The Thibaults (114 page)

Light was filtering beneath the dining-room door.

Antoine threw it open. “Hurry up, M. Chasle! It’s time for you to be going.”

His bowed head flanked by two tall piles of announcements, M. Chasle was addressing envelopes.

“Ah, so it’s you. Glad you’ve come. Have you a minute to spare?” he mumbled, without looking up.

Supposing that the little man needed his help for an address, Antoine went up to him unsuspectingly.

“Only a minute,” M. Chasle repeated, still writing. “Eh? Yes, I’d like to make quite clear what I was saying just now, about that little nest-egg.”

Without waiting for a reply, he laid down his pen, whisked out his false teeth, and began staring at Antoine with a disarming twinkle in his eye.

“Don’t you want to go to bed, M. Chasle?”

“Oh, no! My mind’s too busy with ideas for that.” He perked his little bird-like head and shoulders towards Antoine. “I’m writing addresses, yes, but all the time, M. Antoine”—he chuckled with the knowing smile of a conjurer who is about to explain one of his tricks —”my brain is teeming, fairly buzzing with ideas,
ad lib
.”

Before Antoine could create a diversion, he went on.

“Well, with that little nest-egg you spoke to me about, M. Antoine, I’ll be able to bring off one of my ideas. Yes, one of my pet ideas. The ‘Mart.’ That’s the name I’d thought of—a clever little name, eh? A sort of office, you see. Well, a shop, really. Yes, a shop to start with. In a busy street somewhere hereabouts. But the shop, that’s only what meets the eye; there’s the idea behind it… .”

When, as now, M. Chasle took his theme to heart, he spoke breathlessly, in little spasmodic sentences, his body swaying like a pendulum, his fingers spread and interlocked. The breathing-space after each phrase enabled him to muster ideas for the next remark; once that was ready, it was as if a trigger had been pulled, shooting his shoulders forward and the words out simultaneously. Then he would pause again, as if incapable of secreting more than a thimbleful of thought at one time.

Antoine wondered if M. Chasle’s wits were not even more addled than usual, after the alarms of the past few days and several sleepless nights.

“Latoche would explain all that much better than I can,” the little man went on. “I’ve known him for quite a while now, and from what I hear of his past, he has a very good record, has Latoche. A master mind. Bursting with ideas. Like mine. And he shares the credit, you know, of that great idea I mentioned, the ‘Mart.’ The Mart of Modern Discoveries. Do you see what I mean?”

“Well—I can’t say I do.”

“It’s like this. There’s a lot of little inventions nowadays, useful in the home—gadgets, as they call them. And lots of small inventors who think up something and don’t know how to handle it. Well, we shall make a sort of clearing-house, Latoche and I. We’ll put advertisements in the local papers.”

“What locality?”

M. Chasle stared at Antoine as if he did not understand the question. After a pause he went on.

“In the lifetime of the deceased, I’d have blushed for very shame to talk about such things. But now it’s different. I’ve been turning it over in my mind for thirteen years, M. Antoine. Ever since the Exposition. What’s more, I’ve thought up, all on my own, some A-r little gadgets. Oh, yes, indeed! A patent heel that records the steps you take. An automatic, ever-ready stamp-moistener,” Jumping down from his chair, he went up to Antoine. “But my masterpiece, if I may say so, is an egg. The square egg. The trouble’s in discovering the right solution, but I’m in touch with researchers about that. The country priests, I’ve great hopes about them; on winter evenings, after the Angelus, they’ve heaps of time on their hands for tinkering with inventions, haven’t they? I’ve set them all off on the track of my solution. But that’s child’s play, hitting on the solution. The idea-^ that was the difficult thing to hit on.”

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 …!”

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 caressing 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.”