In any case he had to admit that a mood of tragic grief would have been out of keeping with the present funeral, which was invested with the utmost pomp and circumstance procurable. He was—with the exception of M. Chasle, who, the moment he arrived, had slipped away into the crowd—the only member of the household present. Having attended the service in Paris, the cousins and distant relatives did not deem it necessary to make the pilgrimage to Crouy in such glacial weather. The congregation consisted exclusively of the dead man’s colleagues, and delegates from benevolent societies. “Deputies,” Antoine smiled, “like me; I’m deputizing for the family.” And he added to himself, with a touch of melancholy: “Not a single friend.” What he meant was: “No one who’s a personal friend of mine. And for a very good reason.” Since his father’s death he had come to realize that he had no personal friends. With the possible exception of Daniel, he had had only colleagues or companions. It was his own fault; he had lived so long without a thought for others. Indeed, till quite recently he had been inclined to pride himself on his detachment. Now, he discovered, it was beginning to pall on him.
He watched with interest the movements of the officiating priests. “What next?” he wondered when he saw them retreat into the sacristy.
They were waiting for the undertaker’s men to shift the bier onto the catafalque erected at the entrance to the chapel. Then once more the master of ceremonies came and bowed to Antoine with the prim elegance of a rather jaded ballet-master, ringing on the flags his ebony wand. The cortege formed again, moved down the aisle, and halted in the chapel porch, to listen to the speeches. Dignified, holding himself erect, Antoine complied with the requirements of the ceremonial willingly enough; his consciousness of being the focus of many eyes stimulated him to play his part. The mourners massed on either side strained forward to see, following Oscar Thibault’s son, the Subprefect, the Mayor of Compiègne, the Crouy Town Council in full force and frock-coats, a young bishop in partibus “deputizing” for His Grace the Archbishop of Paris, and, amongst other eminent figures whose names were whispered round, some members of the Institute who had come unofficially to render homage to their dead colleague.
A powerful voice subdued the whispers of the crowd:
“Gentlemen, in the name of the Institute of France, I have the melancholy honour …”
The orator was Loudun-Costard, the jurist, a fat, bald-headed man, in a tight-fitting fur-lined coat with a fur collar. On him devolved the duty of sketching the dead man’s career.
“With unflagging zeal he pursued his studies at Rouen College, near his father’s factory… .”
Antoine remembered the photograph of a schoolboy, his arm resting on a pile of prizes. “So that was Father’s boyhood,” he mused. “Who on earth could have foreseen then …? No, one never gets to understand a man till he is dead. While he’s alive, the sum of the things he still may do is a wholly unknown factor, and it throws out every estimate. At last death comes and fixes every aspect once for all; it’s as if the real man came clear at last of the vague cloud of might-have-beens. You can see him in the round, take a back view, form a general opinion. That, by the way, is what I’ve always said,” he added, with an inward smile; “you can never make an absolutely ‘certain diagnosis till you have your patient on the post-mortem table.”
He was well aware that he had not yet done with musing on his father’s life and character; and that, for a long while yet, he was to derive from such musings interesting and instructive sidelights on his own psychology.
“When he was invited to bear a part in the labours of our eminent fraternity, it was not only his loftiness of purpose, his philanthropic zeal, and his vast energy that we invoked; nor was it only that fine, unswerving probity, which made him an outstanding figure of our generation …”
“Yet another ‘deputy,’ ” Antoine smiled to himself, as he listened to the flood of eulogy. But he was not insensitive to it; indeed he felt inclined to think that he had habitually underrated his father’s true worth.
“… and, gentlemen, let us bow our heads in homage to that noble heart, which to its last beat throbbed ever and alone for just and generous causes.”
The “immortal” had finished. He folded his sheaf of notes, hastily thrust his hands back into the fur-lined pockets, and modestly retreated to his place amongst his fellow-delegates.
“The President of the Joint Committee of Catholic Charities in the Diocese of Paris,” the ballet-master announced in a discreet voice.
A venerable old man, armed with an ear-trumpet and supported by a footman nearly as ancient and infirm as his master, tottered up to the catafalque. The sole survivor of a group of young men from Rouen who had come in the same year as M. Thibault to study law in Paris, not only was he the dead man’s successor to the presidency of the charity organization, but he had been his lifelong friend. He was stone-deaf and had been thus afflicted for very many years; indeed since earliest childhood Antoine and Jacques had always referred to him as “Old Door-Nail.”
“Gentlemen, in the feelings which unite us here today, there should be something more than grief for our great loss,” the old man piped. The high-pitched, quavering voice brought back to Antoine’s memory Old Door-Nail’s visit, two days previously, to the death-chamber. Then, too, he had tottered forward on the same servant’s feeble arm. “Orestes,” he had squeaked, on entering the room, “wishes to give Pylades a last token of his friendship.” He had been led up to the corpse and his bleary, red-rimmed eyes had pored over it for a long while; then, straightening up, he had gulped down a sob and yelled at Antoine as if they had been thirty yards apart: “Ah, if you only knew what a handsome lad he was, at twenty!” At the time Antoine had been genuinely moved by the old man’s remark. “How quickly one’s mood changes!” he thought. Recalling it today, he felt merely amused.
“What was the secret of his forcefulness?” the old man declaimed. “To what did Oscar Thibault owe his unfailingly well-balanced judgment, his unruffled optimism, that self-confidence of his which made child’s play of every obstacle and assured his triumph in the most arduous undertakings? … Is it not, gentlemen, one of the undying glories of the Catholic faith that it gives the world such men as he was and such lives as his?”
“The old man’s right,” Antoine had to admit to himself. “His faith was a tremendous asset for Father. Thanks to it he never knew what it can mean to be held up by scruples or an exaggerated sense of responsibility, or mistrust of oneself, and all the rest of it. A man with faith can always drive straight ahead.” He even fell to wondering if people like his father and Old Door-Nail had not chosen, when all was said and done, one of the securest paths a man may follow from the cradle to the grave. “From the social point of view,” Antoine reflected, “they are amongst the few who best succeed in reconciling their lives as individuals with the life of the community. I suppose they are obeying a human species of the instinct that brings about the anthill and the hive. And that is no small thing. Even those characteristics which I found so detestable in my father—his pride, his thirst for honours, his love of playing the despot—it’s thanks to them, I must admit, that he got far more out of himself, as a social value, than if he’d been humble, easy-going, and considerate… .”
“Gentlemen, for this glorious fighter in the good cause our tributes are superfluous today.” The old man’s voice was growing hoarse. “Never have the times been so critical. Let us not linger burying our dead, but let us replenish our strength at the same holy fountainhead, and waste no time… .” Carried away by the sincerity of his emotion, he tried to take a step forward, swayed, and had to clutch his servant’s wavering arm. But this did not prevent him from ending his speech with a shrill: “Let us waste no time, gentlemen, in returning to our posts, to fight the good fight side by side!”
“The Chairman of the Child Welfare Society,” announced the ballet-master.
The little man with the small white beard who now moved uncomfortably forward see
med literally frozen to the marrow. His teeth were chattering, his face was blue with cold. He cut a pathetic figure, congealed and wizened by the glacial air.
“I am gripped—am gripped”—he seemed to be making superhuman efforts to part his frost-bound lips—”by a profound and melancholy emotion.”
“Those children there will catch their death of cold,” Antoine grumbled to himself. He was getting impatient; he too felt the cold creeping up his limbs, and his stiff shirt-front like a slab of ice under his overcoat.
“He went his way among us doing good. Well might that be his glorious epitaph: Pertransiit benefaciendo.
“He leaves us, gentlemen, laden with tokens of our high esteem.”
“Esteem!” Antoine reflected. “He’s said it! But whose esteem?” He reviewed with an indulgent eye the phalanx of old gentlemen— all decrepit, shivering in their shoes, eyes watering with the cold, each putting his best ear forward to hear the speaker and greeting every panegyric with demonstrations of approval. Not one of them but was thinking of his own funeral, envious of these “tokens of esteem” which they were lavishing today so copiously on their late lamented colleague.
The little man with the beard was short-winded; very soon he made way for his successor.
The new speaker was a handsome old man with pale, remote, steely eyes; a retired vice-admiral, who had taken to philanthropy. His exordium roused Antoine’s dissent.
“Oscar Thibault was gifted with a shrewd, clear-sighted judgment which always enabled him, in the lamentable controversies of our troubled times, to see which side was in the right, and to play his part in building up the future.”
Antoine registered a tacit protest. “No, that’s untrue. Father wore blinkers, and went through life without ever seeing more of it than the hedgerows of the narrow path that he had chosen. One might almost call him an incarnation of the partisan mentality. From his schooldays up, he never made an attempt to think for himself, to take an independent view, to discover, to understand. Always he followed the beaten track. He had donned a livery, and wore it till the end.”
“Could anyone desire a finer career?” the vice-admiral continued. “Was not a life like his, gentlemen, the model …?”
“Yes, a livery.” Once again Antoine reviewed the attentive audience with a keen glance. “In fact, they’re all exactly alike. Interchangeable. Describe one, and you’ve hit them all off. Shivering, doddering, myopic old men, who’re scared of everything: scared of thinking, scared of progress, of whatever might take arms against their stronghold … Steady, now! I’m getting eloquent! Still, ‘stronghold’ hits it off quite well. They’ve the mentality of a beleaguered, garrison who’re always checking up their numbers, to make sure they’re in full force behind their ramparts.”
He was feeling more and more ill at ease, and had ceased listening to the orator. However, the sweeping gesture that accompanied the peroration caught his eye.
“Farewell, beloved President. A last farewell. So long as those who saw you at your noble task shall walk the earth …”
The superintendent of the reformatory stepped forth from the group of speakers. He was the last, and he, at least, seemed to have had a fairly close view of the man whose funeral oration he was going to pronounce.
“Our lamented Founder had not the habit of the specious, flattering phrase, when voicing an opinion. No; always eager to get down to acts, he had the courage to disdain those polite subterfuges that lead nowhere… .”
Antoine pricked up his ears; this sounded promising.
“A blunt, forthright manner disguised his natural kindliness, and perhaps added to its efficacy. His uncompromising stands at our council meetings were an expression of his energy, his steadfastness in well-doing, and the high standard he set himself as our President. For him all was a struggle, a struggle that quickly ended in a victory. Everything he said struck home at once; the word, for him, was a keen sword; sometimes, in fact, a sledge-hammer!”
It flashed on Antoine that his father had been a force, and he was surprised to find himself thinking with already well-assured conviction: “Yes, Father might easily have been something more—might have been a really great man.”
The superintendent was pointing now towards the rows of boys aligned between their guards. All eyes turned to the young criminals, standing there motionless, blue with cold.
“These juvenile delinquents, doomed from the cradle to fall on evil ways, these lads to whom Oscar Thibault stretched out a helping hand, these unhappy victims of an, alas, very far from perfect social order, are here today, gentlemen, to bear witness to their undying gratitude, and to mourn with us the benefactor who has been taken from them.”
“Yes, indeed, Father had all the making of greatness; what might he not have been?” Behind Antoine’s insistence lurked a vague hope; an agreeable thought was hovering in the background of his mind. If nature had failed, in his father’s case, to endow the robust Thibault stock with its great man …! Why not? With a thrill he pictured the future opening up before him… .
The pall-bearers were shouldering the coffin. Everyone was eager to be gone. The master of ceremonies bowed again, clanging his black wand on the flagstones. Bare-headed, impassive, but inwardly exultant, Antoine took his place at the head of the procession bringing the earthly remains of Oscar Thibault to the grave. Quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris… .
XIII
JACQUES had spent the whole of that morning in his room and, though he had the ground-floor flat to himself—Léon having naturally enough desired to attend the funeral—had double-locked his door. As a precaution against himself, to make sure that when the mourners were filing out he would not peep to see if certain well-remembered figures were amongst them, he had kept the shutters tightly closed. Stretched on his bed, his hands in his pockets, his eyes fixed vaguely on the pale glow of the ceiling-lamp, he was whistling under his breath.
Towards one o’clock, feeling bored and hungry, he decided to get up. The funeral service in the reformatory chapel must by now, he judged, be well under way. Upstairs, Mademoiselle and Gise must have been back some time from the mass at Saint Thomas Aquinas’s, and had presumably begun lunch without him. In any case he was quite decided not to see anyone all day. He would find something to eat, no doubt, in the pantry.
As he crossed the hall on his way to the kitchen, his eyes fell on the newspapers and letters that had been slipped under the front door. And suddenly his heart missed a beat, he bent forward. Yes, that was Daniel’s writing: “M. Jacques Thibault.”
His hands were trembling so violently that he could hardly open the envelope.
My dear Jacques,
Antoine’s letter reached me yesterday evening …
Across his mood of black depression the friendly greeting struck like a sword-thrust at his heart and he savagely crumpled the letter tighter and tighter, crushing it in his clenched fist. Then angrily he flung back into his room and locked the door again, without the faintest memory of why he had gone out. After some aimless steps he halted under the lamp, unfolded the crumpled sheet and gazed at it with unsteady eyes, making no effort to read the words till the name he was looking for flashed across his vision.
… during these last years, Jenny has found the winters in Paris rather trying; both of them left for the South of France a month ago.
Again, as feverishly as before, he screwed up the letter into a ball and this time thrust it into his pocket.
For a while he felt shaken, dazed; then, of a sudden, infinitely relieved.
A minute later—as though the perusal of those lines had changed his decision—he ran to Antoine’s desk and opened the time-table. Ever since he had got up, his mind had been on Crouy. If he started at once he could catch the two o’clock express. He would reach Crouy by daylight, but after the funeral was over and all the mourners had left by the return train; there would be no risk of running across anyone he knew. He could go straight to the graveyard and return at once. �
�Both of them left for the South of France a month ago.”
But he had not foreseen the effort of the journey on his already frayed nerves. He found it impossible to sit still. Luckily the train was empty; not only was he alone in the compartment, but in the whole car there was only one other passenger, an elderly lady in black. Jacques fell to walking up and down the corridor, like a wild beast pacing its cage. At first he did not realize that his curious behaviour had attracted the notice of his fellow-traveller, perhaps somewhat alarmed her. Furtively he examined her; never could he encounter anyone the least exceptional in look or manner without pausing a moment to take stock of the specimen of humanity that chance had thrown across his path.
It struck him that the woman had an attractive face. The cheeks were pale and ravaged by the years, but in her eyes there glowed a warm vitality, clouded now with grief, as if her mind were brooding on the past. A look of gentle candour and repose, finely set off by her snow-white hair. She was tastefully dressed in black. Jacques pictured her as an old lady of the provincial middle class, who lived by herself, in quiet, dignified surroundings, and was now on her way back to her home, at Compiègne, perhaps, or at Saint-Quentin. She had no luggage. On the seat beside her lay a large bunch of Parma violets, the stems of which were sheathed in tissue-paper.
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