The Holy Terrors (Les Enfants Terribles) (4 page)

The doctor paid his routine visit to his other patient and went away.

Paul slept. Elisabeth kept watch beside him, listening to his breathing, her passionate
anger spent, or rather turned to a passionately tender contemplation. Sick and asleep,
he was exposed to scrutiny, immune from teasing. She could examine the mauve stains
beneath his eyelids, the fullness and forward lift of the upper lip; she could lay her
head against the boyish arm. What is this uproar in her ears? Blocking one ear, she
strains to listen, hears her own hammering pulses amplifying his. Louder, louder?
… She panics. Surely if this goes on it must mean death. Wake up! She must wake
him up.

“My darling!”

“Mm? What d’you want?” He stretches himself; her haggard face
confronts him. “What’s the matter? Have you gone nuts?”

“
Me
nuts!”

“Yes, you. What a nuisance you are. Can’t you let a fellow get a bit of
sleep?”

“
Some
people could do with a bit of sleep themselves, but oh, dear
no!
They
have to listen to the row other people make.”

“What row?”

“A damned awful row.”

“Idiot!”

“I was going to tell you something—some very exciting news. But as
I’m an idiot, I won’t bother.”

He pricked up his ears. Exciting news? … But he smelled a rat. He wasn’t
going to let himself be caught so easily.

“You can keep your old news,” he said. “I couldn’t care
less.”

She undressed. Neither of them knew the meaning of embarrassment in the presence of the
other. This room they shared was as it were a shell in which they lived, washed, dressed
together as naturally as if they were twin halves of a single body.

She put a plate of cold beef, some bananas, and a glass of milk on a chair beside his
head; then fetched herself a bottle of ginger-beer and a few sweet biscuits, got into
bed, and opened a book. She read, munched on in silence until Paul spoke, suddenly
devoured by curiosity, requesting to be told the doctor’s verdict; not that this
interested him
qua
medical opinion: it was the news—presumably somehow
connected with it—that he was angling for.

Elisabeth went on munching, her eyes glued to the page, while she considered her dilemma.
She was reluctant to enlighten him; yet a point-blank refusal might be unwise. Finally,
she flung at him, on an offhand note: “He said you wouldn’t be going back
to school.”

Paul closed his eyes. Intolerable vistas yawned before him, with Dargelos vanishing down
all of them, Dargelos forever elsewhere, irrevocably absent from the future. The pain
was too sharp; he cried out:

“Lise!”

“Well?”

“Lise, I don’t feel well.”

“What’s the matter now?”

She got up, stumbled; one leg had gone to sleep.

“What is it you want?”

“I want … I want you to stay by me, near my bed.”

The tears streamed down his face. He wept as very young children weep, in a welter of
tears and snot, his lower lip pushed forward. She dragged her bed across the kitchen
floor, close up to his, got into bed again, reached for his hand across the chair that
separated them, and started to stroke it.

“There,” she said. “There … who’s a silly billy? You
tell him he’s never going back to school, and he boohoos. Just think! … We
needn’t ever budge from this room now. We’ll have nurses dressed in white,
the doctor promised me, and I’ll never leave you except to go out for sweets or
books.”

Still the tears poured down, streaking his drenched wan face and splashing on the
pillow.

Puzzled, taken aback, she bit her lip, said:

“Are you in a funk?”

Paul shook his head.

“Are you as keen on lessons as all that?”

“No.”

“Then what on earth … ? Listen, blast you.” She shook him by the
arm. “Would you like to play the Game? Do wipe your nose. Look at me. I’m
going to hypnotize you.”

Dilating her eyes to the utmost she leaned over him.

Paul wept and sobbed. Elisabeth was beginning to feel tired. She wanted to play the Game,
to hypnotize him; she longed to comfort him; she would have liked to understand. But
sleep was bearing down on her, sweeping her mind with broad dark beams like headlights
across snow, obliterating all her efforts.

By the following day the household had been radically transformed and reorganized.
Calling at five-thirty with a box containing a nosegay of artificial Parma violets,
Gérard found himself admitted by a trained nurse in a white uniform. Elisabeth
was greatly taken by the flowers.

“Do go and see Paul,” she urged him, unequivocally cordial.
“I’m busy at the moment—I’ve got to superintend
Mummy’s injection.”

Washed, with his hair brushed neatly, Paul looked almost blooming. He asked for news from
school. The news was shattering.

Dargelos had been summoned that morning by the headmaster for further interrogation. He
had lost his temper and answered back in so insolent a fashion that the headmaster had
leaped from his armchair and threatened him with his clenched fist. Whereupon Dargelos
had pulled a bag of pepper from his pocket and flung the contents full in the
headmaster’s face.

The consequences had been so instantaneous, so appalling, that the panic-stricken
Dargelos had bounded forthwith on to a chair, in the manner of one facing the savage
onrush of some cataclysmic flood and making an instinctive bid for safety. From this
advantageous position he had witnessed the spectacle of a blind old man tearing at his
collar, bellowing, rolling on the table, and displaying every symptom of raving lunacy.
This was the scene which had greeted the dumbfounded proctor when, startled by the
sounds of uproar, he had come hurrying to the rescue: a raving madman, and Dargelos
perched on his chair, stupefied, just as he had been after throwing the snowball.

The headmaster had been removed to hospital, and Dargelos had been sentenced—not to
death, since schoolboys are exempt from the supreme penalty—but to expulsion. He
had crossed the courtyard with his head high, with a ferocious scowl; he had shaken
hands with no one.

Needless to dwell on Paul’s reactions to this shocking story…. But, since
Gérard had been at pains to suppress any tendency to crow, it would clearly be
unseemly to parade his anguish. He tried to control himself but could not, and presently
he said:

“Do you know his address?”

“No, old boy, I don’t. Fellows like him never let on where they hang
out.”

“Poor Dargelos! That’s that, then. Go and get the photographs.”

Gérard found two behind the bust and handed them to Paul. One was a school group
showing the whole class ranged according to height, with Paul and Dargelos on the left
of the housemaster, squatting side by side. Arms folded, arrogant, posed like a
footballer, Dargelos displayed those legs which had so notably contributed to his
prestige. The other photographs showed him dressed as Athalie—a rôle he had
set his heart on playing in a recent school performance of
Athalie
in honor of
St. Charlemagne’s Day. Tigerish beneath his veils and tinsel draperies, he looked
like some great tragic actress of the late nineteenth century.

The entrance of Elisabeth disrupted a scene of pious reminiscence.

“In with it now, I think, don’t you?” said Paul, waving the second
photograph.

“What? Where?”

“Into the treasure.”

“What’s to go into the treasure?”

Her brow darkened. The treasure was holy, not to be trifled with. She was jealous of its
sanctity and of her rights in it.

“If you agree,” said Paul. “It’s the fellow who chucked the
snowball—his photograph.”

“Let me see.”

For a long time she studied it in silence.

“He chucked the snowball,” went on Paul. “He threw pepper at the
headmaster. He’s been expelled.”

Elisabeth continued to pace up and down, biting her thumbnail, rapt in silent
contemplation and debate. Finally, she opened the drawer a fraction, pushed the
photograph inside, closed it again.

“It’s a bad face,” she said. “Mind you don’t tire
Paul, Giraffe.” (This was their pet name for Gérard.) “I must go
back to Mummy. I’ve got to keep an eye on the nurses. It’s awfully
difficult, you know. They’re trying to get the upper hand. I daren’t leave
them for a moment.”

Half in earnest, half in self-derision, she made a histrionic gesture of running her
fingers through her hair; then, turning, swept from the room as if manipulating an
imaginary train.

T
HANKS TO the
doctor, the children's lives now conformed to a somewhat less abnormal pattern. They
themselves, however, cared nothing for conventional amenities; those they enjoyed were
theirs alone, and not of this world. Only Dargelos could have persuaded Paul to go back
to school. With Dargelos cast forth, the Lycée Condorcet had become a prison.

For the rest, Dargelos’ prestige was beginning to undergo a subtle change of
scale. Far from dwindling, his figure was expanding, beginning to take off into the
upper reaches of the Room. Those sunken eyes, those lips, so coarse, that lock of hair,
those clumsy hands, those knees and all their scars, were becoming separate stars of one
great constellation, spinning, turning, in interstellar vacancy. In short, Dargelos had
gone into the treasure to rejoin his photograph. Image and original were identified; the
prototype had lost his function. As an abstraction, as the ideal of a handsome fellow,
Dargelos became a valuable property, potent in the magic zone; and thus delivered of
him, Paul reveled freely in the sweet delights of sickness and perpetual holiday.

As for the Room, the efforts of the nurses proved unavailing to subdue it. On the
contrary, the wilderness spread rapidly, and before long the patient had succeeded in
imposing his personal town and landscape upon chaos. Streets wound in and out among the
litter; trunks flanked his broad avenues; strewn papers were his lakes; piles of
discarded linen were his mountains. All these Elisabeth with a murmur of
“Laundress … waiting …” would pounce on and demolish,
rejoicing in the havoc she created, the atmosphere of perpetually impending storm which
was the breath of life to both of them.

Gérard called every day, to be greeted with volleys of foul language, which he
accepted meekly with a smile. Prolonged familiarity with their technique of welcome had
rendered him immune. Indeed, the words flung at him had come almost to caress his ears.
Then they would burst into hoots of laughter, comment derisively on his “stiff
upper lip,” and make a great show of conspiratorial giggling and whispering.

But Gérard had the whole performance taped. Unshaken, tireless in the pursuit of
his investigations, he went on combing the Room for traces of some new caprice already
under seal of secrecy. Thus one day he came upon these words, printed in soap upon the
mirror:
Suicide is a mortal sin
.

Clamorous affirmation, stamped indelibly, but doubtless assumed by the children to be no
more visible than a scrawl in water, the slogan—symbolic equivalent, no doubt, of
the mustache that decked the bust—bore witness to some rare lyric mood whose
secret none might share.

Then, at some clumsy thrust of Gérard’s, Paul would abandon him for
worthier quarry and apostrophize his sister, sighing: “Ah, you wait till
I’ve got my own room.”

“You wait till I’ve got mine.”

“Fine sort of room that’s going to be!”

“Better than yours! I say, Giraffe, he’s going to have a chandelier
…”

“Shut up!”

“And a sphinx, Giraffe, he’s going to have a plaster sphinx on the
mantlepiece, and he’s going to give his Louis XIV chandelier a coat of
paint.” She collapsed with laughter.

“Perfectly true, I do intend to have a sphinx and a chandelier. You
wouldn’t understand, of course, you’re too ignorant.”

“O.K., I’m off. I shall take a room in the hotel. I’ve got my bag
already packed. I shall go and live in the hotel. He can look after himself. I simply
refuse to live here any more. I’ve packed my bag. I’m not going to live
with the great oaf a moment longer.”

The performance ended invariably with Elisabeth sticking out her tongue, raining kicks on
the planned chaos of the model city, and storming off. Paul would spit after her
retreating back. She would bang the door, was presently to be heard banging other
doors.

Paul was subject to occasional brief spells of sleepwalking, whose recurrence, far from
alarming his sister, filled her with delight; for they and they alone compelled this
nitwit she was saddled with to leave his bed.

The moment she saw a pair of long legs appear and start to move in a certain way, she
would become transfixed, intent, holding her breath to watch, while before her paced a
living statue, prowling, adroitly maneuvering, then climbing back into bed, and settling
down again.