Cloudless May (4 page)

“He's quite a good fellow,” Ligny said. “Intelligent—and he has the energy of the devil.”

“I'm not denying his talents,” Woerth said. “But I disapprove of them. He has the General Council in his pocket—or enough of it. If it has a protest to make, he hears of it beforehand and sees to it that it doesn't come to anything.” He looked at Piriac. “It seems to me a pity not to curb him—when we could.”

Piriac said nothing. Either he missed the disapproval of his laxness—if it were laxness and not simply Bergeot's flattery which made him leave, in practice, almost all the Prefect's peace-time powers still in his hands. Or, which was more
likely, it gave him a malicious pleasure to annoy Woerth, even when it involved favouring a civilian. . . . He had only learned in the last week that Mme de Freppel was Bergeot's mistress. He had not accustomed his mind to it yet. He had strict ideas, and he disliked irregularity. Marrying at thirty, he had been a faithful husband during the twenty-nine years his wife lived to enjoy her ailments. But, just as he was never surprised when he heard that a Protestant or an atheist had stolen public funds, so, without realising it, he had a lower standard for civilians than for soldiers: the Prefect's morals seemed to him infinitely less vicious than a careless groom. If he had had only to do with horses during his career, Piriac would have merited his name as a humane general.

As soon as he could, while Bergeot was apologising to General Piriac, Rienne slipped away. He looked for his hostess. She was nowhere to be seen now. But when he was passing a screen drawn across a window he heard her voice, followed by a familiar muffled boom.

“. . . my dear Countess, my nephew is a-ah young man of the highest ability. I assure you. If you can prevail on the Prefect to find a place for him, you will be doing a service to the Department—I say nothing of the service to me and the young man's parents. After all, why should all the future intelligence of the country be sacrificed in this war?”

Rienne decided not to interrupt.

The road from Mme de Freppel's house into Seuilly followed the Loire the whole way, between the countryside asleep and the silent river—silent except that now and then a movement begun undersea ended its life here with a scarcely perceptible sigh among the reeds growing at the edge. He could only hear this sound if he stood quiet to listen. A shrew-mouse, disturbed by his footsteps, ran across the road and vanished, a shadow, in the grass. It was at last almost cool.

As he came into Seuilly he walked along the Quai Gambetta, between pollarded trees of the same height like ninepins, and the screen of pallid houses of all sizes, their doorways scribbling an illegible sentence along the lower edge; almost every window was shut to keep out the mist that for a bare hour at sunrise would cover the Loire. Behind and above them, on its cliff, the Prefecture cut the sky with its long roof and one delicate tower. Rienne passed the end of the bridge over the Loire; instead of taking the shortest road to the barracks, he kept along the embankment, here the Quai d'Angers. Just beyond the piled-up tables of the Café Buran he saw a man leaning against the wall of the river. When he drew level, the man turned his head; it was Louis Mathieu, editor of the
Seuilly Journal.

Mathieu had taken off his hat, and in the darkness it was still possible to see the one feature in which he looked like himself as a schoolboy—the rigid parting of his dark hair, a line running from forehead to crown like a cut. “Louis, an .ancestor of yours must have been sliced by an axe,” a friend said to him. “Very likely,” he had answered calmly, “anything might happen to a Jew.”

It is exaggerating to speak of his friends. So far as Rienne knew, Mathieu had no friends, and he had no family, no private life or affections. Even at school he had been respected, though he was not liked. His greed for facts, the thoroughness which seemed the whole of his nature, would have made him first in the examinations if Émile Bergeot had not so often stolen a march on him at the last minute by simple audacity. He was never beaten in history: where it touched France his mind was seized by the excitement, the foolish ardour of a boy for his first love, and he spent as much time studying her face.

He was a poor man. The
Seuilly Journal
was not the most popular newspaper in the neighbourhood; it was too uncompromising, made no concessions to human weakness, there were no anecdotes, crimes of passion were either forgotten or dealt with in three lines: it was a paper for schoolmasters and mature men; above all, for Republicans. A Conservative, he cherished an idea of the Republic which would have surprised even its founders, and he hated its enemies on the Right as mercilessly as he hated socialists. He was a purist.

Rienne halted beside him.

“What are you doing here at this time of night, my dear Louis?”

Mathieu smiled, if you can call it a smile when two lines move apart.

“I had no idea it was this time. My watch had stopped. I came out to eat my dinner.”

“You're unlucky.”

“Worse, I'm starving. I remember eating a roll some time today, I can't remember that I had anything else.”

They had begun to walk slowly along the embankment. On their right, the Loire, out of respect for Mathieu's calculating intellect, had become only a river, wide and modestly handsome, no longer what Rienne had just seen in it, a sign linking past and future of his province: the houses on their left were walls behind which men and women turned in their sleep, snored, scratched themselves, and dreamed their illogical dreams. No doubt Louis remained a sensible practical Frenchman even when he slept, just as everything he came near in his waking hours shrank or swelled to its exact size, not a grain more or less.

Almost at the end of the Quai d'Angers Rienne looked at the shuttered window of a small café. Someone was awake there, a thread of light hung between the shutters.

“Perhaps Marie would give us something to eat.”

“Marie?”

“She and her husband had only just opened this place,” Rienne said, “when the war started and he was called up. They're both young. They'd borrowed the money from his mother, and Marie keeps up the repayments; she serves in the café all day and does her work at night. I know all about it, my servant is her half-brother; when I've been out at night I breakfast here.”

He knocked gently on the shutters. There was a pause, then a woman's voice said nervously,

“Who's there?”

“It's all right, Marie. It's I, Colonel Rienne.”

“Ah, one moment, one moment.”

With the noise of bolts and a chain, the door opened. Marie bolted it again after them.

“You needed something, sir?” she said anxiously.

A pale young woman, small, thin: nature had intended her
to grow plump when she was happily married, but nothing remained of this intention except a dimple; she worked too hard. She stood with bare arms hanging, her dark eyes fixed timidly and obstinately on Rienne.

“Marie,” Rienne said, “my friend is starving. Can you give us a cup of coffee?”

“Yes, indeed.” Her expression changed quickly to one of pride; she hurried to the inner door, then turned back, with a slight smile. “I can do better than that, I can give you soup if you'd like it.”

Mathieu spoke for the first time.

“Splendid.”

She started at the brutal harshness of his voice, and looked at Rienne, who nodded. She went away. Mathieu looked round the small room with its few tables and the counter in one corner. It was clean, the floor had just been scrubbed; but for the first time Rienne saw it as a bare place, without any of those pitiful or feminine touches he had imagined on his other visits. When Marie came back he asked her whether she had heard from Pierre. She put down the tray with the bowls of soup and drew a letter out of her pocket. She did not offer it to him to read, but held it while she said,

“He is well, he wants to come home for a day, it's eight and a half months since he went, and all this time he has done nothing except mix concrete. Pierre. He says the Germans fire for a quarter of an hour in the evening, and ours fire back, and that's all, they hear the Germans singing their songs. The Germans put up notices—
Go home to your wives, we don't want to fight you.
Pierre says if only he could.”

She hesitated. The colour that had come into her cheeks ran over her face and throat. She turned to go away.

“So long as he's well,” Rienne said.

The young woman turned back. She was weeping like a child, uncontrollably, without lifting her hands to her face.

“It's not that,” she said. “He should be at home. When will this war end? Do you know?”

“Not better than you do,” Rienne said gently. “It's for the safety of France. And to make this home of yours safe.”

“How did it become unsafe?” Marie asked. She stopped abruptly. “I must get on with the work. Excuse me, please.”

She disappeared into the room at the back, the only other room beside the kitchen. Rienne supposed it was the bedroom; it would be almost filled by a double bed, and there would be a chest and a large cupboard holding all they possessed, apart from themselves, of pride and pleasure. He glanced at Mathieu, who was frowning.

“What's the matter, Louis?”

“Do you suppose women cried as much in 1914?” Mathieu said coldly. “I'm quite sure they didn't. They held their heads up, and when they had to wear black they bought it with dry eyes. Something is wrong with a country at war when women cry to have their husbands sent back.”

“But it's natural,” Rienne said.

“One doesn't ask women to be natural in a war. They're asked to be unselfish and quiet.” He lifted his slender hand and brought it down like a knife, edgewise. “They might remember they're unimportant: France is made up of myriads of dead French men and women and a handful, a few million, of living. If some of these join the rest it can't matter much.”

“They think it does,” Rienne said, with a smile.

He reflected that Mathieu had as few possessions as a professional soldier. But had he no memories? Since it is by their memories that men cling to life, clinging to the curtain of glass beads hung across a doorway in their first home, to the ray of light reflected in a cupboard, to the smell of a leaf or of their toothpaste, to a word, to a ship's whistle. Mathieu had eyes of the kind we call piercing: what prevented him from seeing with them the appeal as well as the weakness of Pierre's Marie, with her childish arms and the memories of a wife? At some moment in his life he must have turned against himself and his own humanity. He had hated himself—but why?

“At least a dozen people living in this town,” Mathieu said, “ought to be shot at once, before they turn the rest into cowards.”

Rienne shook his head. “They couldn't do it by themselves, my dear Louis. You forget they have helping them a million and a half others, the dead of the last war.”

“If I know them—and I did know them,” Mathieu said harshly, “the young men I lived with for four years—some of them were not young, and towards the end some were almost
children—they're the last to say: It's impossible, we can't do it.”

“I heard some of them say it, all the same. That was in '17, after the slaughter on the Chemin des Dames. Thousands of them must have died thinking it.”

“Well, they were mistaken,” Mathieu said. “We did do it.” He made the same gesture with his hand. “What alarms me is this appalling vacuum along our frontier. Half a million men doing nothing, bored to death. Waiting. For what? For a German clock to strike. . . . You hear the sort of letter they write to their wives. . . . It's not only the soldiers, but at home here things are going as badly. Do you know what I discovered yesterday? That Thiviers's immense works is turning out five aeroplanes a month. Five! Think of it! It's madness.”

Rienne did not answer. He did not think the other man's anxiety absurd, but he thought it exaggerated, he thought that when the hour struck, and whether it struck in German or not made no difference, everything weak and greedy would vanish. Pierre, a million Pierres, would know what to do, and the Maries go about, as before, dry-eyed. As before. . . . Between a France at peace and at war is only the difference between two sets of habits, equally familiar; the husband's hand caressing his wife takes as suddenly to a rifle. Why not? Like the habit of pleasure, the war habit very soon loses its strangeness. A matter of a few weeks. . . .

The room was airless. Rienne noticed that the walls had been painted by an amateur, who did not know how to keep the colours even. Pierre, probably. He heard the young woman move in the next room. We must go, he thought: she'll want to sleep for a few hours, with Pierre's letter.

Mathieu began speaking again, in a curious voice. You might have thought he was ashamed, if he had ever been known to feel shame. But he was not sensitive.

“You know about the internment camp at Geulin?”

“I'm told it's very uncomfortable,” Rienne said.

“Uncomfortable is scarcely the word,” Matthieu said drily. “It's a cess-pit. Don't mistake me, I know it's useless to protest. The German refugees have outlasted their welcome and we have other things to do now than protect them from ourselves.”

He stopped. Rienne waited.

“I . . . have a friend there.”

Rienne looked at him kindly. It is the first time, he thought, I have ever heard Louis speak of someone as his friend. It would be an interned German! He noticed with some surprise the effort Mathieu was making to control his voice.

“He's not a Jew, he's an ex-officer in the Imperial army called Uhland, Joachim von Uhland. I knew him in Berlin, after the war. He had had a curious career: he was one of the men who put down the socialist revolution, mercilessly, I believe. Later on he became a socialist himself, left the army; when I knew him he was very poor. He looked like a Prussian officer. He always will. After 1933 he spent three years in Dachau; he was released and came here. I saw him in Paris. Only last week I heard he was in the camp at Geulin.” He paused. “It's not six miles from this room.”