Cloudless May (2 page)

“How fond you are of him,” Mme de Freppel said, smiling.

“Why not?”

She invited him to sit down, but he remained standing, his long thin body quite rigid, head bent forward. He did not intend to stay a second longer than necessary. A little malice came into her eyes, but she looked away and began to talk about Émile, his courage, the energy with which he made his hand felt in every village of the department.

“The peasants know him as well as they know their mayor; they write asking him to settle quarrels, they tell him what Jules and Jean write from the regiment. Yesterday an old woman came with a single egg and a marigold for him. He answers every letter, he sees everybody; you'd think he had nothing to do but reconcile two bad-tempered old men who have been quarrelling over a square yard of mud. I see them leaving sometimes; he walks across the courtyard with a hand on each of their shoulders. . . . 'Goodbye, sir, goodbye,' they call out, smiling at him like schoolgirls, waving their hands:
‘we shan't forget you' . . . and off they go, the old fools, and Émile rushes back to his room to finish the work they interrupted. When I scold him—‘Why do you let them?'—he says, ‘Oh, they're all children.' And he works until midnight and can't sleep.”

Charmed in spite of himself, Rienne sat down. After all, if she could appreciate how good Émile was, she must be good herself. He noticed that she had tears in her eyes. She got rid of them, and listened smiling as he told her in his precise voice that Émile was stubbornly ambitious and a bad judge of people. I know both these things better than you do, Mme de Freppel thought. She kept her eyes fixed gently on Rienne, half admiring him for his simplicity, aware that at the back of his cool glance his mind was acute and balanced. She was not at her ease with him; he made her feel ignorant. And this morning she had fastened the torn strap of her chemise with a safety-pin; she imagined he knew it.

She interrupted him quickly.

“Do you know I have people coming to dinner tonight? Will you come? Please do. Dinner is at half-past eight. Émile has promised me to be in time.”

Not wishing to hurt her—since she appreciated Émile—Rienne said he would come.

As soon as he saw Rienne, Bergeot closed the file he had opened, and stood up. “Let's go outside. I've been in this room since eight this morning.”

He walked in front of Rienne along passages and down a staircase leading to the south terrace. Not above middle height, he held himself well and walked with a nervous quickness; all his movements were abrupt and lively. Looking at him in the light, Rienne saw that he was grey with fatigue. But he was smiling.

“I've had a grand day,” he said. “You know the trouble we've had with the farmers the whole of this spring. Well, I've
settled it! I had the worst and wealthiest offenders in my room and I talked, my God, Bonamy, how I talked! I demolished all their arguments and made them angry, then made them laugh, then talked to them about the war, and all but one of them came round. At one o'clock I took them down to lunch and brought out bottles of Rablay and Quarts de Chaumes. The last sinner repented. It's all over, I've won.... And another blessing—even more merciful. Our Grosdidier has at last taken his liver to Vichy, the first time for three years. I'm absolute. I enjoy all my divine right.”

Rienne smiled. When they were children, Emile had practised his diplomacy not only on older people who rewarded him with francs, but on his schoolfellows, so that whatever he did was right. But there was always one boy, usually his senior and hard-working, who refused to be charmed and cost Émile more in irritation than the respect of the others flattered him. This austere ràle of irritant was filled by his deputy, the general secretary of the Prefecture: at least a quarter of Émile's energy and ingenuity was spent on outflanking him. It was probably the strain on M. Grosdidier himself which had ruined his liver.

“You ought to rest now and then.”

“Nonsense,” Bergeot said, “I flourish on overwork.”

“On your successes, you mean.” In those days, he thought, Émile was conceited, but no one, not even Louis Mathieu, told him so. Is he still conceited? Of course—and why not?

“You know me too well,” Bergeot said, smiling. “If ever I begin to rob the till, you're the person I shall be afraid of. . . .”

From this south side of the Prefecture they could see, across the roofs of the town, the narrow valley of a river hurrying to join the Loire; the country on this side was smudged with blue patches of forest: three miles away, on its hill above the river, the village of Thouédun, only its château visible. They had no need to see them to know that at this moment three elderly fishermen were trying for the thousandth time to catch a pike in the mill-pool, always the same pike. And they could see the reeds and water-lilies in the pool move gently; it was a meadow for pike. Thouédun was their village, they had been born in it, in the same room, almost in the same moment.

They heard Mme de Freppel's voice. After a moment a
man appeared at the end of the terrace and came towards them, smiling shyly.

He was M. de Thiviers, Émile's friend and patron. Thiviers was probably the wealthiest man in a town which, small as it was, unimportant—having neither Court of Appeal nor university—concealed a number of very rich men: he was a banker: his aeroplane works, on the southern edge of Seuilly, had been extended to meet war needs. He was a scholar, author of a highly-esteemed Life of St. Augustine. He had an incurable and appealing modesty. Fervently religious, a Protestant, descended from a family of Huguenot landowners, his intimate friends were among believing Roman Catholics. He shared their anxieties about an irreligious and tainted Republic. When the Abbey Church of St. Peter needed a hundred thousand francs for repairs he came one evening to see the Bishop's secretary with a cheque for the whole sum, and offered it with the guilty air of a child trying to please his nurse. But for the indiscretion of a clerk, the gift would have remained anonymous.

He had married, very young, his second cousin. She was not good-looking, and a few weeks after the marriage she was hurt in a car accident, and disfigured. She became an invalid as well as ugly. Thiviers did not allow her to think of herself as useless. He asked her advice before he made any decision of importance. When he came into her room—probably she was lying down, a handkerchief soaked in Florida water tied round her head, because of her headaches—he talked to himself aloud. If one of his business rivals had hidden himself at the other side of the couch, he might have heard, “And so, my dear Nini, you agree to selling the West Africans. Very well, but it will frighten them in Paris.” All this time Nini lay with half-closed eyes. She never answered. She listened. Her husband kissed her hand and tiptoed out of the room. She would see him again at eleven o'clock at night, when he came into her bedroom and knelt at her bed to say his prayers. Unless she were too ill, she knelt with him. Her heavy angular body, covered in delaine and brownish-grey wool, leaned forward by the side of her husband's in tailored silk. Thiviers carried his natural elegance into his piety. She had smelled the same fresh scent of fern from his hair and body every night for thirty-five years. The table in his dressing-room held a row of gold-topped bottles of
lotions, mouth-wash, hair-oil, put up for him by Lhoty. He rode every morning, and every evening exercised faithfully in his room. One of his wife's rare carnal pleasures was to keep up to the mark his cupboardsful of linen shirts, pyjamas, handkerchiefs, embroidered with the small monogram.

This dandy, this faithful husband, this Christian financier, had the diffidence of a well-meaning child.

“Marguerite sent me round,” he said gently to Bergeot. “I had no idea you were not alone. I only need to speak to you for a minute.”

Rienne walked to the other end of the terrace. From there, without overhearing what was said, he could watch them. The banker was head and shoulders taller than Bergeot; he stooped a little. His long mild back, picked out like a tombstone by the setting sun, offered its witness to the charities of the man lying under it. Bergeot looked up into his face, listening avidly: when he answered, he gesticulated, smiled, putting out every sparrow trick of charm he possessed. He was replying to some criticism. Words gushed out of him, he put both hands on Thiviers's arms and gripped them affectionately. He was getting his way; an air of confidence and gaiety rose from him. . . . He had reason, as Rienne knew, to be grateful to the banker. When they met, three, or was it four years after the end of the last war, M. de Thiviers's influence took the place in the younger man's career of a family and money. He placed Émile with his personal friend, the Prefect of Seuilly, and when Émile became sub-Prefect in the Seine-et-Oise Department, placed him again as P.P.S. to a Minister, another friend. The Prefect of Seuilly died suddenly and the Minister was able to appoint Émile. . . . Rienne was convinced that, without Thiviers, Émile's honesty would have ruined him at a time when politics has to share a living between lawyers and financiers.

M. de Thiviers had never been involved in a scandal, personal or political.

He went away. Bergeot was smiling and satisfied. He rushed back to Rienne and began to talk about the financier with a half-pitying admiration.

“Heaven knows what he goes through, with his wife. . . . And he's liberal-minded, you know, in spite of his wealth. He supports me at every turn.”

“You flatter him,” Rienne said drily.

“Not at all,” Bergeot said. He smiled. “Perhaps I do—a little. He has his vanities. But they all have—the poorest peasants. Surely you'd rather I led them gently by the nose along the right road, instead of kicking them behind? In any case, kicks would be useless… Thiviers supports me because he approves of my plans. From a man like him, that's something. Bonamy, in ten years, war or no war, we shall have the finest schools, the best roads, the most satisfied farmers in France. Isn't it worth a little trouble in handling people? Or perhaps you think I flatter because I'm weak?”

Rienne looked at him, at his firm delicate mouth and lined forehead. The lines were deeper than a week ago. He was wearing himself out; he had only too much courage, too eager a will.

“No,” he said.

The undergrown schoolboy Émile had imposed himself on his class by friendliness and wit. His vanity in those days was to pretend to be idling. In fact, he studied until late at night; he had the knack of being able, in an examination, to recall everything he had read once touching the question. The same knack provided him on the instant with a comment that would please the person, schoolfellow or master, he was talking to. Rienne had seen the trick played a hundred times: since it was never played on him, he forgave it. It touched him, and he loved Émile for it.

“You must be the best-liked man in Seuilly,” he said, smiling.

“That's nothing,” Émile retorted. “What I should like is to be Premier.”

Was he joking? Rienne thought so. But—thirty years ago—they were shivering together in their unwarmed attic, he had smiled in the same way when the other boy said, “One of these days I'm going to live in the finest house in Seuilly. You'll see.”

Rienne stood up. His arm in Bergeot's, he looked across the valley towards their unseen village. The rays of the sun, level now with the tops of the trees, gave them, and the roof and towers of the château, an exquisite clarity. Points of light sprang from the roof. He imagined the narrow village street, between its old houses, and the slow coming of night there with
a step as silent as an old woman in her list slippers. Without any regret, he looked forward to the day when he would be retired, to live out the rest of his life there, in that deep obscurity of a province.

“To think,” Émile said abruptly, “that we started there. In that nothing. If I had to go back I'd drown myself.”

He laughed, but there was an undertone of fury in his voice. Rienne looked at him with affection and amusement.

“Why should you go back?”

“I never will,” Bergeot said. “Whatever happens to me in the future will be extraordinary. I know it, I've always known it.” He smiled, with a trace of embarrassment. “I can say that to you. To no one else.”

Mme De Freppel's house, a moderately large manor-house of the sixteenth century, was on the bank of the Loire a little east of Seuilly, less than two miles from the Prefecture. A long low house, with an octagonal tower enclosing the staircase. The carriage-road swept round a rough lawn to the door at the foot of the tower. At the other side of the house, the gardens, just as rough, sloped down to the river, spread out here in all its magnificence, like a wide lake, rather shallow.

Rienne told his driver to go back to Seuilly; he would walk home afterwards. He stood for a moment enjoying the freshened air: the sun was almost gone and a new clearness was waiting to seize everything for a few minutes, until it too was dispossessed slowly. Impossible, in spite of anxieties, of his distrust of Mme de Freppel, not to feel grateful for the fineness of the Angevin air, finer, easier, he felt sure, than any other in the world. He turned with regret to go into the house.

At dinner he was placed at the end of the table, next an unimportant guest. This was Lucien Sugny, Bergeot's principal private secretary, a young man he had picked up himself, from the Law School. He had been able to keep him out of the army—against his will—because he was short-sighted; without
his glasses he could not see across the table. His exemption worried him, and he seized his chance to talk about it to Rienne. Couldn't Colonel Rienne arrange for a peremptory order to come from the barracks: a despatch-rider was urgently needed, he must be able to see better at night than in the daytime; the general himself had thought of Lucien Sugny. . . .