Cloudless May (12 page)

Labenne could not resist a stab. “That affair at Amiens did you no good,” he said.

The deputy was silent.

If ever there had been an episode in his career of which he need not feel ashamed, it was the night of July 27, 1917. That night, visiting Amiens, he heard that a German officer was to be shot as a spy: a pure impulse of pity drove him to see the prisoner and offer, since he had been educated in Marburg and spoke German, to take any message and forward it after the war. He stayed for three hours with the German, talking to him about the country outside Marburg and the opera season. Years
after the war a journalist told the story, and accused Huet of treachery. He had only to tell the truth. Instead, he denied everything, he had never visited Amiens, he had never known any German officer. When the truth was forced out of him at last, no one believed it, and he was mortally discredited. . . . He saw the face of the enemy officer. It came between him and Labenne's flat sinister mug. The German smiled politely when he was leaving, the conventional smile of a friend who knows he will see you tomorrow; he was young, fair, a Catholic. All that hung now against a background of bitterness and disgrace; he dipped his tongue in the bitterness.

“Since you want to go in for politics, my dear Georges, I warn you beforehand, never do anything quixotic, unless you have witnesses. Even then you'll get a reputation for being a dangerous fellow.”

Labenne smiled, with an air of eager simplicity.

“I count modestly on your advice,” he said. “I believe we can do a great deal for one another. You have experience, but you know I have a lucky thumb.”

He held it out—broad, flattened like a cleaver: he could turn it back in a semicircle. It was also dirty. Huet looked at it down his nose, smiling.

“Since we're allies,” he drawled, “I'll tell you frankly”—his nose quivered—“I'm a pessimist about the war. We ought never to have let ourselves in for it. We haven't the money or the men for a long war. We shall become a colony of the United States—or else we shall be defeated. And mark me—if we're going to be defeated, the sooner the better—or we shall be too weak to make terms. . . . I perceive you're shocked, my dear Georges. I'm a realist. I admit it. I never had any use for the illusions of novelists and politicians.”

He stopped. Not because he was suddenly ashamed to be lying about himself—at school he had been famous for the lyricism of his essays; every age group produced at least one boy who compared German Alsace to Eurydice in hell, and it was he who did it for his class—but because he saw that his careful indiscretion was not having the right effect. He had expected to see Labenne becoming more Thibetan than usual, his slits of eyes and broad nose a mask of amiable cunning. Instead, he saw a mask of reproof.

“My dear fellow,” Labenne said in a dejected voice, “I had no idea you were such a defeatist.”

Huet kept a frank smile on his lips, while he shrank into the farthest corner of himself.

“A defeatist!” he cried. “Oh, no. Far from it, I assure you.”

Still eyeing him, Labenne said gravely,

“We must build, excuse me for talking like a politician, for the future. As to that, I have my ideas. We must have new men! No more aristocrats like Thiviers, no fatherly Piriacs mumbling about Joan of Arc. . . . We'll use them. We'll use even Joan of Arc if she can stand up. But what we want is to attract young men from the solid provincial families—ambitious, clever, greedy. They'll push, they'll use their brains for us. We'll find editorships for them, jobs. You—forgive me, my dear fellow, I know it's a mark of your noble nature—you've never had a following.... There's nothing noble about me! I'm going to see to it that we're followed by a school of young energetic grateful hopeful sharks. I have my hand on one now. Do you know him—a young fellow called Derval? Gabriel Derval.”

“Never heard of him,” Huet said coldly.

“You have—without knowing it. He edits our other newspaper, the
New Order.”

“Ah! It attacked me brutally, yes, brutally, during the election.”

Labenne smiled widely. “It won't next time.”

“Thanks!”

“Oh, that won't cost me anything. I don't even finance the rag. Another friend of mine does that—he has his own hopes, no doubt.”

Huet opened his mouth to ask the name of this friend, and closed it. He would not ask anything. Let Labenne choke himself with his secrets. He got up to leave.

Labenne took him to the side door of the Town Hall. You reached it by a long vaulted corridor, and the deputy had the happiness of moving from pillar to pillar, never in the open for more than a second. Labenne stood in the doorway and watched him cruise along the wall of the courtyard. He turned and waved his hand, as limply as an empty glove. Labenne waved back. The same thought crossed both their minds in the same instant, along the same ray of light.

“What a blackguard, though!”

The ceremony of unveiling the bust of Foch in the Town Hall Square was more than nine months overdue. People had become used to the pedestal swathed in canvas. Even during the last week when the poles were being hurriedly set up, and flower-boxes fixed to them with off-hand energy by the only workmen in the world who know how to make one nail support a dozen geraniums in their proper amount of earth, no one would have been surprised by another postponement. The first had been due to the lawsuit threatened by a firm of contractors who said they had been employed to do the decorations, now handed over to another firm. It was a promising scandal. Half the citizens of Seuilly knew the exact sum which had passed through official hands from the hands of the triumphant contractor; the other half could trace the line of second cousins linking him to the Mayor. When it was decided simply to postpone the unveiling, “because of the crisis”—as if the crisis had not already lasted six years—everyone guessed there would be no lawsuit. Nor was there.

Now, on May 9, less than a year later, with both firms working overtime together on the decorations, the day of the unveiling arrived. Unless Foch had been stifled by the canvas, he would step out into sunlight, under a dazzling blue sky, to find himself hemmed in by boxes of scarlet geraniums. . . . Possibly he had expected cavalry. . . . A squadron that had welcomed at the station the Minister arriving from Paris was back in its barracks, and the infantry lining the streets were out of sight behind the crowd of women and children and ageing men which blotted every side of the Square. Only from the sight of this crowd he would have known that in the interval his country had gone to war again.

Standing with General Piriac in the group behind the Minister, General Ligny was talking to Rienne without a movement of his lips. He learned the trick at school, and he kept it up as faithfully as his other childish habits—planting both feet on the floor at once when he got out of bed, in fear of a surprise, choosing lottery numbers in multiples of nine, turning into
Latin verse the scraps of conversation he overheard in the street.

“Good heavens, what a mug the fellow has! I distrust all Ministers, but to come here wearing a pair of yellow gloves—it's too low. Don't you think so?... And look at our deputy. What's he plotting? Something against your friend the Prefect, I shouldn't wonder, he's watching him so very affectionately. I've seen too many lizards waiting about under stones. You should warn your friend. . . . Do you know what Piriac said to me this morning? He said, I hear that the enemy are very active behind the Dutch frontier; there's even some idea they'll invade on Saturday, but I can't believe they're so grossly insensitive. What do you mean? I asked him. He reproached me for forgetting that Saturday is Joan of Arc's Day. As if I could forget it, after hearing him rehearse his speech twice! The urgent question is, Has the Boche forgotten?”

The Bishop of Seuilly was standing a little apart. His broad face, the heavy features pinched and blunted, had a polite air of attention. Actually, he was resting. He had learned how to do that while standing upright. Moving his head very slightly he could see a spire of the Abbey Church. By an effort of will that gave him the sense of looking from a great height on the Minister, the generals, and the other little figures, he attached himself to it. From this height they were charming. He could set them on the palm of his hand like Gulliver and watch them move their tiny limbs, insects at the end of a twig. Among them his secretary, Abbé Garnier, whom he could feel palpitating with curiosity.

He was old and tired enough, the Bishop, to have forgotten the need for moving on from one minute to the next. He would stay in a minute so long that it held for him everything he had ever felt, from his first moment of conscious happiness to the ordeal of a death he could feel close to him, as you feel the nearness of a tree in the darkness by the silence of its leaves. He saw the Minister's lips move. The fellow was still talking; he had removed the flag that since this morning had covered the bust of Foch in place of the weather-stained canvas, and in a voice directed at the microphone slung between two posts he was admonishing or instructing or chatting to the dead Marshal. . . . Among all these minute creatures, Foch kept his proper
height. And, pressed closely together, his lips kept the secret of his thoughts.

Be careful how you move, the Bishop warned him. You could easily crush someone. . . . He felt a sudden gentle envy of the dead. How Foch must have enjoyed stretching his limbs in French earth, after his life. How thankful he must have been to know that these roots he felt near him were sending upwards a life to be caressed by the air of France. There couldn't be a better use, the Bishop thought, for one's body. He looked down at his hands. Let the last energy in them be used, he said.

The Minister was assuring Foch that the young men of France, sons of the young men of 1914-18, honourably deserved his blessing. He paraded them here, all those who were going to die in this war and those who would survive for the unveiling of war monuments. There was something missing in his speech. It limped a little uncomfortably between the speeches he had grown used to making during the last war and the speeches he would make at the end of this. He scarcely knew where to look. At Foch, who had once cut him brutally short when he was addressing a body of aspirant officers? At certain young men in shabby earth-stained uniforms who were surprised to find him, after more than twenty years, repeating the same sublime phrases with the same modest gestures? At other young men, like, and yet—because of the memories seeded in them—not like the first? His gestures became confused. No one, looking at him, would have known whether he was excusing or defending himself, dismissing or summoning the young men he debited to sacrifice, to glory, to the future—to everything except the moment when one of these young men, stretching his arms, smiling, opening his eyes widely to look at the light, saw nothing and felt only the bitter agony before dark.

Colonel Rienne listened. The poor hypocrite means well, he thought. But what has any of it to do with Foch, who was a soldier, not a politician, who had a direct, not merely a contingent, idea of necessity? And, if he felt any of the things—pride, devotion, pity—that this fellow gives him credit for, kept them to himself. He didn't pity the men he ordered to die. How could he? A surgeon can't pity his instruments. The pity this fellow is emptying on them is a lie. He is pitying himself, like every non-combatant who talks in this way about war. Like
them, he can't see that the one decent thing he can do, since he is alive, since he can enjoy the sun, is to hold his tongue. . . .

The Minister made his final gesture to the microphone. The group of notable persons round the pedestal split up as though at the last minute Foch had exploded among them.

The old Bishop went towards his carriage waiting in a side street. He had already—during the reception at the Prefecture—paid his respects to the Minister, who was a Freemason and an atheist.

The Minister waited to let the mob of ordinary people applaud him for a minute before stepping into the Prefect's car. The generals followed. Now the police lowered the ropes, and the mob drifted across the Square to look at Foch. The children stared at him as they would stare at any circus animal, finding in themselves the reason for his aloofness. The women looked at him, some with pity, as though he were an orphan, others with a kind of ravaged despair. Did he know how long this war would go on? Did he believe it would end before Georges, Alfred, Pierre, had been killed on them? . . . Speak! Tell us the truth. Anything is better than not knowing. Than waiting. Than starting awake at night with the certainty that the shock jerking your body has reached you, along that nerve joining your womb to him, from your son. . . . Foch had nothing to tell them.

Almost everyone had left the Square. Two men who had lingered in front of the pedestal turned to go away. One of them had an arm missing, the other an eye. They gave him a last glance.

“He wasn't a bad old bastard.”

“As generals go,” the other said.

Mme Huet was a devoted wife. The influence of her family and her own fortune had imposed her husband as deputy on the voters of Seuilly, and she worked loyally to make them enjoy their choice; no honest doctor, lawyer, retired civil servant,
however insignificant, could say his wife had been ignored by Mme Deputy: it was said that she kept her husband up at night to rehearse his speeches; some said that was because, bad as they were, she preferred his oratory.

She had let it be known—in good time, to forestall Mme de Freppel—that she would give a reception for the Minister. He had often visited her in Paris, both on her Thursdays, when she gave a formal dinner to diplomats and politicians, followed by a reception, and on her Tuesdays, which were, as she put it, vowed to the spirit. Here you met the famous pianist visiting Paris, the painter most in vogue, writers who had earned their elevation. She blended with these a few Ministers or aspirant Ministers who might be useful to her husband: you could judge his nearness to office if you knew which Minister accepted regularly for Tuesday and which came only when Picasso or Lifar or Jouvet was likely to be there. . . . To reach her house you crossed the Champ de Mars and turned right. The house was strictly anonymous. Nothing in it, neither the excellence of the wines, the elegance of the rooms, Mme Huet's dresses, the conversation, was signed, unless by the date of its purchase. A novelist, probably Morand, had called it the most distinguished waiting-room in France.