Cloudless May (35 page)

“It can't touch me in any way to release one of them,” he said.

Marguerite was still watching him. “How unlike Bonamy.”

“What?”

“To have a German friend.”

“Oh, as to that,” he said, yawning, “the fellow is really Mathieu's friend. Bonamy worries me about him to please Mathieu. He has a weakness for our dear Louis.”

“Which you don't share?” she said, smiling.

“Which I don't share.”

She was silent. Bergeot moved away and began loosening his tie in front of a glass. How old I look, he thought, grimacing. He tilted his face to the light to see its lines; his hair, thick and wiry, had begun to go back at the twin peaks of his forehead. The thought of growing old disgusted him. So actively that the spurt of rage revived him. . . . I have years of a long life in front of me; all we Bergeots are hard to kill off. . . . Turning round, he saw that Marguerite was sunk in her thoughts. She had stretched out a bare leg, the fineness of the ankle denied by the knot of muscles higher up; she was straightening and bending back the toes with the easy menace of a cat stretching and hiding its claws. She was absorbed and impatient. He saw that she was waiting for him to speak.

“What's the matter, my child?”

She looked at him, with sudden gravity and candour, from a dull blackness where his own glance would not know whether it was lost or close to a wall.

“You'll be making a mistake if you release Mathieu's German friend. Now, at least. Perhaps later you could do it. But at this time—when you need all the support you can get. Bonamy is inexperienced—a soldier, not a government official. Think of the scandal your enemies will make of it—the Prefecture is under Jewish influence—Monsieur Bergeot has too many German friends! You know just how you will be abused——”

“Oh, abuse!” Bergeot said.

Marguerite lifted her hands in a gesture of indifference and mockery. “Pr-r-r . . . have it your own way,” she said, smiling. “You don't mind abuse. I know. You're strong, immovable. And your precious schemes—which I don't like at all—are immovable, too, eh? How do you know Mathieu is not doing this deliberately to ruin you? You don't know. You want”—afraid to make a mistake, she felt for a thrust that would convince him without rousing his vanity and self-will—“you want to show him and Bonamy that you're generous. You're a
child. An idiot. Like all heroes when they're not fighting. And Bonamy is too innocent, he doesn't know what he's dipped his hand in.” Her voice had become gentle. She brushed his cheek with her fingers. “My darling Émile, be just a little sensible. Your German can surely wait until you could let him out without ruining your plans?”

He was struck by her acuteness. So often he felt that he was clumsier than she in reading motives. . . . He had forgotten that Mathieu had snubbed her this afternoon.

“You may be right,” he murmured.

She said nothing, not wanting to risk more pressure on his vanity.

“Yes. I'm almost sure you're right. I can let it ride a few weeks. Why not? I have all the time in the world,” he said joyously.

He took hold of her hands and pulled her up to lie like a finger of sun along his body. His lassitude had gone, and he carried her across the room. She lay watching him, lying with arms doubled back, palms upward, against her shoulders. She closed her hands over the edge of his shoulders. They were at first the coolest, then the moist and burning points of his body. Now he could let himself laugh quietly, getting rid of some of the pain of his inner laughter. It was, after all, an act of good-humour, even a joke, a leg-pull. He took possession of himself, easing his angry nerves, drawing on an energy in her as much as in himself. Without effort. In the end there is so narrow a difference between weariness and well-being, between thinking and sleeping. . . .

Mathieu was not at the second meeting of the Committee of Civil Defence next morning. Bergeot felt relieved of a light burden on his conscience. And vexed, when Labenne, carrying in his buttonhole a yellow rose the size of his fist, came in to say that, alas, he was very busy and could not find time to
attend. Bergeot smiled in his face, to show his indifference to the insult.

“We know you have other interests besides the safety of the town,” he said.

The Mayor took this jibe with a placid face, without a movement of his lips below the fringe of coarse black hair which accented them. Still looking in his face, Bergeot was not quick enough to catch the slight narrowing of his pupils. Labenne's face was so ostentatiously a peasant mask of covetousness, double-dealing, brutality, that when people looked at him they corrected it instinctively to read prudence, competence, power. Bergeot could not help admiring him for his energy. He was drawn to him by the vigorous warmth Labenne gave off, as though he carried about with him the slopes planted with joyous vineyards, the southern fruits, all the odours and ardent heat of summer in Anjou. It was difficult not to feel friendly towards Labenne when he smiled with that charm and rich gaiety which must, surely, come from the heart.

He had reached the door before he turned round and looked at Bergeot with one of these smiles.

“I've just read your article in the
Journal”
he said. “Magnificent. Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Bergeot said.

He felt flattered in spite of himself by this praise, so spontaneous that it must be genuine. Scoundrel Georges Labenne may be, he thought confusedly, but he's a pleasant fellow, with a fund of decency. He relaxed as though he were stretching himself in a field at Thouédun, in the warmth and manifold life of that deep valley, the ground under him bursting with its own richness like a vast gourd; he felt kindly towards even gross human beings, and the smile he gave Labenne had in it a point, a very obvious point, of condescension.

“Good of you to run in,” he said indifferently.

As the door closed on Labenne he turned on the three remaining members of the Committee—Piriac, Woerth, M. de Thiviers—a face full of respect. He had taught himself young the habit of being simple and respectful with great men. He rarely broke the habit. Held by it, and half out of pity, he would listen to some long-winded old Senator with a lively air of interest. It was not real pity. He had less of it than any of the
people he listened to, charmed by his interest in them, would have believed.

With a smile, he invited the commander-in-chief to speak. General Piriac was sitting in his usual attitude in public, arms and doubled fists resting, to buttress his heavy body, on the table. At this moment his thoughts had gone so far from him that looking into his blue eyes you would only have seen a single object, like one of the figures a child cuts out and pastes on a blank page, a horse he had ridden when he was a subaltern, a tunic belonging to his father. When the Prefect spoke he looked slowly at his chief of staff, turning his head without moving any part of his body. Woerth spoke at once.

“I disapprove of your article in the
Journal”
he said. “You are ignorant of the situation. There is no hope now of a stand on the Somme. Or on the Seine.”

Bergeot felt the shock, in the centre of his body, of being reproved. It was so severe, so humiliating, that the significance of what Woerth was saying missed him completely. His feeling of disgrace hid the quarter of France already lost' and the quarter that was being abandoned. He forced himself to say deliberately,

“Then it will be the Loire.”

“Possibly,” Woerth said drily.

The Prefect assumed at once that Woerth was treating him as an ignorant civilian, perhaps even believed that he was ignorant. His proper pride—he had not become Prefect of Seuilly by a lucky accident—as well as his vanity, were roused. The part of him he repressed, the instincts which would have made him a mocker of authority and respectability, sprang out.

He looked at Woerth, a glance full of shrewd impudent amusement, quite detestable.

“You don't seem very sure. Fortunately for us, you're not in Weygand's shoes. They won't ask you to decide which of our rivers is to be handed to the Boches.”

This insult—so dangerous—restored his self-respect. He felt confident and excited. Blinded by it, he missed entirely the flicker of rage in Woerth's eyes. Woerth prudently lowered his eyelids. A soldier of the time when wars had rules, which were kept, he knew when not to strike. Besides, Piriac had moved.
His hands, still doubled, drew back a bare inch, with the result that he was even more rigid, more nearly his own monument. He disliked being forced to lean forward, it gave him a feeling of giddiness, as though his seventy years had slipped behind and were pushing him. To have moved his hands at all was a sign of extreme agitation.

“Monsieur Bergeot, you are not a soldier,” he said severely. “I have to remind myself that you are a Prefect. When I was shown your—what was it you called it?-your message this morning, in the
Journal,
I had to remind myself. Otherwise I should have said, This irresponsible fellow—this journalist——”

The Prefect felt his humiliation rise to his throat, where it could strangle him. He kept a stolid look on his face.

“General Piriac——” he began.

“Don't interrupt,” Piriac said. “You interrupt too often. It's a fault. I must remind myself that you are a civilian. What right have you to print inflammatory messages? If there is fighting near Seuilly, the only duty of civilians will be that of obeying my orders. The town will be evacuated——” He paused—certain that Bergeot would realise that a commander-in-chief's shortness of breath is as sacred as his words.

“Is it proposed to evacuate Paris, in order to defend it?” Bergeot said vivaciously.

“What?” The only thing Piriac took in was that once more he had been interrupted. He looked at Bergeot with cold fury. “Your conduct is doubly dangerous and indecent. As a civilian, you ought in a crisis of this sort to hold your tongue. As an official . . . you don't even understand the nature of the crisis. We ought not to have begun this war now, we were not armed for it and it is too late to think of arming. . . .”

His voice disappeared on his last words as suddenly as if a flag had been pulled down. He may have wondered why he was explaining anything to a civilian. . . . In fact, Bergeot was still stupefied by his sense of disgrace and failure. He looked at Thiviers, hoping to surprise from him a grain of help. Thiviers had said nothing: gazing at the table with an air at once vague and benevolent, as though meditating some charity for the use of the great-great-grandchildren of the citizens of Seuilly, he had drawn round him the veil of his private Sabbath.
Bergeot was stretching out a profane hand to tap him on the arm and demand an opinion when Woerth began talking again.

He listened to Woerth with growing bitterness. The chief of staff had become almost suave. In a precise voice—he might have been addressing a meeting of senior officers—he laid it down that the overriding need was order, to keep order in Seuilly. Whether it were defended or not. And if it were not defended, the need, perhaps, would be even greater. Without using a harsh or insulting word he managed to make Bergeot see that he was teaching him his job as Prefect.

Bergeot was as much mystified as enraged. He felt sharply that something—what?—had happened which made Woerth judge it wise to snub him. There is something more in this than high-minded military nonsense, he thought. He listened with painful intentness, trying to guess whether Woerth's politeness, more insulting every moment, were personal or official. Meant for Émile Bergeot or the Prefect? Have I, he wondered bitterly, an enemy in the Cabinet? A thought brushed his mind: the soldiers might be concealing from him an order that Seuilly was to be evacuated in certain circumstances. He dismissed it. Even Woerth would not treat the civilian chief of the Department with so much mistrust.

Woerth had just used the word order for the tenth time. Clearly, it was the equivalent in his mind of at least nine other words, such as freedom, hope, courage.

The door opened, and Mme de Freppel came in. As if she were in her drawing-room, she walked radiantly, smiling, towards General Woerth.

“I do so agree with you,” she said. “You're absolutely right. I've warned the Prefect time and again.”

Bergeot looked at her: he was dumbfounded. It was the first time she had interrupted a conference. Persons closeted with the Prefect had had to submit to the irruption of an angry or coaxing “Madame Prefect”; and they suspected of course that she had been waiting at the other side of the door to run in and prevent an infatuated Prefect from doing something she disliked, or take a hand in some business she chose to like. Until this morning, she had avoided a public outrage. And she must choose a meeting at which the commander-in-chief and his chief of staff were present. . . . Bergeot could not help
admiring the boldness with which she broke every rule. Indiscretion at such a heat was almost courage. She may have ruined me, he thought proudly. . . . He could afford an insane moment of vanity, the vanity of a lover, because deep in himself he believed that nothing could ruin him.

“Please wait in the next room,” he said to her, with a pretence of annoyance.

General Piriac had dragged himself painfully, without meaning to, from his chair. Forgetting where he was, he realised only that a woman had come into the room. After a moment he became still more rigid, with annoyance. Thiviers had risen and was watching with an air of grave tact. It underlined the fact that Marguerite had behaved with the worst taste.

She took no notice of Bergeot. Quivering slightly with excitement, her body made an easy gesture—Mme Vayrac would have recognised it at once. She repeated, looking at Woerth,

“You are perfectly right.”

Woerth glanced at her with distaste.

“I am glad to have your approval.” He turned to Bergeot. “This meeting need not go on.”