Cloudless May (38 page)

Without knowing how he came to be there, he was in the courtyard of the Prefecture. The porter told him that the Prefect was still at work. He went in.

Bergeot spoke to him with a friendliness which he felt was put on, and not easily. At once his new senses hardened. His everyday sight—only capable of seeing the angle at which the
man or woman in front of him was leaning away from frankness, or honesty, or good faith—swung back like a shutter.

“I came to tell you,” he said sharply, “that I shall attack Huet for keeping his money abroad.”

Bergeot looked at him attentively. “Why?”

“It's the best way of discrediting him.”

“Why do you want to discredit him?” the Prefect said, frowning.

“Because he's a defeatist. And therefore a grave danger.”

Bergeot began to set out all the excellent reasons for discretion at this time, the bad effect on morale if the deputy himself were shown to have so little confidence in victory. He was promising to have Huet watched when suddenly Mathieu's face was convulsed, his lips trembling and his eyes dilated. Bergeot was taken aback. He thought Mathieu must be going to have a stroke.

“Are you ill?”

Mathieu shook his head. He had not heard a single word of the other's excuses. The moment Bergeot began speaking an access of tenderness had closed his ears and opened others. He leaned forward lightly.

“Thank you for agreeing to release Captain von Uhland.”

Bergeot stared and made a confused gesture. Jumping up he put his arm round Mathieu's shoulders—the first time anyone had felt able to take such a liberty—and led him towards the door.

“Don't thank me,” he said. “Nonsense, it's nonsense. . . .”

On Sunday morning, after a night with barely an hour of real darkness, and under a sky still without clouds, the French—those who had slept—woke to find they had lost Calais, the Vimy Ridge, and fifteen generals sacked as more than normally incompetent. The rumours, the evasions, the deaths were declared in a light without nuances, so that the spectators could not make a mistake. If in spite of the clearness many of
them did, it must have been their own fault. Never was there less excuse for that purely human stupidity which sees to it that we understand when it is too late. Wishing to destroy, the gods only have to begin by telling us the truth—with the result, in its way charming, that instead of coming to the catastrophe through tears, suspense, terror, hope, we come to it through fine sentiments, interviews with comic characters, soothing words, jokes about a statesman's umbrella, and these, and only these, lead to the final scene where for decency's sake blood runs and some poor wretch dies.

Very early that morning Labenne was rung up from Paris. His informant—one of Daladier's right-hand men—gave him the news and said excitedly, “And now what?”

“If you don't know,” Labenne answered, “I advise you to ask the General Staff.”

He put the receiver down. He was expectant and calm. He had known for a long time that the war was lost. On September 3, 1939, when many people were still hoping that, apart from a few thousand or a few million Poles, no one would have to die in a war, he knew that a French war was inevitable. And each time a Minister spoke serenely of the country's strength in its trial, he knew that sentence had been passed already and on a terrible weakness. He knew this morning that defeat was not going to be delayed by any river or any miracle. If there were any distortion in Labenne's mind, it was on the side of reality. He saw things with great distinctness, but all absurdly small. Towns, villages, men, became toys he could move. If, at any time in the future, he came a cropper it would be through misjudging the amount of blood in a few of these tiny figures. At present he felt himself master of the puppet-play. While the two little armies, one noticeably smaller than the other, rolled over the toy villages, crossing threads of water which carried immense names—Sambre, Aisne, Somme—along the dusty lines drawn between the little poplars and chestnuts or between the postage stamps of corn and beet, cracking the insect-like bodies fallen aside or jerked along with arms hanging over the edge of toy carts, Labenne felt himself very close to the moment when he would step forward to take Seuilly and the Department under his protection. And after that Anjou, and Touraine, the garden of France . . . as—before Labenne
could stop him—Rabelais said. And after that, why not?, France,
le plus beau pays d'avant le jugement
—as Péguy said. . . . No doubt of it, all the quotations he had exiled from the language were waiting their turn somewhere, to approach him. And not as friends. Perhaps as avengers, as executioners. In the final scene—when everything, the rivers, the villages, the men, assume for him their real size. When he will not be able, his shadow falling across a province, to lean over a thousand of them at once. . . .

This morning he took his children to Thouédun, to the château, still being swept and garnished for him to live in. They drove through sunlight brushed on the road and trees like an enamel. He stopped the car on the bridge over the young river, so that the children could lean on the stone parapet and try to see water-lilies in the thick forest of plants. The sun was drawing up the scent of an acacia; earlier, there had been a few sounds, a bird, a child crying; now suddenly all was still; the heat flowed everywhere, rising above the tops of the trees, falling down both sides of the sky. The leaves of the water-plants moved: a trout weaving from side to side in the greenish darkness. You can be sure—the only innocent web being woven that morning.

Half-way up the road to the village a lane leading to the château was masked by trees. An innocent mask—the only one in France. The entrance was severe, a pointed arch below a high double tower, but in the inner courtyard all this severity broke down in surprises and fantasy. On the left, in a charming disorder, were two groups of buildings: a little castle of the fifteenth century with miniature towers, and a mediaeval kitchen superbly giving itself the airs of a mosque. You never know where the memory of the crusades is going to break through in France. His kitchen delighted Labenne. He intended to use it as a dining-room, with the food served directly from an immense modern range behind a glass screen, so that his guests could watch their rows of ducklings and capons being basted, their eels stewing in wine, and their pike and salmon baked. A single innocent ambition? . . . Opposite, on the right of the courtyard, the château flung up the six stages of its staircase tower, its turrets, pinnacles, chimneys. It was the pasr talking about its memories, with a charm, with a strong
friendliness, which did not exclude Labenne. Overlooking his manners and his reputation, it behaved to him kindly and civilly. Was this innocence on its part, or a deep careless complicity?

He let the children run about the gardens, following them to see that neither of them went bareheaded in this sun. A breath of air came from the lowest terrace, from the stream, to be pushed back by the scent of herbs and roses. The vines were at the other side of the deep valley; already Labenne was dissatisfied with the lightness and flinty taste of his wine, and planning a nursery with earth fetched from Saint-Georges-sur-Loire. . . . “We'll see which Georges is the greater saint,” he said to Henry. . . . A pigeon circled slowly, slowly, round one of the islands in the centre of the stream: it must have been finishing off a charm of some sort; at the end of the third turn it flew clumsily across the valley into the trees below the vines. The boy clapped his hands and pretended to fire at it.

“Quiet, be quiet,” his father said, “you'll get overheated.”

Henry looked at his sister and laughed. His father came between them; he rested one hand on the boy's shoulder, feeling him stiffen proudly to take the weight, and put his other arm round the girl. In the last weeks she had grown a little shy of him. Her thin flesh drew closer to the fine bones. Half angry, he insisted, pressing his hand up under her little breast. She escaped adroitly, running from him to pull with her thin arms at the branch of an acacia. Labenne felt in his body a fearful weight of pleasure and rage, the rage of the father, the pleasure of the young man she would not try to evade. And afterwards she would not be so shy with her father—and he would care much less for her.

When he looked at Henry he felt only joy. It blinded him. He glanced over his shoulder at the château with its boldly rounded towers. . . . Look at me! Labenne father of Labenne. . . . Henry would marry and have one son and three or four daughters. The daughters would marry into modern steel or banking dynasties; the son would inherit: or of two sons the younger might go into the Church—why not?—the Church is still a power. . . . Labenne father of Labenne. Labenne father of Cardinal Labenne. Labenne father of His Holiness. . . . A gross laugh choked him. He was forced to laugh for a moment at his ambitions—not because he thought them absurd, but he
was bursting with pride. His will equalled his appetite. He would never lose his hunger and he would die reaching his hand out. What Labenne son of Labenne could ask a better death?

Henry moved away. “Why have you bought this place?” He knew; he wanted his father to tell him.

“For you.”

“And Cécile?”

“No,” Labenne said. He seized the girl's arm with a cruel tenderness. “No. Cécile will have a château of her own.”

“Where? When?”

“When she marries.”

Henry burst out laughing. His laugh was a young fresh echo of his father's. I'm bequeathing good habits, Labenne thought. It delighted him to think that his laugh would run on through the generations, long after he had ceased to smile—and with it his trick of rolling his lips, blinking heavy eyelids, raising an eyebrow. There is more than one immortality. He would be content to have them all.

“Then it won't be hers,” Henry said.

“It will,” Labenne said tenderly. “Cécile is my daughter.”

Henry looked slyly at his father. With a touch of malice. Labenne had bequeathed other habits.

“Have you seen today's
Journal?”

“I don't get any news from the
Journal”
Labenne said, “there's nothing worth reading in it.”

“There's this.”

He took the single sheet from his pocket and handed it to his father with an excited smile. On the back page was an article headed: We Accuse. . . . Mathieu had inherited a habit. . . . It was a savage attack on Labenne. It accused him of cowardice, treachery, lying. He read it twice, the first time with resentment, the second with pure grief that his son had read these .. . these slanders. He looked at Henry. The boy was innocence itself—that is, malice, a child's innocence. Labenne frowned, and folded the paper, carefully; it was a crime.

Lowering his head, the boy mumbled,

“They oughtn't to write about you like that.”

“But none of it's true,” Labenne said calmly.

Henry's chin trembled, he could not keep back his tears. Throwing himself furiously against his father, he butted him
in the chest with his head. “You're going to kill Germans, aren't you?” he shouted. “You'll do it, you'll save everyone?”

Labenne stroked his head. “Of course, yes, of course I shall,” he said. I must get rid, he thought drily, of Mathieu. It's too much of a good thing.

Ernest Huet's mind was a map, in slavish detail, of legal finance. Marked on it, the turns of every path along which a bank or a financial house can climb above the control of society. He could have run quickly up any of the interlaced flights of stairs leading by way of tobacco, petrol, insurance, to the Council of the Bank of France. His ambitions went beyond this. He cared nothing for money, helping himself lavishly to his wife's only because he needed it. What he wanted was the most reputable form of power. To become Minister of Foreign Affairs would gratify at once his social vanity, his itch to prove himself subtle and implacable, and his passion for intrigue. This had become part of his nervous system. Entirely without charm, even as a baby, he was left about by parents who had the best reasons in the world for disliking each other. His mother, an egoist by profession, and an amateur poet, detested him. In any surroundings his vanity would have given him trouble, but this infected it for life, and all during a neglected childhood passed in the least pleasant town in Touraine he soothed it with endless tortuous day-dreams. At school these took a definite form—Richelieu. He read all the books about his hero, true and false, preferring quite naturally the false, and he grafted on to his skinny body what he took to be the voice and gestures of a great man. They made him ridiculous. His acquaintances—he had no friends; his anxiety only to know useful people killed a spontaneous growth—laughed at him behind his back. According to his need of the moment, he bored them by repeating his talks with other and greater men, or with an irritating air of condescension he asked favours.

There are only too many men in whom intellect and singleness of purpose are not distinguishable from aridity and servility: Huet was one. His brain served him only to gorge second-hand facts, his strength of will fastened on useful people like a leech—and besides, he looked like a leech—and clung there in spite of insults and even ridicule. He had grown a complacent skin. Successive failures taught him nothing except that he was more honest than other politicians. In its turn, his conviction of his honesty let him play any shabby trick, and disguised it for him as an act of virtue and foresight. There were no limits to the deceit and treachery he could allow himself, since both were in the service of his noble mind. His fellows did not recognise this yet? Then for their own good they must be forced, by lies where possible, to see the truth.

Sometimes a man, or more often a woman, hearing him made fun of and snubbed, was seized by pity for him. After they had watched him, they took it back: no one, they felt, could swallow so many insults; he must be immune to them. And in fact it was these same persons, who had been kind to him, whom he despised, and when he could, injured.