Cloudless May (31 page)

“At least he'll keep order.”

“He has been called in to make war,” Ligny said.

“We have a war on two fronts in our dish,” Woerth said. “Against the Germans and against disorderly elements at home. We're worse off than the Germans, they have only one front.”

“My advice to Weygand,” Ligny said calmly, “would be to stick to the one enemy.”

Woerth made his favourite gesture. He held out both hands, palm upwards, and moved them up and down, the scales of a balance. Rienne had seen him make this gesture at manoeuvres—he was weighing the weather; at a court-martial, with a soldier's poor life on the scales; in front of a cenotaph, where perhaps he had the living, the survivors, on one side, and the dead on the other—with all each of them weighed in light and darkness, heat and cold, the sun, and earth between the teeth.

“It remains to decide,” he said, “which of our enemies is the more dangerous.”

Ligny's shoulders moved across another degree of his private circle. “I'm old-fashioned. If someone talks to me about the enemy I look for him on the frontier . . . Just as when they talk about public morale I think of religion. . . . I don't like Germans.”

“Why should you?” Woerth said. “After all, you're civilised.”

“Good of you,” Ligny murmured.

“I dislike Germans with my instincts and mind,” Woerth said drily. “After all, I am a good Catholic. You are, too. . . . Reds I dislike with my heart. Did you suppose I have no heart?”

“It's not the Reds,” Ligny said in a soft voice, “who have just taken Le Cateau and St. Quentin. And crossed the Sambre and the Oise—two of our most faithful rivers.”

Woerth said nothing. He held his head slightly to one side. He is waiting, Rienne thought, to be tipped off about the Seine and the Loire. Are they going to be disgraced, or promoted to
be victories? The moment he gets word he'll know whether he ought to drop them. . . .

Ollivier glanced past General Woerth at his friend—a glance brief enough, he thought, to elude Woerth's net. He was mistaken. . . . Considering the time we've waited for him, his glance said, your great man might make himself pleasant. . . . Woerth's inspection was the most perfunctory imaginable. He walked back to Ollivier's headquarters in a silence he broke to ask Ollivier about his officers. Ollivier's answers were all obviously a little wide of what he wanted to find out: after each of them he looked fixedly past Ollivier's head to a point where he hoped to catch them from one side and correct the impression they were intended to give. At last he looked Ollivier in the face—in a leisurely way, as though comparing it with a passport photograph in his hand: peculiarities, the shrewd russet eyes, the convex forehead, the narrow lips with their little air of authority and patience.

“And you, what do you think? Are your officers in good heart?”

“No, sir.”

The general's eyebrows pretended to be surprised. “Explain yourself,” he said mildly.

“They don't like inaction, sir.”

Woerth's lips moved in his slight smile. You could wonder whether it was a smile or the relaxation of a muscle which had been on guard.

“And I suppose you share their feeling? Tell me, what would you like to see happen?”

The way Ollivier stood reminded his friend of Jean Viard in front of his house and his fields—the same stubbornness of shoulders and head. Ollivier was defending ideas he had nursed as jealously as any Viard his land. He saw Rienne's warning glance, and brushed it aside, with a contempt which said: Thank God, I'm not on the staff. “My opinion is——” he began. He went on, calmly, as though he were writing out an exercise for manæuvres, with the same precision, the same anxiety to be clear. He explained what use the French tanks and aeroplanes would be—if G.H.Q. decided to use them. He knew exactly which point of the advancing German column he would puncture with them. He knew—seeing them with their
telegraph wires, elms, the oldest elms in the world, fleece of woods, villages sunk under the weight of church, mairie, humble inns,
Commerce,
or
France,
strung along them like beads, or breaking off to shelter from the heat of late May in a fold of the earth—all the roads along which he would bring up armies from the south and east. “And in the meantime I would resist there,” he said, in his composed voice, “and here, and here”—using his hands to scoop out a hill and a river-bank. “I should be beaten but I would resist—for the sake of the time gained, and also the sake of resistance. For encouraging others. . . . My view is, that you can't know what men are capable of until you order them to cling to the ground with their nails. And—of course—until you make use of my tanks. . . .”

After five minutes he had scarcely begun his discourse. It was that. Rienne saw him—in his room with its low ceiling, its dresser, table fetched from the kitchen, wooden chairs, all the fragments of an artisan's home—pacing out with his soldier's stiff walk, hour after hour, the line along which he would launch his tanks. During the past five days this line, pivoting on his poor room, had moved across an angle of as many degrees. . . . What had prompted Woerth to let loose this flood of deliberation? Curiosity? Certainly not friendly curiosity. It was because he felt Woerth's malice that Rienne had tried to warn Ollivier, with his firmness and pig-headed innocence. Ollivier's answering look of contempt made him smile in his sleeve.

Woerth interrupted. The irony of his voice ran out to touch Rienne.

“What strategists all our colonels are now!” he smiled.

Each time Rienne visited Jean Mourey in his home, he felt the same acute pleasure that his friend lived in this and not in any other old house—very old, almost the oldest in Seuilly. Certainly the most charming and friendly among the old houses.
Ever since he was a boy Mourey had wanted just this house. Of the thirteenth century, it was small, and had grown shabby. Every part of it was shabby. The front door with the three semicircular steps and the carved jambs. The bricks, the cross-timbers. The roof half the height of the walls, and sharp, like narrowly-opened scissors. Modest as the house was, Mourey could not afford to live in all of it. The ground floor had been let to a midwife: then if she had to run out suddenly at night she would not be stumbling and creaking down the staircase. He kept for himself the upper floor and the attics.

In spite of its age, the house was certainly not senile. The wood was sound everywhere, the staircase stood with the assurance of steps in a lighthouse, the dry faded bricks formed a frame, a skeleton, of extreme toughness. It was like the better wines of Anjou and Touraine, delicate in colour, rather carelessly smooth, yet robust. It needed no condescension from the present, no piety, of the modern sort, towards relics: it lived in its own right. Unflustered, in its own sober and prudent strength. After all the labour, prayers, sufferings, pleasure, it had seen and accepted, it was still alert, still strongly and gaily accepting its present. All its presents, one after another as they came—generation after loyal generation. The newest sound—Mourey's three children running barefoot to save their shoes over the waxed floor—echoed in it no less firmly than the steps of the Huguenot vine-grower and his four grown-up sons when they were resisting expulsion: they were finally expelled dead on the 1st of June 1685. Among the marks the house kept in its memory, and ineffaceable at that level, was a mark of blood. After all, a very usual mark.

Here Mourey had been living—with the same sense of ease and fitness as if he were still living with his battalion—since he came back from the War. (Hard for him to remember that the War was now only a war.) The house gave him the same certainty of good faith, no less good for coming not from a few men of his age but from countless—he had tried to count them—age groups. As in the battalion, his responsibility was lightened by being shared with other Frenchmen. He had only to follow. What a relief to lay your hand on a stair-rail and be given with the smoothness of the old wood your orders for next day. For all the next days.

It was Mme Mourey who opened the door to Rienne. Still a young woman, usually silent, she greeted all her husband's friends from behind the same serious air of dignity. She dropped it only with Rienne, and let him see what she was—a young countrified woman, still in love with her husband. In love even with his shortcomings, his mind which was too preoccupied and his body too easily tired to give themselves up to her. She sat without talking, at the side of the table nearest the lamp, and mended. And mended. It was endless; old clothes had to be made over for the younger children and new ones contrived, somehow—often out of her own—for the eldest. At this time in the evening all three were in the attic in bed, and she could work undisturbed. Now and then she lifted her head and, still not speaking, looked at Mourey with quiet bewilderment. She knew he trusted her and was fond of her: she knew, too, how little except kindness and trust he had to give. Taking his gift, she gave it the place of honour, like a mother pretending to be delighted with the poor little brooch her son has given her. Could he have afforded to spend more? A true mother, she does not ask the question, even of herself. And perhaps she is really delighted.

As soon as Rienne came into the room he felt that something was wrong. Mourey, was working as usual, the table covered with documents. But he was unhappy. Rienne had a dismayed moment when he feared there had been a quarrel: it might—he knew his friend—begin the ruin of this good marriage. In which all the devotion, the flowering of spirit and body, were on one side, and the dependence and withholding of self on the other. Nothing so audaciously balanced can afford shocks.

The glance Mme Mourey gave her husband as she went to her chair reassured him.

Without waiting for his friend to sit down, Mourey said,

“They're going to pull down the house.”

“What?”

“I've told you,” Mourey said. He spoke jerkily, with the senseless fury of a man too tired to bear kindness. “This house is to come down. My house. Someone, some damnable firm or other, is going to put an iron and concrete horror at this corner. It's not even needed. There's no need for any building of such a size. Not in Seuilly. In any case, the concrete is needed for
other things. For the war! But what does that matter? Not at all. The firm—I've been finding things out—belongs to a brother-in-law of the Minister, and both Georges Labenne and Monsieur de Thiviers are in it for thousands of shares. It's murder.”

“I don't understand it,” Rienne said.

He understood that Mourey was in the state of mind of a man whose friend has been killed idiotically. By an idiot of an officer sending him off to do some unnecessary and useless job. The order to demolish his house struck poor Mourey as insane; he felt the despair of any man trapped by an insane force.

Mourey threw his arms up.

“The world had the luck to have this house built for it by men who knew how to build—they weren't thinking only of money. Money is putting up the iron and concrete, it will be fit for money to live in—that is, vulgar, senseless, modern, divided scientifically into cubes the same height and size, stairs not one deeper or shallower than the others, built quickly, not like a child coming after its full term. An abortion. Without a mind. Without a memory. They're going to destroy a house which is entirely memory—able to draw on five centuries of memories. Sunk that deep. You know, you can't put your hand on it anywhere without touching somewhere an immense column of time. There isn't a knot in the floor that doesn't include the past—every one of the pasts which have grown up in this house and people it. The house is a people itself. And they're destroying it. This whole people . . .” He looked at his wife—“You know, Michèle, why I like walking on our floors. I tell you, Bonamy, this house is alive. For an old house it's quite new, it would have lived easily another five hundred years. They'll have to murder it to get rid of it. Yes, yes, I know. I said that before. Michèle, poor girl, has been listening to me for hours. But I can't get used to the idea of all this—in a way it's Seuilly—it's almost France—being torn down, scattered. Forgotten. Lost.”

“Why should it be forgotten?” Rienne said. “You can add it to your book on Seuilly. . . . Your children won't forget it.”

Mme Mourey gave him a look of affection. “It's what I was saying,” she said in a low voice.

Mourey was silent; his wife and his friend watched him
helplessly, as little good to him as if he were dying. But—not as if he were dying—none of their grief was for themselves. Mourey made an effort to smile. He was trying to think that at the end of a long life the house would come to flower in him in the first, the only moment of its perfection: it would even be better than the reality—as the memory of ecstasy is better than ecstasy. This is a lie, but if only out of politeness to our poor life, we should try to believe it.

“I'm an unbalanced fool,” he said, looking at Rienne. “I have everything a man needs to be happy—and I make a fuss about a house.”

“But what a house,” Rienne murmured.

“Yes, yes. There isn't another like it. Not even in Seuilly. . . . If the Labennes have their way, in fifty years there won't be one like it in France. We shall have been brought up to date—that is, finished. . . . Nowadays we kill everything we touch.”

Rienne let him talk. He knew that some of Mourey's bitterness would fly off in words: the rest would return and return, each time lighter. If he lived long enough, the cruel happiness he got out of his memory would equal exactly his grief now. He has a chance, Rienne thought: any civilian in this war has as good a chance as the next. He sat and listened, his body tilted stiffly forward. He listened with that part of his mind only open to this friend. Behind his quietness—patiently, with a lucid anxiety—he was studying the danger he felt threatening Émile. Spreading it out like a map, he examined the ground. From which side was the attack due to come? From Émile himself? He's too impatient and confident, Rienne thought; he trusts his courage too far. . . . Well, what can I do? Nothing. . . . During the last war he had learned that the limits within which you can interfere to save another man have been fixed narrowly, as narrowly as possible. War, if it teaches pity, teaches with the same stroke the indecency of indulging it.