Cloudless May (53 page)

“You can give yourself up to being nursed,” he said, smiling. “Try to leave the Department to me for a week or two. You can, you know.”

“Don't come too close to me,” Mathieu said. “I must smell very unpleasant.”

“You're talking nonsense,” Bergeot said, too gently.

He irritates Mathieu by his gentleness, Rienne thought. You speak to men when they are dying in just such a weak foolish voice.

“Louis doesn't trust you,” he said drily. “He doesn't understand why you allow Derval to preach defeat and panic in a rag that belongs to Labenne. I've no doubt myself that it was Derval who hired the thugs, and Labenne, even if he knew nothing about it, won't be sorry——”

“Leave me out of it,” Mathieu said coldly. “Of course Derval ought to be locked up. As well as half a dozen other people who are infinitely more dangerous, and had nothing to do with last night.”

“What do you want me to do?”

A film of sweat covered Mathieu's face. The effort he was making—to force from Bergeot an honesty as intransigent as his own—cost him atrocious pains. Possibly only his body knew it.

“I believe it's useless to defend Seuilly,” he said in a low voice. “The retreat won't be stopped now. The disintegration, of the army and the civil administration, has gone too far. . . .”
He became almost unaudible. “I'm beginning to believe that the Île de France is the key. When once we've dropped it, and when
they
have picked it up, they can go anywhere, they can roll their tanks through the Beauce, over the young wheat . . . over our grapes. . . .” He stopped, realising that he had begun to talk to himself, and made another effort to pass off on Bergeot his own contempt for half-measures. “You must act
as though
Seuilly were going to be defended. . . . Is there still a chance?”

“Yes,” Rienne said.

“Don't count on it,” Mathieu said anxiously to Bergeot. “You could be disappointed, and—you are not the type to profit by disappointments, they unnerve you. But listen what you must do. You must get out of the way the men who will employ fear and mistrust against you. You can suspend Labenne, and you must re-arrest Derval. . . . If, I say if, the town is defended, and it is all useless—I'm nearly certain it will be—it's still something for the future to copy. . . .” His faced softened a little. “You can't imagine,” he murmured, “how closely that little idiot of a future sticks to her models. And how she needs them.”

He waited, looking at Bergeot.

“If you'll identify Derval——” Bergeot said, hesitating.

“I can't.”

“Then——”

“You'll have to arrest him for a polite form of treason. Not attempted murder. I don't want revenge.”

“You're a brave man,” the Prefect said.

“So you won't do anything . . .?”

“Can't you leave our handful of defeatists to me?” Bergeot cried. “I'll take care they don't do any harm.”

Mathieu turned his head away, as far as he could, little more than half an inch. He said nothing. Rienne saw that he was looking for the profit in a brutal disappointment—not his own, but attached in some way to his sense of order, authority, the nation. He touched Émile's arm.

“Are you telling Louis the truth?” he asked curtly.

Bergeot looked from one to the other with a quite joyous frankness. “I'm not surprised you don't believe me,” he said. “I've made as many mistakes as anyone in my position could
make and survive. I flatter people, usually the wrong people, because I'm afraid of being disliked. I need approval, you know. You both know. It's my nature to flatter people. But in real life I try extremely hard to be honest. I promise—you're both witnesses—that I'll shut up anyone, no matter who he is, who might be troublesome in a crisis. You have my word. And let me tell you that no one will interfere with me. The Minister won't. In any case, he's too busy. . . .”

“So you think this isn't the crisis?” Mathieu said, without opening his eyes. “You really think you can go on playing at politics with men who are playing it for their lives and fortunes? You're wrong.”

But Rienne was almost reassured. This was again the Émile he knew, clear-sighted, selfish, capable of any levity and any sacrifice. His little body was a battle-ground of faults—vanity, ambition, self-indulgence, genius—the greatest of faults, and which pardons the others. Never had he felt closer to his foster-brother—or more afraid for him. It must be the weight of his energy which was hollowing his shoulders and dragging down the lines of his face when he was not smiling or talking. He looked old. . . .

During the rest of the day Rienne was too busy to think over the news. Towards ten o'clock he left the barracks and sauntered along the Quai d'Angers. The heat was stifling, what he had first thought were guns turned out to be thunder. A pyramid of clouds blocked the sunset. Rain began falling, the first for weeks. During the time when cloudless days favoured the Germans in their race across French roads and fields, not a cloud but dispersed in a few seconds, leaving the ground firm for the tanks. Now that pitiful hordes of civilians shared the ditches with soldiers, rain fell on them like shrapnel. What could you make of it if, as Rienne did, you believed that God needs the French more than He needs other nations?

The first drops fell with the flat sound of metal on the wall under his hand. In his sober way he was picturing the defence of Paris. What the world would lose, if it were destroyed, was not calculable. If it lost the bridges and the Sainte-Chapelle, if it lost the Arc de Triomphe, the rue St-Jacques, and the lovely line of the quays, if it lost the cathedral moored in the Seine with its ballast of how many centuries, and if it lost the
houses of the other more modest island. If it lost the gardens, palaces, monuments. And Paris itself a monument. And Paris itself carrying the past. There would be left only what poets of all nations and centuries had written about it, and painters recorded. And an example like a few, a very few, in the past. The whole world, if Paris were destroyed, would know that France was imperishable. The French would know it. On the Loire or on the Garonne or on the Dordogne or on the Lot, they would defend the Seine, they would defend a memory and the future.

The rain now was torrential. Standing there in the darkness, he did not notice it until he had been soaked to the skin.

This same evening Marguerite waited for Bergeot to come, as she had waited the past four nights, expecting a message that he was going to stay at the Prefecture. Even she hesitated to go back there at nine or ten o'clock to remonstrate. She would scold on the telephone, but very often his secretary brought a letter and explained—the real object of his visit—that the Prefect had been forced to ask the exchange not to put through any calls before eight the next morning. She had lost the impudence to argue her way through this barrier.

She had lost, she was beginning to realise, much of her self-confidence. It seemed that an impulse to change your life destroyed your energy without placing any new weapons in your hand. I'm growing old, she said to herself, not better, but older. Was it age that kept her from visiting her friend Léonie, or an instinct warning her that she would not be able to deliver herself from any temptation she met there? Age or a shapeless fear that pushed her to pray now and then, shamefaced, behind a locked door? She sat in her room thinking about a future when she and Émile would be secure, with no need to oblige anyone. Her thoughts were as vague as the Loire, ripples starting from a sandy island to die in mid-stream without touching either bank. As she had longed for excitement, money, power, she
longed for goodness—but what was behind her longing? Nothing. Not a fever of flesh and spirit, not the hunger of her fingers clinging painfully to ledge after ledge of her climb.

She avoided thinking about her daughter. It was easy, seeing her every day, to feel a thin security. It blew away the instant she tried to touch Catherine's mind, which eluded her as easily as her heart. The girl, all smiles and amiability for her mother, was as distant as an eagle. It would be as much use trying to tame her. Better not think about her. Better avoid rousing this new anguish she felt when she remembered the tears a child had wept because she was being sent away, and was so unlikely to weep now that the mother reproached herself as if for a great crime that her daughter had learned to be self-possessed. She suffered if she let herself think: I neglected her. Better think about a child she had never neglected, because he was not born yet. . . .

Bergeot came in. He was tired and smiling. He told her, as if it were the most remarkable of his news, a miracle, that it was raining, and then that the Germans had crossed the Marne at three places. Evidently you could not expect two miracles in the same day.

“I know,” Marguerite said. “Well?”

He sat down and leaned his head on her shoulder. “How cool you feel. I'm so thankful to be with you, my love.”

“What have you been doing?”

“What do you think? Working.” With his familiar nervous gaiety, trying to startle her, he said he was preparing to arrest Thiviers, Labenne, “even Ernest Huet if he pushes his rat's nose in here. He's in Tours now, pestering Ministers to let him spoil something, if it's only a piece of official paper.”

“Are you mad?”

“Not in the least. Paris is going to be defended. That means Orléans, Dijon, Le Mans, will be defended. And Seuilly. I think you and Catherine had better move tomorrow, to the Hotel Buran. An isolated house isn't safe. And I can see you more easily there.”

Marguerite did not answer at once. The shock had reawakened all her energies. It was her future happiness, her future honesty, that were at stake. To save them, she would pretend to anything now, tell without a qualm as many lies as
were needed. Or her infant qualms were inaudible, they had been smothered by her coaxing hands and voice, which were playing parts they knew too well to need prompting. So with her terrible will, which fastened itself ruthlessly on what she wanted.

“Have you seen Piriac?” she asked mildly.

“Yes. Yesterday morning.”

“What did he tell you? Is the Army falling back here? Has he had orders——?” She broke off, not wanting to tell him she had spoken to Thiviers. “Are you sure that Piriac knows what he's talking about? He's senile, you know. Would they have left him in charge here if they had had any intention of defending the Loire?”

“Why not? He wouldn't be in charge of the defence, he would be subordinate to the divisional general. No, no, the point is that he encouraged me to go on. And he's not gloomy, he doesn't think we're going to be defeated.”

He is putting his own ideas into Piriac's mouth, she thought. She had caught the over-emphasis in his voice, and knew he was boasting. She smiled. It was an effort. For the first time, her body was protesting a little against going through its tricks.

“You don't usually rely on General Piriac.”

“I rely on myself,” Bergeot retorted. “I knew there were no Ernest Huets among our real leaders. They understand that the Germans mean to finish us this time. Even if it ruins us, we're forced to fight.”

“Of course it will ruin us.”

Bergeot shrugged his shoulders. “I would rather be dead than take orders from a German lieutenant. They do so enjoy giving them.”

“And you'd rather I were dead——”

“Hush,” he said. “Decent people don't say these things.”

“I'm not decent. I love you and I want us to live.”

He put his arms round her, and she felt the weight of his body becoming part of hers, as in sleep. She tried to think coolly. Surely something she could say would move him from his maddening self-confidence? Her thoughts were terribly disordered; an old actress, deserted by her cunning, would feel the same weakness and despair.

“Don't talk nonsense,” Bergeot said, “you're not a coward.
Besides, it's not in my hands, I'm an official, a Government servant.”

“You don't know whether peace terms are being discussed. They must be—or you would have had special orders.”

“It wouldn't make any difference. If—I don't believe it—but if we're going to make peace, I shall have to make other plans . . . to carry on here. . . .”

“By then you will have been ruined. Thiviers and Labenne will have ruined you.”

He pushed her gently away from him, to be able to see her. “What are you talking about, Marguerite?”

She felt stupid with fear. Something she could not control was happening to her, her ears sang, she imagined that she was being drawn into a black whirlpool. It was not unpleasant—a little alarming. It was the first time in her life that she had fainted, and it lasted less than a minute. When she recovered she was lying uncomfortably on the floor; Émile, who had lost his head completely, was gripping her by her shoulders. The circle of light round her widened slowly to include what they had been talking about before she fainted. Smiling, and closing her eyes to enjoy another minute of freedom and irresponsibility, she said,

“You are killing me.”

Labenne had no intention of exposing himself. So far as he could, he never showed himself in a political intrigue until the moment when he could step forward to take the place he had all along had in view. He made others move for him. If by their incompetence, or by developing scruples, they sometimes ruined everything, he began again patiently with other tools. And without throwing away the first. In another emergency they might come in useful; he blamed himself for having picked them up at the wrong time. Unlike his enemy, Mathieu, he despised all human beings except himself—in himself were included his children. He had not yet reached, perhaps never
would, a stage of remorse for his lack of public morals. He had so many private ones, and he had been spared any impulse to disinterest and any movement of his intelligence which did not return instantly to its point of departure—himself. Moving as cautiously as he did, he had no suspicion that he was leaving a wake which the future would notice. Had he still a touch of the innocence which makes a child indignant when it is discovered sitting quietly in its chair and punished for the mischief it did on its way? . . . There was no question that the butcher's little boy had every right to think he had done the best he could with his talents. What are talents for unless to advance their owner? And he was advancing! Only five years ago, would General Piriac have sent for him to ask advice? Certainly not. It amused him that M. de Thiviers had been sent for as well. I shall see which sounds the hollower when I knock them together, he said to himself.