Cloudless May (34 page)

“You think so?” Mathieu said.

“I'm sure!”

Mathieu lowered his hand and his eyelids at the same moment, and became unreadable. He must have given up hope of assassinating anyone. He said politely,

“I was sure you would say so. My conscience—you can count on it—made me warn you.”

“Your conscience would be the death of me,” Bergeot smiled.

“Probably,” Mathieu agreed. “If Labenne kills you—I mean politically, of course—you won't die of an enlarged conscience. Just the same, you'll die.”

“You exaggerate his importance,” Bergeot said with energy. “Leave him to me, I'll answer for him being harmless. Besides, he's too busy making himself rich.”

“Are you quite sure,” Mathieu said, “that you know where all his money comes from? And where he keeps it?”

He turned his head brusquely. Mme de Freppel came into the room through a door immediately behind him; he was furious that he had not noticed this door. Her fixed candid smile made him certain she had been listening: unless the door had been ajar, she would not have played so clumsily with the handle.

“Monsieur Mathieu,” she said charmingly, “I wanted to tell you how good your articles have been lately.”

Mathieu thanked her drily.

“If every editor of a newspaper were as uncompromising——”

He interrupted her with an insulting anger. “You would feel less comfortable. As it is, you can be polite to me. I'm harmless.”

She let him see that she felt his rudeness. Mathieu left. No surgeon completing an operation of which the patient will die could feel a more metaphysical delight in doing his duty. The Prefect had watched him with irony.

“There goes an honest man,” he said. “The rest of us not only have to put up with his honesty, but pay for it. Why does he think that being outrageously honest gives him the right to be insolent?”

“You can rely on him to support you,” Rienne said; “you can't be as sure of all your allies.”

Without reflecting, Bergeot retorted furiously, “If the day comes when I have nothing left to rely on but Mathieu's honesty, I'm lost.” He turned to Mme de Freppel. “And now, my child, since you've shocked my editor—he'll think you live here——”

“Are you all mad?” Mme de Freppel cried. She was humiliated by her failure with Mathieu; it had released all her fears, threatening her with a failure she would not be able to control. “We may even be losing this war, and you two go on nodding portentously like mandarins. Bonamy plays at defending Seuilly with his tin soldiers, you play at being Prefect. It's ridiculous. It's like men. I know. There are rules for every situation, even for losing a war. You are good little officials. You obey the rules. You shut your eyes to what is going on—until it has happened. Until you're being killed, ruined. And until I am.”

She had startled Rienne into listening to her with the same detached notice he took of a dispute between Ligny and Woerth. He noticed that she was even more alarmed than she said; she was in a mood of panic. He saw, too, that she had no scruples about making a scene in the Prefect's room: the clerks could hear her in the room across the corridor. She must be in the habit of making scenes here. He felt profoundly shocked.

“What are you talking about?” Bergeot said. “You could save all this for the evening, my poor child.”

He glanced at Rienne. His glance said: You see what I have to put up with, but what can you do with a woman in a rage? Rienne met his glance coolly, careful not to give notice of his distaste.

Mme de Freppel was beyond herself; she ran towards Bergeot, lifting her clenched hands in a superb gesture. “I'm saying that we shall lose everything. We shall be poor. I shall be poor. You think I don't know what poverty is? And cruelty? I know better than either of you. My bones know it. And I know you're not the sort of man who can carry off a failure. Or be faithful to me when I'm hideous because I'm poor. I couldn't face it again, I'm too old. I shan't forgive you, I shall remind you of it when I'm dying, when a bomb kills me—if you won't even try to save us. . . .”

Rienne detested scenes. He could not stand this one any longer; and he wanted to reflect on his discovery that she harassed Émile in this shameless way.

“Forgive me, I must go now,” he said in a calm voice.

Mme de Freppel looked at him with nervous dislike. “You disapprove of me. You can! I disapprove of your influence over Émile, and your revolting insensibility. I detest anyone who likes war. I can see a use for concentration camps. To shut up warmongers! You—I——”

“Don't go,” Bergeot said to him.

Smiling a little, he took Marguerite in his arms and talked to her as though she were a sullen child. Yes, the news was bad; yes, they were probably both ruined. And Bonamy—Bonamy was nothing but a soldier, a professional murderer. It was all true and all unimportant. Important things couldn't be talked over now. . . .

She freed herself. “When?”

“This evening.”

“You'll come home early?”

“Yes, I promise,” Bergeot cried.

“To dinner.”

“No. After dinner. About nine.”

Her face changed, to a tigerish gaiety. Licking her finger, she rubbed it on her sleeve and drew it quickly across her throat. “See this finger wet, see it dry; cut your throat if you're telling a lie?”

“Yes, yes,” Bergeot laughed.

He shut the door on her and turned round with a face emptied of gaiety, an anxious husband's poor baffled face. Coming back to his desk, he sat down, deflated.

“My God, I'm tired.”

“Is it necessary for Marguerite to come in when you're working?” Rienne said gently.

Bergeot made excuses for her: she was nervous; her position was abominably difficult. If only Freppel would divorce her . . .

Rienne did not speak: he was appalled by his glimpse into the disorder of his friend's life, and Marguerite's indecent interference. It was obviously a usual happening. I've been blind not to see it, he thought. He blamed his blindness; he
was not conceited enough to think she would take trouble to mislead him.

“I never thought it wise to let her spend so much time in the Prefecture,” he said. “She ought not to have a room here.”

Bergeot shrugged his shoulders. “If she were legally my wife she would insist less on her privileges,” he said frankly. “I have to make allowances for that.” He looked at Rienne. “You think I'm being cynical? Far from it, I assure you. But you're not married and you don't know anything about women.”

Rienne felt a little ashamed of the simplicity of his life. He had never, except for brief episodes when he was a young man, been in love. The war first; and after the war, service abroad, had taken all his energy and will. Almost without noticing it, he had withdrawn as finely from the world as a monk. Soldiering, in all its shapes, with all its ugly necessities—over which, as over its moments of ecstasy and contentment, his mind closed sharply—had absorbed him more and more, taking away his life and giving him—what? A sort of peace. A strength without desires. As if it had taken the place of his young belief in God. The face war had shown him was neither wholly cruel nor wholly fascinating, but the fascination, like the cruelty, was real. And absorbing. And jealous. With such a jealousy that never perhaps, after his twenty-fifth year, had he been tempted, seriously tempted, to place a woman's face next it.

Bergeot had revived—with that lucky resilience which surprised and charmed his friends.

“Mathieu is not the only stubborn man in Seuilly. He thinks so. Being a Jew, he's a religious fanatic.” His eyes sparkled with malice.

“You're unjust to him,” Rienne said, smiling.

“Very well, I'm unjust. Who cares? Did he tell you—I've written an article for him? You'll see it on the front page of tomorrow's
Journal.
It's masterly.” He laughed at his boast, but his friend saw that he was delighted with himself, and blown out by the excitement which followed his moods of discouragement. “It's a message. An order of the day for us civilians. Forward the fallen arches, the varicosed legs! No one can avoid this war. Civilians are involved as hopelessly as
soldiers and they must have the fantasies of war. And the fanaticism. They'll need it.”

“You can't fight on excitement,” Rienne said. “You've become a proper civilian. . . . I must go.”

Bergeot walked with him to the door, opened it, and looked along the corridor. He said quietly,

“Don't think I don't know what a mess we're in. Amiens, Arras, Abbeville, Laon—all the names of the last war coming back, and in one day. It's frightful. I sleep badly. I dream about the war. . . . The brutes must be nearing the Chemin des Dames. We had a boy killed that evening, I only remember him because we'd tried to look after him, he was very willing, docile, if you like—but he was puzzled from the first day to the last, his last, and made mistakes. He was so light the men thought they were burying a child. . . .”

“There were others like him.”

“You . . . soldier,” Bergeot said, smiling. He turned back.

“I forgot something I had to say to you,” Rienne said quickly. “That Prussian fellow at Geulin. Captain von Uhland. Did you have him vetted?”

Bergeot let his weariness flow over his body; his shoulders dropped. He smiled feebly, exhausted. His friend was remorseful, even though he recognised a trick.

“I did. He's all right. As soon as I can find a minute I'll push him through. The difficulty is to find the minute.” His voice changed, and became spiteful. “I suppose Louis put you up to remind me.”

Bergeot reached the Manor House late—near midnight. He got out and listened to the sound of the car being driven through the arch into the courtyard; it stopped noisily, the door shut, a house door opened and a woman's voice grumbled into the darkness. The silence stretched itself suddenly to fill the whole dark hemisphere. He was tempted to go round to the other side of the house, to see whether the Loire, sunk in its
summer bed, had kept for the last some flicker of light it was giving off now: the line of sand drawn under each bank would be the colour of ivory in the starlight. He was too tired. He rested his hands and forehead on the stone of the doorway, feeling its centuries of life beating steadily at the surface of the stone in his finger-tips. But it is my own life, he thought; my poor short life. A rage he knew well filled him, and despair, because of the shortness of human life. Even the elms at his back would outlive him, like—unless the barbarians destroyed it—this fortunate stone. But the sum of all he burned to do, to feel, to know—in that order—must be pressed between two blades of grass. I have seen so little, he thought. Seuilly, Paris. True, they are among the few wholly admirable cities in the world, but—even of this valley, this superb valley, and its châteaux, and its cathedrals, and its cities, playing with and played on by an air like no other in the world, finer and more pointed with light than any in the world:
Et plus que l'air marin la douceur angevine
—he had seen hardly anything.

The coldness of the stone was now aching in the bones of his forehead. He moved. “I haven't time,” he said. He needed a dozen lifetimes. More. He needed time running through him while he took what he wanted. And suddenly he felt too tired to endure another minute of it.

When he came into her room Marguerite waved both arms at him like a child. She was wearing a nightgown which had shrunk and was too short for her: it left bare her legs from the polished turn of the muscles at the back under the olive skin, dancer's legs, a little deformed by muscle, with a too short foot. She laughed at him for being three hours late.

Without knowing it, he had stiffened his nerves to face sarcasm or anger. He knelt gratefully on the floor by her chair and let her stroke his head. Her fingers reminded him not of any woman's, but of Bonamy patiently, endlessly stroking his forehead when he was twelve or thirteen and had what his overworked mother called “his” fevers. Marguerite's fingers and wrist had the hardness and nervous strength of a schoolboy's.

“How good you are,” he said. “I really meant to come home early.”

“Rest,” Marguerite said.

He got up restlessly and stood looking at her. What he felt
was neither happiness nor disquiet, but one masking the other; he did not know which was his real self. He recognised one of those moments which belong to an existence of another order, or simply to an existence of order—not this disorder of life wearing itself out, reducing itself to a vapour, to a few minutes which have the proper taste of life. The moment was gone. Marguerite looked at him with a smile and he bent obediently to kiss the nape of her neck. Black fine hairs spread from it to both sides like the fronds of a fern; the mass of her hair gave off precisely an odour of fern. He felt the pleasure of touching her nape—a little usual, but real.

“How long did Bonamy talk to you?”

Suspicious—she had spoken too carelessly—he said,

“A few minutes.”

“What did he want?”

“He has a friend in the internment camp at Geulin. He wants me to get the poor devil out.”

“Can you? Safely?”

“They're harmless,” Bergeot said. He shrugged his shoulders. “Most of them would be shot by their countrymen.”

He was close enough to her to see the fixed flame which sprang in her eyes when she listened carefully. A fire seen through the wrong end of a telescope at night would be as distant and unmoving.

“You know I don't care whether they're harmless,” she said. “The point is, will it harm you to begin releasing Germans? As to that, they're all anti-Nazi—that is, traitors to their Government. If they have betrayed their own country, why not ours?”

Bergeot was amused and shocked by her reasoning. It sprang, he knew, from dislike not of Germans, but of the revolutionaries she supposed they were. He could feel for the misery of these poor devils behind barbed wire, enemies in an enemy country invaded by their enemies. But his pity for them was impatient. A wretched business, he said to himself. But what a bore. And after all, they're Boches.