Assignment in Brittany (12 page)

Unlike the rest of the furniture, it was a rough, amateur piece of work. Whoever had made it had been impatient. The shelves hadn’t been sandpapered sufficiently before the first undercoat of stain, and the varnish had been scantily applied. The top and sides had been finished well enough; viewed that way, it wasn’t a bad job at all. But the man who had made it hadn’t bothered about the rest of it. He had probably thought it didn’t matter because the books themselves would hide his unfinished work. At the moment, standing empty as it was, the bookcase looked as hideous as a child with ringworm.

By dinner-time the task of sorting the books was only half done. Albertine, bringing some food to the American in the store-room, halted in amazement at the litter surrounding Hearne on the floor. He followed her obediently downstairs, and ate his meal in silence. His thoughts would have increased Albertine’s amazement. After some attempts to talk about the potatoes which he had bruised yesterday in his digging, she was left to concentrate on the fire and the soup-pot. “Back to your old ways,” she had said sourly, and the remark only added to Hearne’s thoughtfulness. He finished the food hastily, hardly concealing his impatience to be back in his room. As he mounted the stairs, he found his excitement growing. Albertine was calling after him something about pictures on his wall. He paused on the top step to shout down “Later! Later!” and then he was once more among the piles of books.

But he wasn’t alone. The American had hobbled to the connecting door as he heard him return.

“Hello,” he said in a mixture of surprise and pleasure as he looked at the books on the floor. “Can I help?”

“No. It’s all right. It will be bad for your feet; you must rest.”

“As you like,” Myles said stiffly. “Thought I could lend a hand, that’s all.”

Hearne relented. He lifted the small pile of fairly recent novels which he had discarded as being of no interest to him, and carried them into the store-room. “Here’s something to read,” he said. “You shouldn’t try to walk about so much.”

“To be perfectly frank, that was all I wanted...just something to read. Thanks.” He looked at the novels. “If,” he added, “if my French will take me that far.”

“It will be good for you to read French. You’ve still a journey to make.”

“Yes, I wanted to ask you about that.”

Hearne looked at his watch. “I’ll be finished in one hour, or perhaps two hours at the most. I shall come and talk with you then. Okay?”

Myles laughed unexpectedly. “Okay,” he echoed, and laughed again.

Hearne closed the connecting door firmly behind him. “Now,” he said to himself with considerable satisfaction, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

The books were indeed a strange collection. As he had pulled them out of the wardrobe that morning, Hearne had noticed two things. One part of this small library was formed of old books, badly printed in eye-straining type. Their bindings ripped at a touch, the paper was yellowing not so much with age as with cheapness. But the other part, and by far the greater part, had been bought within the last two years. Handsome volumes they were, with binding and paper and type to shame the older books. The first thought that struck Hearne was that Corlay must have been making money then with his teaching. The older books, obviously second- or third-hand, were a monument to the days when Madame Corlay had pinched and scraped to let her son stay at the University. Then, when he had a job, he had begun to buy himself some new books. It was just after this solution that Hearne saw the signature on each fly-leaf, together with the date when Corlay had added each book to his bookshelves. The solution crumbled away. Hearne examined all the new books methodically; his mind was a strange mixture of excitement, dawning suspicion, and dismay.

The earliest date on any of these newer books was the twentieth of January, 1938. By that time Corlay had been out of his temporary teaching job for over six months. For six months he had been living on the farm, dependent on Albertine’s work for his food, on his mother’s generosity for his pocket-money. Hearne had seen enough of the life on this farm to know that
there was little pocket-money for anyone. Madame Corlay’s dress had been of the ageless variety, of a cut and colour which a careful woman would wear for years. Her one piece of jewellery, the gold chain and brooch, had obviously been inherited like the house and furniture. The piano was a relic of the hard years in Rennes. There was no wireless set, the usual consolation for an invalid.

Hearne rose on impulse, and went over to the wardrobe again. He counted the jackets and suits thoughtfully: more than he would expect for a man in Corlay’s position. He fingered the materials; they felt as new as they looked. Cheap clothes, imitation smart clothes, none of them any older than two years. Hearne was thinking. I don’t like this at all. Perhaps Corlay had saved enough money somehow; perhaps there had been a legacy; perhaps he had won a lottery. Perhaps any of these. Perhaps. Hearne shook his head slowly, and walked back to the books.

The second thing which had startled Hearne that morning was that Corlay had rarely finished reading a book. Or else the man was a genius and could read through uncut pages. In the whole collection, there were only about ten books with the pages entirely cut. The rest had pages cut for the first chapters, and occasionally some pages cut at the end. But not one of these books had been read right through.

Hearne found himself looking at the bookcase. I bet he made that, he thought; made it, and then lost interest in it before he had it properly finished. The wood was sound, and the design was an attempt at a piece of modern furniture. Corlay must have seen some pictures of Swedish modern. That was what he had copied. Grand ideas he liked. Grand ideas... The phrase
haunted Hearne. He shook himself free of speculation and went back once more to the books. The beginning of the riddle would be solved with them, he felt.

He would begin with the earliest volumes, and here Corlay’s passion for inscribing his name and the date would prove invaluable. Hearne laid the books in rough groupings, according to the date on their fly-leaves. Each heap of books on the floor represented a year of Corlay’s intellectual life. The first book belonged to 1928: a school prize for ancient history. Next came 1930: a school prize for medieval history, and three text-books on French history, with the sections on Brittany closely underlined and annotated. By 1932, Corlay was at the University of Rennes; and for the next four years the books were texts on either French literature or history, or potted biographies of famous Bretons such as Jacques Cartier, Surcouf, Mahé de La Bourdonnais, or abridged cheap editions of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Brizeux-Renan, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Abélard. And these were all Bretons, too, reflected Hearne.

It was just at this point that Albertine had appeared with food for the American, and had reminded him sharply that dinner had been ready for half an hour. If only, he had thought, as he followed Albertine downstairs, if only people would stop being well-meaning, if only they’d leave him alone.

But now, at last, both Albertine and the American had been settled.

“Now,” he said to the books with considerable satisfaction. “Now...”

10

POEMS FOR E.

Hearne adjusted himself comfortably on crossed legs, and reached for the 1937 pile of books. There were magazines, too, in this lot, but the subject was uniform. It was politics.

Corlay had definitely been interested in Breton nationalism. That was hardly surprising after his earlier choice in history and literature. But he had also now branched into Royalist ideas. Perhaps he had thought that Brittany’s cause could be best served by a restoration of a King in France. And then, in the summer of 1937, he had ended his subscriptions to Royalist publications as if he had had a sudden revulsion. After that summer, there were no books or magazines on the Royalist side. In fact, from the summer of 1937 until the twentieth of January, 1938, there were no books bought at all. That was when he was unemployed. Then, in January of 1938, began the new series of books—first editions, modern, well-bound, well-printed. But, Hearne reminded himself, Corlay was then
still unemployed. He sat and looked at these recent additions to the library, the witnesses of Corlay’s unexpected prosperity. As a last excuse, he thought that a friend might have sent them to Corlay. A friend...but a peculiar kind of friend. For these books dealt with the decadence of democracy, the future for men of action, the new order in economy and politics.

“Well,” said Hearne, “well, now.”

He felt he could do with a cigarette, or a drink. He rose and went to the window. The air was heavy with the smell of the fruit-trees after rain. But at least it was clean. He looked at the pile of Fascist literature on the floor: at least the air was clean.

There still remained one heap of books to be examined. They looked like copy-books. Hearne picked them up one by one, glancing quickly but methodically through their pages. Corlay’s writing was flamboyant, but in spite of the excesses of sweeps and curls the pen-marked pages were easy to read. Most of the note-books belonged to his university days. At first, he had been a prolific note-taker and underliner, but the lecture notes tailed off as his classes progressed. By the end of a year they were short and uninterested, and the margins were filled with the variations of the Bertrand Corlay signature.

But two note-books really attracted Hearne. The first was a desultory diary, or, rather, a series of condensed complaints. Corlay had been an unhappy young man: little, if anything, had pleased him. He hadn’t liked his school-teaching job—the pupils were uniformly stupid, his fellow-teachers were nincompoops. But when, he lost that job, then his scorn switched to the unfairness of a Government which preferred a Paris to a Rennes degree. There was a hint of “victimisation,” of persecution for his nationalist beliefs. And yet, when he came back to live on
this Breton farm, it was strange that he seemed still unhappier. This time he railed at the stupidities of the Breton peasant, the banalities of country life with its mixture of coarseness and superstition. Occasionally there would be a page concentrated on the Corlay family. He went to some lengths to identify his ancestors: all of them seemed either very noble or very brave or very artistic, or all three. His last entry, dated the seventh of January, 1938, stated flatly: “It is intolerable that we should have been forced to live like animals. Once our name was famous, but now we must be content to eat and sleep our way to death. I will not be content.” That was the end of the diary.

It was nice that he could eat, anyway, Hearne thought grimly. That was more than some families were able to do.

He carried the second note-book over to the window. He felt he needed some more fresh air to help him finish this job. So Corlay would not be content...

The second book contained Corlay’s own writings. They amounted to exactly eleven pages—the sum total of his work from August 1937, when he had come to live on his mother’s farm, until January 1938. January 1938. The date haunted Hearne. Something pretty powerful had struck Corlay’s life in that month. January 1938. Hearne roused himself to look at the eleven pages of poems and epigrams. It was just as he feared: Corlay would probably have made a good farmer. His curse was his desire to live in the Ritz, to be a Breton without living in Brittany, to be the best poet explorer film-star orator artist statesman tennis-champion scientist of his time. He was mentally aged fourteen, except that that slandered most fourteen-year-olds.

The joke is on me, Hearne thought savagely, and went back
to the books. Corlay’s possibilities were more than either he or Matthews had bargained for. He began to jam the books into the bookcase. Automatically he chose the heaviest volumes for the two lowest shelves, but the books he had tried to thrust into the second bottom shelf wouldn’t fit. They overlapped the edge by two inches. Hearne struck at them impatiently with his fist.
The Myth of the Twentieth Century... The Myth of the
... “Damn you all to hell,” he said, and gave a blow with the side of his wrist to their bold titles. His wrist hurt, but the books didn’t move. They couldn’t, for the shelf was not wide enough for their breadth: the shelf could only hold the smaller octavo-size books. Whoever heard of anyone making a bookcase with the small books on the second bottom shelf? And Corlay had taken some trouble about that. The back of that second bottom shelf had been blocked in to hold the smaller volumes securely. Blocked in... Hearne’s fingers lightly tapped the back of the shelf. It was of lighter wood, possibly a thin plywood. Between it and the real back of solid wood there must be a space. But how to get into that space was another question. Corlay must have been a cleverer carpenter that Hearne had imagined.

But he needn’t have credited Corlay with too much skill. As he pushed and shoved and pressed the false back with the palm of his hand, it suddenly slid along grooves in the two shelves which it had separated. The end of the plywood panel came out of the side of the bookcase and stuck there incongruously, quivering with the force of Hearne’s effort. It was as easy as that. He pushed the panel back into position, and looked at the side of the bookcase. Simple, but neat enough, he decided. An imitation join going up the whole length of the bookcase, like
the stripe on a Guardsman’s trouser leg, had disguised Corlay’s subterfuge.

“Cunning chap I’m supposed to be,” Hearne said. Cunning: still another aspect of the simple Corlay, the misunderstood genius. Hearne grinned. “I really begin to think I’m a bit of a stinker,” he added. He pushed the panel sideways once more, slowly, carefully this time, so that the plywood board wouldn’t crack up. This secret compartment might have its uses. It had, as he found out when the panel was slipped aside to its full length. There, in front of his hand, lay two note-books and some sheets of paper fastened together with an elastic band. As he removed his discovery, he replaced his own notes in the neat recess. And before he closed the false shelf-back once more, he retrieved his revolver and map from the unlocked table drawer. They would be safer inside that bookcase, if any stray Germans had the inspiration to search for weapons. Then he stacked about twenty of the narrower volumes along that shelf. They would be a safeguard if the American got tired of vicarious passion in high places, and abandoned the over-complicated emotions of the novels for a walk, perhaps a talk, in this room. Hearne filled the other shelves, too, for good measure. The room looked neat once more; that should keep Albertine happy.