Cloudless May (20 page)

“You and he are a pair!” she said, laughing.

Displeased and a little shocked, Thiviers let go of her at once. “Really, Marguerite, you startle me sometimes,” he said quietly.

“Do I?” she mocked. “Really? You're so sensible and pure.” Glancing at his face, she decided that it would be wise to placate him. “There, forgive me, my dear boy, you know I'm never serious unless I'm unhappy—or unless I'm forced to listen while some idiot explains himself to me. Why are men taken in so easily by the faces a woman makes to hide her boredom? It's almost an insult. I will say for you, Robert, that you never tried to improve me, except—do you remember?—the day you read me a chapter from one of your books and I fell asleep.”

Her impulse to soothe him had been too feeble; she could not help this small gibe. Thiviers looked at her with a smile before he paid her out for it.

“Dear me,” he said gently, “and now I must make you unhappy. I came to talk seriously to you.”

“About what?” She knew he was punishing her. She looked at him calmly, afraid.

“Your shares.”

Relief and anxiety seized her together. “I'm losing money? You have bad news for me? Tell me at once.”

Thiviers felt all an honest man's satisfaction in the discomfiture of a friend. He had produced exactly the effect he wanted, and sooner than he hoped.

“My dear child,” he said, “you're not a whit worse off than other people whose income depends on a modest degree of stability in the world. You can be sure I'm doing my best for you, but I can't promise to save you. You must be prepared for losses.”

“Oh, this war!” she cried. “Why can't even the Germans see that it's destroying civilisation?”

“It's doing nothing of the kind,” Thiviers said sublimely. “The very contrary is true. Nowadays civilisation is in the hands of a few men. None of them are soldiers—they're temporarily hampered by the soldiers, as they would be by an
attack of measles or diphtheria. And they won't destroy each other. Cured of their measles, they arrange things. After 1919 I made room in my aeroplane works, and in other factories I could control, for the money one of my German colleagues was not allowed to invest at home. I call that an admirable effort of practical religion—religion as it can only be practised in our day. Politicians can cherish mediaeval ideas of revenge, too too mediaeval. So can common people and soldiers. A few of us have got beyond this. And we, we are the future, we shall save civilisation.”

“So God is a banker, is He?” Marguerite said, with a malicious smile.

“Not as you mean it,” M. de Thiviers said placidly. “But let me tell you that it requires a mastery of modern finance, the intelligence to grasp its beautiful but very tortuous design, before one can even begin to put into operation God's intentions for the world. In all humility, I believe I'm doing His work as no priest, however pious, is able to do any longer. You smile—but it's true.”

What a frightful hypocrite! Mme de Freppel said to herself. She was unjust—blind. Thiviers was sincere. He believed gratefully that we have emerged at last from the jungle of the nineteenth century, where industrialists lay in wait, plotting each other's bankruptcy and suicide in truly ferocious struggles; we are at last approaching a divine, and divinely predestined concord. A few men are marked before birth to rule and to be rich. The refusal of demagogues, politicians of the Left, writers, evilly-disposed workmen, to admit the existence of this divine plan, filled him with frenzied disgust: their sin was blasphemy. Without remorse, simply because he was upright, and out of a love of order, out of a true father's true piety, he would have beheaded these sinners. Why not? It is a loyal remedy for evil. Any other is quite likely to fail.

“You're forgetting my investments,” Mme de Freppel said in a coaxing voice. “What should I do without you, my dear Robert?”

He looked at her, tricked by this voice into forgetting himself. His glance passed from her shoulders, the colour of amber, as suave as if it had been spread on by Ingres, to her eyes. He had long since discovered that they held no more reflection than
the eyes of an animal, but they could and did gleam with an extraordinary fixed brightness when she was roused; at the same moment her mouth, very wide, became sensual and malicious; the contrast drew attention to it, and to a deep furrow joining it to her slender nose; when she smiled, its ends were turning up like a flourish at the end of a word. Thiviers saw her at this moment as unchaste and desirable. He felt ill, and sat down.

“It's people like you who are ruined by war,” he said brutally. “I'm not sure that I can do much.” He enjoyed her dismay. “But you and Émile will have enough money to live on, hidden away in the States, if you're content to live carefully. Very few men in Émile's position are so lucky.”

This warning, covered by a look of benevolence, reached her through her dismay; she was clever enough to ignore it, as she would ignore the insolence of the Duchesse de Seuilly if she could once be on visiting terms with her. Only a booby lets you see that he has been hurt by a stroke he cannot return—nor resent safely.

“Émile would never be happy living a dull life,” she said plaintively. “And I want him to be happy.”

“You're as fond of him as that, are you?” Thiviers said, smiling.

“Except Catherine, he is the only creature in the world I love.”

He was taken aback—by her tone, and cruelly by the tears which filled her eyes and rolled down her cheeks until she checked them with the back of her hand, forcing herself to laugh.

“You love him?” Thiviers said. He knew he was behaving like an idiot. He turned pale. “Dear me, do you really?” He felt his smile fixed on his face like a false nose. “How charming!”

“Why are you making fun of me?” Marguerite said. She knew quite well that he was not doing anything of the kind, but she wanted to soothe his vanity—before it was too late. “You know—everyone knows—what I am to Émile.”

“Of course. But—forgive me—ambition had more to do with it than love. Surely? And you hoped your husband would divorce you, so that you could re-marry. . . .”

“All that is true,” she said firmly. “But I know Émile better
now than I did four years ago. I know how good he is, how intelligent—and how weak. I know him as well as if I were married to him. I've no illusions. I'm used to him, too, I couldn't live without him.”

Thiviers looked at her calmly. “All this is very touching,” he said in a natural voice. “My poor girl, I didn't realise that Émile had turned you into a lower-middle-class housewife, the kind of wife suited to his very ordinary talents. And, if I may say so, his background.”

Marguerite opened her eyes widely. She was facing the light: he could see the fine yellow lines striping the pupil. They were, for a moment, the eyes of a savage animal. Thiviers could not help a movement of fear which was stronger than his surprise.

“Don't give away your jealousy of Émile,” she said ironically. “He has ten times your brain and your vitality—and you know it. And let me tell you, he hasn't an invalid for a wife.”

M. de Thiviers did not answer this gibe, so abominable that only an angry woman was capable of it. He stood up and walked about the room for a minute, in silence, his head bent. All at once he found himself before one of the long mirrors separating the windows. Lifting his head, he looked at himself steadily and solemnly, as though asking advice. He looked first at his well-shaped body, no doubt without seeing in it that something soft and womanly which even his friends noticed: he saw—he could not avoid seeing—that his clothes fitted him like a well-cut uniform. They were in fact a uniform—of a dandy, of the provincial aristocrat: his hands, long and bony, were cared for; the skin of his face was fresh and well-coloured; his hair, brushed off his large forehead, was without grey, his man plucked any white hairs when he brushed it. His image must have reassured him. Skin and cloth do not feel an insult, and he was able to deflect it on to them. But Marguerite had behaved abominably to him; he had the right and the duty to reprove her.

Turning round, he said soberly,

“Very well, my dear. But let me warn you that husbands in the kind of family Émile comes from are narrowly respectable. If you want to keep him, you must be careful not to shock him in any way.”

“What do you mean?” Mme de Freppel asked coldly.

. Thiviers hesitated. It was not easy for him to find words which would compromise neither his dignity nor his moral honesty.

“How can you be sure that everything you do, or have done, would please Émile? But—naturally—you don't tell him everything. Even I—who am only your friend—I may know certain things about you which our dear Émile doesn't.”

“What is it you want me to do for you?” Marguerite asked, with an ironical smile.

“Look after him better,” he said coolly. “All this nonsense about preparing for a siege. If only for his own sake you must throw a little cold water on him.” His voice changed, he might have been speaking to a defaulting clerk. “How many times must I tell fools that if it comes to fighting on the Loire, the war will have been lost; it would be no use going on? Your intelligent good Émile is one of these fools. When he realises that he has made an ass of himself, he'll feel ashamed. You know him. You know that the more he talks about his schemes the more compromised and deflated he'll be when they collapse.”

He had convinced her by this last argument. But she did not allow him to see it. She would not give him that pleasure.

“You may be right,” she said drily. “It scarcely seems important.”

“Only if your—and his—happiness is important.”

She laughed, opening her mouth frankly to show her strong teeth. “You pride yourself on your judgement—and you think you can come between Émile and me. What you must think of yourself!”

Thiviers was silenced again. This time he did not comfort himself by looking in the glass. He looked at her fixedly, with an air of absorbed contemplative lust. She had seen such looks too often not to know that he was seeing her naked. She was amused rather than offended. It was just as well that she could not so easily read the expression in his eyes when he looked at her face. He was noting the lines drawn faintly from her jaw to meet under the point of her chin, and the wrinkled skin of her eyelids—which had once been white and were now turning yellow. He felt a cold malice, and transformed it quickly into pity. Poor Marguerite, he said to himself, she will hate growing old.

“Sweet child,” he said kindly.

Stooping over her, he placed a second brotherly kiss between her eyebrows and went away.

He told his chauffeur to take the Loire road. He let both windows down, so that the air from the river would cool him. I must, he told himself, have a fever. His eyes ached, his teeth were chattering. He seemed to have on his lips every sensation they had drawn from their light touch on her skin. Pressing the back of his hand against them—it was as smooth as her forehead—he set his teeth into it. He was suffering a ridiculous grief. Slowly he became calmer; by the time he reached his house he was in control of himself and could not remember what had been wrong with him. Had he been ill?

A servant spoke to him as he was going to his room: his wife was asking whether he had come in. He hesitated, and went to her. If he had neglected even so indirect an appeal from her, his conscience would have kept him sleepless.

Nini was lying down in bed. This had been one of her good days, and she had hoped against hope that her husband would come home to dinner. When at nine o'clock hope had to be abandoned, she still sat up for another hour before giving way to a terrible fatigue. She promised herself that if he came in before eleven she would be able to sleep: if not, she would be forced, as usual, to lie awake, counting minutes until her sense of justice—which was purely domestic, and did not engage her for anything outside her house—let her rouse her maid. It was now a quarter past eleven. When her husband came into the room she turned her head on the pillows, smiling at him, with an ineffable joy.

“How marvellous you've come. I didn't expect you.”

Thiviers stood looking down at her. Her body under the quilt was as thick and rigid as the marble woman on the Thiviers mausoleum in the cemetery, the Huguenot cemetery. From the modest frill of her nightgown her neck emerged, brown, strong-looking, marked in places with patches of darker pigment; her hair was plaited close to her head, and so arranged, with a coquetry which would have been sad if it had not been so innocent, that the dead patches were hidden. He did not ask her how she was; he knew what her answer would be. She was always, for him, perfectly well; no, she had no pain, she might
be a little tired but that was understandable . . . the war and all that. . . . He knew she was quite indifferent to this war; she would take an interest in it only if it seemed likely to threaten him: until then, it could be cholera killing off a million Chinese, floods in the United States, or famine in Russia for any mark it made on her tender heart.

“How do you feel?”

“So happy,” she said, smiling.

This word, on her dry lips, fetched tears to his eyes. How could she be happy, with her stiff body, the shape roughly of a log, and jutting bones? She had no idea what happiness was. No one had told her that it springs from having a chest too small for your round thighs and a waist little broader than a child's. She was ignorant, her mind bent in a cramp of piety. She was also brave, pious, an angel of modesty. Her life lay open before him at a single page, all the earlier ones humbly blank.

He saw that she was dying of weariness, and hurried to get through the nightly ritual. Kneeling down, he pulled the knees of his trousers, closed his eyes, and began silently to pray. . . . Mme de Freppel's shoulders were traced on the inside of his eyelids; splinters of light reflected from them pierced his eyes. He took up one of his wife's cold hands and pressed it against his eyelids. The image sheered off at once. And now he prayed God to give him strength to do His will, thanking Him at the same time for making His will so obvious that a mistake was impossible. There have been wars which no sensible banker could object to—just as there are forms of self-indulgence not only necessary but moral: beauty, luxury—even, in certain well-recognised forms, lust—are the engines of society. But this present war, with its threat to order, was a crime, as was Émile Bergeot's liaison with Marguerite—crimes, both of them, against morality and twenty per cent. A feeling of confidence and inner peace descended on him.