The Thibaults (81 page)

He had reached the Elysee. A patrol of military police had just completed their circuit of the Palace. There was a clatter of rifle-butts on the sidewalk. Before he could avert their onset a horde of wild imaginings, like the protean pageant of a dream, streamed through his mind. He pictured Studler sending the nurse out of the room, taking a syringe from his pocket. Presently the nurse came back and passed her fingers over the little corpse. Then … ugly rumours; a report of the police; burial refused; an autopsy. The coroner; the police. “I’ll take the blame.” He was passing a sentry-box just then, and glared defiantly at the sentry within. “No,” he heard himself affirming boldly to a phantom coroner, “no injections were made by anyone except myself. I administered an over-dose—deliberately. It was a hopeless case, and I take upon myself all the …” Shrugging his shoulders, he smiled and quickened his step. “What drivel I’m thinking!” But well he knew he had not laid the spectres of his mind. “If I’m so ready to take the blame for a fatal dose administered by another man, why did I so emphatically refuse to administer it myself?”

Whenever a brief but strenuous mental effort failed, if not to clarify a problem, at least to throw some light on it, he always felt intensely irritated. He recalled the passage of words with Studler, when he had lost his temper, stammered. He did not regret it in the least; yet he was unpleasantly aware that he had played a part and voiced opinions which were somehow out of keeping with his personality as a whole, disloyal to his truest self. He had, moreover, a vague but galling presentiment of a day to come when his outlook and conduct might well belie his attitude and words on this occasion. His sense of self-disapproval must have been keen indeed for Antoine now to feel so impotent to shake it off; as a rule he firmly refused to pass judgment on any of his acts; the feeling of remorse was wholly foreign to his nature. True, he enjoyed studying himself; of recent years, indeed, he had made a veritable hobby of self-analysis—but always from a strictly scientific point of view. Nothing could be more alien to his character than to sit in moral judgment on himself.

Another question shaped itself in his mind, adding to his perplexity. “Would it not have needed greater strength of mind to consent, than to refuse, to act?” Whenever he had to choose between two alternatives and when, all things considered, one seemed as cogent as the other, he usually chose the line of action involving the greater exercise of will-power; experience had taught him, so he averred, that this was almost always the better one to follow. But tonight he had to admit that he had chosen the line of least resistance, followed the beaten track.

Some of his own remarks still echoed in his ears. He had prated to Studler of “the sanctity of life.” A ready-made phrase, and treacherous like all its kind. We “reverence” life, we say—or do we make a fetish of it?

He recalled an incident which had struck his imagination at the time—the case of the bicephalous child at Tréguineuc. Some fifteen years earlier, at the Breton seaport where the Thibaults were passing the summer holidays, a fisherman’s wife had given birth to a freak of nature, with two separate, perfectly formed heads. Father and mother had begged the local doctor to put an end to the little monstrosity, and, when he refused to do so, the father, a notorious drunkard, had flung himself on the new-born child and attempted to strangle it. It had been necessary to secure him, lock him up. There was great excitement in the village and it was a burning topic at the dinner-tables of the summer visitors. Antoine, who was sixteen or seventeen at the time, had embarked on a heated discussion with his father (it was one of the first occasions on which father and son came into violent conflict), Antoine insisting, with the naive intractability of youth, that the doctor should be permitted to cut short a life, doomed from the outset, without more ado.

It startled him to find how little his point of view regarding such a case had changed. “What view would Philip take?” he asked himself. The answer was not in doubt; Antoine could but admit that the idea of ending the child’s life would never have crossed Philip’s mind. What was more, did any dangerous malady develop, Philip would have strained every nerve to save its miserable life. Rigaud would have done the same thing. Terrignier, too. And Loiselle. So would every doctor. Wherever the least spark of life remains, the doctor’s duty is imperative. Saviours of life, like trusty Saint Bernards! Philip’s nasal voice droned in his ears: “You’ve no choice, my boy; you haven’t the right …!”

Antoine rebelled. “ ‘The right’? Look here, you know as well as I do what they amount to, those ideas of ‘right’ and duty. The laws of nature are the only laws that count; they, I admit, are ineluctable. But all those so-called moral laws, what are they really? A complex of habits, foisted upon us by the past. Just that. Long ago they may have served their purpose, as furthering man’s social progress. But what of today? Can you, as a thinking man, assign to all those antiquated rules of hygiene and public welfare a sort of divine right, the status of a categorical imperative?” And, as no answer was forthcoming from the chief, Antoine shrugged his shoulders and, thrusting his hands deeper into his overcoat pockets, crossed to the opposite sidewalk.

He walked blindly ahead, debating still—but only with himself. “One thing’s sure: for me, morality simply doesn’t exist! ‘Ought’ and ‘ought not,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ are meaningless to me—just words I use, like everyone else, as the small change of conversation; but in my heart I’ve always known they have no application to reality. Yes, I’ve
always
thought like that. No, that’s going too far. I’ve thought like that since …” Rachel’s face rose suddenly before his eyes. “Well, for quite a long time, anyhow.” For a while he made a conscientious effort to sort out the principles governing his daily life. He could find none. “A kind of sincerity?” he ventured tentatively. He thought again and found a better definition. “Isn’t it rather a kind of clear-sightedness?” His mind was still unsettled, but he was fairly satisfied with his discovery. “Yes. Obviously it doesn’t amount to much. But, when I look into myself, my impulse to think clearly— well, it’s about the only sure and solid thing I can find. Very likely I’ve made of it—unconsciously, no doubt—a kind of moral principle, my private creed. ‘Complete freedom, provided I see clearly.’ That sums it up, I imagine. Rather a risky principle, when you look into it. But it works out pretty well. The way one sees things, that’s the only thing that matters. To profit by one’s scientific training and examine oneself under the microscope coolly, impartially. To see oneself as one is; and, as a corollary, to accept oneself as one is. And then? Then I could almost say: Nothing is forbidden me! Nothing, provided I don’t dupe myself; I know what I am doing and, as far as possible, why I am doing it.”

But, almost at once, a wry smile pursed his lips. “The queerest thing is that, if I look into it carefully—my life, I mean, with its famous gospel of ‘complete freedom’ that does away with good and evil—the queer thing is, my life is almost entirely devoted to ‘doing good,’ as people call it! What has it brought me to, my precious emancipation? To acting not merely just like everybody else, but, oddly enough, in the very way which according to the present code of morals sets me among the best of men! The way I behaved just now is a case in point. Can it be that, for all practical purposes and despite myself, I’ve come to kotow to the cut-and-dried morality of those around me? Philip would smile… . No, I can’t allow that our human obligation to behave as social animals should overrule our impulses as individuals. How then explain the line I took just now? It’s fantastic how little the way we think fits in with, or even influences, the way we act. For, in my heart of hearts—why quibble over it?—I think Studler’s right. The platitudes that I hurled at him carried no weight at all. It’s he that has logic on his side; that poor child’s sufferings are so much needless agony, the issue of her fight with death is a foregone conclusion, foregone and imminent, too. Well, then—the least reflection tells me that if her death can be accelerated, it’s so much the better on every count. Not only for the child, but for her mother; it’s obvious that in her present condition the sight of the baby’s lingering agony may well prove dangerous to her—as Hequét, no doubt, is well aware. And there are no two ways about it; on a purely logical view the soundness of such arguments is as plain as daylight. But isn’t it odd how mere logic seldom or never really satisfies us? I don’t say that just to condone an act of cowardice; indeed, I know quite well that what drove me to act as I did this evening, or, rather, to refuse to act, was not mere cowardice. No, it was something as urgent, as imperative as a law of nature. But what it was, that urgency—that’s what passes me.” He ran over in his mind some possible explanations. Was it one of those inchoate ideas (he was convinced that such exist) that seem to sleep below the level of our lucid thoughts, but sometimes come awake and, rising to the surface, take control of us, impel us to an act— only to sink back once more, inexplicably, into the limbo of our unknown selves? Or—to take a simpler view—why not admit that a law of herd-morality exists and it is practically impossible for a man to act as if he were an isolated unit?

He seemed to be turning in a circle, his eyes blindfolded. He tried to recall the wording of Nietzsche’s well-known dictum: that a man should not be a problem, but the solution of a problem. A self-evident axiom, he used to think, but one with which, year after year, he had found it ever harder to conform. He had already had occasion to observe that some of his decisions—the most spontaneous, as a rule; often the most important ones he made—clashed with his reasoned scheme of life; so much so, indeed, that he had sometimes wondered: “Can I be really the man I think I am?” The mere suspicion left him dazed and startled; it came like a lightning-flash that slits the shadows, leaving them the darker for its passing. But he was always quick to brush the thought aside, and now again he flouted it.

Chance befriended him. As he came into the Rue Royale a whiff of baking bread, warm as a living creature’s breath, came to his nostrils from the vent-hole of a bakery, and started off his thoughts on a new tack. Yawning, he looked about him for an open tavern; then he was suddenly impelled to go and have something to eat at Zemm’s, a little café near the Comédie Francaise which stayed open till dawn and where he sometimes dropped in at night before proceeding homewards across the river.

“Yes, it’s a queer thing,” he admitted to himself after a moment of no thoughts. “We can doubt, destroy, make a clean sweep of all our beliefs, but, whether we like it or not, there remains a solid kernel proof against every doubt, the human instinct to trust our reason. A truism of which I’ve been the living proof for the last hour or so!” .

He felt tired, disconsolate, and hunted for a reassuring formula apt to restore his peace of mind. He fell back on an easy compromise. “Conflict is the common rule, and so it has always been. What is happening in my mind just now is going on throughout the universe: the clash of life with life.”

For a while he walked on mechanically, thinking of nothing in particular. He was nearing the serried tumult of the boulevards and questing women here and there pressed on him their companionable charms; he shook them off good-humouredly.

But all the time his brain was unconsciously at work, his thoughts were crystallizing round an idea.

“I am-a living being; in other words I am always choosing between alternatives and acting accordingly. So far so good. But there my quandary begins. What is the guiding principle on which I choose and act? I’ve no idea. Is it the clear-sightedness I was thinking of just now? No, hardly that. That’s theory, not practice. My zeal for clarity has never really guided me to a decision or an act. It’s only
after
I have acted that my lucidity comes into play—to justify to me what I have done. And yet, ever since I’ve been a sentient being, I’ve felt myself directed by a kind of instinct, a driving force that leads me almost all the time to choose this and not that, to act in this way,, not in another. But—most puzzling thing of all!—I notice that all my acts follow precisely the same lines; everything takes place as if I were being controlled by an unalterable law. Exactly. But what law? I haven’t a notion! Whenever at some critical moment of my life that driving force inside me leads me to take a certain course and act in consequence, I ask myself in vain: What was the principle that guided me? It’s like running up against a wall of darkness! I feel sure of my ground, intensely alive, lawful in my occasions, so to speak—yet I’m outside the law. Lawful and lawless! Neither in the teaching of the past nor in any modern philosophy, not even in myself, can I find any satisfactory answer. I see clearly enough all the laws which I can’t endorse, but I see none to which I could submit; not -one of all the standard moral codes has ever seemed to me even approximately to fit my case, or to throw any light upon the way in which I act. Yet, all the same, I forge ahead, and at a good pace, too, without the least hesitation, and, what’s more, keeping a pretty straight course. Yes, it’s extraordinary! Driving full-steam ahead like a fast liner whose steersman’s scrapped the compass! It almost looks as if I were acting under orders. Yes, that’s exactly what I feel; my way of life is ordered. Under orders, yes; but
whose
orders? … Meanwhile I don’t complain; I’m happy. I’ve not the least wish to change; only I’d like to know why I am as I am. It’s more than simple curiosity; there’s a touch of apprehension in it. Has every man alive his mystery? I wonder. And shall I ever find the key to mine? Shall I know one day what it is: my guiding principle?”

He quickened his steps. Beyond the crossroads a flashing shop-sign, Zemm’s, had caught his eye, and hunger drove out thought.

So quickly did he dive into the entrance of the cafe that he stumbled over a pile of oyster-baskets that filled the passage with the sour smell of brine. The restaurant was in the basement, to which a narrow spiral staircase, picturesque and vaguely conspiratorial in appearance, gave access. At this late hour the room was full of night-birds taking their ease in a warm bath of vapour, thick with the fumes of alcohol, cigar-smoke, and odours from the kitchen, all churned up together by the whizzing fans. With its polished mahogany and green leather seats the long, low, windowless tavern had the aspect of a liner’s smoking-room.