Cloudless May (43 page)

Amiability itself, since he had just, he thought, pulled off a triumph of diplomacy, he drew Labenne across the room. The only way he could bring himself to cross a room openly was
in convoy, and he kept his long nose turned to his exposed side.

The moment they reached Piriac and Mme Huet, she started up. Her air of distraction made Labenne inquisitive, and he kept her talking. She let her glance go to Saint-Jouin and the young girl. Labenne guessed the truth. It amused him to keep her. To be just, he did not grasp that she was tormented: the only human beings who could make him suffer were his children, and he was as far from expecting that as he was from understanding any feebler grief. It amused him, with his back to the young officer, to follow the scene in its reflection on Mme Huet's face. Suddenly this became bland and insolent. Without turning his head, he knew that Saint-Jouin was no longer chattering to a young woman. And now Mme Huet had the energy to flatter him. We need, she said, looking into his face, a strong character, a Hitler, a Mussolini, to keep order in the Department. Who? . . . “I can see no one for it but you, Monsieur Labenne. As Daudet used to say——”

“Don't begin quoting,” Labenne said curtly. “I never read.”

A feeling of contempt seized him and spread instantly to the company. To the retired civil servants, weary to death and standing up to avoid the strain on their last set of official clothes, to the dignified M. de Thiviers, that column of saintliness and negation, to the provincial matrons, their bosoms filled with pointed nails, to the young green girls, to General Piriac, block of death kept barely alive by one vein tough enough to outlast the withering of all the others. There was nothing pleasurable about his feeling. It turned everything round him to a desert, drying the roots of his tongue, even his eyeballs. He did not dare think of his children. If the acid were to touch Cécile, if suddenly he saw Henry as a pinch of dust, a bone turned over by some peasant. . . . With an effort he dodged the obsession. It withdrew to a fold of his mind where it was out of reach. He looked defiantly round the room, at the ceiling alive with flying angels and the superb frescoes separated by nymphs and plump goddesses. What junk! he said to himself; Thouédun is far better. Jostling bare arms and trampling deliberately on thin slippers, he shouldered his way to the door.

He had expected to see Derval. To save time, he had arranged to talk to him here. He was furious with the young man for
disobeying: not until he was in bed did it strike him that it was unlike Derval to miss a party.

Catherine stepped out of his way. After she had succeeded, deftly; she thought, in shaking off Saint-Jouin, she had been left alone. She did not notice it. She was busy moving her happiness from her shoulders to her wrists and the ends of her fingers. If only there were dancing, she thought. The warmth, the lights, the extravagant splendour of the room were making her head swim.

Behind her shoulder two people began talking.

“. . . four of Monsieur de Thiviers's workers, married men with families, were executed. Communists. Sabotage. . . .”

“When?”

“This morning or this evening. It will teach the others.”

She turned round. Two old faces, the texture and hue of cork, without eyebrows, without malice, bobbed away from her on the current. She gripped her hands. And now wherever she looked she saw four shabby rooms, four shabby poor women, and children to whom no one had explained their father's fault yet. That was to come.

Bergeot that evening was alone in his room at the Prefecture. Towards eight o'clock, when he was writing letters, Rienne came in. He had a sheet of notepaper in his hand. In half a dozen curt sentences he had drawn up an indictment of Gabriel Derval. The editor of the
New Order
had (1) commented on the official news that the situation was clearly hopeless, (2) said that Seuilly ought to be evacuated, (3) said that defeat must be thought of as very probable, (4) said that Seuilly was in danger of being pillaged and its decent citizens murdered by socialists and other disorderly elements, (5) said that but for the war Hitler would have led Europe, including France, towards the new age.

He read it aloud. “There you are,” he finished, laying it on Bergeot's desk.

“Why didn't he say Trance, including Europe'?” Bergeot said. “It would have been just as sensible.” He felt a familiar irritation followed by as familiar a calm. When Bonamy spoke in this voice, there was nothing to be done. It had been so all their lives. When they were children Bonamy let him behave with complete selfishness for weeks or months, then one day he said seriously, “I've had enough, Émile.” And it was enough. . . . He pushed the paper away.

“Where did he talk all this nonsense? What's your evidence?”

“I have the evidence of a Lieutenant Aulard—Derval talked to him in the Café Buran—and of two others who overheard——”

“Is that all?”

“Isn't it enough? Did you know that the
New Order
is owned by Labenne now? It used to belong partly to Monsieur de Thiviers and partly to the Italian Government——”

Bergeot interrupted. “Who told you all this?”

Rienne shook his head.

“It was Louis Mathieu,” Bergeot said viciously. At this moment he was exasperated by the trouble these honest people were giving him. A plague on honest men; they are far worse nuisances than rogues.

“That's enough, Émile,” Rienne said placidly. “Master Derval is subject to military law. A court-martial. But if you choose to act, we shan't interfere with you. It's better for you to shut him up. And in fact you want to.”

Bergeot burst out laughing. “I have my hands full. You and Louis don't trust me to be thorough, and you want me to commit myself. Do you think I don't see through you? Why, Bonamy, I can read you like a novel. . . . And what a novel! No love affairs, a mere thread of plot—nothing but the servitude and grandeur of a soldier's life. Much too Vigny. As for Louis—any minor prophet. . . . All right, all right. I'll have Derval locked up. You shall hear me. It's right, I suppose, it's necessary, and it's a damned bore.”

He went cheerfully to the telephone. And it was true that his anger had gone off in the pleasure of letting Bonamy see that he was acute. Dear Bonamy. A soldier, nothing but a soldier. . . .

“I know you're only tying up the dog,” Rienne said. “His master is still running about.”

“Oh, if you want me to have Labenne arrested—” Bergeot smiled.

Rienne did not smile. “You won't need me to tell you when to arrest him,” he said. . . .

Little more than an hour later Bergeot answered his own telephone and was surprised to hear Marguerite's voice.

“But where are you? I thought you were with the Huets?”

“I went there. Catherine felt faint and I brought her home and put her to bed. It's nothing. Nowadays young women imagine they have nerves.” Bergeot could see the gesture she made, of amused contempt. “I hope you can come home—and stay.”

He called Lucien, told him—for the pleasure of seeing his face—about Derval, and went off. During the drive he tried to think about the effects of the arrest. His mind betrayed him with odds and ends of dreams, he seemed to be hanging head-down in memory. It was a clear night, with wisps of the day's clouds lying about. They waste time up there, too, he thought. He felt irritably that he ought to be at work. His eyes pricked.

He let Marguerite wait on him; she brought a tray of bread, pâté, cherries, and a bottle of thin Vouvray. He began to feel ashamed of his impatience. When she chose, she could soothe him by moving quietly about the room, taking a slipper off and setting it by its fellow, folding garments with the neatness of a convent. All her gestures spelled rest and approval. And how he needed to be approved!

“You're not thinking of going back tonight?”

“No,” he said. “No, I'll stay here.”

“Good.” She came to him. “Let me look at you. Yes, a new line here—and here. Oh, this war.”

“It's not the war. I'm forty-eight.”

“I'm forty,” she laughed. “But I don't make it an excuse for killing myself. I have another forty years to live. At least. Do you imagine I want to be tired all that time? You could rest a little.”

“I'm resting.”

She kissed him lightly. “As soon as the war ends we'll go away, we'll go to Royan or Cap Ferrat. We'll lie in the sun.”
She drew back, smiling. “Why shouldn't we have a child? I'm not too old yet.”

Bergeot did not know whether what he felt was grief. If, he thought, you were my wife. . . . But all these years he had been under the illusion that what he had with her was a marriage. Suddenly it was not marriage, it was a relation. With a mistress you have relations; with a wife—children, certainty, boredom, happiness. One marriage in the family is enough to point out the differences, and in the Bergeot family not less than a hundred and three marriages of Bergeot sons and daughters had been noted at the parish church of Thouédun and the shabby mairie—beginning, in 1799, with Gaston Bergeot, peasant. ...

Marguerite had moved to the other side of the room—just when he felt this intolerable need to touch her. Getting up, he put his arms round her. She smiled at him.

“And if we can't marry?”

“Does it matter?” she said in a light voice.

“But the boy——”

“Will be ours,” she said in the same voice. “He will be like you, brave, a great talker, with a touch, oh, only a touch, of genius. And your hands.” She touched them.

“And you wouldn't mind?” Bergeot groaned.

She put her head back to look at him. Her body, smooth as it was, sprang out of his grasp, She was still smiling.

“You don't know me. My dear husband, I shan't mind growing ugly for our son—I see you've decided to have a son. I mind nothing—for him, for you, for myself—except poverty. I can't be poor. I've seen poverty too close, it's not even hideous, it's squalid. Too many bodies crowded together in small rooms, an endless labour of keeping clean—and you can't, you know. And all the—oh, what can I call it?—all the mucus of life swamping us. Our son—why not our sons?—must be safe from that. And from war. You won't ask me to have him in an air-raid shelter or a ditch? Oh, my love, let us have peace and a son.”

Bergeot held her by the waist so that she should not jerk out of his hands. He could not see further in her eyes than you can see at night in a rut full of water, the reflection of blackness in blackness, a thin single gleam. Do I know you? he thought, with
pain. I know a great many things about your body, little enough about your soul, if you have one. He was holding her closely and awkwardly. His body felt broken.

“I can't stop the war.”

“Of course you can't,” she said, mocking him. “But you needn't help to prolong it.”

She held back a sentence beginning: Thiviers says. . . . “What idiots men are,” she said softly. “Women alone would never risk the deaths of their sons and husbands. It is bad enough that there are hundreds of streets my son will walk in and I shan't see him there, I shan't know what rooms he's entering, what bodies he is touching: long after I am dead he'll go here and there, stretch his arms out, look at other women, look at the sky, and I, I shall know nothing.”

She had been using the tone which made him think of an animal lying in the sun; he heard her without at the moment taking very much notice of what she said. He made her lie down.

“If the war lasts for years and years I shall be too old to have children,” she said.

“Be quiet,” he said to her.

“But you would like it?”

“Please be quiet.”

She sighed once and was quiet.

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

The policemen who arrested Derval must have had orders to treat him politely. They allowed him to be alone in his bedroom while he packed a bag, and when he threatened them with “friends of mine who'll deal with this outrage,” they shrugged their shoulders in a way which was almost an apology. “I suppose you'll allow me to telephone,” he said.

“Certainly.”

They waited without impatience while he rang up Labenne.

“. . . he's gone already? . . . Yes, I know where he is, I arranged to see him there. I'll ring him again in the morning.” He put the receiver down, turning to them with a smile in which they read that he was not completely sure that Labenne was prepared to help him. Neither were they. But it is easier to avoid a mistake of this sort than to put it right later.

“I'm ready,” he said curtly.

One policeman opened the door, the other picked up Derval's bag. Other doors opened on the landings and faces appeared in the cracks with the speed of insects. His landlady, who had been standing at the foot of the stairs to remind him that he owed for a month, was overcome by the ceremony of this arrest, and prudently, timidly, held her tongue.

Rienne was watching Piriac and Woerth, trying to guess where each would show himself. Woerth had read the intelligence report aloud, he had been going to comment on it, but Piriac had silenced him with a gesture—surprisingly vigorous. He's really thinking, Rienne said to himself. A shadow crossed the old general's eyes—a second, a third—like the shadows thrown upward by fish moving along the bed of a river. The disturbance reached his hands, they twitched.

“Close the shutters,” he said suddenly.

Rienne closed them against the single ray of fierce June sun which could reach this room.

After a minute Piriac said, “We must be ready.”

General Woerth lifted his yellow face with a movement of curiosity so unguarded that for a second he really did show himself. His ambition is tormenting him, Rienne thought; he has to guess whether Piriac, in preparing to defend Seuilly, is taking the right, that is, the politic line.