Cloudless May (22 page)

“They're moral cowards,” Mathieu said, “afraid of losing their money, of ridicule, of the future, of change, of dying poor, of dying. In uniform they die like poor devils. As civilians, they cheat, lie, save their money, and behave as the lower-middle-class always will—as meanly as possible.”

“It's the class I come from,” Bergeot said.

“There are exceptions,” Mathieu said, after a moment. He moved his head slightly. . . . So he can move it? Bergeot thought. . . . “Do you know what my father was?”

“A Jew,” the Prefect said. He bit his lip.

“A Jewish bookseller. A completely honest bookseller, who was ruined and forced into bankruptcy by virtuous tradesmen, his neighbours—they even burned his house and shop. They were punishing him for his support of Dreyfus. The disgrace of the bankruptcy killed him, and not one of his neighbours—they had once been his friends—dared offend the others by coming to my mother's help.” He was silent. “A young woman with a baby,” he said. “Those are your ordinary citizens.”

“You were unlucky,” Bergeot said.

Mathieu stretched his lips. “Perhaps.”

“Very well, tell me—what would you do—you—to prevent panic?”

“Oh, exactly what you suggest. And if air-raids are all we need be afraid of, you may be able to turn respectable citizens into heroes, prepared to fight for the Republic instead of waiting for it to die of its own dryness.”

“They won't be defending the dryness,” Bergeot said with passion. “You can loathe it and what makes it. But even you must love the gesture a peasant makes when he points his field out to you—'That's mine, monsieur'—and workmen who advise on the best way to build your cottage; the village innkeeper cherishing his great-grandfather's recipe for stewing eels; old women who still, at eighty, work like saints; schoolmasters watching their shabbiest pupil in case he shows signs of being a genius. That's the Republic. It could be ruined. It's what we're defending!”

“Yes,” Mathieu said coldly. “Of course.”

The Prefect was silenced. He glanced at Mathieu, whose head was now hanging to one side—Ah, he's beginning to feel it, Bergeot thought—and wondered what the country meant to this man who certainly loved it. But it was absurd to think of Mathieu and love, or love and Mathieu. He had no friends, no wife and no mistress. No feeling. He would ignore the smile, protective or coquettish, that from one day to the next France gives all her children, the least deserving or the poorest. When he thought about her, what did he see?

“If you had to leave France—as a refugee, I mean—what would you miss most?”

Mathieu lifted his head.

“The light.”

That explains why not a soul likes you! the Prefect thought ironically: you have no weaknesses. He felt inferior—it was an intolerable feeling—to this Jew whose imagination even was incorruptible. Mathieu had never wanted to be liked, his contempt for humanity made him invulnerable; his glance went directly to the other's weakness, like a worm; he himself could never be touched, since he loved no one—not even himself. What did he care about Seuilly? . . . Bergeot was seized by a rage of love for his town. It was not the most beautiful, certainly,
of the Loire cities, a little crafty and reticent, shabby in spite of its rich citizens—they were cautious as well; at least one member in every family turned out a miser. But what a grace of light poured over the town from the river, what elegance in the old houses, what discreet delicacy of the past offering itself, with an innocent hypocrisy, to the future! When I leave Seuilly, he thought, I shall regret it in all the moments when I regret not being young. It is my youth. Louis, poor devil, never was young and has nothing to regret. . . . Bergeot felt suddenly that he could force Mathieu to lower his gaze. Cold, penetrating, incorruptible as it was, it would be forced to drop before pity. He looked at Mathieu.

Mathieu's face was the image of shame and guilt. His eyes were clouded. Averting them hurriedly, he said,

“Bonamy spoke to you about the German camp at Geulin, didn't he?”

“Yes,” Bergeot said: he seized joyfully the chance of hurting Mathieu. “Why did you send Bonamy? Why didn't you come yourself to ask me about your Boche friend?”

Mathieu had recovered himself. In a cold voice, he said, “Naturally—I didn't want to force myself on a hard-working Prefect.”

“Well?” Bergeot said.

“The camp is a disgrace. A crime. The ground is waterlogged even in summer. You know it belongs to Labenne. He leased it to the War Office at some monstrous rent. Do you know who worked that for him? Huet. Our dear deputy.”

“I'm not surprised,” Bergeot said. He frowned. “Why need you worry? The men in Geulin are only Boches.”

Mathieu was silent for a moment. “True.”

“You hate the Germans so much that you would let France be destroyed, torn out of the ground with all its centuries—and cathedrals, villages, walled cities, trees, vineyards—sooner than given in. Why d'y'care what happens to the Germans in Geulin?” He smiled. “Or to one of them?”

“We all have our pet principles,” Mathieu said calmly. “Mine is justice.”

“Louis, I believe you're the devil,” Bergeot cried. “I can't help admiring you. I've sent for Captain von Uhland's papers; if they're sound I'll slip him out at once.”

Mathieu did not thank him. He bent his head, and after a moment stood up sharply. He might have been a skeleton straightening itself by a jack-knife spring of the knees, there was so little appearance of flesh under his clothes. The Prefect took a file of papers from a drawer and gave it to him.

“You'll find there all the details of my scheme. Everything you'll need to support it in the
Journal.
I'm counting on you.”

“You can count on me more safely than on some of your—friends,” Mathieu said.

Bergeot let him reach the door. Then he said, “I want to tell you that you beat me fairly in history. What's more, you ought to have passed out the head of our year. I only beat you because I know how to put everything I have in the window, and because I don't mind bluffing. I bluffed my way above you.”

Mathieu turned round. His smile, always a disguise of some sort, disguised him at this moment as a human being.

“You can use your charm on the others. Not on me.”

“You think so little of me that you won't let me tell you the truth,” the Prefect said gaily.

“It's too late for that particular truth. You should have handed it to me when I was lying on my floor going through an agony of shame and disappointment at being second.”

“Good God, you can tell me that?”

“Why not?” Mathieu said.

Bergeot smiled at him. “You have no vanity at all.”

“You have too much.”

Bergeot reflected calmly. “It's because of my height,” he said. “If I weren't a little man I shouldn't need all this Napoleonic energy. I could take things easy, and I needn't be on the offensive. You see, I have to make myself noticed and I have to be heard.”

“This is one of the moments when I trust you,” Mathieu said.

“Why not always?” the Prefect said simply.

Mathieu hesitated visibly. He looked Bergeot in the face. “What does it matter? I'm not in the habit of trusting people, I hear too much.”

“About me, Louis?”

“I was thinking at the moment about our deputy. I've just
had absolute proof that he has been sending money abroad. Well, what am I to do? Tell the Public Prosecutor? It would be no use. I shall have to expose him in the
Journal.”

The Prefect said nothing for a moment. He had never before had to conceal a blunder to do with money. He had no trick prepared. For an ordinary lie, which had to do only with politics, or an appointment, or a mistake he wanted to cover up, he looked you in the eyes, with a truthful smile. When he was jealous of a man, he would repeat an idiotic story about him, nothing scandalous, merely ridicule. For every occasion where it would work, he had his charm, the warmth he could switch on in an instant if he needed approval, or an escape. But he was not used yet to having money hidden in New York. He was not even certain how much there was—was he lying about twenty thousand francs, a hundred thousand? . . . He groaned silently. He was genuinely ashamed. . . . He gave Mathieu an anxious smile, full of reserve.

“I beg you not to do it now,” he said. “I don't want a scandal to take people's attention from the war. Leave it alone, Louis. You can do that sort of thing in peace-time, but now—My God, do you think this the right moment to upset public confidence?”

Mathieu listened closely. He was not listening to the words. They were too adroit. He was listening instead to an incident from their past. In their last year at school, one of the masters, an obscure writer, named Monzie—Mathieu never forgot a name—made himself odious by his snobbishness. It is the last fault to be expected of a French schoolmaster, and he pushed it to the point of neglecting or sneering at every great writer who had not been socially reputable. It was Émile Bergeot who led his comrades in a campaign against this idiot. They were on the point of triumphing when the headmaster, only in the interests of discipline, turned the campaign slyly into a joke. Mathieu was the only one of them who saw that he would give way if the campaign went on. He rushed to warn Bergeot and found him shivering with disgust at the mere notion of going on, all he wanted was to forget the mistake he had made—and let it be forgotten.

He interrupted Bergeot. “Do you remember our literature master—M. Monzie?”

Bergeot looked at him with a blank face. There was no pretence about it, he had forgotten completely.

Mathieu made a reassuring remark, and went away.

The
New Order,
the rival paper to Mathieu's, was edited in two rooms, both poky, but it flattered Derval's vanity to sit in state in a cupboard marked Editor, with a window looking on the garden of the Town Hall. By pressing himself against the window, he could see a strip of rough grass, covered thickly with flowers from a chestnut tree, otherwise out of sight. A pane of the window, one only, opened. Derval stood with his head in the current of air, reading the letter from his father. It was short. It smelled of eucalyptus and tobacco. The lines were crowded together on the back of an old leaf from a diary—on the other side a mob of hieroglyphics stood for the names of patients to be visited. There was nothing in the letter except facts strung together without any visible string. “The walnuts will be good. Old Despard the notary is dead. The sun this May is too strong for my vines. Despard's son is a scoundrel, he is disputing my account. . . .” Written in a margin—“Don't be afraid of the news, we French always start badly. Have discovered that my captain in 1917, Colonel Ollivier, is commanding a tank battalion at Seuilly. Go to him and ask him to help you to get to the front. You can rely on him. Best love, Father. Jean-Émile Derval.”

Derval knew that at precisely this hour of the endless May evening, his father, wearing a jacket too stained and shabby to be given away, would be shuffling about in slippers in his garden. From a corner of it you see the Vézère. And what a silence—except for the brushing together of leaves, the drooling of a pigeon, and from the kitchen a faintly sharp note when the servant begins to chop herbs for the evening omelette. And what emptiness, except for the Vézère, the vast blue of the sky, the strong evening sunshine, the scent of wild parsley,
and all the other houses of Le Bugue—a town, not a village, but so small—crowding to the edge of the river. . . . His father would consider going out to the hotel to drink a glass of Mon-bazillac with the schoolmaster: watching the river, the two of them argued their out-of-date Liberalism. But since it was so warm, and he had had a long day—he never cut short a patient's blithering but listened with a delicate patience, noting the tricks of speech that gave away the wretch's hidden illness—he would shuffle a little longer, then drag a chair to the garden doorway of his room and sit there between the odours of the pot-herbs and the bookcase—not to speak of the smells of drugs, dusty papers, and the bitch lying under the desk with her puppy. He would take from the corner of the desk a frayed school edition of Horace—he had been an avid reader and he had come down now to reading nothing except one book he knew by heart. His daughters, when they passed his door, would hear him talking quietly; they were never sure whether to a belated patient or Horace. They could only wait. Horace would not be shown out. . . .

The young man crumpled the letter. He felt exactly as he used to feel when, quoting a line from one of the Odes, his father expected him to know the next. The comical air of disappointment on the old doctor's face when he had to finish it himself was too ridiculous and sad. A score of times the schoolboy had promised himself to learn every line, and never did it. It's too late, Derval thought. The smell of eucalyptus stung his eyelids. . . . He turned his back quickly on the garden. My father, he said angrily, is an innocent fool. With all his talk of the last war, he is a fool. He doesn't know even now that he was fighting for Jewish bankers and their assassins. What does he know about the rottenness everywhere?

He pitied his father boldly. Innocence gets you nowhere, except into the ranks. In this war a young man who gets himself killed deserves nothing better. Ideals—where do they get you? To an ill-paid provincial practice, to poverty in Le Bugue. What had Dr. Jean-Émile Derval to show for a lifetime spent getting into a dog-cart, encouraging people not to die, bottling his own thin wine, smelling his herbs, looking at the Vézère through a glass of Monbazillac, fitting a line of a Latin poet to everything from a fine day to a young goat? What use is Horace? What
use nowadays is Liberalism? Try being liberal in a jungle!