Cloudless May (21 page)

Getting carefully to his feet, he stooped over the bed. A last flicker of vivacity moved in Nini's eyes, fixed on him. He quenched it by closing them gently and kissing her forehead between the eyebrows. How harsh and damp her skin was. As soon as he straightened himself, her eyes flew open: reflected in them, the noble spirit he had been sentenced to for her life.
He was in the habit of talking to this spirit without reserve, with fewer euphemisms than when he talked to himself.

“That fellow Mathieu,” he said simply, “is hinting in the
Journal
at the money I still have in South America. The police will know how to deal with him. In war-time an incitement to disorder is a serious crime.”

Marguerite took off her dress and wrapped herself in the shabby dressing-gown she wore when she was preparing for bed. She had two charming dressing-gowns in her wardrobe, but she could not bring herself to wear them. An irresistible habit, the years of waking in dingy furnished rooms, drove her to put on this garment with the dark ring of face cream round the neck. She began to brush her hair. It was black, so unmanageable that when she brushed it the hairs curled back like springs. Émile came into the room. Her mirror faced the door, and she watched him coming towards her: he walked with a slight swagger which sometimes moved her to pity. It was at those times that she thought: He might be defeated.

He took her head between his hands. “What scent do you use on your hair?”

“Nothing.”

“When I was eight or nine I used to wonder about Martinique. I knew nothing about it; simply repeating the name excited me. Your hair reminds me of it.”

He took her head in both hands and pulled it backward, to kiss her mouth. Still holding her, he looked in the glass at her throat, pressing a hand on it, on the firm arch. She freed herself and turned round.

“I must go back to my Prefecture,” he said. “I arranged to see Louis Mathieu there about half-past eleven.”

“Why?” She was disappointed. “So you're dressed up for Mathieu?” She pulled out of his pocket the handkerchief folded there. It was finer than any she used herself; he had them sent from Paris by the tailor who made his clothes.

“No, for myself. As usual.” He smiled, with a conscious irony. “You know quite well that I like to look the same, and correct, whether I'm in Paris seeing the Minister, or he comes to see me. This is my uniform.”

“But the Minister's trousers are quite shapeless——”

“I know. He can afford to wear them. I have my lower-middle-class upbringing to forget, and this helps me.” He could not have said this to anyone else; he trusted her even with his feeble vanities, and even when they were ridiculous.

Marguerite sighed. “I daresay. But the point is, you're going back to work. You'll kill yourself—and for what? Can't Mathieu wait until the morning?”

“No,” he said, frowning.

“You needn't go through your part with me,” she said, mocking him. “I don't need to be impressed by your iron will.”

He pulled her ear. “What did Robert want?” he asked—too carelessly. She had expected the question, and prepared for it. Pretending to hesitate, she moved her fingers nervously across and across the arm of the chair, where he would see them.

“He was talking about our investments.”

Bergeot fell into the trap. “No. He was talking about me.”

“How did you know?” she murmured. She looked away from him—an image of embarrassment. Long since she had discovered that it is easier to take in an honourable and intelligent man by the crudest acting. It is the only sort which touches his instincts, so much slower and weaker for being worn down by his intellect.

Émile laughed. “By your hands. You give yourself away when you're lying. I know the signs.”

“What are they?” she said, smiling.

“Tell me what he said to you: You may as well, I know it already. He doesn't approve of me just now. Come—tell me.”

Under his air of indifference, he was anxious, and so mortified that she felt vexed for him. But she went on with her comedy, giving in to him with such exaggerated relief that it would not have taken in a child.

“Very well—since you know. He is afraid you'll do yourself harm with the Government—with important people. He didn't tell you—because you're always sceptical—but he has it on the highest authority that, whatever happens, there won't be
any fighting down here, on the Loire. The Government is anxious to avoid frightening people, and he thinks——”

“That I have the wind up,” Émile interrupted.

“No, oh, no. He admires you so much.”

Suddenly Émile laughed, his good coarse country laugh. “It's all nonsense. Bankers are always nervous. Besides, Thiviers is an old man. He's finished. All these rich men who do nothing for the country are finished. It's men like me who are going to run France after this war. Yes, look at me. I—your good clever little Émile—I am the coming man; not Robert de Thiviers. Don't you know what I'm doing? I'm going to give the rest of the country a lesson in energy and goodwill. You wait. I have old Piriac in my pocket, I always had and he hasn't slipped out. Just think what he leaves to me—in wartime! I believe he would agree to arm my volunteers, if I insisted. My child, you're going to see France finding itself here—
ce monument unique au monde,
as Bonamy says. I mean, as Péguy said. Do you think I don't know what I'm talking about?”

He was speaking with all the force of his magnificent energy, yet he was laughing. He was a great man at this moment. Marguerite had seen too many men of the genus Great Man, and at moments when their greatness should have shown itself in spite of circumstances, not to be able to recognise the true germ when she saw it. She listened with as much grief and pride as the mother who listens to her son boasting about what he is going to do, knowing that he is brave and intelligent as clearly as she knows that life usually, always, disappoints. It can play dreadful tricks, too. Émile was vain, but he was not a fool, not conceited. No difference is so marked as the difference between vanity and conceit. He was vain and humble; he criticised himself; his mind was never content with anything it had finished. Rienne had said to her: Émile is sometimes a genius and sometimes a weak ass; he is always lovable, and one can always respect him. . . . God in heaven, she prayed, don't let him be disappointed.

“How fond you are of Seuilly,” she said in an ironical voice.

“Of course I am,” he laughed. “I'm the cleverest man here. In Paris I shall have to fight men who are much cleverer, with more experience. Besides, you can't walk for ten minutes here without seeing the Loire. I shouldn't have the same feeling for
the Seine, it's too urban. Too urbane. I shall always be a provincial in Paris, always looking round for some shabby square to remind me of Seuilly. But if I never get to Paris, if I have to give up all idea of showing what I can do—I shall shoot myself. I couldn't bear it.”

“But you won't have failed—even if you never leave Seuilly,” she said anxiously.

“In my own eyes I shall.”

“What nonsense!”

“I'm not going to fail,” he said, smiling.

He looked at her with a calm gaiety. She was startled into admiring him without any of the pity which would have spoiled it. Everything that belonged to her past life, its recklessness, its optimism of the young woman whose talents and body are both marketable, responded.

“Of course you'll succeed,” she cried.

“I know.”

“You'll get into the Government, you'll be Home Secretary, then Foreign Secretary, then Premier. A duchess with a long nose and chin will fall in love with you, her husband will die, you'll marry her, thinking of your future. I shall go on working for you, of course; you'll come and see me and tell me political secrets. And suddenly one year we shall both be old, looking at each other in my room, and asking, Do you remember that last autumn in Seuilly? . . . And how bored I shall be without you, my love.”

“Don't talk nonsense. As if I could put up with any ordinary woman, after you.”

“I've made you happy?”

“Completely.”

“In spite of my bad temper?”

He freed himself from her. “I must go.”

She tried to keep him. “When do you find time to read—who was it?—Péguy?”

“I don't. Bonamy does that for both of us. . . . Let me go. . . . Good-night, my puppy, my love. Sleep well.”

As soon as she was alone, she tumbled from excitement into an icy panic. Her mind, when she lay down, would not let her sleep. Thiviers's warnings were stepping on all her nerves like a gramophone record repeated endlessly. She began planning,
feverishly, to turn everything she possessed into diamonds, which she could carry about with her. But she might be robbed. . . . She was walking along a road; people, indistinct but menacing, came round her; they were going to strip her, perhaps hurt her. . . . She woke suddenly, feeling her heart beating in her wrists, her knees, her stomach. She was suffocating. Her hand touched a cool part of the sheet. Jumping out of bed, she threw off her nightgown, and, naked, went through all the exercises she had felt too anxious to do before she went to bed: if you are going to be ruined, murdered, robbed, it scarcely matters whether you can fold your legs round your neck. Crimson in the face, she stood on her hands just long enough to be sure that she could still do it, then dropped into bed and fell asleep at once.

His secretary warned Bergeot that M. Mathieu had arrived and was waiting for him in his room.

“You locked all the drawers?” Bergeot said.

Lucien Sugny stared. “I always do, when you leave.”

“Monsieur Mathieu is a journalist, after all,” Bergeot said. He was ashamed of it, but he could not resist the insult.

The door of his room was half open. Glancing in, he saw Mathieu seated in a chair pushed against the wall, upright, as if his head were nailed there. He looked ill. But then he had always this rigidity and pallor, as though he were walking about crucified on an invisible cross that left his arms free. He had the toughness of wood, his air of delicacy was a fraud. He is nailed to his own spine, the Prefect thought. He wondered whether Mathieu's toughness was French or Jewish—in the first case it would be a question of will and bone, in the other of nerves.

The editor turned his head slightly and saw Bergeot in the doorway. For a moment, and before Mathieu's lips parted, Bergeot saw in him the schoolboy who had proved his contempt for the others—when they tried to humiliate him by forcing him to walk on the very edge of the Loire—by jumping in. It
was a January afternoon, and almost dark. The water was colder and far more dangerous than ice. Horrified, they watched him being forced downstream to one of the islands. Some of them set off running towards a small boat fastened under the embankment; he saw them, turned his back, and plunged in again to swim to the other bank. He reached it cruelly exhausted, but he walked home without looking at them when they caught up with him. How wretched we felt and how we hated him, Bergeot remembered. What is it he wants to prove this time?

“Good of you to come at this time of night,” he said.

“It's nothing,” Mathieu said. “I don't go to bed before two.”

The Prefect felt irritated. He's proving that he needs less sleep than other people, he said to himself. He sat down, facing Mathieu, who had not moved. No doubt discomfort and rigidity were part of the evidence.

“I won't keep you longer than I need. I wanted to ask you—you ought to be in a position to judge—what people in Seuilly are thinking.”

“They're bored,” Mathieu said drily. “Sedan ought to have roused them, but in fact it has only exaggerated their dullness. I have the impression that they sink themselves in boredom to avoid thinking—which may be natural and healthy for other nations, but not for us. The women are bored by their husbands' absence. You'd think they had discovered something perverse in Frenchmen becoming merely soldiers. As if it wasn't an instinct with us! And the men who are not in the army, and the soldiers on leave, talk about Germany's incredible strength—as if they've forgotten the fact that every other nation is stronger than we are, stronger but less enduring and less cunning. Suddenly, everything French, our gold, our young men, our vines, our poets—and down to our courage—weighs lighter than it did. Lighter than German courage and machinery and habits. And of course their tanks! So what can we do except throw our arms up and declare peace? . . . We shall discover then what a German peace weighs compared with a French one.”

He had spoken without warmth, and without moving anything except his hands with that stiffness suggesting they must be nailed above the wrist.

“Oh nonsense,” Bergeot said. “They want to be told what to do.”

“And you'll tell them?” Mathieu said, with his curious smile.

“Yes, certainly I will.” Bergeot jumped up and began to walk about like a man trying to keep warm. He gesticulated. “This war isn't an affair only of soldiers. If it were—say what you like, we are the best soldiers in the world. In any fair fight——”

“There has never been such a thing,” Mathieu interrupted. “You're ridiculous. We're talking about war. Wars only start because one side is weaker than another.”

“Very well,” Bergeot said, stung, “in an unfair fight we can balance the account with our intelligence—we have plenty of it. But this is a war of civilians, it could be lost by them. It will be, if they have nothing to do in air-raids but count the bombs. I'm going to turn ordinary men and women into heroes by giving them shovels, lint, fire-engines——”

“You're talking about civil servants and shopkeepers,” Mathieu interrupted.

“Yes, why not?”