The Thibaults (97 page)

“How could it be otherwise? A book he wrote from beginning to end in a prison cell!” He took a few steps. “I haven’t brought you his letter today. I’ve lent it to Olga to take to the club. I’ll have it back this evening.” Without looking at Jacques, like a dancing will-o’-the-wisp he flitted about the room, his eyes uplifted, beatifically smiling. “Vladimir tells me he has never been so completely himself as he was in that prison. Alone with his loneliness.” The singing quality in his voice grew more pronounced, though he spoke in a lower tone. “He says that his cell was nice and light, right at the top of the building, and that he used to stand on the boards of his bed, so as to bring his forehead level with the edge of the barred window. He says he used to stand there for hours, thinking, watching the snow-flakes swirling above. He says he could see nothing else, not a roof, not a tree, never anything at all. But as soon as the spring came round and all through the summer, late in the afternoon a ray of sunlight would fall across his face. He says he used to wait for that moment all day long. You’ll read his letter. He says he once heard a little child crying in the distance. Another time he heard the report of a gun.” Vanheede glanced across at Antoine, who was listening to what he said and could not help following his movements interestedly with his eyes. “But I’ll bring you the letter itself, tomorrow,” he added, returning to his seat.

“Not tomorrow,” Jacques said; “I shan’t be here tomorrow.”

Vanheede showed no surprise. But he looked round at Antoine again and rose to his feet after a short pause.

“Please excuse me. I’m afraid I’ve been intruding; I only wanted to let you know about Vladimir.”

Jacques, too, had risen.

“You’re working a bit too hard just now, Vanheede. You should take care of yourself.”

“Oh, no.”

“Still at Schomberg and Rieth’s?”

“Why, yes.” He smiled mischievously. “I do the typing. I say: ‘Yes, sir,’ from morn to night and pound the typewriter. What harm can that do? When the day’s over, I am my own self again. Then, I’m free to think: ‘No, sir,’ all night long if I choose—till the next morning.”

As he spoke, little Vanheede was holding his small head very high and his tousled flaxen forelock gave him the air of drawing himself up still further. He turned slightly, as though addressing Antoine for the first time.

“I starved and starved for ten years, gentlemen, for the sake of my ideals, and I’m not going to give them up.”

Then he moved back to Jacques, held out his hand, and a note of distress came into the high-pitched, reedy voice.

“You are leaving us, perhaps? That’s a shame! It always did me a lot of good, coming here, you know.”

Deeply moved, Jacques made no answer, but placed his hand affectionately on the albino’s arm. Antoine remembered the man with the scar. Him, too, Jacques had greeted in the same friendly, encouraging, and rather patronizing manner. He seemed really to hold a place of his own in these queer groups of people. They consulted him, sought his approval, and feared his censure; obviously, too, it did their hearts good to be in his company.

“He’s a regular Thibault!” Antoine thought with satisfaction. But, immediately after, a feeling of sadness came over him. “Jacques will never remain in Paris,” he mused; “he’ll come and live in Switzerland again—that much is quite certain.” In vain did he say to himself: “We’ll write to each other, I’ll come and see him, it won’t be the same now as these last three years.” That sense of disappointment rankled. “But what will he turn his hand to, what sort of life will he lead amongst these people? What use will he make of his talents? Ah, it will be very different from the wonderful career I’d mapped out for him in my dreams!”

Jacques had caught hold of his friend’s arm and was steering him discreetly towards the door. There Vanheede turned round, took leave of Antoine with a shy nod, and disappeared onto the landing, followed by Jacques.

Once more, and for the last time, Antoine heard the small indignant voice.

“Everything’s gone so rotten. They won’t have anyone about them but fawning toadies.”

ON HIS return, Jacques volunteered no more information about this visitor than he had given about the hooded cyclist they had met in the street. He had poured out a glass of water and was sipping it slowly.

Antoine, to keep himself in countenance, lit a cigarette, and got up to throw the match into the stove; after a glance out of the window, he returned to his seat.

The silence lasted a few minutes. Jacques was again pacing up and down the room.

“Look here, Antoine!” he said abruptly, still walking to and fro. “Do try to understand me a bit! How could I possibly have given three whole years, three years of my life, to that Ecole Normale of theirs?”

Antoine was startled, but at once assumed an attentive, studiously indulgent air.

“It would only have been my school-life all over again,” Jacques went on, “with a thin veneer of freedom. Lectures, and lessons, and everlasting essays! And ‘proper feelings’ of respect for all authority. And then the promiscuousness of it all! Every idea peddled round, and torn to tatters by that half-baked mob in the poky dens they call their ‘digs.’ Why, even the jargon they use—’freshies’ and ‘profs’ and ‘grinds’—it’s all in keeping! No, I could never have put up with life under such conditions.

“Don’t misunderstand me, Antoine. I don’t mean … Of course I have a high opinion of them. The teacher’s job is one that can only be carried on in an honourable way, as an act of faith. There’s something attractive, I grant you, in their self-respect, the mental efforts they put forth, and the faithful service they give for so beggarly a reward. Yes, but …

“No, you can’t really understand,” he muttered after a pause. “It wasn’t only to escape that barrack-like existence, nor from a distaste for all that machine-made education—that wasn’t it. But, just think of the footling life, Antoine!” He broke off, then repeated the word “footling,” with his eyes stubbornly fixed on the floor.

“When you went to see Jalicourt,” Antoine asked, “I suppose you’d already made up your mind to …?”

“Certainly not!” Jacques remained standing where he was, with his brows raised, staring at the floor; he was making a genuine attempt to reconstruct the past. “Oh, that month of October! I’d come back from Maisons-Laffitte in a really dreadful state!” He hunched his shoulders as if a heavy load weighed on them, murmuring: “There were too many things that wouldn’t fit together.”

“Ah, yes, I remember that October.” Antoine was thinking of Rachel.

“Then, on the last day before the beginning of the term, with that crowning misfortune, the threat of the Ecole looming just ahead, a sort of panic came over me. Just think how strange it all is! At the present moment I realize quite clearly that till my call on Jalicourt, I’d had only a deep-seated fear of what was coming, nothing more. Of course, I’d often felt heartily sick of the whole business and thought of giving up the Ecole, even of running away. But all that was no more than a vague dream. It was only after that evening with Jalicourt that it all took definite shape. You can hardly believe me, eh?” he said, looking up at last and noticing his brother’s bewilderment. “Very well, you shall read the very words I jotted down in my diary that night, on reaching home; it so happens I came across them only the other day.”

Again he fell to pacing gloomily up and down; the memory of that visit seemed still to upset him, even after so long an interval.

“When I think of it all …” he began, shaking his head. “But tell me, how did you get in touch with him? Did you write to each other? You went to see him, of course. How did he strike you?”

Antoine merely made an evasive gesture.

“Yes,” Jacques said, supposing his brother’s impression of the professor to have been unfavourable, “you can hardly realize what he meant to youngsters of my generation!” And, with a sudden change of mood, he came and sat down opposite Antoine, in an arm-chair beside the stove. “Oh, that Jalicourt!” he exclaimed with an unexpected smile. His voice had softened. He stretched out his legs luxuriously towards the fire. “For years, Antoine, we’d been saying to one another: ‘When I am a pupil of Jalicourt.’ By ‘pupil’ we really meant ‘disciple.’ And whenever some misgiving came over me, as regards the Ecole, I’d comfort myself by thinking: ‘Yes, but there’s always Jalicourt.’ He was the only one whom we thought worth while, you see. We knew all his poems by heart. We retailed all we could pick up about him and his ways, we quoted his witticisms. His colleagues were jealous of him, so we were told. He’d not only succeeded in making the university put up with his lectures—long extempore effusions, full of bold views, digressions, sudden confidences, and broad jokes—but with eccentricities, his dandified get-up, his eyeglass, and even that jaunty soft hat of his. A curious character, whimsical, enthusiastic, a bit of a crank in his way—but what a mind, so well stocked and generous! What was so fine about him was his feeling for the modern world; he was the one man, for us, who had managed to lay his finger on its pulse. I had corresponded with him. I had five letters from him—my most valued treasures. Think of it, five letters, three of which, if not four, are, I still believe, simply masterpieces!

“Now listen to this. One spring morning at about eleven o’clock, we met him, I and a friend, in the street. How could one ever forget such a thing? He was walking up the Rue Soufflot, with long, springy steps. I can still see him with his coat-tails ballooning behind him, his grey spats, the white hair peeping out under the wide brim of his hat. Very upright, his monocle screwed into position, his Roman nose jutting out like a tall ship’s prow, and the drooping white moustache that brought to mind a Gallic chieftain’s. The profile of an old eagle, ready to strike. A bird of prey, with the spindle-shanks of a heron. And something of an old-school English nobleman, as well. Unforgettable, he was!”

“Yes, I can see him!” Antoine exclaimed.

“We shadowed him up to his door. We were spellbound. We visited a dozen shops, trying to get a photo of him!” Jacques jerked back his legs under him with sudden violence. “And now that I think of it, I loathe him!”

“I’m pretty sure he’s never had the faintest idea of that!” Antoine grinned.

But Jacques was not listening. Facing the fire, a pensive smile on his lips, he went on speaking in a faraway voice.

“Shall I tell you all about it? Well, it was after dinner, one night, I suddenly made up my mind to go and call on him. To explain, well, everything to him. So off I went, on the spur of the moment, without giving the matter a second thought. By nine o’clock I was ringing his bell, in the Place du Pantheon. You know the house, don’t you? A dark entrance-hall, a stupid-looking Breton maid, the dining-room, the rustle of a vanishing skirt. The table had been cleared, but there was a work-basket left behind, with clothes to be darned in it. A smell of food, of pipe smoke, a stuffy heat. The door opened. There was Jalicourt. Not a thing to remind one of the old eagle of the Rue Soufflot, or of the writer of those marvellous letters. Nothing of the poet, or the lofty thinker! Or any Jalicourt we knew. Nothing whatever. A round-shouldered Jalicourt, minus the eyeglass, an old pea-jacket mottled with dandruff, a dead pipe, a peevish mouth. He must have been quietly snoring, digesting his boiled cabbage, with his big nose nodding over a stove. I certainly shouldn’t have been admitted, if the maid had known her job. Well, he’d been caught napping, taken off his guard, and had to see it through. He showed me into his study.

“I was too excited to think. I just blurted out what I had come to say. ‘I’ve come to ask you, sir,’ and so forth. He pulled himself together, came to life, more or less, and I got a glimpse of the old eagle again. lie put up his eyeglass and motioned me to a seat. There was a touch of the old peer in his manner. ‘So you want my advice?’ he asked ir a surprised tone. As if he meant: ‘Have you no one else to apply to?’ True enough. I’d never thought of that. You see, Antoine, it’s not your fault, but it was very seldom I could bring myself to follow your advice—or anyone else’s, for that matter. I preferred to steer my own course; I’m built that way. My answer to Jalicourt was to that effect. His attentiveness led me on. I told him straight out: ‘I want to be a novelist, a great novelist!’ I had to tell him; no use beating about the bush. He never turned a hair. I went on pouring my heart out, I explained to him, well, everything, in fact. That I was conscious of a store of energy within me, of a deep-seated, vital impulse that was my very own, personal, unique! That for years past every step forward that I made in ‘culture’ had always been made at the expense of what was best in me, that vital force. That I had developed an intense dislike for study, for schools, and learning, for pedantry and idle chatter, and that this aversion had all the violence of an instinct of self-defence, of self-preservation! Yes, I’d taken the bit between my teeth! I said to him: ‘All that is weighing on me, sir; it’s stifling me, and it’s warping all my natural impulses!’ ”

As he spoke Jacques’s expression was constantly changing; at one moment his eyes were obdurate, smouldering with passion, then suddenly the hardness would go out of them; they grew tender, wistful, almost appealing.

“Antoine!” he cried. “It’s true, every word of it, you know.”

“I quite realize that, old man.”

“But don’t imagine that there’s pride behind it,” Jacques went on. “I’ve no wish to be above the rest, not a trace of what most people call ambition. You’ve only got to look at the way I’m living. And yet, Antoine, believe me, I’ve been perfectly happy here!”

After a few seconds, Antoine spoke again.

“Well, what happened next? What was his answer?”

“Wait a bit. He made no answer, so far as I can remember. Ah, yes, in the end, I came out with some lines from a poem I’d begun. It was called ‘The Spring.’ A sort of prose-poem, it was. Awful nonsense, really!” he added, with a blush. “I’d written that I aspired ‘to bend above myself as one bends over a flowing spring,’ and so forth. ‘To draw aside the tall grass and peer unhindered into the crystal depths.’ There he stopped me. ‘A pretty conceit.’ That’s all he had to say! The crabbed old pedant! I tried to catch his eye. But he would not look at me; he kept on fiddling with his signet-ring.”