Cloudless May (15 page)

After all, why wish to be marked off from the generations who made this a French village? French not simply in its walls and their formidable clumsy gates, its fifteenth-century château. But French still more in the roots plunging deeply into its earth, in the dead who never left their descendants' elbows, jogging them when they fell asleep in old beds, when they married neighbours and second cousins in the twelfth-century parish church, when they used the same words, when they were born in low-ceilinged rooms, when they died. All this death thrusting into them toughened the shabby houses to stand together against the fierce light. They were tougher than the strong columns of the church. They, and not the church, were France's immortality.

A soldier when he set foot on the narrow street at the top of
the hill, at the other end of it Rienne was a child, the child of his village. A child, and a million other Frenchmen, offering in this same moment the same unseen gesture of respect and love. The warmth of a million summer noons, the stillness of a million nights without clouds, break like a bubble on the surface of France's eternity. . . . Or so Rienne felt at this moment. . . .

The cobblestones of the street scorched his feet. He met the shrewd ironical glance of an old woman sitting outside her house, and felt abashed. As child, as soldier, what did he know that was not better known to this woman's little finger when it touched the wood of chairs or the hard flesh of the earth?

His own house stood outside the village. He spoke of it as a house out of politeness to the cousin who left it to him. It was of brick and timber. It had one room, with a loft in the pointed roof. There were two windows in the room, one beside the door, another facing it in the far wall, beside another door. In four hundred years the house had had time to settle down, but it had kept its air of distrust and innocence.

His sister was standing beside the open doorway, watching for him. He quickened his steps.

Mlle Rienne was fifteen years older than her brother. She was sixty-three. When their mother died she was taken to Arles by a distant relative, who brought her up as a peasant, and without being brutal neglected her and almost starved her. Agathe wrote to her brother once every year, but it never entered her head to complain. She had not seen him since he was a week old, and when he was twenty-five she was still writing to him in the words used by one child to another. That year, for the first time, he came to see her. Perhaps he had expected to find his mother, with the fresh mouth and blue eyes of a miniature he had. He waited in a sitting-room. The door opened. A middle-aged farm-hand came in, stooping, her face blackened by the sun. She spoke to him awkwardly. “Brother. . . .”

He had only his pay as lieutenant. He took her away with him, back to Thouédun. A year later, when he inherited his house, he installed her in it. Her love, all these years nursed for an infant, now moved seriously and clumsily, like a peasant making the stations of the Cross, to the young soldier; she never spoke of him as “my brother,” but always as “Lieutenant
Rienne.” And then “Captain Rienne.” When he became Colonel she imagined he stood next to Foch.

“Abbé Letourneau is waiting for you,” she murmured.

“Where is he, Agathe?” Rienne asked.

“Why, where do you think? He's in the back.”

Rienne went into the house. There were rugs on the tiled floor, chests of drawers—he had no idea what was in them; Agathe's clothes would barely fill a drawer. The canopy of the bed was fastened to the beams of the ceiling. He stooped to go through the low door at the other end of the room. Out here in the scrap of ground which went with the house were Agathe's herbs, with a few pinks and larkspur. There was a well, a flowering chestnut—and his friend the vicar of Thouédun. Apart from the bees arguing, there was an immense column of silence, reaching the sky. The Abbé had dropped off to sleep.

Rienne stood quietly looking at him. The priest's heavy body sprawled in his chair, his hands—shaped by generations of peasants to grasp a plough—hung to the ground. He slept as soundly as he used to sleep in the trenches, where he planted himself in sleep every night and had to be dragged up by the roots. In 1914 he had just been made vicar of Thouédun. He was twenty-nine. All the devotion, the hard patience, and the arrogance of his nature, qualities which made him an acceptable priest, served him when he became a lieutenant in an infantry regiment. Rienne was his superior officer for a time. Once, when he had volunteered for a dangerous job, Rienne refused to send him. Letourneau was coldly furious.

“You'll excuse me,” he said, “if I point out that none of the other officers is as fitted to do the job as I am.”

“I decide that,” Rienne said. He smiled. “And what are your special qualifications?”

“Eh? What? Why, I can see in the dark.”

It was true.

Rienne recalled this. Letourneau's face when he slept was alert, fully present. He must still be seeing in the dark, Rienne thought. . . . The priest's thick boots were worn-out and covered with dust. He was shabby.

“Wake up,” Rienne said.

No answer, and no movement.

“Gontran,” Rienne said gently.

He had discovered that his friend's Christian name, which no one used, travelled by a short cut to his brain. There was perhaps a child always awake, always listening and waiting, at the end of the short cut. Letourneau opened his eyes and sat up.

“Oh, it's you.”

“Were you expecting someone else?”

Letourneau did not answer. He shook himself, yawned, then said smiling,

“I'm like an old horse, I fall asleep on my feet.”

Rienne shrugged his shoulders. It was useless to go on repeating: You work too hard. He brought out a third chair from the house and sat down. They sat for a few minutes in silence in the warm evening. In the room behind them old Agathe went to and fro as quietly as though she were setting snares.

At last Rienne spoke.

“Do you find people hating the war?”

“Peasants hate all wars,” the priest said.

“I mean more than that. Are they talking much against this war?”

“You know,” Letourneau said drily, “they wouldn't talk to me about it. Not frankly. Not as they talk among themselves.”

Rienne looked at him. His friend's face, lined, sunburned, heavy, was slightly malicious. Vexed, he was going to question Letourneau sharply. Agathe came out, and said in a timid voice.

“Where is Monsieur Mourey? When is he coming?”

“I thought I should find him here,” Rienne said. “We'll wait a few minutes more, Agathe.”

She went back into the house. Rienne turned to his friend.

“Do you realise that you yourself have never spoken to me about it frankly?”

“Why should I?” Letourneau said. “You know what I think. We shall be defeated. . . . It's time now that we paid for the centuries of hating each other. The rich hate and fear the poor, the poor envy and hate the rich. Neither of them believe any longer that they'll be equals in the City of God. Liberal philosophers imagined that if men were fed they would be content to live quietly, without God . . . they're shocked to find that men without God hate one another. But of course
they do. It's natural. Love is always love of God. . . . Poor France. . . .”

“So, if you were still twenty-nine,” Rienne said drily, “you wouldn't fight?”

“Certainly I would fight,” Letourneau said. “We French are fighting for our lives.”

“Exactly!”

The priest looked at him soberly. “There aren't enough of us. Forty million of us Frenchmen against sixty-five million Germans. . . . The young women who said, No children, were getting us ready for defeat. They're no more to blame than the others. . . . Just think! Everyday life was pleasanter here than anywhere in the world. It wasn't starved of its nature, it wasn't hurried. I've seen an old woman sit savouring her life like a workman sitting over a glass of wine at the end of his day. ...”

“We ought to be all the readier to fight.”

“You're wrong, Bonamy. Men don't gladly give up a glass of wine . . . or an omelette with herbs in it... or an argument in the sun, if they believe it's all they'll ever have. Why should they?”

“For France,” Rienne said.

They heard heavy, very heavy, footsteps in the room. Jean Mourey appeared. He threw himself into a chair, and sighed noisily, and smiled.

“Heavens, that's good,” he murmured.

“What made you late?” Rienne asked.

“Just as I was dismissing my class, your friend the Prefect turned up. Don't ask me why. He kept me talking for an hour.”

Jean Mourey was a schoolmaster in Seuilly. He was short, slight; an air of youth was cancelled on his face by deeply-cut lines of fatigue. In fact, at forty-five he had the nervous sympathies, the exaggeration, of a young man; but he was tired. He had used up during the War, the last war, more than half a lifetime of energy, devotion, happiness. He imagined he hated war. It was because he had cared for it too much. The moments when he had seized, out of exhaustion, out of danger, a piercing joy, remained in his mind not as they had been, not as happiness, not as the sudden ecstasy, but as disappointment and loss. They were always there. Always the unseen standard he used to measure his days—which always fell short. And the greater the
effort he had made, the heavier his sense of loss. Only simple joys could reach him and pierce his heart, the first days of hot sun, the reveille waking him—he slept near the barracks.

After the war he married, and after a long hesitation—he was afraid of not being able to meet the demands made by an untouched human being. . . . He thought he was a failure as a schoolmaster, and worked himself to death to do well: he was always surprised and moved when a young man wrote from his military school or his university a letter beginning, “Thanks to what you taught me, I . . .”

He allowed himself an hour a night—usually the last—to add a page to the book he was writing, a history of Seuilly. It was, although written in the driest prose, an immense poem. All the tenderness he withheld from himself, and from any woman, he gave to the old streets, the buildings, the bridges over the Loire; he could not pass an old house without brushing its walls with his fingers; he knew intimately the past of every building, it split open and showed him under the husk of age and ruin an entirely fresh face, marked lightly by its makers. He talked to these long-dead makers and learned from them secrets they had told no one when they were alive; he knew why the anonymous sculptor of the twelfth century had given his female angels the features of a young boy; they were all of them portraits of his dead brother. There were days when not the past only but the future spoke to him, and he saw, in the bodies of young girls passing him in the street, the gestures and smiles of children who would stand where he was standing, looking at the bright Loire, when he had long been dead. Yet he believed his book was a failure. . . . He never spoke of it. . . .

“Jean,” Letourneau said, “you walk like a cavalryman. I never heard anyone make so much noise. What do you weigh?”

“Eight stone,” Mourey said.

“They must all be in your feet. Now I, I weigh thirteen, but

I walk reasonably——”

“Like a poacher,” Mourey said.

Mlle Rienne came to the door and told them that supper was ready. They went indoors. On the scrubbed walnut table were three bowls of soup, bread, two bottles of cheap Vouvray, a round thick goat cheese, a basket of wild strawberries. She seated herself at one end of the table, but only to watch that
everything went properly. She would never eat with her brother's guests.

Mourey tasted the soup.

“Mademoiselle Agathe,” he said, “you make the finest soup in the world. I was once for two months on the staff of a Division—I was thrown out in the end for not keeping the general happy. . . . We had a famous chef to cook for us, bu he never turned us up soups like yours. I swear it.”

“It's quite true,” Abbé Letourneau murmured.

Agathe reddened with joy.

Three aeroplanes passed over the house, making the spoons and knives rattle. Bold because she had been praised, Agathe said,

“I never used to mind the noise of an aeroplane. Now I can't help thinking that men are being killed.”

“Not Frenchmen,” Mourey said.

“Thank God.”

“If you like,” Mourey said. “But in fact we're not at war. I believe we ought to be. I believe we're making a hideous blunder.”

He looked at Rienne.

“Yes, I agree with you,” Rienne said quietly. “We allowed the Germans to slaughter Poles without sending an aeroplane. Now we're allowing them ample peace to prepare a blow against us. It's wrong.”

“It's better than casualty lists,” Agathe said. She glanced humbly at the Abbé. Surely he would support her?

Letourneau said gently,

“No, your brother is right. War is always hideous. But defeat—when it means barbarians destroying France—and without our finding the energy to attack them——”

“Do you know why?” Mourey interrupted. He struck the table with his fist. “The rottenness starts at the top. What does a man like Thiviers care about France? What does he know, yes, about France? Less, far less than any old woman dying in the bed she was born and married in.”

“It's not so simple,” Rienne said.

Letourneau broke pieces of bread and swallowed them whole. “It's simple and deep enough,” he said vigorously. “Ragged starving soldiers will defend a country they trust, but who
trusts whom now? The rich have forgotten their duty, the others know they are being cheated. They could demand honest leaders, they could revolt. . . . There aren't enough Frenchmen with faith in God or in France to revolt in time.”

“I don't believe that,” Rienne said in his quiet voice. “We shall have to pay bitterly for our inaction, but we can pay. In September I saw a soldier of the last war joining up with his son, and the woman watching them as they went was mother and wife. France is a closed circle. The Germans will break in at some point but it won't do them any good. You wait. I don't think it will be long now.”