The Thibaults

by Roger Martin Du Gard

  Antoine gazed at him open-eyed.

  “And when you’ve got your solution …?”

  “Why, then I steep the eggs in it, just long enough to soften the shell without spoiling the egg. You see what I mean?”

  “No.”

  “Then I put them to set in moulds.”

  “Square moulds?”

  “Naturally.”

  M. Chasle was squirming like a sliced worm; Antoine had never seen him in such a state.

  “Hundreds, thousands at once. A square-egg factory. No more egg-cups. My egg stands four-square on its base! And the shells come in handy in the home. For match-boxes, or mustard-pots. Square eggs can be packed side by side in ordinary boxes; no more trouble about shipment, don’t you see?”

  He began climbing back on his office stool, but jumped away at once, as if he had been stung. His cheeks were crimson.

  “Excuse me, sir, I’ll be back in a moment. Bladder trouble. Nerves, you know. Once I get talking of my egg …!”

  XI

  ON THE next day, a Sunday, Gise woke to find her temperature definitely back to normal; her limbs no longer ached, and she now felt resolute, eager to be up and doing. She was, however, still too weak to go to church, and spent the morning in her room in prayer and meditation. It was annoying to find she could not come to any satisfactory conclusion as to the changes Jacques’s return might bring about in her life. She had nothing clear to go on; daylight filled the room, she was alone, and still she racked her brain in vain to find some adequate reason for the aftertaste of disappointment, almost of despair, Jacques’s visit on the previous evening had left behind it. Yes, they must have an explanation, do away with every misunderstanding. Then, all would become plain.

  But the morning passed and Jacques did not appear. Even Antoine had not shown up since the body had been placed in its coffin. Aunt and niece had a solitary lunch, after which the girl retired to her bedroom.

  The hours crept slowly through an afternoon of bleak, soul-deadening gloom. At a loose end, tormented by thoughts she was unable to shake off, Gise felt the strain on her nerves becoming so unbearable that at four o’clock, while her aunt was still in church, she slipped on a coat, ran downstairs to the ground-floor flat, and asked Léon to show her into Jacques’s room.

  He was sitting at the window, reading a newspaper.

  Clean-cut against the grey light of the street, the outline of his head and shoulders showed in profile; Gise was struck by his robustness. Once he was no longer near her, she forgot the man he had become and could recall only her “Jacquot,” the boy with the almost childish features, who had strained her to his breast under the trees at Maisons three years before.

  At her first glance she noticed, though she did not pause to analyse her impressions, the way he was sitting, uncomfortably perched on the corner of a light chair, and the general untidiness of the room— a suitcase gaping on the floor, a hat hung on the unwound clock, the unused desk, two pairs of shoes sprawling beside the bookcase—it all suggested a casual halting-place, a bivouac where there is no point in acquiring habits before the traveller moves on.

  Rising, Jacques moved towards her. When she felt the blue sheen of his eyes, in which she caught’ a flicker of surprise, hovering like a caress upon her face, she grew so flustered that the reasons she had planned to give in accounting for this visit passed clean out of her mind. Only the real reason—her passionate desire to clear things up —persisted. Casting discretion to the winds, pale, determined, she halted in the middle of the room.

  “Jacques, we’ve got to have a talk, you and I.”

  In the gaze lingering on her with an affectionate insistence she glimpsed a sudden steely flash, veiled almost at once by a flutter of the eyelids.

  Jacques laughed. “Good heavens, how serious that sounds!” His voice was a little shrill.

  The jesting tone chilled her, but she contrived to smile, a small, woebegone smile that ended in a wince of pain. Her eves were brimming with tears. Looking away, she took a few steps to the side and sat down on the sofa-bed. The tears were rolling down her cheeks now and, as she dabbed them with her handkerchief, she murmured in a reproachful tone to which she tried to lend a certain playfulness:

  “Look, you’ve made me cry—already! It’s silly of me.”

  Jacques felt a rush of hatred stirring within him. Thus he had always been; even in childhood there had always smouldered deep in his heart a secret fire of anger—like the molten core, he pictured it, that seethes in the bowels of the earth—and now and again from that fiery underworld of rancour there would surge a jet of red-hot lava that nothing could hold back.

  “Very well! Have it your own way!” he shouted furiously. “Say what you have to say. Yes, I too would rather get it over!”

  She was so unprepared for such brutality, and the question she had meant to put was so completely answered by his outburst, that she sank back onto the cushions, with parted, quivering lips, as if he had actually struck her. With a weak gesture of self-defence she held her hand before her face, murmuring: “Oh, Jacquot!” in so heartbroken a voice that Jacques swung round at once.

  Dazed, forgetting in a flash all he had been feeling, he made an abrupt transition from the cruellest malevolence to a sudden, impulsive, yet self-deceptive mood of tenderness. Running to the sofa, he seated himself at Gise’s side, and strained the sob-racked body to his breast, murmuring in a broken voice: “Poor little girl! My poor little Gise!” Close under his eyes he saw the velvety texture of her skin; the dark, translucent rings round the tear-stained eyes made them seem sadder, gentler still. But suddenly, overwhelmingly, keener indeed than ever, his lucidity returned and even as he bent above her, breathing in the fragrance of her hair, he perceived as clearly as if he were looking at a stranger, the pitfalls of this purely physical attraction.

  Thus far—and no further! Once already, on the treacherous descent of pity, he had saved them both from disaster by putting on the brakes in time—and leaving home. And, now he came to think of it, did not the mere fact that at such a moment he could take so detached a view, so clearly see the miserable risks they ran—did this not prove the superficiality of his feelings for her? And, also, did it not expose the hollowness of the self-deception which might play havoc with their lives?

  No great heroism was needed on his part to fight down his emotion and resist the brief temptation to kiss the forehead that his lips were brushing. He contented himself with pressing affectionately to his shoulder, and gently stroking with his fingertips, the warm, silken cheek still moist with tears.

  With a wildly thudding heart Gise nestled in his arms, eagerly proffering her cheek and neck to his caress. She made no movement, but she was on the brink of letting herself sink to the floor, clasping Jacques’s knees in humble ecstasy.

  But he was conscious of his pulses steadily slowing down to normal as he regained an equanimity that almost shocked him. For a moment he actually felt annoyed with Gise for rousing in him such sordid, commonplace lust, and even despised her a little for it. Suddenly like a blaze of lightning, dazzling and dying down at once, the picture of Jenny flashed across his mind, jarring it into renewed activity. Then, with another breathless shift of mood, he began feeling ashamed of himself. How far, far better was Gise than he! That staunch devotion, like a steady flame, which after three years’ absence still burned bright as ever; that reckless self-abandonment to the dictates of her love, to the tragic destiny which she accepted, cost what it might, unflinchingly—these assuredly were stronger and purer emotions than any he could muster… . And now he found he could review it all with a sort of detachment, a frozen calm enabling him at last, without the slightest risk, to lavish tenderness on Gise.

  While his mind drifted thus from thought to thought, Gise was stubbornly intent on one thing, and one only. Set wholly on her love, her mind was so keyed up, so sensitive to everything that emanated from him, that suddenly, though Jacques had not said a word, and though he was still c
aressing the little cheek that nestled against his hand, she knew. If only by the casual, vaguely affectionate way his fingers strayed from her lips to her forehead and back again, intuitively she had guessed all—that the link between them was snapped for ever, that for him she … did not count!

  Desperately, like one who verifies something proved to the hilt “just to make sure,” finally, indubitably—she slipped abruptly’ from his arms and gazed into his eyes. Taken unawares, he had no time to veil their hardness; and now everything was clear to her, clear beyond question. All was over, irremediably.

  None the less, she felt a childish dread of hearing it said aloud. The truth was horrible enough; that it should crystallize into cruel words, words they would be fated never to forget, was more than she could bear. She summoned up what little strength remained to her, so that Jacques should not suspect the havoc of her hopes. She even found the courage to move further away from him, to smile, to murmur with a weak little flutter of her hand:

  “What an age it is since I last came to this room!”

  Actually she had a clear memory of the last time she had sat where she was now, on the sofa—beside Antoine. That day she had fancied she knew what sorrow was; had thought that Jacques’s absence and her heart-racking anxiety about him were trials hardly to be borne. Yet what were they compared with what she now must bear? In those days all that was needed was for her to close her eyes—and there was Jacques, responsive to her call, exactly as her heart would have him be. And now—now, when he had come back, she was learning for the first time what it really meant to have to live without him. “How is it possible?” she asked herself. “How can this have happened?” And her anguish grew so urgent that she had to keep her eyes closed for some moments.

  Jacques had got up, to turn on the light. After going to the window to draw the curtains, he did not come back to the sofa.

  “Sure you haven’t caught cold here?” he asked, noticing that she was shivering.

  “Well, it isn’t very warm in this room.” She snatched at the pretext. “I think I’d better go upstairs.”

  The sound of their voices, breaking the silence, roused her a little and steadied her nerves.

  The staying power she got from the pretence of easy conversation was precarious, yet her need to keep the truth at bay was so pressing that she went on talking by fits and starts, throwing out phrases as the cuttlefish projects its ink-cloud. And Jacques played up to her pretence, with an approving smile, secretly pleased, perhaps, that tonight again he could evade an explanation.

  With an effort she had risen, and they stood gazing at each other. They were of almost the same height. “Never, never will I be able to live without him,” she was thinking. That was a way to avoid confronting another thought, the cruellest of all: “He is so strong; how easily he can live without me!” Then suddenly it dawned on her that Jacques, with the callous unconcern of a man, was choosing the way of life he wanted, whereas she, she had no power to choose, or to give the least deflection to her own course.

  She blurted out a question, trying to adopt a casual tone:

  “When are you going away again?”

  He kept hold on himself, took a few paces absent-mindedly, then half turned towards her.

  “How about you—when are you going?”

  How could he have made it clearer that he intended to leave, and assumed that Gise, too, would not be staying in France?

  With a faint shrug of her shoulders, for the last time she forced a weak smile to her lips—she was becoming quite adept at it!—then opened the door and walked out.

  He made no effort to keep her, but as his eyes followed her receding form, they had a sudden gleam of pure affection. If only, without risk, he could have taken her into his arms, and shielded her! Against what? Against herself, against himself. Against the pain he was causing her (though he was only vaguely aware of it), and the pain he was yet to bring upon her—that he could not do otherwise than bring on her.

  His hands thrust in his pockets, his feet planted well apart, he remained standing in the centre of the untidy room. Flaunting its motley labels, the suitcase gaped up at him, and he pictured himself back at Ancona, or perhaps Trieste, in the dimly lit steerage of a mail-steamer, jostled by emigrants cursing one another in unfamiliar tongues. Then an infernal din broke out at the bows, the sound of metal rasping upon metal drowned the angry voices; the anchor was coming up. The swaying increased and everywhere there was a sudden hush, as the ship began to forge ahead into the black night.

  Jacques felt his breast heave; that almost morbid craving for some undetermined struggle, some gesture of creation and fulfillment of his being, was balked by everything about him: this house, the dead man upstairs, Gise—all the past with its snares and shackles.

  His jaws clenched stubbornly. “I must get away from all this,” he muttered. “I must clear out.”

  Entering the elevator, Gise sank onto the seat. She wondered if she would have the strength to reach her room.

  Yes, all was over now; that explanation on which, in spite of all, she had set such hope, had been attained, accomplished. “Jacques, we’ve got to have a talk,” and his retort, “Yes, I too would rather get it over.” Then the two questions, both unanswered: “When are you going away again?” and: “How about you?” Four little phrases, echoing in her baffled brain … and now … what was she to do?

  As she re-entered the huge, silent flat where in the background two nuns kept vigil at a bier, where nothing now was left of the fond dreams she had been dreaming in it half an hour before, a spasm of such distress shot through her heart that the dread of being alone proved more insistent even than her weakness and desire for rest. Instead of hastening to her own room, she entered her aunt’s.

  Mademoiselle had returned and was sitting at her usual place, in front of her desk littered with bills and samples, pamphlets and medicine-bottles. Recognizing Gise’s footstep, she turned stiffly round.

  “Ah, there you are? As a matter of fact …”

  Gise stumbled towards her, kissed the ivory-yellow forehead between the snowy braids and, too big now to shelter in the little old lady’s arms, dropped at her knees, like a disconsolate child.

  “As a matter of fact, Gise, I meant to ask you: haven’t they told you anything about the house-cleaning, disinfecting the flat, you know? No? But there’s a law on the subject. Yes, ask Clotilde. I wish you’d speak to Antoine about it. The first thing is to call in the Health Department. Then, to make quite sure, we’ll get some fumigator from the druggist’s. Clotilde knows how; you have to stop up the doors and windows. You must give us a hand that day.”

  “But, Auntie,” Gise murmured, her eyes filling again with tears, “I’ll have to be going back. They’re expecting me—over there.”

  “Over there? After what’s happened? You’re going to leave me by myself?” The words came out in jerks, timed to the spasmodic shaking of her head. “Can’t you see the state I’m in? I’m seventy-five, Gise.”

  Yes, Gise was thinking, I shall go away. Jacques too. All will be as it was before—but with no hope left. Without a single ray of hope… . Her temples were throbbing, her thoughts in turmoil. Jacques had become incomprehensible to her; and it was the keenest pang of all that he, whom she had thought she understood so well all the time he was away, should now be a sealed book to her. How had it come about?

  What should she do? she wondered. Enter a convent? There she would have peace, the rest that Jesus gives the heavy-laden. But first she must renounce the world. Could she make that great renunciation?

  Giving way at last, she burst into tears and, drawing herself up, clasped her aunt tightly in her arms.

  “Oh, it isn’t fair,” she sobbed. “It’s not fair, Auntie—all that!”

  Alarmed and somewhat vexed, Mademoiselle began to remonstrate. “What isn’t fair? I don’t follow… . What on earth are you talking about, Gise?”

  Gise sank back to the floor, helplessly. Now and again, g
roping for some support, a friendly presence, she rubbed her cheek on the rough fabric under which jutted the sharp knees of Mademoiselle, whose voice went droning on indignantly, while the old head wagged this way and that.

  “Imagine being left alone at seventy-five! Really, considering the state I’m in …!”

  XII

  THE little chapel at the Crouy reformatory was full to overflowing. Raw though the weather was, the doors stood wide open, and in the courtyard, where the snow had been trampled by the crowd into a morass of slime, the two hundred and eighty-six young inmates stood, bare-headed and unmoving, in serried files. The brass badges on their belts gleamed above their brand-new dungarees, and round them were stationed the guards in full uniform with revolver-holsters dangling at their hips.

  The mass had been said by the Abbé Vécard; but the Bishop of Beauvais, who had a sepulchral bass voice, was in attendance to pronounce the final intercession.

  The responses floated up and hovered for a moment in the throbbing silence of the little nave.

  “Pater noster …”

  “Requiem ceternam dona e’l, Domine.”

  “Requiescat in pace.”

  “Amen.”

  Then the instrumental sextet posted on the dais struck up the closing voluntary.

  From the start Antoine had been following the ceremony with keen interest. “It’s odd,” he thought, “the mania they have for playing Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ on these occasions; there’s very little that’s funereal about it. The sadness doesn’t last; at once it strays off into a mood of joy—that craving for illusion, I suppose. Like the way consumptives have of thinking about their death light-heartedly.” He remembered the last days of a young fellow named Derny—a composer, too—whom he had seen at the hospital. “Most people sentimentalize it; they fancy they’re watching the ecstasy of a dying man who sees heaven opening to him. We, of course, know better; it’s just a characteristic of the disease, almost a symptom of the lesions— like the high temperature.”