemed to breathe an atmosphere of moral certitude, of ripe reflection, and tenacity of purpose. And yet did not the very existence of this sheet of paper which the old man had (deliberately, Antoine felt quite sure) placed in the envelope that contained his will—did it not testify to certain qualms of conscience, a desire to justify himself?

  Antoine picked up his father’s will again. It was a huge affair, with numbered pages, divided into chapters, subdivided into clauses, like an official report, and boxed in boards. It was dated July 1912. So M. Thibault had made his will at the start of his illness, shortly before the operation. No reference was made to Jacques; the testator spoke throughout of “my son,” “my heir,” in the singular.

  On the previous day Antoine had only glanced through the chapter headed “Instructions for the Obsequies.” Now he studied it in detail.

  I desire that, after a low mass has been said at Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Church, my remains shall be taken to Crouy. I desire that my obsequies shall be solemnized in the Chapel of the Insti
tution in the presence of the assembled children. I desire that, unlike the funeral service at Saint Thomas Aquinas’s Church, the ceremonies at Crouy shall be performed with all the dignity the Committee may deem fitting to accord my mortal remains. I wish to be carried to my last resting-place by representatives of the charitable societies which for many years have availed themselves of my wholehearted service; and also by a delegation from the Institute of France, whose reception of myself into their midst was the proudest moment of my life. Further, in view of my rank in the Order of the Legion of Honour, I desire, provided the regulations admit of it, that military honours may be accorded me by our army, whose cause I have defended my life long in all I have said and written, and by my vote as an elector. Lastly, I wish that those who may express a wish to say a few words of farewell beside my grave may be permitted to do so without hindrance.

  Let there be no mistake: in writing thus, I have no illusions as to the vanity of posthumous encomiums. I tremble at the thought that one day I shall stand before the Judgment Seat. But, after seeking heavenly guidance in prayer and meditation, I am led to believe that my true duty is to shun the counsels of an unprofitable humility, and to take steps that, when death befalls me, my light may, God willing, for the last time so shine before men that other Christians who belong to our great French middle class may be encouraged to devote themselves likewise to the service of the Faith and Catholic Charity.

  A clause followed, headed: “Detailed Instructions.” M. Thibault had gone to the trouble of arranging the whole ceremony step by step, and Antoine had no say in the matter. Up to the last moment the head of the family was exercising his authority; and, indeed, Antoine found a certain grandeur in the old man’s determination to play his patriarchal part up to the very end.

  M. Thibault had even drawn up the notice of his death for circulation to his friends, and Antoine had sent it on, as it stood, to the printer’s. M. Thibault’s numerous distinctions were set forth in an order that had evidently been meticulously worked out, and took up a full dozen lines of print. MEMBER OF THE INSTITUTE was in capital letters. Following this came not only such descriptions as Doctor of Laws and Sometime Member for the Lure Department, but also Honorary President of the Joint Committee of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paris, Founder and President of the Social Defence League, Chairman of the Governing Board of the Child Welfare Society, Sometime Treasurer of the French Branch of the United Catholic Defence League, President of the Church Council in the Parish of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Antoine could make little of certain descriptions, such as Corresponding Member of the Brotherhood of Saint John Lateran. The imposing catalogue concluded with a list of Orders, that of the Legion of Honour coming after the Orders of Saint Gregory and Saint Isabella, even after that of the Southern Cross. The insignia of all these Orders were to be pinned above the coffin.