The Age of Reason (16 page)

‘We have decided on an operation for abortion,’ said Mathieu brutally.

Jacques did not lift an eyebrow. ‘Have you found a doctor?’ he asked with a non-committal air.

‘Yes.’

‘A reliable man? From what you have told me, the young lady’s health is delicate.’

‘I have friends who assure me he’s all right.’

‘Yes,’ said Jacques. ‘Yes; obviously.’

He closed his eyes for an instant, reopened them, and laid the tips of his fingers together.

‘In short,’ said he, ‘if I have properly understood you, what has happened is this: you have just heard that your girl is pregnant; you don’t want to marry, that being against your principles, but you consider yourself as pledged to her by ties as strict as those of marriage. Not wanting to marry her, nor to damage her reputation, you have decided on an operation for abortion under the best possible conditions. Friends have recommended you a trustworthy doctor who charges a fee of four thousand francs, and there is nothing left for you to do but to get the money. Is that it?’

‘Exactly,’ said Mathieu.

‘And why do you want the money by tomorrow?’

‘The fellow I have in view is leaving for America in a week.’

‘Right,’ said Jacques. ‘I understand.’

He lifted his joined hands to the level of his eyes and contemplated them with the precise expression of one now in a position to draw conclusions from his words. But Mathieu had made no mistake: a lawyer doesn’t conclude an affair so quickly. Jacques had dropped his hands, and laid them one on each knee, he was sitting well back in his chair, and the light had gone out of his eyes. ‘The authorities are inclined to drop on abortions at the moment.’

‘I know,’ said Mathieu, ‘they get a fit of doing so from time to time. They catch a few poor devils who can’t protect themselves, but the great specialists don’t have to worry.’

‘You mean that that’s unjust,’ said Jacques. ‘I’m entirely of your opinion. But I don’t wholly disapprove of the results. By force of circumstances, your poor devils are herbalists or clumsy old women who use dirty instruments: the attentions of the police do weed them out, and that’s something.’

‘Well, there it is,’ said Mathieu wearily. ‘I have come to ask you for four thousand francs.’

‘And —’ said Jacques, ‘are you quite sure that abortion is in accordance with your principles?’

‘Why not?’

‘I don’t know, it’s for you to say. You are a pacifist because you respect human life, and you intend to destroy a life.’

‘I have quite made up my mind,’ said Mathieu. ‘Moreover, though I may be a pacifist, I don’t respect human life, there’s no such implication.’

‘Indeed!’ said Jacques. ‘I thought...’ And he eyed Mathieu with amused complacency. ‘So here you are in the guise of an infanticide! It doesn’t suit you at all, my poor Thieu.’

‘He’s afraid I shall get caught,’ thought Mathieu. ‘He won’t give me a penny.’ It ought to have been possible to say to him: ‘If you let me have the money you run no risk, I shall get into touch with a clever man who is not on the police records. If you refuse, I shall be obliged to send Marcelle to a low-down abortionist, and in that case I could guarantee nothing, because the police know them all and may pull them in any day.’ But these arguments were too direct to influence Jacques. Mathieu merely said: ‘Abortion is not infanticide.’

Jacques picked up a cigarette and lit it. ‘True,’ he observed, with detachment. ‘I agree, abortion is not infanticide, it is “metaphysical” murder.’ And he added gravely: ‘My dear Mathieu, I have no objections to metaphysical murder, any more than to any perfect crime. But that you should commit a metaphysical murder — you, being what you are...’ He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. ‘No, that would be quite out of the picture.’

It was all up, Jacques would refuse, and Mathieu might as well go away. However, he cleared his throat, and, to salve his conscience, said; ‘Then you can’t help me?’

‘Please understand me,’ said Jacques. ‘I don’t refuse to do you a service, but would this be really doing you a service? Added to which I’m quite sure you’ll easily get the money you need...’ He rose abruptly, as though he had taken a decision, went up to his brother, and put a friendly hand on his shoulder. ‘Listen, Thieu,’ he said cordially. ‘Assume I have refused. I don’t want to help you to tell yourself a lie. But I have another suggestion to make...’

Mathieu, who was about to get up, subsided into his chair, and the old fraternal resentment took possession of him once more. That firm, but gentle pressure on his shoulder was more than he could stand: he threw his head back, and saw Jacques’ face foreshortened.

‘Tell myself a lie! Look here, Jacques, say you don’t want to be mixed up in a case of abortion, that you disapprove of it, or that you haven’t the ready money, and you’re perfectly within your rights, nor shall I resent it. But this talk of lying is nonsense, there’s no lying in it at all. I don’t want a child: a child is coming, and I propose to suppress it; that’s all.’

Jacques withdrew his hand, and took a few steps with a meditative air. ‘He’s going to make me a speech,’ thought Mathieu. ‘I ought not to have let myself in for an argument.’

‘Mathieu,’ said Jacques in a calm tone, ‘I know you better than you think, and you distress me. I’ve long been afraid that something like this would happen: this coming child is the logical result of a situation into which you entered of your own free will, and you want to suppress it because you won’t accept all the consequences of your acts. Come, shall I tell you the truth? I daresay you aren’t lying to yourself at this precise moment: the trouble is that your whole life is built upon a lie.’

‘Carry on,’ said Mathieu. ‘I don’t mind. Tell me what it is I’m trying to evade.’

‘You are trying,’ said Jacques, ‘to evade the fact that you’re a bourgeois and ashamed of it. I myself reverted to the bourgeoisie after many aberrations, and contracted a marriage of convenience with the party, but you are a bourgeois by taste and temperament, and it’s your temperament that’s pushing you into marriage. For
you are married
, Mathieu,’ said he forcibly.

‘First I heard of it,’ said Mathieu.

‘Oh yes, you are, only you pretend you aren’t because you are possessed by theories. You have fallen into a habit of life with this young woman: you go to see her quietly four days a week and you spend the night with her. That has been going on for seven years, and there’s no adventure left in it: you respect her, you feel obligations towards her, you don’t want to leave her. And I’m quite sure that your sole object isn’t pleasure. I even imagine that, broadly speaking, however vivid the pleasure may have been, it has by now begun to fade. In fact I expect you sit beside her in the evening and tell her long stories about the events of the day and ask her advice in difficulties.’

‘Of course,’ said Mathieu, shrugging his shoulders. He was furious with himself.

‘Very well,’ said Jacques, ‘will you tell me how that differs from marriage... except for cohabitation.’

‘Except for cohabitation?’ said Mathieu ironically. ‘Excuse me, but that’s a quibble.’

‘Oh,’ said Jacques, ‘being what you are, it probably doesn’t cost you much to do without that.’

‘He has never said so much about my affairs,’ thought Mathieu, ‘he is taking his revenge.’ The thing to do was to go out and slam the door. But Mathieu was well aware that he would stay until the end: he was seized by an aggressive and malicious impulse to discover his brother’s true opinion.

‘But why do you say it probably doesn’t cost me much,
being what I am
?’

‘Because you get a comfortable life out of the situation, and an appearance of liberty: you have all the advantages of marriage and you exploit your principles to avoid its inconveniences. You refuse to regularize the position, which you find quite easy. If anyone suffers from all this, it isn’t you.’

‘Marcelle shares my ideas on marriage,’ said Mathieu acidly: he heard himself pronounce each word, and felt extremely ill at ease.

‘Oh,’ said Jacques, ‘if she didn’t share them she would no doubt be too proud to admit it to you. The fact is, you’re beyond my comprehension: you, so prompt with your indignation when you hear of an injustice, you keep this woman for years in a humiliating position, for the sole pleasure of telling yourself that you’re respecting your principles. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, if you really did adapt your life to your ideas. But, I must tell you once more, you are as good as married, you have a delightful flat, you get a competent salary at fixed intervals, you have no anxiety for the future because the State guarantees you a pension... and you like that sort of life — placid, orderly, the typical life of an official.’

‘Listen,’ said Mathieu, ‘there’s a misunderstanding here: I care little whether I’m a bourgeois or whether I’m not. All I want is’ — and he uttered the final words through clenched teeth and with a sort of shame — ‘to retain my freedom.’

‘I should myself have thought,’ said Jacques, ‘that freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one’s responsibilities. But that, no doubt, is not your, view: you condemn capitalist society, and yet you are an official in that society; you display an abstract sympathy with Communists, but you take care not to commit yourself, you have never voted. You despise the bourgeois class, and yet you are a bourgeois, son and brother of a bourgeois, and you live like a bourgeois.’

Mathieu waved a hand, but Jacques refused to be interrupted.

‘You have, however, reached the age of reason, my poor Mathieu,’ said he, in a tone of pity and of warning. ‘But you try to dodge that fact too, you try to pretend you’re younger than you are. Well... perhaps I’m doing you an injustice. Perhaps you haven’t in fact reached the age of reason, it’s really a moral age... perhaps I’ve got there sooner than you have.’

‘Now he’s off,’ thought Mathieu, ‘he’s going to tell me about his youth.’ Jacques was very proud of his youth; it was his moral guarantee, it permitted him to defend the cause of order with a good conscience; for five years he had assiduously aped all the fashionable dissipations, he had dallied with surrealism, conducted a few agreeable love affairs, and occasionally, before making love, he had inhaled chloride of ethyl from a handkerchief. One fine day, he had reformed: Odette brought him a dowry of six hundred thousand francs. He had written to Mathieu: ‘A man must have the courage to act like everybody else, in order not to be like anybody.’ And he had bought a lawyer’s practice.

‘I’m not bringing your youth up against you,’ said he. ‘On the contrary: you had luck in avoiding certain misdemeanours. Nor, indeed, do I regret my own. The fact is we both had to work off the instincts we inherited from our old brigand of a grandfather. The difference is that I worked them off at one go, while you are dribbling them away, indeed you haven’t yet finished the process. I fancy that fundamentally you were much less of a brigand than I, and that is what is ruining you: your life is an incessant compromise, between an ultimately slight inclination towards revolt and anarchy, and your deeper impulses that direct you towards order, moral health, and I might almost say, routine. The result is that you are still, at your age, an irresponsible student. My dear old chap, look yourself in the face: you are thirty-four years old, you are getting slightly bald — not so bald as I am, I admit — your youth has gone, and the bohemian life doesn’t suit you at all. Besides, what is bohemianism, after all? It was amusing enough a hundred years ago, but today it is simply a name for a handful of eccentrics who are no danger to anybody, and have missed the train. You have attained the age of reason, Mathieu, you have attained the age of reason, or you ought to have done so,’ he repeated with an abstracted air.

‘Pah!’ said Mathieu, ‘Your age of reason is the age of resignation, and I’ve no use for it.’

But Jacques was not listening. His face suddenly cleared and brightened, and he went on briskly: ‘Listen, as I said, I’m going to make you a proposal; if you refuse, you won’t find much difficulty in getting hold of four thousand francs, so I don’t feel any compunction. I am prepared to put ten thousand francs at your disposal if you marry the lady.’

Mathieu had foreseen this move; in any event it provided him with a tolerable exit which would save his face.

‘Thank you, Jacques,’ he said, getting up. ‘You are really too kind, but it won’t do. I don’t say you are wrong all along the line, but if I have to marry one day, it must be because I want to. At this moment it would just be a clumsy effort to get myself out of a mess.’

Jacques got up too. ‘Think it over,’ said he, ‘take your time. Your wife would be very welcome here, as I need not tell you; I have confidence in your choice. Odette will be delighted to welcome her as a friend. Besides, my wife knows nothing of your private life.’

‘I have already thought it over,’ said Mathieu.

‘As you please,’ said Jacques cordially — was he really much put out? And he added: ‘When shall we see you?’

‘I’ll come to lunch on Sunday,’ said Mathieu. ‘Good-bye.’

‘Good-bye,’ said Jacques, ‘and of course if you change your mind, my offer still holds.’

Mathieu smiled and went out without replying. ‘It’s all over,’ he thought to himself, ‘it’s all over.’ He ran down the stairs, he was not exactly in a cheerful mood, but he felt he wanted to burst into song. At this moment, Jacques would be seated in his chair, staring into vacancy, and saying to himself, with a sad, grave smile: ‘I’m worried about that lad, though he has reached the age of reason.’ Or perhaps he had looked in on Odette; ‘I’m distressed about Mathieu. I can’t tell you why. But he isn’t reasonable.’ What would she say? Would she play the part of the mature and thoughtful wife, or would she extricate herself with some brief words of commendation without looking up from her book?

Whereupon Mathieu remembered that he had forgotten to say good-bye to Odette. He felt rather remorseful: indeed he was in a remorseful mood. Was it true? Did he keep Marcelle in a humiliating position? He remembered Marcelle’s violent tirades against marriage. He had indeed proposed it to her. Once. Five years ago. Rather vaguely, in fact, and Marcelle had laughed in his face. ‘Alas,’ he thought, ‘my brother always inspires me with an inferiority complex.’ But no, it wasn’t really that; whatever his own sense of guilt, Mathieu had never failed to defend his position against Jacques. ‘But here is a damned fellow who makes me sick. When I cease to feel ashamed in his company, I’m ashamed for his sake. Well, well, one is never finished with one’s family, it’s like the smallpox that catches you as a child and leaves you marked for life.’ There was a cheap café at the corner of the Rue Montorgueil. He went in, and found the telephone box in a dark recess. He felt his heart flutter as he unhooked the receiver.