Cloudless May (77 page)

The German turned quickly and Charles-Gouraud recognised him. A well-known young physicist. It was a little over four years since he visited the laboratory, bringing a letter of introduction from the German scientist who had been Charles-Gouraud's only German friend . . . “I send you my best pupil—he is the bearer of my
gratitude
to you and to France. . . ”He had underlined the word as, in order to call attention to them, he underlined mathematical signs in his letters. Obviously it stood for something nobler than the simple word for friendship or kindness. . . . The pupil stayed a fortnight, charming his host with his childlike candour and enthusiasms.

He came forward with both hands out. “My dear colleague!”

Dr. Charles-Gouraud stepped back. “What are you doing here?” He felt a sudden fury, and corrected himself. “Foolish of me. You'll forgive me—but I can only see an officer in the German army, not a colleague.”

“How wrong you are,” the German said pleasantly. “I'm a civilian in uniform, not a soldier. My job is the expert one of supervising the packing and despatch of scientific apparatus.” He laid a caressing finger on the godchild. “This came high on my list,” he said, smiling.

“Your list?” Charles-Gouraud said.

He listened, a little dully. The German was telling him that four years ago he had been making a reconnaissance for his Government—the military term came naturally; it was as natural as his frankness and charming smile—in French laboratories. Poor Charles-Gouraud! But he was not the first person to learn that in German the word gratitude can stand for any number of things from spying to mass air-raids. With despair, he realised that this intelligent man saw nothing to apologise for in his trick. Far from being embarrassed, he was as proud of his cleverness as a child. He was two men, the honest scientist and the tribesman: they were not even at war with him, they used the same brain, hands, nerves.

The sense of unreality which follows a shock lifted. His despair dried up. I have a few minutes, he thought. His mind used them eagerly. Germany—what a paradox! The only country in Europe where the instincts—hunger, cruelty,
sacrifice—can count on being served by a coldly rational intelligence. When did it happen that every German became two men, or a man and an hysterical woman asking, “Do people like me?” When did they begin their search for a Messiah, demanding from him only that his kingdom should be of this world? By pushing it to its logical conclusion, they had discredited for ever the religion of Humanity? Was that why they were created? Yes. . . . His mind—he had only a minute left—made its first hurried movement. These things are not improvised, he thought, calmly. The world was created. . . .

He had moved, very slowly, until he was near enough his precious apparatus to swing at it with the wooden stool under his hand. The German shot him—a little awkwardly, he was after all a civilian—emptying his revolver into Charles-Gour-aud's body. It stood for a second or two, then fell backwards. He could see the young German's face—nothing else. A sad business, if a blow over the heart could wipe out everything except one hateful image. What a world he was going to have to live in!

“It was your own fault,” the German said, bending over him.

“You have saved me the trouble,” Charles-Gouraud said. He imagined he was saying it.

Curiously enough, this was the first time the German had seen anyone die. He had a moment of anguish. He did not recognise it; he thought the sun was making him giddy. What a fool, he said, looking furtively at the dead Frenchman; he's missed his chance; we should have used him.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

The Bishop of Seuilly had been summoned to see Major Landauer at six o'clock. He put aside the temptation to dignity. If by appearing before the Germans he could help his people, it was a trivial affair, trivial and ridiculous. Nothing to disturb an old priest. Besides, he had noticed in his reading how often the step from a gently disappointing past to the cruelty of the future is bridged by a person of no importance—the telegraph boy bringing notice of a death, the starving inventor, the neglected poet. Attended only by his secretary, he went.

A little to his annoyance, he found that the German had prepared a long speech. No doubt—like the posters already on the walls, ordering people to trust the benefits of invasion—it
was an issue. Since it concerned his duty, in which he did not need instruction from the invader, he gave up listening. With a little malice, he watched his secretary. He knew that Garnier expected him to treat the German as politely as if he were an anti-clerical Minister—I am going to alarm him, he thought, smiling. The Bishop of Euxerre had just died—and he knew that the Abbé was wondering how the end of the war could be turned to serve his dear ambition. My tiresome learned Garnier is a peasant, the Bishop thought. With a peasant's devotion to the fabric of the Church, its grandeur and body. He covets the Euxerre pasture. Obviously, if the Church were less likely to last than the land, he would never have given it his greedy love. . . . The Bishop was surprised to feel pity breaking through his mild dislike of Garnier. . . . How much disappointment and loss he will have to suffer before he opens his hands and lets everything fall. I daresay He needs a few priests who feel for His Church the sober greed of a peasant. . . . He looked at his secretary with an amused tenderness. . . . I must be growing very old and saintly, he thought. Or very foolish. . . .

He sighed. What a bore this German is! . . . Landauer was talking about closing the cafés, in a voice at once smooth and metallic, like the noise of a wave breaking. He became sarcastic about the slackness of the French. . . . True, the Bishop thought. We were slack. But how pleasant it was! Something imperfect and infinitely modest and arrogant and human splintered under the wave.

The German had finished his speech: he waited. “I trust I have made your duty clear,” he said.

He expects me to thank him, the Bishop said to himself. What a savage!

“My duty has always been clear.” He stood up. I only need strength, he reflected. And after all these years, He is not going to deprive me of it. He looked at his secretary. Garnier, he saw, was longing to interrupt and show his tact and dignity. I shan't let him, he thought, with a return of his dry malice.

“Come, my son.”

On their way out they ran into M. Huet, his face transformed by an indecent joy. He stopped, and said affably,

“Your Grace has beaten me. But I'm delighted to find you here. You share my feeling, no doubt.”

The old Bishop was not able to restrain his repugnance for this man. “I doubt it very much.”

“At least you agree with me that .we are being offered a victory,” the deputy said, smiling. “If we could have had it without German help, it would have been pleasanter. But let us be thankful we have it! . . . Frankly, I am doubly happy to see you here. I might so easily have found Monsieur Labenne!” His smile became very frank—it needed to, if suspicion were to be drawn away from the rest of his face. From his eyes especially. “A man not to be trusted, our Mayor. I suspect him of—in short, of treachery. He is a cynic, and a cynic will betray anyone.”

Have I ever known anyone more loathsome and peculiar? the Bishop asked himself. He was less of a saint than he had just supposed.

“This is not a victory, Monsieur Huet. The war was a chastisement—we have all, all, sinned—but we have none the less been defeated.”

“Ah,” Huet said, “you misunderstand me. The victory is over our own unruly members—let us call them frankly the mob, then we can admit with a good conscience that we have been saved.”

“The mob? We used to talk of the people,” the Bishop interrupted. “If you are thinking of saving France from the common people, you are doing her a grave injury. The truth is—we have not been common enough.”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •

Mathieu's landlady ran upstairs, using all the force of her old body, to tell him that German soldiers were in the courtyard. She had heard one of them—the worst of all was that he spoke French—ask a neighbour which was his floor. “What are you going to do, Monsieur Mathieu?”

Mathieu remembered the poison he kept in a drawer of his desk, and took it out.

He decided not to take it. A phrase he had not thought of since he read it came, almost brutally, into his mind. . . .
Terror is not French
. . . . He withdrew his hand. Later, I shall be sorry I didn't kill myself, he thought coldly. He smiled. The frightened old woman did not recognise this young gentle smile; she had never seen it in this room.

“You were in here dusting,” Mathieu said. He pushed a cotton scarf into her hand.

The man who came into the room ahead of the German soldiers was French. For that reason he showed none of their curiosity and mistrust. He was at home. Ordering them to search the two rooms for money and papers, he pushed Mathieu with a brutality which equalled that of Rimbaud, against a wall.

“All the money I have here is in a note-case in my pocket,” Mathieu said.

He was going to take it out. Vayrac knocked him down quickly and stepped on his hand, crushing it. What pleasure this is giving you, Mathieu thought. With a lucid calm, he realised that the man leaning over his body was like him. . . . I despised men too much to want to hurt one of them: he hurts them so that he can enjoy depising them. . . .

“Be careful,” he said, smiling. “This morning I set a mousetrap on the floor of the cupboard.” It was his landlady who had set it, but he was anxious not to draw attention to her.

“Are you finding this amusing?” Vayrac said.

“One of your friends might have caught his fingers,” Mathieu said lightly.

All the gaiety he had ignored in his life was making frantic signals to him. He saw them and smiled. Always so careful not to confuse one thing with another, keeping them apart with all the force of its strict logic, his mind overwhelmed him suddenly with likenesses: he saw that his landlady resembled like a sister the fourteenth-century figure of Saint Madeleine in the Abbey Church, she was holding the improvised duster against her breast with an air of surprised grief worthy of an alabaster box; a double crack in the ceiling was the Loire with its blond islands—it was really the Loire, in spite of the smell in the room of uniforms and hate; and now for the first time he saw how exactly, in its lack of taste and luxury, his room resembled a million rooms in France and this minute a million minutes, past and to come, in which a grief and a dishonour past bearing had been, would be, borne. How? By France choosing to resemble France, and succeeding to perfection. . . . Now he felt only a sober indifference. He thought for less than a moment of Uhland. . . . He could have given Rienne a message for me. . . . It never entered his head that Rienne had forgotten to deliver
it. . . . After all, he's a Boche, he thought gently. . . . Is it because I am a Jew that I see Seuilly, and France, as at the same time part of me and separate? Am I the only person who carries them about like a burden, like a child—like a friend? Never easily. Never without feeling the weight of them.

Vayrac pulled him up, dragging on his crushed hand.

“Make the most of your hour,” Mathieu said.

As he left it he looked round his room; the clearest thing in it was his landlady's face. How handsome she must have been, he thought. Crossing the courtyard, he thought: I never thanked her for coming to warn me. Even in his regret he was glad to think that, old, poor, strong, she had not been too afraid. You can trust them, he thought.

Towards midnight of this same day, the 19th, Lucien was moving slowly—how slowly—along the road towards Châtillon. He could see nothing. It was pitch dark, and it rained. The darkness had changed itself into a hideous geometry. It moved sluggishly against him, cubes giving birth to solid rectangles of shadow, swallowing others, black profiles on blackness, a Walpurgis-night of engines and cries. He nodded forward, asleep; his motor-cycle ran against the car in front, he woke, the earth carried him forward with it, jerking him from side to side as though it were crossing tramlines, he woke again. . . . The rain—until now he had only felt it—was visible, a grey shadow moving across the others. Lorries separated themselves from cars and tanks; he could see the trees drawing away in front of him along the sides of the road. . . . A terrific clatter. The Germans were bombing a place not nearer than fifteen kilometres. They dropped flares. A harsh sunlight swept over the greyness; he saw the column jerking itself like a goods train between trees and hedges; a village on fire opened out in the rain like an enormous dahlia. . . . The bombing stopped.

It was now almost light. Turning a corner, he could see a cross-roads ahead. At the far side a car, overturned in a ditch,
was lying with its wheels in the air. The dress of a woman laid on the grass verge was spread out like linen put to dry. The man bending over her made no attempt to get help from any of the passing cars; perhaps he realised the folly of trying to halt one drop of a flood. He was kneeling, with his back to the traffic. In the moment before he turned his head, Lucien recognised Bergeot. Mme de Freppel, as he saw when he was lifting his machine into the ditch, was dead.

She was lying with her arms spread out, bent so that her hands lay on the ground above her head. One hand was gloved, the fingers of the other were closed gently, thumb outside. Her eyes were closed, and the look of patience had escaped from them over her cheeks.

Without speaking, Bergeot stood up. Lucien realised that he wanted his help to carry her into the field. When he touched her he was shocked to feel that she must have been dead for some hours. Her cheeks were cold and hard. Yet he felt sorry to lay her on the soaked grass.

He noticed that the rain ran off her face in firm hard drops.

“When?” he asked. For his life, he could not have spoken gently.