The Bachelors (8 page)

'Yes, me. Do you think I'll be able to live on five hundred francs a month! I'll just starve to death.'

'One doesn't starve to death when one has a brother.'

No sooner had he heard these words than M. Élie went back into the hall and made for the front door, as though he genuinely regarded this promise as the price for his departure. Like his nephew, he also had come to seek a pledge of support. He now had it. He could clear out.

On the threshold M. Octave did not give his brother a vague 'Keep in touch'. He said:

'If you go to Lebeau tomorrow, you'll probably have his answer by Monday. Come back here on Tuesday at two o'clock; I'll be alone. And we'll see what needs to be done. . . . Would you like the car to take you back?' he added.

Three years earlier M. Octave had bought a car, which he found extremely agreeable. It enabled him to traverse swiftly and without having any contact with it, a world which he dimly felt he neither knew nor understood and which only a sort of miracle — the friendship of M. Héquelin du Page — had saved him from. At first he had placed the car at his brother's disposal whenever the occasion arose, and M. Élie had made use of it a few times. But ever since M. Octave had said to him one day, 'You ought to give Georges (the chauffeur) a tip, you know . . . It's the thing to do,' Élie would have walked from one end of Paris to the other rather than use his brother's car; and he no longer even acknowledged Georges's salute now that he felt obliged to him. So that the baron, having seen through his brother, now took pleasure in offering him the car at the slightest opportunity, delighted to have discovered this means of being brotherly on the cheap. This time, as usual, M. Élie said no, muttering 'You want to have me killed. Doesn't know how to drive, your chauffeur. And anyhow I'd dirty your cushions.' Having thus succeeded in combining, in a few short phrases, rudeness, calumny, and acerbity, the old man withdrew.

The two brothers had been together for three-quarters of an hour. Not once had M. de Coantré's name been mentioned.

4

M.
DE
C
OANTRÉ
had not taken the slightest trouble to find himself a job after hearing from Lebeau about his new financial situation. Nor did he do so after his visit to his uncle. He plunged once more into his preparations for the move, which gave a tangible meaning to the break with 'Arago' and the advent of a 'new life ', and in which he could make use of his abilities, dusting, packing, hammering, pasting, tying, and painting. Invariably bewildered by any intellectual task, he was all afire at the prospect of tidying up the Augean stable of this Arago house in which everything was systematically kept so that nothing would ever have to be bought. Anyone who wants to appreciate the lyrical frenzy that comes from moving house has only to watch M. de Coantré.

Moreover, the idea had occurred to him that he might fall ill before having completed his preparations. He imagined the fatal day, 15 October, arriving with the house still in disorder, an extension being refused, and his belongings being thrown out into the street. Thus did his dire imagination work. By sorting everything out now — 'I want everything settled as if we were leaving in a fortnight' — he was setting his mind at rest.

He threw out everything that was not worth keeping, all that was briefly listed in the inventory as not being worth detailed description. The rest was brushed or cleaned and packed in trunks or packing-cases on which he had painted large numbers. Then the description of each object was noted on a sheet of paper with its appropriate trunk or packing-case number, so that Mlle de Bauret would have no difficulty in finding anything she wanted. (It will be remembered that he was giving her everything.) He assumed that his niece, having no other home but her old cousin's château, would put it all in store until she got married. As soon as the decision to leave Arago had been made, he had written to inform her that everything in the house — except what was in his own room and Uncle Élie's — would be got ready for moving wherever she wanted it moved by a given date. Mlle de Bauret had not replied to this letter, but M. de Coantré was not surprised because he knew she was an up-to-date girl.

A week after his visit to M. Octave, M. de Coantré was nailing down a packing-case when, glancing absent-mindedly through the window, he was struck by an extraordinary sight. A small boy of six or seven in a black school smock was roaming about the garden. A young living creature, in this backwater where none but the old were ever to be seen! M. de Coantré felt ill at ease. Not only because there was a stranger 'making himself at home' there, but chiefly because this stranger was a child. Léon was naturally friendly and easy-going. But children made him feel awkward; he never knew what to say to them, and his embarrassment sometimes amounted to acute physical discomfort.

A few seconds later he discovered a new source of anxiety. The garden tap had been left on and the water was overflowing the tank. M. de Coantré, who would have sacrificed a million, as he was sacrificing his twenty thousand francs' worth of furniture, with a smiling detachment tinged with unawareness, worried himself to death over a few sous. Besides, even if this wasting of water did not mean an extra bill (of three or four centimes), it wounded his sense of order (itself, however, extremely ill-ordered).

He went downstairs with the intention of turning the tap off, but stopped first in the kitchen to ask Mélanie who the little boy was. She said he was the daily woman's son, and he had asked her permission to play in the garden.

So M. de Coantré went out into the garden. But, once there, instead of going to the tap he stayed near the kitchen and began pulling up weeds. To reach the tap meant passing the little boy. The little boy might speak to him, he might have to make conversation, and that terrified him.

His apprehension was reinforced by a new circumstance: he had just noticed M. de Coëtquidan at the bottom of the garden — M. de Coëtquidan standing motionless as a statue, his stick dangling from a waistcoat pocket. Normally at this hour, whenever he was at home, M. Élie would be prowling around outside the kitchen waiting to tease the cats when they came in for lunch. It was clear that M. de Coëtquidan was 'blockaded' at the end of the garden by the presence of the small boy. He must have been loitering there, waiting until it was time for the cats, or else urinating against a certain tree, a sort of sacred tree against which it was a solemn ritual for the two gentlemen to relieve themselves, when the small boy arrived, and now he dared not go in for precisely the same reasons that prevented M. de Coantré from turning off the tap.

(It was an old story. Often, in summer, Mme de Coantré would be sitting in the garden when a caller arrived, whom the old lady would receive under the shade of the trees. If either of the two gentlemen happened to be there, as soon as the bell rang he would disappear into a tool-shed by the garden wall and stay there, sometimes for as much as an hour, crouching in the dark among the rats and the cobwebs, unable to get back to the house without passing the visitor. Better a whole day imprisoned with the rats than to have to put themselves out for a few minutes with a guest.)

Meanwhile M. de Coantré had decided that he must at all costs turn off the tap; this water overflowing was like blood flowing from his veins. As he went forward, he saw the little boy raise his head, smile and come towards him. His courage failed him, and on an impulse of irresistible panic he turned tail and retreated towards the kitchen.

But alas! the little boy was of a naturally friendly disposition. He followed M. de Coantré, and the latter, thinking it better on the whole for an encounter in which he would cut a poor figure to take place without witnesses rather than in front of the cook, wheeled round and bravely stood his ground.

'Don't you pick ticklers?' asked the little boy.

'I'm afraid not. . . .'

'Why? Won't your mummy let you?'

M. de Coantré, who was a sentimental soul, found the question charming, and smiled. But he was so embarrassed that he could think of nothing to say. Then the small boy held out a handful of those hard little fruits of the wild rose which undignified people call 'ticklers' and which are the delight of children and birds in their mysterious picnics.

'Here you are, would you like some?'

'Eh? What would I do with them?'

No sooner had he spoken than he realized, both from his gruff tone and the look of surprise that had superseded the cheerful expression on the child's face, that he had replied churlishly to this friendly offer. He felt he ought to say something, take the hips and put them in his pocket — but he had for so long been cut off from human intercourse that he could not bring himself to do so.

At that moment he saw a shadowy figure pass hurriedly behind the little boy and sneak into the house. It was M. de Coëtquidan, who, taking advantage of the fact that the child's attention was distracted, had put on speed from the bottom of the garden and made port. Emboldened by the pleasure of having spotted his uncle and having rendered him this high strategic service, M. de Coantré summoned up the strength to say to the little boy 'Well, now, enjoy yourself. . . .' and then to lunge forward, as though leading a cavalry charge, turn off the tap and return triumphantly to the house without being further troubled by the child.

They sat down to lunch and were in the middle of discussing the social implications of this encounter ('A charming youngster! And so clean! . . .' — 'In my day working-class children
looked
like working-class children. Now they're all like little gents.' — 'There aren't any classes left.') when the bell rang and Mélanie said: 'It's the postman.'

For twenty years, whenever the postman rang, M. de Coantré had seen a wave of anxiety cross his mother's face. Yet, like everyone else, she sometimes received quite pleasant letters, and nine out of ten were at worst indifferent. But no: for her, the arrival of a letter could only mean trouble. Since his mother's death, M. de Coantré reacted to the postman's visit in exactly the same way: his face became suffused with anxiety. But when the envelope was in his hands and he saw the crest
Maître Lebeau, Solicitor,
he ripped it open feverishly, tearing the edge of the letter. And he read: Sir, A new matter has arisen in connexion with the estate of Mme la Comtesse de Coantré, and I should be obliged if you would be so good as to call at this office on Friday the 22nd inst, around 3 o'clock.

Yours, etc.

That
was the letter he had always been expecting, and now it had come. Trouble, for sure: the sad thing about worriers is that they always have reason to be worried. M. de Coantré read the note to his uncle and then tried to eat, but his throat was constricted. Meanwhile, he could see M. Élie casting surreptitious glances at the letter, which he had put down beside his place. At last he understood.

'Here you are, Uncle, if you want the stamp. ...'

'Why, yes! Thanks…'

And M. de Coëtquidan proceeded to spit on the stamp. Suddenly M. de Coantré stood up.

'I'm going there today. The appointment is for tomorrow, but I must know now. I can't bear to wait.'

In vain does a hunted man, who is terrified of a knock at the door, decide to lie low and wait for it to stop; after the second knock he can stand it no longer. He must know, he cannot bear this presence, this mystery behind the door; rather death, if that is what it is, than the agony of the unknown. . .. He opens the door.

'But you've got plenty of time,' said M. Élie. 'It's only twenty to one!'

'I must shave, and change my clothes. And I don't want to rush. I must keep calm, very calm.' (He clenched his teeth.)

He went upstairs and shaved. His hand shook and he cut himself. 'I know what it is, by Jove! It's a new creditor. Anyhow, whatever it is, it can only mean trouble.'

So little did he trust his own memory and presence of mind that, whenever he went to Lebeau's, he took with him a large bundle of papers more or less connected with the estate, imagining always that at some stage of the interview an essential point would slip his memory, and also, theoretically, in order to be able to check what the lawyer said to him. He had great confidence in this man, Bourdillon — but after all, one never knows! Like all incompetent people, he was suspicious. All these papers, many of which should have been in the waste-paper basket long ago, were meticulously classified and numbered and covered with caballistic signs scrawled in coloured crayon. And yet he was rarely able to find the one he wanted: partly because any bit of paper, however unimportant, that looked as if it might be connected with 'business' was for him something mysterious, sacred and awe-inspiring, and he kept everything down to shoemakers' bills going as far back as 1898, and partly because, whenever he felt he was being watched, or whenever he had to act quickly, his brain clouded over, his hands trembled and he lost control of his faculties.

An hour later, having, in spite of his oppression of mind, carefully brushed his clothes, cleaned his stiff collar with a piece of bread he had brought upstairs, and arranged his handkerchief in his breastpocket in such a way that the little of it that showed was not soiled, M. de Coantré left the house.

During the ten years between his return from Chatenay and the war, M. de Coantré, as we have seen, had scarcely been out of the house. When he had joined an auxiliary hospital in 1914 he had chosen one quite close to the boulevard Arago; to reach it he had only one street to cross. Afterwards, for another ten years, he no longer went out. Thus, when his mother died and he had to go through all the formalities death brings in its wake, he was completely crushed, the more so because his mother's long illness and death-throes had already worn him down.

Outside in the street, everything seemed blurred in front of his eyes, and his ears were shattered by the din of buses and trams. He was a terrifying sight as he crossed the road, jumping like a frog whenever a car appeared; he should have been run over a dozen times. When he came to the main avenues and wider squares, he would not cross them without the help of a passer-by. He had steeled himself against taking taxis, not only because of the expense but because he was just as frightened when he was in a car. So he wandered through the streets, continually on the look-out for 'means of transport' whose details he had studied for an hour before leaving in out-of-date time-tables, so that the antics of these vehicles were never the same in reality as they were on paper, unless it was he who lost his way in them. Sweat poured down his face, with the same prickly effect as the hairs which the barber leave under one's collar. Why was it only he who tripped over his own feet? Why was it only he who could never find the number of a house? Now he would imagine that people were making fun of him, were deliberately getting in his way. And anger would well up inside him, the anger of a man who knows that he has reached the very depths of human weakness; he would thrust his way through, jostling people to left and right, and anyone who challenged him would have been treated in a very lordly way. But whenever possible he would move away, go and sit on a bench and try to recover. And he was utterly exhausted by the time he returned, in the evening, to the silence of his room, where no one wished him ill and where gradually a modicum of equanimity and self-respect would be restored to him. Afterwards, he would need several days of relaxation at home to recover the flat calm of mind and soul which alone kept suffering at bay.