Cloudless May (49 page)

“Our deputy, who is only thinking of his career.”

“I'm not sure that Monsieur Labenne isn't a more compromising ally.”

“You can leave him, he's really a peasant, to me!”

“Gladly,” Woerth said, smiling. He frowned at once, with his habitual reserve. “And our Prefect? The immoralist? . . . The Minister, who is an atheist, a Jew, will support him—as long as he lasts himself.”

“I don't believe that Monsieur Bergeot will go on giving trouble,” Thiviers said slowly. “If he does—General Piriac has a strong sense of duty——”

“Yes, yes.” Woerth looked down. “He can be of the greatest use.”

“To us?”

“To France,” Woerth said.

“The same thing. What terms are you on?”

“With Piriac? Oh, I allow him to believe he makes his own decisions.”

Thiviers smiled. He leaned forward. “Tell me one thing. You were quoting an authority—is he as optimistic about the future as you are?”

“I can only speak for myself,” Woerth said stiffly.

“But you're satisfied?”

“The German army,” Woerth said in a dry voice, “will be our best, if unwitting, ally.”

“That's really your opinion?”

“I have the deepest admiration for its discipline and equipment. Its leaders ought to be grateful to Monsieur Hitler. He gave them everything they needed. . . .”

“To conquer us,” Thiviers said.

“Yes.” Woerth stood up quickly. “Why not our turn next?”

“A strong government will build up the army. Is that what you mean?”

“It will take ten years,” Woerth said. He looked at his hands. “I'm healthier than Piriac.”

Thiviers smiled. His friend did not notice it: he had walked to the window, where his slight body was outlined on the bars of the shutter. A deep excitement had seized him, noticeable in his voice.

“You may think it's not just that the innocent people in France should have to suffer for the wickedness of the rest. But there is a higher justice which holds the balances between nations at war, and presses first on one, then on the other side. The destinies of Germany and France are inextricably involved. Each of us was created to give the other lessons in courage, discipline, firmness. When one sinks, through weakness, through its vices, the other becomes a rod to punish it and bring it to its senses again. Foch was the real saviour of Germany, not Hitler. Hitler, and not Pétain, not Weygand, is just about to save France. If an equilibrium were ever established between our two countries, they would become the masters of the world. That may happen, in another century or so—we can't know what an all-seeing Justice has in mind for us. All we know is that the hour of our greatest humiliation and our greatest triumph is at hand. You and I, my friend, won't be those servants who hired themselves at the tenth hour. We may even be the first.”

“You've forgotten,” Thiviers said with his gentle smile, “that the first shall be last.”

The two men smiled at each other with the same good faith, the same, perhaps involuntary, understanding that made it possible for the dry, passionate and ambitious soldier to suit himself so well with the Protestant banker.

They shook hands, and Thiviers went off to call on Mme de Freppel. The mistress of the immoralist was the second ally he proposed to himself in this crisis.

On his way to the Manor House he did not try to arrange his thoughts. He was in that beatitude he always brought away from seeing Woerth, and talking about his own future. It seemed to him that they had been talking of his future. I shall not enter the government, he said to himself. My work—no one else can do it—will be done in my study, or as a travelling ambassador. Since I'm above politics, I shall be respected in every chancellery. . . . The thought of his memoirs crossed his mind. If Montaigne, he thought, had been an ambassador of my kind, he would have written my greatest book. . . . It is delicious to feel certain of fame; Thiviers felt cool and relaxed. He complimented himself on having, once and for all, reached a point in his life when the chapter Woman, the chapter Distractions, was closed.

Mme de Freppel was expecting him, in the small sitting-room with a window facing the Loire and a second opening on to a rose-garden. Thiviers disliked the scent of roses, indeed of all flowers; as soon as he came in, she shut it out. The room began to fill up with air from the Loire. Even that left on the lips a taste of young vines.

“I can't,” she said, smiling, “close both windows. The evenings are much too warm.”

Thiviers noticed how hot it still was. In his exaltation he had overlooked it, and now, feeling tired, he was vexed by her
fresh look. He refused a drink, and told her, making no bones about it, why he had come. He hoped to startle her.

“The retreat has become a rout, you can take it as certain that the terms of an armistice are being discussed already. Nothing short of capitulation, instant, complete, can save France———”

She interrupted him. “Must you talk as though you learned how to talk at all from the leaders in the
Times?
. . . Nannie, his
Times
for Master Robert, please! . . .”

Furious, Thiviers got up brusquely. He walked to the window, with an idea of snubbing the Loire.

“You'll have bats coming into the room,” he said.

“They don't frighten me,” Marguerite said. “I'm not a young woman.”

“At least you could listen to me. What I have to say is important. And to you and Émile.”

“Yes, yes, you're going to tell me to keep Émile quiet. I'm doing all I can.”

“It's not enough,” he said harshly, “Émile, like any other civilian authority, has one duty, only one—to see that there are no local disorders. Suppose—I say, suppose—that what he calls his volunteers were to give trouble, serious trouble, before the armistice is signed. Or after. The army would be forced to act, there would be bloodshed, people killed—and then what? Civil war. Hideous. . . . But—it won't happen, strong measures are being taken, there'll be no volunteer guard in Seuilly. Whatever happens, we have a sensible general in control. There's only one question. Is Émile going to join the right side—now? Or is he going to be broken? He's not a fool. Surely you can make him see that in politics it's all a question of making yourself indispensable to the right man at the moment when he needs you and you can dictate your own terms.”

He was surprised that she did not become agitated or defiant. Hands folded in her lap, she was looking at him as though in another moment she would be sure to see a weakness she could use. He made himself stiffer and more upright. He was not going to reopen the chapter Weakness—not he. The Thiviers of the memoirs was at hand to tell him what to say and do. He himself need do nothing.

She was silent so long that, without meaning to, he spoke again.

“You do want to save Émile?”

“Yes, yes. . . . Not only for his sake.”

“For your own,” Thiviers smiled.

She took no notice of his sarcasm. Her gaze was only meditative and calm. He had the uneasy sense that she was judging him, not, as always before, with the eyes of an experienced clever woman, but by some impersonal scale. Where could she have borrowed—she who was all instinct and impulse—the detachment of a real mind? He was far from guessing that she believed she had cut the nerves holding her to her past. This illusion was giving her a feeling of strength.

“I'm thinking of our future,” she said. “I want Émile to be sensible. But you must give me time.”

“Are you mad? Don't you understand anything I've told you? You have, at the very most, a fortnight. Less, perhaps.”

He saw, without satisfaction, that at last he had frightened her. Her eyes became those of the clever animal he knew.

“A fortnight!”

“Perhaps only a week.”

“But I can do nothing with Émile in a week! You don't know him, he's too stubborn. If he's going to stay in Seuilly, he must go on being the great man—he must have time to put something else in the place of his absurd scheme——”

“In a week he can be ruined. Finished. With no future at all.”

“But——” She put her hands over her eyes. “Oh, my God, it's too late. Too late. I'm too tired. I was mad.”

Thiviers felt horribly weak. He sat down. “What do you mean?”

“I'm too old. At my age, you can't get away from the past. There's been too much of it, I'm too old.”

She means that she has told too many lies, he said to himself. But why does she want suddenly to be a young woman, young enough for her meanest lies to be still in her future? He was seized by a jealous rage. He felt jealous of her hopes, her despair, the future itself. He could not bear to think that she might, after all, escape punishment for her lies, greed, and want of conscience. She must be punished. She must suffer for her vices.

“You can do what you like with Émile. Warn him that if he persists in behaving badly I shall tell the proper authorities that he's hiding money in the States. And I shall publish the fact. You needn't think I shall be involved. I can take care of myself. I'm not a fool.”

She was looking at him with an insulting calm.

“No, you're a blackmailer. You are, aren't you?”

Thiviers reached her by pushing aside a table holding some glasses. They fell and broke. He was ridiculous; he threw himself on her and the buttons of his jacket gave way, making him still more ridiculous. She escaped from him, quite easily, and stood smiling.

“What were you going to do?'”

“Kill you.”

“Oh, no,” she said with a smile, “you were going to hate me by making love to me. What a dangerous creature you are.”

Thiviers was still beside himself. But his mind had begun to work. Clutching his jacket he said quietly,

“You ought to know me. How long were you my mistress, and how much of my money had you put away before I asked you to corrupt Bergeot?”

Marguerite cried out. “You did nothing of the kind! You asked me to invite him to the house.”

He felt a deep sense of relief and comfort that he had broken her, “You didn't tell him you were my mistress. Just as you didn't tell me you were his until I was on the point of finding it out for myself.”

“You were always so vain.”

“I daresay—but you made use of me.”

He had not been able to keep back this cry of vanity and grief. It lost him all the advantages he had gained. He watched her seat herself calmly, folding her hands on her knees. She was in complete possession of herself again. She has the will of a hard peasant, he thought. He felt humiliated before her.

“And now that I know exactly what you are,” Marguerite said steadily, “and what I can count on from you, I'll tell you how far you can count on me.”

“Well?”

“I'll persuade Émile—to do anything you want. As soon as I can. Soon. On your side you must promise me two things.
One, not to give away his investments in America. Two, not to punish him later on for being necessary to you now.”

“How well you understand politics,” he said.

“I understand that you are ashamed of having had a mistress, and vexed that I'm happy. And you know that you can punish me through Émile—” She broke off, as though she had been on the tip of saying something more—which was her secret. “Do you promise?”

“Yes.”

“Your word of honour.”

Thiviers wrapped himself in his dignity. “I've promised.”

Mme de Freppel stood up. He was being sent away. His body, when he moved it, felt bruised, and only obeyed his sense of dignity out of disgust for itself. He had the courage, or was it insensibility?—or he may have been seeking the thread of his memoirs—to look at himself in the mirror.

As soon as he was at home, he shut himself in his bedroom. His vanity, weaker than his sense of sin, could not help him. Once the flood of guilt reached the level it had reached now, he was always helpless. As he prospered and became richer—two wars had more than trebled his income—and the more he was praised for his piety and uprightness, the stronger and more nagging was his secret fear. Simple and affable with his equals, generous except to workers, honest in his business dealings unless he were dealing with a detested government—when he felt entitled to squeeze—a kind faithful husband, rationally but deeply pious, he felt himself to be less safe than many sinners. And it was Marguerite's fault. She was his sin. Through her he had learned that he had no control, not the slightest, over his lower self. It was only when he fell in love with her that he found out he had another self than the one which sat at its desk, visited prime ministers, and day in day out turned everything it heard and saw into grist for the mills of its spirit. The pleasure she had given him, the joy of having a supple body near his, the gratitude she made him feel—not to speak of his delight in her freaks of gutter humour—were all vices of that lower self. All—and in its least forgivable shape—evil.

Wherever he looked now, he saw her. She was lying back in his armchair, her clothes folded across another—he adored her habit of folding a garment neatly as she took it off, learned,
if he had only known it, from undressing in rooms where the carpet would have soiled any garment dropped on it—watching him from those eyes which reminded him of an animal or a loyal child. He groaned. His body was on fire. Terrified by the beating of his heart, he lay down on his bed, and felt there only the warmth and shape of her body. His torments grew beyond bearing. He looked at the carafe of water on his night-table and thought of pouring it over himself. “I'm yours,” he said aloud, “only yours.” And my immortal soul? he thought. You might, he said to God, help me a little; I only need help!—And you, answered God, might see your way to confessing.—But I've been doing nothing else!—It's unfortunate, that is to say, natural, God said, but in fact, ever since I began noticing you, you have only confessed your dear sin, not a word about the other. Not a word of your avarice. . . . Although he had been taking part in this debate for several years, Thiviers did not hear it. He was deaf from habit. His mind had so many habits by now that it was nearly dead.