Cloudless May (14 page)

He tried to attend to his hostess. She was sitting beside him and seemed to him to be talking nonsense. In fact, she was. Distracted because the guest she had been expecting the whole evening had not turned up yet, Mme Huet could only just stop herself from jumping up to push aside the people who came between her and the door leading to the landing. She was unable to sit still any longer. She beckoned her sister-in-law, pushed her into a chair next the general and fled. The old general pressed his hand on the table as though he meant to stand up. It was only a polite gesture. When he did stand up, the effort would have to carry him out of the room and downstairs to his car.

“Please don't move,” Léa de Chavigny said, “I can see you're tired.”

Piriac glanced at her sallow face, stupid and jolly. He had forgotten who she was. But she was obviously a Jewess, and he was faintly surprised when—she must have forgotten to prepare a second subject for this evening—she began about the need for a religion. She was sincere. As sincere as anyone can be who talks without knowing what the words she uses—poverty, thrift, sacrifice—mean.

“There is only one religion,” Piriac said in his slow precise voice.

“But of course. But that's what I'm saying. We must bring the Church back into our lives, and into the schools and the professions, don't you know. I'm terribly anxious.”

The general was touched. He blinked at her, tilting his heavy body forward and supporting it with his hands on his knees.

“We shall alter all that,” he said slowly. “The day when I see a king crowned in Rheims . . . may not be far off. . . . Have patience. ...”

A young man—but not the young man Mme Huet was expecting—arrived. He stood hesitating in the doorway. This young man had a thin face, which seemed to be made of dark wood boldly and roughly planed; strong dark eyebrows formed two points on his forehead: he kept an engaging smile at the ends of his mouth, ready to bring it forward when he saw his hostess. She was nowhere to be seen. He was making for the
buffet when someone who had followed him up the staircase seized his arm. He jumped round. It was the Mayor.

“I came here to see you,” Labenne grumbled. “Why weren't you in your office this morning? My secretary telephoned to you a dozen times. . . . Come into the next room, I want to talk to you.”

Without a by-your-leave Labenne pushed through the groups in his way. He made for the far end of the ballroom, near the orchestra. The young man, Gabriel Derval, followed him.

The editor of the
New Order
was well under thirty, he would have been mobilised and sent directly to the front but for the trouble Labenne took to get him exempted for some ill-defined work under the municipal council. He was able to edit his paper and work at a book he was writing—a plan for the regeneration of France. He had never managed to put together a rabbit-hutch or boil a kettle, and he was in debt, but his far too agile brain furnished him with dozens of schemes for saving his country from falling to pieces. He wrote incisively, always ready to give up a principle for the sake of a phrase.

“What is it?” he asked impudently—when they were seated on a couch directly under the music. “I sent you my next week's editorial.”

“It must be rewritten.”

“Why?”

Like a dancer, Derval was able to pout with the whole of his handsome body; he became nervous and sulky. The trick did not impress Labenne. His eyes, slits between a low forehead and steep flat cheek-bones, turned away after one bored glance. He said nothing, and Derval became tired of his pose and dropped it. He watched the dancers instead. They were almost all young girls; he chose three to look at closely each time they came round—sturdy young women of the type he preferred, rounded, supple, their faces naturally rosy with the exercise, thin muscular legs. Their freshness and immaturity, the air half beckoning, half defiant that they kept without knowing it, gave him acute pleasure—even though they belonged to his past, to garden parties of sisters and cousins in his parents' shabby garden, and not to the grandiose future he had planned for himself. Perhaps it was just because this past was still alive and warm in him, and the future more than half stifled in its
cocoon of schemes, that he enjoyed watching them. They are harmless, his mind warned him, they would never let you down.

“I gather,” Labenne said, “that—again—you're short of money.”

“It's hardly my fault,” Derval exclaimed. “It's a shocking piece of bad faith. . . . Simply to drop me, when I was relying on them . . . it's treacherous and dishonest. So like an Italian.”

“You'll have to find another way of adding to your salary,” Labenne said placidly.

“I know. In the meantime, it's awkward.”

“Listen. It's no use asking old So-and-so. But perhaps I can make it good. Are you prepared to do a little work for me?”

“Of course,” Derval said eagerly. “But when haven't I done my best? I owe you so much. I——”

Labenne cut him short.

“This editorial of yours. It's a sickening boost of the Prefect. . . . Yes, yes, I know we've been supporting him and all his works. But I haven't been doing it out of charity, you know. If I've changed my mind about him, I have a good reason. . . . Come, you're not going to tell me you're surprised? You—a man of the world!”

Derval was ashamed of the feeling of discomfort that had seized him.

“You might tell me a little more about it,” he said timidly.

Labenne looked at him with a touch of malice. He began speaking in a friendly, gentle voice, with an air of candour.

“You're ambitious. I know it, I approve of it—a young man without ambitions, what earthly good is he? Ah, Gabriel, my boy, you had all the advantages I missed—a good middle-class upbringing, you'll inherit a little money. You're intelligent. It's men like you who ought to be the masters of the future....” He broke off, smiling and rolling his eyes.

Derval frowned in the effort to understand, prepared to believe anything the Mayor told him. He was desperately anxious not to seem ignorant or naïve.

“Your duty, my boy, is to discredit romantics like Mathieu. And our ambitious Prefect. It's a duty to the country. . . . We must be discreet. Discretion, my boy, is half the battle. The other half is timing.” Labenne was pleased with this maxim, and stopped to savour it for a moment. “No crude methods, my
boy. No attack. Simply insinuate that our excellent, our admirable Prefect, is over-zealous. That makes it easier, eh? Next week we'll warn people against panic measures—and so on and so forth.”

He squeezed the young man's arm, smiling into his face with the frankest kindness and good-humour.

Telling Derval to go and amuse himself, the Mayor sat on alone, forming in his gross body a hard ball of contempt: if he could spit it out among all these cautious lives it would explode. Which of these apes knew he was living in a moment as fatal as the one in which a surgeon exposes the heart of his patient? Not one. They were useless.

He caught sight in the next room of the Minister talking to General Woerth. Those two may know, he thought. Swallowing his contempt, he walked through the room, nodding and smiling, and walked down the flamboyantly handsome staircase. He felt like Samson in the house of the Philistines. But he was not blind. ...

The Minister had been talking to Woerth for several minutes before he decided to speak frankly. With great delicacy, he confessed to Woerth that until the last hour he had opposed the war. Why? Because this was not the moment. He spoke of France in the tone he would use of an invalid who had disobeyed every honest doctor and got into the hands of quacks.

“We may even be defeated,” he said; “let's face it.”

Woerth did not answer directly. He touched the Minister's elbow to make him look round. Émile Bergeot had just come into the room.

“Invariably he comes late to parties,” Woerth said drily. “He wants to give the impression of working hard. An ingenious fellow. He has everyone under his thumb, though not all of them at the same time.” He looked the Minister in the eye. “As to what you were saying—you might drop him a hint to keep his fingers out of civil defence. The defence of Seuilly is in our hands. A civilian is a nuisance.”

He turned away deliberately as the Prefect came towards them. The Minister held out both hands with a friendly smile.

“I thought I was going to miss you,” he said gaily.

Bergeot was grateful for his warmth. His spirits—he was deathly tired—rose, and he spoke eagerly.

“I had to make up for this morning's holiday,” he said. “We're incredibly busy. I want to prepare people psychologically for the danger of air raids. If they're not prepared we shall have panic.”

“Nonsense, my dear fellow, nonsense,” the Minister said. He laughed and tapped the Prefect's shoulder. “Don't waste your time and money on it. The war won't come here.”

Bergeot swallowed his mortification. He began a protest, but a feeling of shame and discouragement seized him and he was silent. He had, he thought, made sure of official approval. To hear that the Minister found him ridiculous and ill-informed dismayed him. He struggled against his sense of disgrace.

“It can't do any harm to be prepared,” he said coldly.

The Minister yawned. “Forgive me, my dear Prefect,” he said, smiling. “I'm dying of sleep. I really must go.”

Propped in the doorway, Mme Huet was looking at her guests with an air of astonished insolence. The Minister approached her to say good-night. Scarcely lowering her voice, she said,

“Aren't they extraordinary?”

“Really? Do you think so?” he said, amused. “Why did you invite so many?”

“They expect it at least once a year. . . . You were asking me why I don't live here, If I were a private person I could. But to have to be civil to these people! Impossible!”

She was over-excited and haggard. The Minister glanced at her with cool curiosity.

“Get rid of them and go to bed.”

“Yes, good-night,” she said absently, giving him her hand. “Perhaps when I see you again this abominable war will be over.”

“I hope so.”

Seeing the Minister leave, the other guests began almost to. rush away. No one wanted to be the last to walk down the wide staircase and plunge, evading the shabby old majordomo, into the park and the night—which, besides being perfectly fresh, did not have to get up in the morning. There was a line of cars in the drive, but many of the guests had to walk to their homes; these did not like being overtaken and forced to press themselves against a hedge.

A young officer came into the hall through the door opened
for Mme Huet's guests to leave. He stared at them with an admirable air of astonishment, as though he could scarcely believe that people were going away already. At the foot of the staircase with her daughter, Mme de Freppel felt vexed and disappointed to see him arrive now—when she was taking Catherine home.

“Did you see who it was?” she said to Catherine.

“No,” the girl said, yawning.

“It was Saint-Jouin . . . the Comte de Saint-Jouin.”

Catherine did not answer. Leaning forward, she pressed her head against the window of the car, trying in the darkness to verify the sum she had been doing all evening in her head; she was surprised—she had such a good memory—to find how much of it she had got wrong.

Saint-Jouin took the stairs three at a time, smiling right and left on departing guests. He found Mme Huet in the empty ballroom. The musicians were crawling out, one after another, through a gap under the lowest rank of flowers—they were the colour of mushrooms coming up in the grass.

As soon as she saw him, she drew him reproachfully into the small ante-room.

“Why have you come at this hour?”

“My dear Andrée,” he said, smiling, “did you really think I could spend an evening with your husband's supporters? I've only come to see you—my God, how haggard you look!”

She had too much self-assurance, and she was too well trained to let him see that she suffered. Smiling, she tried to recall one, only one, of those biting and apparently spontaneous witticisms she used in Paris. They had given her her reputation for cleverness. None came to her help. She shrugged her shoulders and said with perfect simplicity,

“I'm forty. How do you expect I can stand up to these appalling evenings?”

Colonel Rienne left the barracks early that evening. He was going to spend the night with his sister, and he decided to walk the three and a half miles to the village.

Thouédun sleeps on the edge of a hill. Its thirteenth-century ramparts protect it from everything except progress—which would have destroyed it if it had been worth while. At the foot of the hill, the river, the fortunate tributary of the Loire, sleeps still more deeply; even the old mill leaves it be, to choke itself with water reeds and lilies. As he always did, Rienne leaned against the parapet of the bridge to look into this rich gentle field of water. Birds—the trees were full of birds—skimmed the points of the reeds, hurled themselves under the arches of the bridge, with an inconsequence they have been a million years learning. A million years after the last aeroplane has foundered in the last trickle of human blood they will not have learned a single new trick or forgotten any of the regular ones. A superb sun, on a level with the roof of the château, filled all this narrow valley with light and warmth.

Rienne walked slowly up the road. Whenever he came back to this village where he was born, he felt smaller and less real. The few and narrow streets, the ramparts, the old houses, not many of them so high as the ramparts, claimed back everything he had taken from them to fit himself for the world. He had left here so many dreams, so much unnoticed happiness, so many terrible childish griefs, that if he had wanted to be a poet he need only have mobilised them. . . . He was content to come back as a soldier. A soldier, moreover, who would never be well known, never leave on these streets any marks so clear as those he made on them by his footsteps when he was a child.