Cloudless May (39 page)

Émile Bergeot had once helped him. Only from vanity, Huet had become involved in the criminal behaviour of a Seuilly landowner. He was going to be disgraced. At some risk, the Prefect interfered—sorry for a man who came to him in tears—and managed to cover up Huet's share in the scandal. The deputy had never forgiven him.

This Sunday afternoon, on his way to call on Bergeot, he thought about him with voluptuous dislike. Smiling a little, he fingered the dangers threatening the Prefect. He was almost tempted to show off his sources of information by warning him. He rejected the temptation. He wanted the sharper pleasure of watching Bergeot ruin himself.

Left alone for a moment by Lucien Sugny, he leaned forward at once to read the letter lying on the desk; it was nothing. When the Prefect came in he was sitting with finger-tips pressed together, head sunk above them in thought. He started. Without rising from his chair, he held out a limp hand.

“Ah, Bergeot,” he drawled, “how goes civil defence? You're quite the local hero. The Gambetta
de nos jours.
Or so I'm told.”

Bergeot was amused by this naïve malice. “What can I do for you, my dear deputy?”

Huet was taken aback. In answer to the defiance he expected from Bergeot, he had prepared an epigram on the duties of civilians in war-time. He hesitated and let it go. He added this misconduct to Bergeot's other crimes of
lese-Huet.

He waved his hand. “I came, my dear fellow, in the first place to give you a warning, secondly, of course, for the pleasure of talking to you.” He smiled and blinked. “I refer to the article in the
Journal
on our friend Labenne. Now however you may distrust Labenne—and I don't, you observe, say that you have no reason to distrust him—quite the contrary—but he is in fact Mayor of Seuilly, and as such—mark me, I say as such—ought not to be accused of anti-social acts. Especially in war-time.”

He saw with greedy satisfaction that Bergeot was going to refuse anything he asked. In other people he recognised at sight their impulses to meanness and folly—so eagerly that he was always completely blind to a movement of generosity or wisdom, or imputed it to a base motive.

“What do you expect me to do?” Bergeot said with contempt.

Huet noted the contempt. It did not touch him: he saw in it a tribute to his grandeur of soul. I've frightened him, he thought.

“I didn't come to teach you your business,” he said affably. “But surely you're going to advise Piriac to suppress the
Journal?”

Bergeot allowed himself to be irritated. “Not at all. Why should I?”

Before his visitor came in he had been drafting a letter to Mathieu, scolding him for his indiscretion and warning him that if he persisted in attacking high officials during these critical weeks he would have to be silenced for the sake of order. He decided at this moment to tear it up. Although he knew that by supporting Mathieu he would earn the dislike of more important people, he could not bring himself to do anything for Huet. Since the time he saved the deputy's public life, he had grown wary of him. Besides, he could not look to Huet for any of the favours a successful deputy can offer a Prefect—Huet would never be in a position to make him an Ambassador.
Without being able to see anything in him deeper than his vanity and his habit of crawling up to rewards he never reached Bergeot was revolted by the double odour Huet gave off, of intrigue and failure. The worst was that there was a faint whifl in it of his own ambitions. Perhaps ambition is never decent?

“I'm not going to start suppressing opinion,” he said curtly.

“The police—“Huet began in a mild voice.

Bergeot stood up. “I'm too busy to discuss it with you,” he said, without trying to soften the snub. “Sorry, my deat Ernest, I'm afraid I must put you out.”

The deputy gave no sign of feeling insulted. Had he not already explained the other's impatience to get rid of him by fear? But he much resented being cut short in the speech—“I am not wedded,” it began, “to the belief that freedom inheres in cocking snooks at authority . . .”—he had prepared on the duties of the press in war-time. Hiding it under his air of condescension, he drawled,

“I agree that our dear Labenne is rather a gross character.”

“Gross?” Bergeot echoed. “He's not gross, he's a peasant. An unscrupulous grasping peasant. I don't trust him an inch.”

Huet paused in the doorway. “You're a cynic, my dear fellow. You, yes, you're really the astute politician; I'm the idealist, I never sell my soul——”

Bergeot shut the door on him.

He hurried off, walking round three sides of the courtyard to avoid crossing it in the open. He had to make a second visit. At the prison. He was on his way to see Edgar Vayrac.

He had known Vayrac for four years—ever since the day when for the first time, with the certainty of a sleep-walker, he saw his way clearly. In this sudden debauch of light he saw all the reasons why he had made so many false moves, rushed into so many blind alleys, courted so many rebuffs. During the whole of his public life he had been seeking his special task, his mission. It must display his intellect, give him unlimited power, and form the monument he wanted to see ready at the end of his life. Before this, he had had several of these flashes of certainty. At one period he knew he was destined to interpret America to France. Demanding letters of introduction from Laval, he visited New York and Washington and talked to a great many important persons who scarcely waited for him to
eave before giving orders to a secretary never to admit him again. He hurried home to write a book. It was derided. He gave America up. Let it perish. Retiring for a few months to Seuilly, he began to breed geese until one of them flew at him. He preached a crusade in the press against empty cradles. His eloquence failed to fill one, even of his own. To his real rage, the anti-clerical newspapers nicknamed him “the aborted papa.”

None of his earlier conversions had come to him with the blinding light of his conversion to Hitler. It took place on the very day the Germans marched into the Rhineland. It was a miracle. The blind saw. From that moment—certain now of his monument—he worked for an alliance with Germany. His other intrigues had only been rehearsals for the supreme intrigue of his life. He plunged into it joyously, lavishing his wife's money, offering himself—with only as much caution as was needed to prove his usefulness—as a go-between to the Nazi Government. No sacrifice, of his strength or the political and military information he picked up, was too much trouble. Becoming more of a Nazi than the Nazis who were his patrons, he had no scepticism and no scruples.

At no moment did it enter his head that he was behaving treacherously. His egoism turned all he did and every weakness of his own Government into another proof of his foresight; he advanced step by step to being the complete Nazi tool, all the time believing firmly that each step was an act of supreme political truth. . . . The war surprised him. He had been too busy to notice that it was coming. With his usual clumsiness—the most carefully thought-out of his plans always miscarried, thus giving away his inner deformation—he had fixed the week it broke out for a large dinner-party in Paris in honour of Ribbentrop. The invitations had gone out, and he forgot to cancel them. A single guest—an actress who had never had a success—turned up. Huet had left Paris. Furious, she gave the story to the papers.

In the meantime Huet was in Seuilly. He comforted himself with his knowledge—he had shared it freely with Ribbentrop and Abetz—that the French army was short of munitions. He never faltered in his belief that by conquering Europe Hitler would be behaving in the spirit of the new age. A cold ecstasy
filled him with his visions of a Germanic Empire, its capital—where else could it be?—in Paris. Ruled—who else knew so well how to camouflage himself as a statesman?—from behind the throne by the new Richelieu. No more small nations, springing, with their poetry he could not read, and their music—all music was a jargon he could not bear—vigorous and un-wrinkled from the fresh sources of history. No more wild geese. The stiff German eagle would lord it over all the weaker birds. In spite of his present disgrace, he was excited and very happy. . . .

It happened that his meeting with Edgar Vayrac took place on the day of his conversion. An acquaintance in one of the underworlds of finance—he knew someone in each circle—sent Vayrac to him with a message which was too awkward to write. So the young man was associated in his mind with the vision. Vayrac's first words—“I have been sent. . .”—had the tones of fate. He took him under his protection at once.

Huet had two sorts of contacts. When he said contacts he said friendship, profit—the words meant the same thing to him. It was as links between himself and something he wanted that other people showed themselves to him. On one side he wormed or forced his way into the houses of important men, who snubbed him, or used and despised him—when they were not too bored or too honest to do anything but turn him out. On the other, he employed the persons he called his agents. These—he was not exacting—might be criminals turned informer, swindlers with failing hopes of becoming respectable, dope sellers: all of them men who had bungled their lives, and were willing for anything. His vanity saw them as master criminals; it was only the purity of his motives that made it right for him to use them. Edgar Vayrac became one of his more trusted aides.

When Vayrac got himself into prison Huet was inclined to abandon him. It was a shock to find he had been intimate with a man who made his money out of a low class of brothel and peculations that were not even clever. But very shortly after the arrest, Mme Vayrac told him that her son had no secrets from her. Without allowing himself to think it, he felt that he must either defend his agent or face a scandal; in the same instant he turned the whole thing to a generous impulse on his part. Poor Vayrac—how he must have suffered!

“Now, now, leave it to me,” he consoled Mme Vayrac: “I shall devote myself to rescuing our brave Edgar.”

Always at his most affable with the men he had the best reasons to distrust, or meant to betray, he sat close to the brave Edgar in his cell and caressed his arm while he talked. The warder had moved discreetly out of earshot.

Vayrac listened. Now and then he turned his full face to his patron, giving an entirely different view of himself. Seen from the side, his fine jutting nose, high forehead and receding chin, were the sketch for a febrile intellectual. It was wiped out by the full view. Another set of planes formed a severe mask—eyeballs covered for more than half their depth by the lids, long close lips—arrogant and energetic. The swiftness of the change could only mean one thing: there were not two men in his body, but he had pushed his intellect beyond itself in the service of an ambitious brutality. The earthquakes marking the end of an age throw up Vayracs, men devoted to violence, empty of the virtues—pity, disinterest, tolerance—we can afford when we feel safe. In the time of troubles we drive them into monasteries and concentration camps. Vayrac was attractive to many people. In the society which is going to be a victim, there is a nerve which its murderer finds at once. A number of men and women recognised their deaths in Vayrac—with joy. Others, who were afraid, took refuge in pretence. . . . “He can't be evil; evil doesn't exist, it's a classic myth adopted by the Church. . . .” But that is another myth, dangerous for the victims.

Glancing up at a moment when Vayrac was looking at him, Huet felt a slight shock. There was something disquieting, even cruel, in the face near his. He noticed that Vayrac's eyes were striped by fine black lines. For some reason this upset him. He drew back. He had been speaking of the charges against Vayrac—so vaguely that you could suppose depravity and treason were only different words for a simple lapse of memory.

Vayrac interrupted him. “Do you know—have you been able to find out—whether anything is known about my last trip into Germany?”

Huet turned pale. Vayrac's frankness threw over him the shadow of a real treachery—and he found it difficult to turn it into forethought and love of country. For a moment something
faltered in him—his belief that the Republic was so nearly dying that only the virus of German fascism could revive it. Even his vision of himself as a type of higher patriot grew pale. He saw suddenly that in Vayrac's vocabulary the higher patriotism stood for need of money and a taste for anarchy. . . . It was only for a moment. He blinked, smiled, and saw his agent in a better light.

“Now don't let's confuse ourselves,” he said indulgently. “Certain things had to be done in a certain way at certain times. As soon as things become normal——”

“Do you count on that?” Vayrac interrupted again.

“Explain yourself, my dear fellow.”

“Do you really believe,” Vayrac said ironically, “that repression won't be needed after a defeat?”

Huet smiled, kindly, almost sweetly. “Come, come, what do you mean by defeat? Define your terms, my boy. Personally—no doubt I have a prejudice in favour of accuracy, my philosophical training, you know—I prefer to call it a fresh start.”

Vayrac did not answer. The deputy watched him with a faint anxiety. He was surprised by the look of astonished contempt on Vayrac's face. Vayrac looked away.

“What have you been able to do for me?” he asked drily.

“Ah,” Huet said with complacence, “I flatter myself I've achieved a great deal. My friend in the Cabinet”—he smiled warningly and lifted his hand—“has talked to the Minister; that foolish fellow, Maître Naquet, has been informed—by me—of his duty; and Thiviers, dear old Thiviers, is pressing hard on Madame de Freppel.” He added roguishly, “I must say I don't approve of feminine interference—in general. In particular, my dear boy, it is not unuseful.” A mental tic made him prefer the negative form, especially a faked negative.