Cloudless May (29 page)

Bergeot made no direct answer to this criticism. Instead he spoke to Labenne. “There's no need,” he said, smiling, “to remind us that Monsieur Mathieu is a Jew. He has never pretended to be anything else—a landowner, for instance.” His eyes sparkled as he delivered himself of this indiscreet quip. “If you'd been at school with him, as I was, you'd know his unparalleled knowledge of history.”

It gave him acute pleasure to show Mathieu that he was magnanimous, the finer nature of the two. . . . You defeated me in the history class—and I'm defending you. . . . He disliked Labenne enough to enjoy taking a cut at him.

Labenne gave no sign of resentment, unless resentment is a triangle formed by two lines starting from a powerful nose, its nostrils masked by dense flesh, to arrive quickly at firm negroid lips: these lips were like the wrinkled pulp of a fruit. Unless you had watched closely you missed the very slight contraction of his pupils, so black and oily that they reflected neither light nor thoughts; from inside and outside they were despotically guarded.

“You see yourself as the defender of Seuilly,” he said coolly to Bergeot. “It is in ruins and burning, but you have arranged for only the able-bodied to be burned. Necessary, perhaps—but tell me how you propose to make them like your plan.”

“By the simplest means,” Bergeot said. “Tell me yourself what I ought to say to you to induce you to defend your new château. I take it you would object to handing it over intact to the Germans?”

In his certainty of scoring a point, Bergeot was blind to the effect on Labenne. Labenne lowered his eyelids. Behind them, and behind his anger, he made a note of Bergeot's pleasure in using the cutting edge of his tongue. If in due time I want to punish him, he reflected, I can do it through his vanity.

Mathieu interrupted to ask why their deputy was not with them.

“Monsieur Huet has gone back to Paris,” Bergeot said.

“Perhaps just as well,” Labenne said quietly. “Are you sure of Ernest Huet? Isn't he possibly a—defeatist?”

He was less concerned to harm Huet than to see whether anyone would defend him. It amused him coldly that no one did. Poor blackguard! he thought. From the corner of his eye he saw Piriac fumbling stiffly in the pockets of his tunic. Heaven save me, he's going to read a speech on Joan of Arc, he thought. Turning to the Prefect quickly, he said,

“What do you expect from me in your scheme?”

Before Bergeot could speak, M. de Thiviers leaned across the table. He was determined to offer himself as a sacrifice between two duellists. He smiled—with the embarrassment
and sublimity of the martyr riddled with arrows. When he began speaking it seemed he was for all sides. Bergeot—“our noble Prefect”—must carry out his scheme, but in secret, without alarming anyone. He must tell the citizens about their danger, and be reassuring . . . “a difficult task, but just your size, my dear Prefect. . . .” Watching his admirable manner and catching in his voice all the modulations of an experienced diplomat, Labenne felt more wounded than he had been by Bergeot's quips. Bergeot, after all, had grown up with the same village mud on his shoes. Opening his shirt still more widely, Labenne scratched his armpits, sniffing up their odour, and yawned. Stubs of teeth, all quite healthy and nearly black, guarded a grossly thick tongue.

Bergeot said sharply,

“Then you all—all—support me if I carry on in the most discreet way possible.”

“Given the discretion,” Thiviers said, smiling.

“Naturally,” Labenne said, “you have my fervent support.”

Made suspicious by so much warmth, Mathieu looked at him, and encountered a glance in which he could read neither sincerity nor guile: used as he was to piercing the weakness or corruption of human beings, he recoiled from it. He felt himself at the edge of a bog. Without being in the least shocked, he realised that he had under-estimated Labenne.

“Discretion is very well in its place,” he said contemptuously. “Would you, Monsieur de Thiviers, call an officer indiscreet in obeying orders to hold an untenable position?”

“We're only poor devils of civilians,” Labenne said, with a smile.

He saw that Piriac had managed to squeeze a document of some sort from his pocket. The old general's weak heavy voice surprised them. They had forgotten him. He spoke with the authority of a general addressing soldiers; in spite of themselves, his listeners, even Labenne, sat to attention under the pressure of words let fall singly, with long intervals of silence. Even the commonplaces of an old general have behind them the weight of so many deaths, so much decent rigour.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “whatever our differences of outlook we are all Frenchmen. . . .” Then, without paying the least attention to his audience, he read one of the speeches he always
delivered in front of monuments of the last war. In its hollowness and insensitivity it was suited to a monument. He must have been feeling one at his back when he talked of saving French youth and French towns and villages from a disaster he placed vaguely in the future—as if what was happening at this minute, on the soil itself of the last war, was only a repetition, a play written about that war, and acted by young men who were pretending to cry out, pretending to suffer, pretending to fall on their knees like poor beasts. And to lie still.

It was the same when he began to talk about honour. He said, “The honour of our country . . .” but talked about obedience, resignation. . . . Just as he had confused the real young men with their ghosts, so now he confused their duties. His left hand lay on the table, inert, like a dead hand. Like the hand of one of the young men.

Labenne reflected. What the devil is he rehearsing? he wondered.

Labenne and Thiviers came away from the Committee together. It was eight o'clock now, but not a breath of air troubled the heat. Always, from morning to dusk, this heat stretched itself from edge to edge of the horizon, without a break. It was too hot for the young vines, Labenne grumbled. Too hot, Thiviers murmured, for marching—for those who had to march. Labenne shrugged his shoulders. Excellent for the German tanks, he growled.

They were passing the ancient houses driven into the wall of the cliff. The upper half of every door was open. A sort of life—impossible to see what sort—threshed about in there. You saw a hand holding a casserole, a woman's face, the maggot-like forms of children. The whole moved like an ant-heap seen from the outside; it was a disturbance, a threat, rather than life itself. Labenne felt himself fastened to each of these darkened rooms by a nerve starting from his loins. He knew to its last sprig of chive what the soup tasted of in the casserole, he felt
the dampness, even in this warmth, of walls thrust into the soil at their back. An infant plumped its bare bottom on the floor and Labenne felt the mingled shock and joy of meeting the rough stone.

He glanced at Thiviers. Thiviers's long face wore a smile of pure benevolence, the smile of a saint. He was completely isolated from these rooms and their life; neither his brain nor his body brought him news from them: there had never been a connection. His benevolence operated in the void.

His car was waiting at the foot of the narrow road. He turned the smile round on to Labenne. “Let me drive you home.”

It was an immensely roomy car. Inside, shut off by a glass wall from the chauffeur, the two men allowed themselves an air of intimacy. You saw that they knew each other better than appeared in public. It was none the less an air of intimacy, not the thing itself.

“I'm not altogether out of sympathy with your distrust of Mathieu,” Thiviers said. It was almost a declaration.

Labenne was sprawling in his seat: his head left a dark patch on the linen covers.

“Louis Mathieu? He's an enemy of society.”

“Because he denies everything,” Thiviers said gently. “No Jew has faith.”

Yawning, Labenne gave himself no trouble to pick his words. “The best sort of State would be one where the rulers were all atheists and realists, and the mob lousy with religion.”

M. de Thiviers looked grave. “There is a higher realism.” He smiled the same gentle kindly smile. “My dear Labenne, you understand that. You with your sound patriotism—as sweet as our soil.”

Labenne half closed his eyes. How you dislike me, he thought. But you think I'm going to be useful to keep the mob off you and your money. Perhaps. . . . Under his eyelids he watched Thiviers spread over his knees a handkerchief made of a linen more delicate than silk; it had his crest in one corner and in another his initials. . . . I suppose I smell, Labenne thought, smiling. At least I don't smell of hypocrisy. . . . He let his mind leap like a wolf on the man beside him. This banker turned philosopher and writer. This patriot whose love of France took the form of rushing from capital to foreign capital, Rome,
Berlin, New York—no Labenne had ever travelled more than a few miles from his village until Georges Labenne stretched the nerve as far as Seuilly and Paris. . . . Paris—what a hole! . . . And in each of these foreign cities—far from, as a Labenne would have done, despising everything which was not like France—he lent himself eagerly to the worship of all the most obviously and aggressively foreign elements. In Italy he allowed them to make him honorary colonel of a Black Shirt regiment. In Berlin he returned the salutes of the S.S. guard of honour sent to meet his train. Inhibited, an ascetic who preferred to drink water, he accepted invitations to the banquets—they were orgies—offered by Goering. And I, I should have accepted, Labenne thought; I should have sat beside that big active brute—my God, no fool—and out-drunk, out-stuffed, out-boasted him. But I should not have come back to Paris with stories of his delicacy, good faith, and the rest of it. . . . Our friend Thiviers—an evangelist, eh? So pious that he put his arms round the atheist Goebbels and went with him to a Nordic marriage—fertility rites, eh? And gassed to Ribbentrop about peace, when Ribbentrop was entertaining him with a display of ten thousand tanks, a hundred thousand machine-guns, twenty thousand aeroplanes, and what and what and what. A banker, eh? Good at sums. An emissary, a writer. All that equals peace, eh? Do de da, Monsieur de Thiviers—your air of modesty, modesty in extremis, is equal to extreme conceit: you really believe that your talks and journeys were cementing friendship, you believed that Monsieur Hitler was opening his heart to you over fifty cups of tea. . . . And you live in a luxurious house, and compose there your poor little pieces about poverty, suffering, simplicity. Your modesty doesn't allow you to wear your orders or mention your charities: you have to provide yourself with an indiscreet clerk when you give away a hundred thousand francs to the Abbey Church. . . .

As to that, Labenne intended to be infinitely richer than Thiviers, and not simply in money. He felt that Thiviers was unstable. Worse. He had seen Thiviers's family house near Luynes, with the superb view over the Cher and the Loire, and it looked neglected. Thiviers had had the chance to buy land which was cutting into his family land, and let it go. Instead he bought more paintings, more costly junk for his
house in Seuilly and his Paris flat. This, to Labenne, was pure wickedness.

Thiviers stopped the car to buy an evening paper.

“The Germans have reached the Aisne.”

Labenne said nothing. This bell tolling back through all the passages and corridors of French history made no echoes for him.

“Do you know what I hope?” Thiviers said simply. “That we shall go back to an earlier France. And a much juster! With the justice of the saints. Men would still work diligently in the fields, sow, harvest the vines, prune. Diligence! It used to be the French virtue. We must return to having children. If we are to have a future as noble as our past.”

Tuppence for your future, Labenne thought; you and your sterile wife and your no children. You're too long—all wood and airs and no sap. He said warmly,

“You're the only man who will be listened to in the Department. Your name and influence——”

Not altogether bad for us, a religion of sacrifice! Very well—preach it, my good Thiviers. You have my blessing. And the odium—after a time the sacrificed always kick—which will attach itself to you. That's justice. Of the saints! . . . In the early years of their political alliance—still hidden from the electors of Seuilly—it was Labenne who did the unpopular things. . . . It's time, he thought, good-tempered and mocking, for you to pay the bill you've been running up on my patience. With my stomach I shall make a charming saint. . . .

“Let's have this out,” he said maliciously. “Are you still supporting our dear Prefect, or not?”

“Within reason,” Thiviers answered.

“Don't give yourself away,” Labenne mocked. “How within reason? What does it mean?”

M. de Thiviers explained in a gentle voice—Bergeot was brilliantly clever, ambitious, a man of the people . . .

Labenne interrupted him. “And therefore useful—and possibly dangerous. So you meant to seduce him into serving your turn. Very wise.”

“I wonder if I deserve your praise,” M. de Thiviers said, smiling. He went on with great simplicity, “Bergeot—I'm sure of it—is a good fellow, a patriot. We're going through
a moral crisis. All classes must draw closer together to heal the mistakes and injustice of the past.”

“We only needed that,” Labenne said, turning his eyes up.

“What?”

“The moral crisis. My dear Thiviers, it's property that's threatened! It's us.”

“Quite! And property is the stay and stem of our morals. A peasant with half an acre of vines is a patriot. It's your politicians and journalists, with nothing under them but their salaries, who are irresponsible, corrupt, who are immoral.”

Labenne looked at him with a deep admiration. All your fears for your money are hidden by this superb mask of virtue, he thought. And you're truly superb. How I should like to peel you to your dry skeleton. . . . A doubt, in the same moment, pinched him. He doubted whether Thiviers was a hypocrite. . . . Isn't he precisely virtue itself, kindness itself, piety itself?