Cloudless May (23 page)

Derval looked at himself in his pocket mirror. He saw a fashionable novelist. When he telephoned to the Prime Minister, to Dr. Goebbels, to Mussolini, to General Gamelin, for an appointment, he was told to come at once. A car would be sent for him. Or the President came to ask the brilliant young writer to undertake a special mission to Germany. . . . “Monsieur Derval, you are the only man Herr Hitler may listen to. Remember—France, the life of millions, is in your hands. . ..”

The telephone rang. It was the Mayor's secretary. M. Labenne was coming to see him—at once.

Everything must have a beginning.

Derval looked round the room. He put his father's letter in a drawer of the desk. His father and Labenne could not be in a room together. Much help a young man determined to get on can expect from Horace. “Has he any influence?” Not a scrap! Derval smoothed his hair and smiled congratulations at his handsome face in the glass. Labenne would do excellently as a patron. Brutality and egoism are what we need most nowadays. Therefore they are moral. And it is the same for nations. What have you to answer to that, Dr. Jean-Émile Derval? Monsieur Horace? Nothing. Not a word. . .. Their very silence disturbed the editor of the
New Order.
He turned round sharply and caught them watching him; both were shabby, both, as you could see from the waistcoat of one and the toga of the other, took snuff; both faces had the same look, a look of smiling accusation and, yes, grief—or was it pity?

Labenne came in without knocking. “Take care!” Derval cried.

He blushed. His father and Horace had gone, neither had waited to get in Labenne's way. The Mayor could take freely the place of simple shrewdness, gluttony the place of a modest pleasure in the first mouthful of
Rosé buguois.
Chased out by the smell of success, the lighter smell of eucalyptus vanished. Just as Labenne came in, a wireless in the next room tuned in in the middle of a speech from Reynaud: “. . . it is not true that the Government has decided to leave Paris. . . .”

“Shut the window,” Labenne said; “when I want to hear lies I can tell them to myself.”

The young man laughed. “Who believes Reynaud?” he said eagerly.

“If I weren't here, you would,” Labenne said, looking at him. “Don't show off.” He yawned, and began in a grumbling voice to say that he was going to buy the
New Order.
For two years he had let “your Monsieur de Thiviers” pour money through a sieve, always in fear of being found out—as if there were any point in owning a newspaper except to make yourself known!

“Propaganda,” Labenne jeered: “when I make propaganda I make it for myself. D'y'see? Now I'm going to look at your accounts. Prepare to be skinned.”

At the end of an hour, Derval was not only skinned but gutted. He sat, trembling with exhaustion, on the edge of the desk. With the joy of a peasant in driving a hard bargain, Labenne had examined every figure; he was sweating and as lively as a trout.

“I shall offer Monsieur de Thiviers the sum he's been wasting on it in one month.”

“Will he accept?” Derval asked.

“Listen. I never waste my time injuring a man who's on his way up. I make friends with him. But I have a nose”—it was long and fleshy, and dominated his terribly thick lips—“I can smell the moment when he begins to go down—a year sooner than his worst enemy, five years before he suspects it himself. That's when I close in on him. He looks strong—I get all the credit of fighting a powerful opponent—but I know the rot has started. I press on it. The moment comes when anyone can knock him out. Why should I bother? Let someone else do it—and I—I—walk off with a reputation for magnanimity. . . . D'you imagine I'm boasting? I never boast. Not I—I buy property. I've bought the château of Thouédun. D'y'see? The swaggering feudal ape who built it five centuries ago built it for me, me, Georges Labenne! Five centuries from now a Georges Labenne will be using it as a summer house. Five centuries! We Labennes are immortal. . . . Property is safer than money. Why, it's the voice of money!”

Derval had recovered a little. “The Germans may bomb Thouédun,” he said spitefully. “Or take it from you—if we're defeated.”

“They won't take anything of mine,” Labenne said.

He was silent. Derval looked uneasily over his shoulder. Yes, there they were, the two shabby old fellows from Le Bugue; they had crept back. They made warning signs to him. . . . Look out, my boy! Your new patron is a dirty dog—up to no good. Why should his château be spared? Who's been promising him? Look out! . . . Nonsense, Derval said irritably—sheer melodrama. Go back to Le Bugue and take snuff. . . . He turned his back.

Labenne was smiling again, that smile of his which was either wolfish or charming, but in either mood showed off his bad teeth. He told Derval—using his charm, but making clear that it was an order—that he wanted his biography written: at once. Not out of vanity—“I'm not, y'know, vain. . . .” It was true; his powerful body did not need vanity to keep it going. What he wanted was an advance on the immortality he had arranged; he intended to set the legend going—about his luck, greed, cunning—and let it grow and roll him with it to the top of his ambition. And that was—? Labenne did not commit himself. . . .

“You'll begin with me rolling in the frozen mud outside the butcher's shop and stop just as I reach the terrace of the château. . . .”

Swollen by his greed for survival, he filled the room, making it difficult for any other creature to breathe in it. . . . At Le Bugue itself, the old doctor looked up at the single livid cloud coming into sight, and thought anxiously about his few vines. . . . Derval opened the window and let in a weak current of air. The late evening was dragging after it all the heat of the day, of every day. Never, there had never been a spring which gave so many signs of going on for ever: thé men and women and infants who were dying in the invaded countries died in the promise of an eternity of sun and cloudless skies, among murmurs of well-being rising from every field and ditch.

“Well?” Labenne said.

“I'll begin work on your life tomorrow,” Derval said.

Watching Labenne spread his arms, to let the air through the gaping front of his shirt, he comforted himself with the idea that in M. de Thiviers he still had a second and nobler patron. But the banker at this moment was almost as dwindled
and remote a figure as the old doctor with his friend the poet under his arm walking down towards the Vézère.

“Good,” Labenne said, showing his teeth. “I'll dictate the facts and you can put a good face on them.”

Derval asked nervously, “What policy is the
New Order
to follow?”

“Policy?” Labenne answered. “Policy?
I
am the policy of my paper. You can follow me.” He laughed at the young man's bewildered look. “We have only one duty,” he went on, in a dry voice. “To prepare people for the worst. Begin with 'Even if . . .' 'Even if France is destroyed . . . even if we lose two million young men . . .' Don't be afraid to let out the strength of the Germans. You'll be telling the truth, and that's a rare feat nowadays.”

He got up and pushed his shirt back into place. Derval hurried to reach the door. “We haven't spoken about my salary,” he said jauntily.

Labenne poked him in the ribs as though he were a cow for sale. “You're in debt, aren't you?”

“If I had another ten pounds a month——” Derval said.

“You'd spend it,” Labenne interrupted. “Listen. You'll bless the day I gave you your first lesson in economy. Next month I'll pay you ten pounds less than you've been getting—and every month until you've paid your debts. Then I'll put you back where you were. You'll have something to work for. Forward, the young men! The future is yours.”

He slammed the door.

All his humiliations tumbled at once on the young man. It was not only his debts, it was the phrase in his father's letter about getting to the front. And it was the contempt with which the critics in Paris had reviewed his first, his only novel. True, this had happened more than a year ago, before the war, but the teeth of the harrow were still rusting in his flesh; at the least chance they pressed down, and he writhed. There were even tears in his eyes. The reviewers, he didn't doubt, were Jews. And with that thought, hope pierced him. He looked again at his face in the glass, smiling at it with raised eyebrows, practising the delicious and cat-like charm he hoped would become second nature. On his way out he tried it on the porter's wife, who was sweeping the stairs. He took it as an omen
when she did not remind him that he owed for a month.

He walked gaily to the Hotel Buran, and sent his card up to the Baronne de Chavigny. He had written on it—“You won't remember the young man you met at Madame Huet's. I implore you to see me.”

He waited. The doors into the dining-room were open: he saw Labenne settle himself into a chair and the head waiter stooping over him with tender anxiety. Obviously he was advising this or that dish: Labenne listened to him with the severity of lust.

“The Baroness will see you.”

He was shown into the sitting-room of her suite. No one was in this large room, which was as littered as though Mme de Chavigny ate, slept, dressed in it. A fur cloak lay across one of the sofas, with a pair of shoes, and a book, its leaves creased. Automatically—he had been punished too often for ill-treating a book—he smoothed them and closed it. Which of the photographs scattered over the tables was the, Baroness herself? Not having any use for her at that time, he had barely glanced at her when Mme Huet presented him. . . . A half-empty box of crystallised fruits, a bottle of perfume, open, a lipstick, the stalk of a bunch of grapes; both window-seats were strewn with gloves, handkerchiefs, handbags. How like a pawn-shop! He pressed his forehead, to cool it, against the window. In this light the Loire slipped under the bridge like grey smoke; wisps blew up under the trees of the island. He heard the Baroness come into the room, and turned round—smiling, lifting his eyebrows.

He saw a big strong woman, with a lively face and thick ankles. Her dress, of yellow velvet, was open to the knees; her shoulders and the upper part of her breasts had all the air of emerging from a partly peeled banana. Nothing about her was attractive except her look of energetic good-temper. With some pain, the young man kept his seductive smile on his face: he was not prepared for a hoydenish middle-aged woman.

“Do forgive me,” he said in a boyish voice: “we had so little talk the other evening, but I know we were going to be friends. Alas, you were swept away from me.” He kissed her hand: thick and sallow, every finger carried two or more rings. “You said I might call.”

“Did I?” she said, puzzled.

“I didn't hope you would remember,” Derval sighed. “I remembered, of course. It would be hard to forget you, you're so marvellously, what shall I say?—living.”

He judged that gross flattery would go down better with her than subtleties. He was partly right. Léa de Chavigny was gullible and shrewd; she swallowed his flattery, believing it; in the same moment her eyes watched him to find out why he was trying to charm her. At her silliest, she was the daughter of a Jewish banker. Derval talked in an eager voice. He reminded her of intelligent remarks she had not made; and smiled at her with a young impudent devotion. When he guessed that she was in the right mood of maternal excitement, he said boldly,

“Did you forget you were going to contribute to the fighting fund of my paper?”

“I can't remember a thing about it,” she said with a frank incredulity. “Had I been drinking? Why should I give you money?”

Derval frowned. “Me? I don't want you to give me money,” he said in a brutal voice. “But you know what I'm doing. I told you. We must turn all these Eastern European Jews out of France before they ruin the country. They're all Bolshevik agents, and French Jews must do everything possible to get rid of them. You are a Jew. You are also a beautiful and good Frenchwoman, and your husband belongs to an old Catholic family. For your own sake, you must support the campaign I'm mounting against them in my paper. But you see it—I needn't tell you, you have the mind of a great woman, an Esther.”

His brutality, following his flatteries, had an effect neither would have had alone. She was shaken and alarmed. Her natural shrewdness was no use to her against a nightmare she recognised instantly as one of her own. She began to slip the rings off her fingers, only keeping back the two most valuable.

“Yes, yes, I remember,” she said. “You can have these for your fund. I'm sure you'll succeed.”

Derval kissed her hand again. He had not expected to be given more than a small cheque, and he had to hide his excitement and a light feeling of shame. As calmly as possible he said,

“You're very generous. I shall never forget it. Count on me to do anything I can for you.”

Mme de Chavigny looked at him with what from any other woman would have been an invitation. It was purely a matter of form; she was the loyal respectable wife of a husband who did not take any trouble to hide his infidelities.

“Then we're friends?” she said, smiling.

“It's a great honour for me,” Derval said. He leaned his head towards her, with his charming gaze. “You're an intoxicating friend, Baroness.”

“Why not Léa?”

“Léa,” he murmured.

“My relations,” she went on in her loud friendly voice, “call me Bobo.”

“Bobo. How delicious!”

He held both her hands for a moment, admiring the bluish marks left on her fingers. He rearranged the scene in his mind. . . . I must have talked like a statesman, he thought: a simple movement of generosity on her part brought me her rings—which I shall put to the noblest purpose. He stood up, bowed to her with a great deal of dignity. And left.