Cloudless May (32 page)

He stood up, and invited Mourey to walk back with him. Michèle thanked him without speaking. She held out to him timidly a plate of cherries.

“Bonamy doesn't like black cherries,” her husband said.

“I know. But we haven't anything else.”

They walked as far as the Quai d'Angers in silence. A
delicately clear night. The Loire, firm, supple, its banks sharply defined by sand, pretended to be idle. It was simply resting after a day spent drawing into itself all the light of a wide valley filled and running over the brim with light.

“They can't spoil it,” Mourey said. . . . Rienne thought:
La Loire est une reine et les rois l'ont aim
é
e,
bringing it their gifts: Chambord, Blois, Chaumont, Amboise, and all the others.

At the end of the embankment they went into Marie's café. Marie greeted them without smiling and brought them their glasses of wine in a silence which she underlined by going back rapidly into the kitchen. There was one other customer; he was a colleague of Mourey's. Jolivet, the mathematics master at the school, brought his glass to their table. It was more to the point that he brought his thin face, with the scar which was a completely different white from the white skin, and his sunken eyes, their dark surface lively with rising bubbles of light—his face a little too sensitive and intelligent. He was wearing a glove on his artificial hand. “It's providential,” he said sometimes, “I always hated to write with chalk, because it came off on my fingers; it comes off on the glove now.”

Mourey asked him if he had seen the communiqué.

Jolivet's glove scribbled a sign of impatience. “Have I seen my foot! I don't read them. I tell you, we're not fighting this war. That is, a few soldiers are fighting—they've been told off to, poor devils, for the look of it. They're having their legs pulled by the politicians. Pity the poor little corpses with one leg longer than the other! My left arm, you know, is longer than my right, but I can still see and taste. . . . This is a good little wine. . . . I tell you, it won't last another month. Something will be arranged.”

“With the Boches?” Mourey said mildly.

“How you've changed,” Jolivet smiled. “You used to be a pacifist!”

“I detest war. But—this is still, God knows for how long, a civilised country. Do you want to have to teach children Hitler's mathematics?” Mourey paused. “When our armies were marching barefoot about Europe, at least they carried the Revolution in their packs.”

Jolivet shrugged his shoulders. “Don't you think that the rest of Europe felt about Napoleon as we feel about Hitler?”

“It's possible and means nothing.”

“You won't provoke me by your hysteria,” Jolivet said calmly. “I know Hitler is a Boche. Who doesn't? All the same, he offered us friendship.”

“With an innocent little invasion to follow,” Mourey said.

“So what? We asked for it. Why? Tell me why. Why all this eyewash about the Poles? For years we had it driven into us that all those spectres wandering about Europe, the League—what a superb leg-pull!—the Negus, Austria, the Czechs, weren't worth a single dead Frenchman. They're not. I agree! You, d'you think it reasonable to try to kill off my two boys for a black savage, for a stump of a country, Austria, for Versailles bastards like Czechoslovakia? Why suddenly throw us into the fire for the Poles? Much good we've done them!” Jolivet's eyes sputtered with malice. “You know as well as I do that all the editors in Paris can be bought—and the same for the politicians—including our deputy. Good. If they've changed their tune and are only longing to kill Frenchmen now, someone else has paid them. Somebody has made it worth their while to annoy the merry Boche. Probably the English. Have I ever liked foreigners—English, Czechs, savages, Poles? Never. My instinct was sound—they've wangled us into another war. And if you think I don't know what war is . . . I've had my ration. I have my Croix de Guerre. Being a hero, let me tell you, is very unpleasant. Very tiring and dangerous. After 1918 I thought: You can go home; they've told your hand off to go and sit in some shell-hole or other; you mightn't come off so lightly next time. . . . I have my work, my flat, my books, my wife knows how to stuff and roast a duck, my father-in-law has a decent house at Olivet on the Loiret, the good Little Loire, and we can look forward to retiring to it—that's modest enough, isn't it? And now these gargoyles of Poles . . .”

He put his money on the table and stood up, grimacing. The heat, he said, made the scars in his side ache.

Mourey, very pale, called him back. He stammered with rage, as when he was talking about his house.

“Just a minute. We're not fighting for the Poles. It's because we can't let the Germans make a graveyard of Europe.”

Jolivet had been calm. Now his bitterness kicked through that.

“You prove too much,” he said. “We did that before; you see what's come of it. If Europe belonged to me I'd give it to Hitler with pleasure. Who else wants it? Do we want it? I had a cousin in Budapest, our consul. I've seen photographs of their peasants gnawing refuse. You think Hitler can make worse of it? You're a fool, my dear Mourey. You've forgotten what a heap of dead Frenchmen looks like. All wars are glorious—and useless and murderous. This is like the others. I have one comfort—our noble Government has changed its mind once already about the value of a single Frenchman being equal to eighty million foreigners: it will do it again—and call the war off. Unfortunately, some have been promoted already to the rank of our glorious dead, my nephew is one of them—he was going to be a second Curie. How many foreigners and politicians equal one Curie? . . . There's only one Frenchman who equals the rest of Europe. Weygand. I don't trust anyone except our generals.”

He glanced at Rienne: who said nothing. He had nothing to say to this civilian ex-soldier who was denying all he had given one of his hands, the right hand, for, and insisting that his house at Olivet more than equalled defeat. Equalled cowardice. Nothing—Rienne knew it better than either of the others—nothing is easier than to believe that war is murder. It is true in a way that only I know, he thought. I and other soldiers. The real knot—like the knots in Mourey's floor it included the whole of history—is harder. Has any man the right to refuse to kill an enemy who crosses the frontiers, very old and deeply sunk in the earth, of his country? True—some at least of the enemy are poor fellows who are obeying orders. If he wishes, a civilian can stop to argue whether freedom, when you must do murder for it, more than equals slavery. And about politicians and their guilt. None of it touches me—or, if it does, I shall keep my mouth shut. . . . Rienne looked with calm benevolence at the face, half respectful, half mocking, of the mathematics master, and did not speak. After a moment, Jolivet limped out.

“He's lost his senses,” Mourey stammered.

“He'll find them before the Germans get here,” Rienne said.

He had settled with himself to debit every outburst of this sort to the months of waiting. If you stretch a line too tightly along the frontiers for months, here or there it will give. What
of it? There are not two sorts of Frenchmen, not two courages of the French bone. Or, if there are, in war-time they exactly equal one another. Rienne's arithmetic was simple: it was perhaps not arithmetic at all, as a mathematician understands it. He counted Jolivet as a good Frenchman. He had seen many such soldiers, all grousers and sceptics, and they were not the worst. They only need their orders.

He looked up. Marie had come back. She was standing beside them with her arms hanging, like a child, or like a woman who is used to letting things go—her husband, let's say, or her happiness. Her face had an evasive look; she was showing only half her trouble.

“Can I have your advice?” she asked Rienne timidly.

“Of course,” Rienne said. He thought: Pierre is in trouble.

The young woman took out of her pocket a letter badly typed on cheap paper. Mourey recognised it at once as coming from that litter-machine, the political Left. With her respect for anything written, Marie wiped the table before dropping the letter in front of them. They both read it. It was addressed to M. Ernest Huet, Deputy. In turgid—that is, dishonest—sentences, it invited him to force the Government to make peace; if he refused, the undersigned, wife of one of his electors, would know how to behave next time. And so on and so forth.

“Where did you get it?” Mourey asked.

Marie looked at him with mistrust. “One of the customers—I know him—left it here. He says I must sign it and send it to our deputy. . . . I won't tell you his name. You won't ask me?”

Rienne turned it over with a finger.

“I should destroy it.”

The young woman's respect for him was so deep that she forced herself to tear the letter in pieces.

“But how I should like to hear of an armistice,” she sighed.

“My poor child,” Rienne said, “you're too fond of your husband to want him to turn into a coward.”

“No, you're mistaken,” Marie said quickly. “If Pierre was a coward and with me, I should be happy. I should be happier with him than with a dead hero.”

“He will be a hero and alive,” Rienne said. “He has every chance.”

Marie shivered. It is unlucky to say these things—even under your breath. “But the news is bad.”

“The first news is always bad. We're not Germans, we don't nurse our wars beforehand. It's nothing. We shall win.”

Marie called up a poor little smile—a smile of the least robust class, the one called up at the end of a war, to fill the gaps. Surprisingly, there is often a hero among these weakly boys. It was late: she bolted the door behind them. Mourey went off to the right, to his threatened house, and Rienne to the left.

He walked slowly. There was a largeness about these May nights. They included easily everything they had to: silence, the warmth of the day, the gentle Angevin valley, the Loire with the Loiret and all her other daughters. For fully a minute Rienne lost his perpetual hidden sense of impatience. During this minute he was able to think without impatience of his idleness—held here, with German tanks ploughing the Somme battlefield. Out of all the nights he had spent on the Somme during the last war he remembered one, one only: a night when he slept soundly and woke to a sunrise of such inhuman beauty that he felt certain of its place in his memory. And forgot it at once until this second, the last, of the minute it took him to turn his back on the Loire and turn towards the barracks.

When Lucien came into the library Catherine pretended to be very surprised.

“What? You here again?”

The young hypocrite had been waiting for two hours to catch him—since she heard her mother telephoning to Bergeot at the Prefecture to send her the handbag she had forgotten. She knew Lucien would bring it. Bergeot would not send a clerk who might grumble at having the errand added to his day's work.

“Why have you come?”

“I must go back at once,” Lucien answered. “I came, you know, on my motor-cycle.”

He was following her as he spoke through the french window on to the lawn.

“You can go round this way. Past the stables. . . . I didn't know you had one.”

“He
got it for me,” Lucien said. “It's ridiculous”—he smiled sheepishly—“the fellow who showed me how to handle it said I have a mechanical touch. I've drafted a letter to Colonel Rienne about it. Will you look at it for me?”

Catherine read through the letter—nearly illegible, it had been crossed out and overwritten so often. She kept back a smile.

“Need you write as though you were paralysed?”

“It's not right?” Lucien asked. He was anxious.

“In one line you say he promised to get you into the tank corps, and in the next you tell him who you are. If he's forgotten you, he's forgotten his promise. And you write stiffly. Like a schoolmaster.”

Lucien took the paper out of her hands and tore it up.

“Don't laugh at me,” he said. “Help me.”

Leaning against the wall of the house, he stared in front of him at the trees masking the river. In the west over Nantes the sky was an acid green; a few stars were dissolving in it so rapidly they were nearly invisible. There were bats. Catherine got ready to duck if one of them came near her, and from the corner of her eye watched Lucien glare at the sunset. She had questioned Bergeot and learned enough about him to pretend she knew everything. That it was from his mother he had his strong peasant bones and big frame, and it was his mother had made him ambitious. She had no need to see his mother to know exactly how she would hold a child between her strong hands. From his father he had his obstinacy, his blond skin and blue eyes, and his reserve with women. Once a day he had eaten soup—from Sophie, who came from the same commune as the Sugnys and the next village, she knew what went into it, and that he ate from a glazed yellow bowl. He slept, when he was little, next the wall in the bed he shared with an elder brother; afterwards he had the outside, and a younger child learned to keep his knees within a third of the bed.

It was satisfactory to know so much. Above all things in life, Catherine craved certainty. She wanted no complexity, no
mysteries. The less Lucien had had in his life—few young men so intelligent could have had less—the better pleased she was. A surprise which would delight Bella or Valérie—to learn that he was really the son of a Duc de Seuilly, and the Sugnys only foster-parents—would have sent her flying from him. Above all, there must be no lies in his past.

“You could say—Colonel Rienne. Sir. I am Lucien Sugny, private secretary to the Prefect. You were kind enough to promise to get me into the army if things became serious. In my opinion they are serious. I beg you to do me this great kindness. I have the honour to be, Sir, Your obedient servant, L. Sugny.” She looked at him openly. “Must you go?”