The Thibaults (116 page)

“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 seemed 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… .

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.

Jacques’s heart was thudding as he alighted on the Crouy platform. It was deserted. The frosty air was crystal clear.

As he left the station and saw the countryside, a spasm of remembrance gripped his heart. Scorning the short-cut and the highroad alike, he took the road that led by the Calvary—a detour of nearly two miles.

Fierce gusts of wind came roaring up from all four quarters turn by turn, scouring the snow-bound waste with sudden, icy blasts. Somewhere behind the dank, grey cloudwrack a hidden sun was sinking. Jacques walked on rapidly. Though he had eaten nothing since the early morning, he was no longer feeling hungry; the eager air was going to his head. He recognized every turning, every hillock, every thicket. In the distance, at the junction of three roads, the great cross loomed up, ringed by its clump of leafless trees. That track yonder led to Vaumesnil, and this roadmenders’ cabin—how often during his daily walks with his attendant he had sheltered in it from the rain! On two or three occasions with Léon; once at least in Arthur’s time. How well he recalled Arthur’s blunt features and pale eyes, the typical face of a decent Lorraine peasant, one would have thought, till suddenly that evil leer traversed it!

Crueler even than the glacial wind that flayed his cheeks and numbed his fingertips, memory lashed his mind. He had altogether ceased thinking about his father.

Greyly the brief winter day was hastening to its close, but there was still some light left.

On reaching Crouy, he all but took, as in the past, the turning that led off into an obscure back-street—as if he were still afraid of being pointed at by the village children. Yet who would recognize him now, after eight years? Anyway, there was no one in the street, and all the doors were shut. The life of the village seemed congealed by the cold, though smoke was pouring up from every chimney against the greyness of the sky. The inn came into view flanked by its flight of steps, its signboard creaking in the wind.

Nothing had changed—not even the snow melting upon the chalky road into a grey slush—almost he fancied he was trudging through it still in his heavy “regulation” shoes. That was the inn where, to cut short their walk, old Léon used to imprison him in an empty wash-house, so as to be free to play cards with his cronies in the tap-room. Emerging from the side-street, a beshawled girl in galoshes slip-slopped up the steps. A new servant? he wondered. Or perhaps she was the proprietor’s daughter, the child who always used to run away at the sight of the “litde jailbird.” Before entering the inn the girl cast a furtive glance at the young man walking by. Jacques quickened his pace.

Now he was at the end of the village. Once he had left the last houses behind him, he saw, ringed round by its lofty walls, alone, aloof, in the midst of the grey plain, the huge, familiar building, snow-capped, pocked with rows of black-barred windows. He quivered in every limb. Nothing had changed. Nothing. The treeless avenue leading to the entrance-gate was now a river of mud. Probably in the wintry twilight a stranger to the place might have had trouble in deciphering the gold inscription on the front. But for Jacques the proud device on which his eyes were fixed was plain to read: