Cloudless May (3 page)

“And you see, then,” Lucien said, “I could get away without hurting his feelings. . . .”

“Whose feelings?”

“The Prefect's, of course,” Lucien said reproachfully. “You know, he told me he couldn't do without me, he asked me if I really wanted to leave him with a private secretary who wouldn't know where anything was and would let in the wrong people; he made me feel a brute for even asking to go: I promised to stay with him for the rest of his life. You know, there's nobody like him, he's so honest, so clever that no one ever gets the better of him; he thinks of everything, he remembers everyone in every school he visits—and he looks in oftener than the Inspector. I believe he knows five hundred brats by their names. He's marvellous.”

How ridiculous he is, Rienne thought. And how likeable. He noticed that Lucien's dinner-jacket was too small for him; his wrists, wide and strongly boned, stuck far out of the sleeves. He had grown since it was made, or perhaps it was not his, it was a cast-off. Lucien knew he was being examined. He blushed.

“You're wondering about my jacket,” he said. “Do you know I have to sit holding my stomach in, for fear the button gives? It was my brother's when he went to Paris—and since it was perfectly good, and my mother thought I should need one . . . I've grown since I came to Seuilly. We ate much less at home.”

If you dined here regularly, Rienne thought, you would shrink. Mme de Freppel's dinners were notorious. There was never enough food, and what there was, of the poorest sort. She could not bring herself to spend money on guests. Yet no one refused an invitation. If you offend her, they said, you offend the Prefect.

“I'm sorry I can't help you,” he said. “You'll have to keep your promise.”

“If it had been any but war-time, I should be happy working for him for nothing,” Lucien said miserably.

“Quite unnecessary,” Rienne said.

Mme de Freppel raised her voice a little, on a delicious cry of surprise and alarm. Lucien's face changed, he smiled ecstatically.

“She's beautiful, don't you think?”

Rienne did not answer. He was watching M. de Thiviers as he talked earnestly to Mme de Freppel. Thiviers held himself stiffly—what was the matter with his buttons?—and bent his head to bring his mouth on a level with her ear. His long face wore its usual expression of patience, almost of martyrdom; a polite martyr, his hair, brown and thick, was brushed back in three waves. The distance between his nose, firmly arched, and his long firm upper lip, gave his face a naked air; for all its patience it was arrogant.

Lucien said,

“I bet I know what M. de Thiviers is telling Mme de Freppel. The country is ruined, morally and financially. He confuses the two things. He sells his moral issues short and lays up five per cent Exchequer Bonds in heaven.”

“I see you know all about him,” Rienne said drily.

The young man was not abashed. Whenever he could free himself from the self-contempt dragging him back on one side and the insane confidence hoisting him on the other, he had a minute or two of certainty, the shrewdness and intelligence of his mature self seizing him. Later in the evening he would blush, remembering that Rienne had snubbed him, and wish, with despair, that he had held his tongue.

Rienne's other neighbour was a priest, the secretary of the aged Bishop of Seuilly. Mme de Freppel has a precise idea of my importance, he thought, smiling: among the secretaries. A prolonged a-a-ah, issuing from deep in the throat, warned him that Abbé Garnier was going to speak to him. He prepared, with the modest indifference he felt for this priest, to listen. Abbé Garnier was a scholar, the author of half a dozen books on doctrine; they had made him suspect in official Government circles by reason of the tone he adopted each time he referred—in thickly scattered footnotes—to the civil authority. When he realised this—and realised at the same time that his attitude did
not commend itself to his superiors in the Church—he was in despair, and tried to remedy his fault by another and bolder excursion into politics. This had the effect of offending everyone. So far he was blissfully unaware of this, and confident in his learning and integrity.

He was a small man, almost squat, the son of a cattle farmer of the Morvan, from whom he had inherited, with small piercing eyes, his nose for a bargain; his room was stacked with rare first editions and handsomely-bound books he had found in country shops and saved, carrying them home in his arms like a good shepherd, to be dusted and cherished.

“My dear Colonel.” Its resonance, always at the same pitch, made his voice stupefying. “I'm a-ah delighted to see that you are still able to attend a social function. I take it that the war is not absorbing all your energy yet. Is this a good sign?”

“If you like to believe it,” Rienne said.

“Who am I to have opinions on military strategy?” Garnier trumpeted, smiling. It was embarrassing to talk to him because his voice reached so far. “I rely on you to instruct me.”

“Quite useless,” Rienne said. “I'm not a strategist.”

“Well, well. Nor am I. I'm only a modest observer of contemporary history.” He lowered his voice a little. “Do you know what is the real vice of our time, the worm that may destroy us? The passion for security, my dear sir. It has turned us into a nation of place-hunters. Young men, instead of risking themselves to achieve something of their own—if only to turn their father's shop into a better—scramble for a seat in government service. I could name a dozen instances among families I know. It shocks me.”

Rienne listened absently. Through the window facing him he could see, foreshortened, a stretch of the Loire. An island of reeds and stunted willows was anchored in mid-stream; he remembered that when he was ten he had pretended during a whole summer to be living on just such an island—alone: he was careful when he went out not to walk over the edge, when anyone spoke to him he raised his voice to carry as far as the bank, his only food was berries; but he was content: his enemies, the traitors who had chased him from his palace, were baffled. . . . The shadows of bats flew past the window, without a sound.

After dinner, in the long drawing-room, where the curtains had been drawn and as few lamps lit as possible, he stood trying to become invisible, in the bay of a window. At a short distance, the general commanding the region, General Piriac, and his chief of staff, Woerth, had their backs to him. They were talking to Rienne's immediate superior—General Ligny. From the set of Woerth's shoulders, Rienne saw that he was being baited by Ligny. All at once Ligny caught sight of his A.D.C. and beckoned him over. Rienne sighed as he obeyed; he had intended to slip away.

“Rienne, my dear boy,” Ligny said, “did you read the
Seuilly Journal
this afternoon?

“No, sir, I didn't.”

“The editor should be in jail,” General Woerth said coolly.

Rienne glanced at him. Who could believe that Woerth was sixty-four? He was proud of his slender waist, his straight back and of a vitality that wore out officers thirty years younger. His face was thin and lined; the lines themselves seemed the marks made by an impatient energy. His foot tapped, as it did when he was controlling his anger.

“But he has every excuse,” Ligny said, smiling. He looked at Rienne. “You know him, don't you?”

“The editor?” Rienne said. “Louis Mathieu? Yes. We were at school together in Seuilly. I have a great respect for him.”

“And he's a Jew?”

“Yes, he is a Jew.”

“You see?” Ligny said, with an air of modest triumph. “Who has a better right to hate the Germans, and insist that they should be wiped out this time? Personally, I found his article a little violent, but I admit its justice.”

“Whatever his race—and though I dislike Jews I am not an anti-Semite,” Woerth said, with cool distaste, “I don't admit the right of a civilian to make any comment on the conduct of the war. Of any war.”

“Ah,” Ligny said mischievously, “you're all alike, you people who were brought up by a certain chief of staff—no, no, don't worry, I'm not going to insult his memory—poor old Gigi. He taught all his officers the same dogma. According to him, war is an affair of the general staffs—with, of course, the essential collaboration of a proper number of troops. In fact,
a mystery—and only initiates have a right to amuse themselves.”

“The conduct of a war belongs precisely to the general staffs,” Woerth said. “Any interference by civilians—journalists, clerks, women, street-sweepers—is certain to vulgarise it. They don't understand anything, they allow their passions to carry them away, they want miracles, they get hold of romantic notions about new weapons—tanks, aeroplanes, they imagine these will work the miracle. I'd like to forbid discussion during a war. It wastes time and creates a bad atmosphere. People should be told what to do, and do it.”

“What do you think, sir?” Ligny asked, turning to Piriac.

Piriac had been listening to the argument with a faintly bewildered air. His square body, buttoned stiffly into his uniform, had the air of an enormous puppet; his gestures were slow, and when he moved an arm it rose as though a spring had been released; he had a big head, reassuring and severe: the heavy jaw, the pouches under the eyes, gave an impression of serenity rather than age. But he was old; he was seventy, a soldier with a distinguished record, distinguished more for never having made a mistake than for any obvious successes. . . . He had a reputation for fatherly kindness, and a prodigious memory which never forgot the name or face of a soldier he had spoken to once.

He lifted his head and gazed at Ligny. Something in the younger man's face—Ligny was a bare sixty-two—gave him the idea that Ligny was joking. He allowed himself to relax.

“Young man,” he said pleasantly, “you know what I think about tanks and all these other toys for children. What chance will anything have, human or mechanical, if it comes within range of the Maginot guns? In this war we shall hardly lose a man for every hundred Germans who will batter themselves to death. And quite right. France can't afford to lose blood.”

“But do you think civilians should give advice about the war, sir?” Ligny asked.

“Certainly not,” Piriac said simply.

Ligny's eyes sparkled.

“What did I say?” he murmured to Woerth. “You both come from the same staff.”

“That has nothing to do with it,” Woerth said. “As a matter of principle, I say that only a very few persons in the country
have a right to give advice. Too many of our so-called leaders are spiritually rotted—irreligious, greedy, corrupt. There are moments when I look at some gentle awkward soldier and wonder whether it's worth cutting short his life to prolong the life of a diseased society.”

“When you become mystical,” Ligny said, smiling, “I can't follow you.”

“In your own late general staff you weren't, I think, given much training in rapid movement?” Woerth said.

Ligny looked at him with delight. He almost applauded. Turning to Rienne, he said,

“You see? It's always the same thing. Whenever we dine in this house, we argue. It's the atrocious food. I'm suffering agonies at this moment.”

“You might, sir, try eating before you come,” Rienne said in a low voice.

Ligny, though a very rich man, lived as simply as did the other two generals—more simply. Except for a cup of coffee and a roll when he woke, he ate nothing until seven o'clock in the evening. Then he dined lightly and carefully, usually at the Hôtel Buran.

Piriac's mind was still turning slowly and heavily round a thought of its own. He gripped Woerth's shoulder; his hand closing round it as though it were the knob of a stick.

“It will be a long war.”

“The difference between a long war ending theoretically in a victory, and a short war ending in a theoretical compromise, is only that the first will be fatal,” Woerth said calmly.

“And the difference between compromise and victory?” Ligny asked.

“Nil—in the circumstances.”

Ligny shrugged his shoulder. He took out a shabby notebook, opened it and handed Rienne a small photograph.

“My latest find,” he said gaily.

“Who is he, sir, he's not handsome?” Rienne asked. He was looking at the smudged picture of a schoolboy with a thin staring face and anxious mouth.

“Goebbels, aged twelve.”

Ligny had a collection of photographs of the Nazi leaders at all ages. “You understand,” he would say, displaying it, “it's
natural history—I've always had a taste for it.” He intended, as soon as the collection was respectably large, to arrange it in a room of the Ligny house in Bourges, and present the house—on condition that his gallery was carefully kept—to the nation: it was a magnificent piece of sixteenth-century domestic architecture and he was the last of his family.

Rienne handed back the photograph. Before Ligny could take it, Piriac's great paw lifted it out of the aide-de-camp's hand: he studied it for a minute with an indulgent smile, the same smile he gave to tanks and boys whipping their tops, then handed it over.

“Ridiculous,” he said kindly. “But all the same, what a mug.”

“Here he comes—at last,” Woerth said coldly. He had turned his shoulder on Ligny and his natural history, and was facing the door.

The others looked round. Bergeot was just coming into the room: he had not turned up at a quarter to nine when they went in to dinner, and his seat beside Piriac had remained empty. He had not changed his clothes. Mme de Freppel rushed over to him. In the silence his coming in made, her voice, sharpened by displeasure, carried across the large room. She was scolding him for being late. His answers were inaudible, but his hands moved in the gesture of a child defending himself.

“If he were a guest she could feel he'd behaved badly,” Woerth said, with contempt. “But since he's morally and immorally the head of the house, she might spare us the intimacies.”