Cloudless May (36 page)

Piriac caught an inflection of the voice his chief of staff used to rouse him from the half-sleep he fell into sometimes, during a conference. Woerth, he saw, was waiting to follow him out of the room. Obediently, saluting Bergeot like an automaton, he moved to the door. It closed behind the two generals.

The Prefect turned to Mme de Freppel and smiled at her with a trace of excitement.

“You've horrified my generals.”

“Heavens, what a couple of sticks,” she said airily. She sat down, passing her hand through her hair so that it stood out like a mane cut in ebony. She looked at Thiviers. “Do sit down, my dear Robert. What a face! You can let yourself look human, this isn't a memorial service.”

“It was, before you came in, a conference,” Thiviers said gravely.

“Idiot! Do you expect me to sit about doing nothing while Émile ruins us both, with his absurd messages and calls to arms?”

“Émile may—I say may—have done himself as much
harm by his indiscretion as yours will do him. I doubt it.” Thiviers made an embarrassed gesture. “Your ill-judged article in the
Journal
——” he said to Bergeot.

“So you think that, too!” Bergeot said.

He felt suddenly tired, heavy. Abused from all sides, his dear article did at this moment seem only a ridiculous blunder. All his confidence, that it would impress people, do him credit, had been rudely pricked. Too rudely. He felt panic growing in him. So other people looked on him only as a fool, a crude uncouth upstart? He would have given a year of his life to forget the article. Part of his mind warned him that this was the precise moment to attack and convince Thiviers. And if Thiviers would not be convinced, then trounce him. But his energy played him false. Or his vanity.

Instead he began to justify himself. It was painful to watch him—if either of his listeners had realised what was going on. He explained his article until he had drained off its energy, leaving it a rag, like any poor rag hanging, bleached of human nature, on the barbed wire. M. de Thiviers listened stiffly. At last, in a calm voice, marking his phrases by dividing them in half, he said,

“And why in the
Journal
—of all papers? That gutter rag. Why encourage it? Do you imagine Mathieu would hesitate to misrepresent you? If he could. If he were told. If he knew about your prudence in placing a little money abroad.”

He looked at Bergeot with a friendly smile.

“And what, Monsieur de Thiviers, can I do for you?”

Labenne was in excellent spirits. He was prepared to listen—he looked shamelessly at a watch that bulged his pocket like an apple when he put it back—for twenty minutes. It's long enough! he thought ironically. He made himself comfortable behind his desk and half closed his eyes to be able to see farther into the dark wood of Thiviers's mind. He expected any monster. Even a unicorn. Certainly a unicorn. He was not
disappointed. The fable appeared at the right moment, with the lowing note in Thiviers's voice when he began talking about the moral crisis. We're within a second or two of regeneration, Labenne thought. Here it comes! The fable bent its single horn, and an extremely small dove sidled along it. Thiviers's voice trembled a little.

“. . . how true it is! In suffering, in trials, France, poor fallen daughter, will find a soul. I'm sure of it.”

“Certainly, Monsieur de Thiviers, certainly,” Labenne said. He settled himself in his chair. “You find that a consolation?”

He had a trick, when he found it difficult to believe that the person in front of him was real, of picturing him as he would look if suddenly he were run over or otherwise mortally hurt. Astonishing this change which took place. Death, inserting itself in the body, forced out instantly all the lies and affectations of life. Without its ballast of impudence, the poor body shrank; the face becoming smaller had room for only a few emotions, and those the earliest and simplest, pain, hope, fear. No face, even of your most despicable enemy, did not become in this moment, if only for a moment, innocent. Where were its sins? What would God the Father find to judge? Labenne looked at Thiviers and thought: You are dying. At once the other's amply-nourished body fell in; his face, colourless, became a mask of simple nobility. Labenne looked at it again. What am I dreaming about? he smiled: it's merely null, a bag of nothing—in one corner of the bag, a little dust which was all Thiviers's eloquence, piety, family traditions. For the matter of that, all his family.

I can get rid of him any day I want to, Labenne thought.

Thiviers, who did not know he was buried, made a sharp comment on Bergeot.

“Yes, yes, you're right about him,” Labenne agreed. “But he's not merely unreliable. He's a climbing viper.” He grinned. “And his Madame de Freppel—what a tart, eh?”

He scratched joyfully below his armpit. But while he was abusing Bergeot he felt a secret impulse of pity for him. Compared with the elegant tombstone in front of him, what a good chap—with living blood in his veins. Almost as coarse as mine, Labenne thought. He grinned again with pity. His primitive sympathy for the Prefect—a peasant seeing his enemy's fields
spoiled—made him suspect a weakness hidden in Bergeot's soul. He believed it would gape open one day and Bergeot be squeezed to death. And therefore Bergeot was useless, a man to be avoided for fear he touched you. Or to be removed.

He smiled at Thiviers.

“Forgive me, won't you, my dear fellow? I have an appointment in half an hour. With General Piriac. He wants to see me before he dines. So long as he doesn't ask me to dinner! A cutlet and a glass of the thinnest Vouvray. And I'm not a monk! . . .”

He walked to the barracks. Piriac greeted him with simple friendliness. In his soldier's poor cell he was less the soldier and more, far more, the Girondin squire. Not merely his nose for weather—he had only to poke it outside to smell the rain in a clear sky—but his tricks of speech were taken down from his father and grandfather, not from lectures at the Staff College. It happened to him often to come back to this cell a few minutes before dark and imagine that he was going to step into the gun-room of the house above Bourg-sur-Gironde. A cell woven clumsily of his memories slipped itself inside the first. Sometimes he put his hand on the wall at a place where there should have been a shelf holding a book, miserably dogeared, on the diseases of horses, and a leather game-bag, and drew it back puzzled. He had taken to sending to Bourg-sur-Gironde for friendly things he remembered, a crop or a jar of home-made wax for boots. His room began to smell of the small landowner and, close to the Loire as it was, of the Gironde.

As soon as he came in, Labenne recognised the smell; his self-confidence changed queerly. It was not that Piriac impressed him—not in the least. But the Labenne who was the son of a village butcher felt unwilling respect for the landowner of the village, with his simplicities, his greed, his innocent arrogance. It had only to do with his body. It did not embarrass the other Labenne's vulpine mind.

Piriac's simplicity baffled him. It was a little like looking into a pool so clear that your glance can only turn back and enter your eyes. To be really useful to Labenne, the old general should have a vice which could be gratified, at the very least, a vanity. But Piriac was notoriously without vices. As to vanity, Labenne hoped to pick up the scent—it was not possible that
the old general was without vanities—in this room. Dilating his nostrils even further, he smelled beeswax, and the quinces that Piriac's sister dried and sent him to keep among his drawers and nightshirts.

Piriac had sent for him to question him about Bergeot.

“The Prefect,” Labenne said, “is an ambitious man.”

“Yes, yes,” Piriac said. “But that's not necessarily evil. Do you imagine that Foch was not ambitious? Is he reliable? Politically. What is your view?”

“He is unreliable,” Labenne said.

Piriac's face, even in its folds, had kept the freshness of youth, but youth mortally weighted by a mass of aged flesh and rigid bones. He stared in front of him, vacantly. Does he know what he's saying? the Mayor wondered. Why doesn't he ask me for my evidence? Leaning forward to look into Piriac's face, he said,

“He is immoral.”

Piriac drew his mouth into folds as severe as a shroud. “I know. And I used to respect him.” After a struggle, his face became almost animated. “Only men with clean hands and a pure heart ought to govern France.”

“Of course.”

“I'm glad you understand me,” Piriac said. His voice, precise and heavy, balanced his words as though he were dropping cartridges from one hand to the other. “I don't like self-indulgence—a man who refuses discipline. Nor actors. Since my eyes were opened, I've noticed that Monsieur Bergeot has something of the actor about him.”

“I agree,” Labenne murmured.

“Insincerity,” Piriac said, “is worse than a fault. It is sin. Mr. Mayor, this ordeal we are going through cannot be met by rebellious undisciplined men. We must say our prayers. We must obey. We must become simple. You understand me—like that good little daughter, that good captain.” His voice stopped awkwardly to caress his thoughts. “You understand, Mr. Mayor, that to know her I haven't needed to read about our Saint Joan. I haven't needed to make myself a scholar to know that she was an honest girl, she knew she had only to do as her voices told her and that would be her duty, to France. . . . I, too, have my voices. Of course, they are soldiers' voices. I
am not Joan of Arc. Not a saint. But I have my comrades. Monsieur Labenne, I knew Foch.”

He was silent. Labenne did not answer at once. He had first to master his excitement. A ray of light had plunged into the baffling shallows of Piriac's mind. I've got it, he thought; I've got him. The old general's simplicity had grown out of a pride so monstrous that it deceived the eye. Since it had only a single gesture, it seemed modesty itself, simplicity itself. Austere, living in this cell like a country gentleman of poor means turned monk, he allowed himself one pleasure: the most voluptuous imaginable. He believed, at seventy, that he had a future. In this world, you understand. He believed he was destined. Naturally, since the century makes a difference, it would show itself in some other way than with Joan of Arc. But even so, Labenne thought, he dreams of crowning a king. Or does he want to crown himself? No, no, of course not—that would spoil his illusion of modesty. The very root—he had just seen it—the deeply sunk root, of Piriac's life was that he saw himself as modest and simple, an honest child who has only to do as God, or Foch, tells him, and it will be his duty. His life—the paradox of a stupefying pride speaking the simple language of piety. To make use of him, you had only to take the place of Foch and press boldly on his sense of his duty.

“Yes,” Labenne said at last, in a quiet voice, “you convince me, General. Our country must suffer and repent. We must return, as you say, as children, to our past and our knees.”

Pleasure in the ease with which he could control Piriac swelled in him. He did not let himself enjoy it. I must, he thought, be very sincere and quiet.

Piriac lifted a nerveless heavy hand and laid it on the mayor's arm. It lay there like the dead.

“You are a good Frenchman,” he said, “an honest man; as honest as a Frenchman. I can rely on you.”

“I'm a peasant, you know,” Labenne said.

“Ah, our hard-working French peasants. They have their faults, the scoundrels, but they're the salt of the country. I love them as if they were my sons.”

You have no son, Labenne thought. He said, with respect and a touch of robust humour, “Then, General, I am one of your sons. Count on me to be obedient.”

“Good,” Piriac said.

The weight of his hand was something even for Labenne. He stiffened the muscles of his arm.

“And Seuilly?” he said. “Our old streets—the Abbey Church—the Prefecture—are they going to be knocked down by German bombs?”

Piriac's room was in an angle of the building; it was growing dark in it already, on a brilliant May evening. The shadows of the walls reached even to Labenne, who was sitting nearest the window; and they were falling across the game-bag, the envelope full of dried thyme, the other humble memories. Piriac asked him abruptly to turn on the lamp. Labenne placed it on the sill, and now it was his own shadow which dominated the room, pinning down the old general's hands on his desk and spreading a black pool over the bed.

“Horrible,” Piriac murmured. The lines of his face contracted very slightly—a thought tugging them a great way below the surface. Or perhaps it was Foch? “We must spare them. They must be spared somehow.”

“But if Seuilly has to be fought in,” Labenne said firmly, “like Arras. Or like Ypres in the last war. Or any part of the country which was occupied. You remember they destroyed the fruit trees when they went back last time, and blew up châteaux from spite.”

Piriac looked at him with a delicate assurance. “We must pray. I am sure General Weygand is praying. I trust—but can one really trust it?—that the Prime Minister is praying. And you and I must do our duty.”

Labenne realised that he had been dismissed—as abruptly as Piriac's father would have sent away one of his tenants. He got up and stood a minute as if thinking deeply.

“Whatever you order me to do, I'll do,” he said in a warm voice. “I want only to help you, General. So far as the civilian administration is concerned—count on my aid and loyalty. I'm entirely yours.”

He went out. The corridor was crudely lighted and smelled like a harness room: it would be a long time before any newer smell overbore this ancient scent of leather and elbow-grease. A soldier passed him carrying Piriac's supper, one small cutlet, a roll, a bowl of salad, a carafe of cloudy yellow wine and a
beaker of water. Dare he add wine to the fumes already in his head? thought Labenne.