Cloudless May (25 page)

She tore both letters up and dropped them into the Loire. I shall become a nurse, she thought. I shall marry a man who is longer-sighted than I am; our children will be able to see at night and under water. No, I shall marry a poet, then they will be able to see the Loire from its source to its end, mountain to sea, and flowing along the bed of the sea, keeping itself to itself as an honest river should: it passes through a wreck; it is an English wreck, but there was a French sailor on board: Good God, say his bones, the Loire—come all the way from Berthenay to look for me—and he hurries to jump into the current and swim home. . . .

Gentle cheerful Father Lotte, to whom she confessed at school, reproved her for day-dreaming too often. Once he set her, a task for a whole day, to begin something active the moment she caught her mind sliding into a dream. For the other girls it was a day of terrible confusion and trial. Catherine tidied her locker; then she tidied the other lockers, ruthlessly destroying everything she said was rubbish; she made a fair
copy of her essay, and offered to copy out and improve all the other essays in her class: the master who visited them from the lycée was astonished to find repeated in every essay that week—whether it was Napoleon in Moscow, or Why I prefer Orléans to Tours—the sentence, “
Ô Nuit, tu es la nuit,
as Péguy said.” On the Loire as in Moscow the night refused to explain itself further.

The slight feeling of guilt which Father Lotte had managed to give her drove her to jump up and run back to the house. It was full evening now, the plain had drafted off its shadows to thicken trees and hedges; between them, the river was still insolently full of light. She gave it a last look before stepping into the library. Dazzled, she did not recognise Lucien for a second. Nor, for another reason, did he see her come in. He had taken off his glasses and was rubbing them carefully with a silk handkerchief full of holes, so many holes that his fingers kept touching the glass and he had to begin again. He put them on, recognised her, blushed.

Catherine blinked at him. “You're not long-sighted, are you?”

“No. Far from it.”

“You can't, for instance, see in the dark?”

“Can you?” Lucien parried.

“Or under the Loire?”

“Without my glasses I can't see you across this room,” he said gloomily. “Except, of course, that I know your shape. Your neck bends and comes up again properly, like a stalk. Many people seem to have a rusty hinge there. And then, your shoulders, of course——”

“Oh,” Catherine said.

“I can't help noticing shapes,” Lucien went on, with a stubborn face. “I never saw anyone clearly when I was a child. I lived in a world of assorted shadows, thin, straight, crooked, round, like ramrods, like mushrooms, like anything but human beings——”

“Why didn't you wear spectacles?”

Lucien was standing stiffly, looking at her without moving his head: evidently he preferred shadows that were ramrods. His face was still brick-red.

“We were poor. Are, I mean. My mother used to work in the
fields, when she married she worked in her house eighteen hours a day, I used to wake up in the kitchen at night and see her moving about—like a very strong tree. She was at work for us children. When my brother got his bursary, she said to me: And you're the next. And when I was at Lakanal, he was at the École Normale, and she said: Your turn next. . . . But I wanted to study law—ever since my father lost a law-suit he had, and my mother cried. The only time. . . . I had glasses for the first time when I went to school, and my first idea was to become a painter, I was stunned by the avalanche of colours and sharp edges. You can't imagine what it was like to see the light green of birch trees on the darker green of pines. My next idea——”

“What was it?” she asked.

“Nothing. You'll laugh. I decided to be a baker. I was always hungry. . . . You know, it's not unpleasant to have two worlds. I see you as a smudge in one—oh, quite small. And then—well, there you are with your hair coming down and a large tear in your skirt.”

He thinks something of himself, and he's shockingly modest, she thought, surprised. She put a hand on her hair.

“Is that why you're not in the army?”

“Yes,” Lucien said. He drew himself up. “No. I could be in. There are soldiers as short-sighted as I am.”

“Then why—? Didn't you want to be?” She spoke quickly. “I'm not being rude.”

“I know,” Lucien said. He blushed again. It was noticeable only because the colour this time spread out of sight down his neck. “He asked for me. And really he needs me. No one else would work half the night with him. I don't often fall asleep.”

“He?”

“The Prefect. Do you know, he's magnificent. He ought to be in the Government, he ought to be directing this war. There's nothing weak about him, I can see him fighting on alone, rallying the country—you should hear him when we're alone and he says whatever comes into his head. He——”

He stopped abruptly.

After a pause to enjoy his stiff-necked embarrassment, Catherine said, “I want to work in the hospital in Seuilly. I did First Aid at school. Could he help me?”

“Of course,” the young man said eagerly. “As soon as things look worse, he's going to send the civilian sick into the country, to make room in the wards for air-raid casualties. He takes care of everything.”

Catherine laughed. “How you admire him!”

He was uncertain how to take this. Had he offended her by talking about her mother's lover? Did she know anything about that? So far as he knew, the innocence of well-brought-up young girls lasts until their first quarrel with life; and Catherine—you had only to look at her—was all pride and happiness. He looked, and was ready to cut his tongue out. She was certainly laughing at him.

The silence lasted until Catherine switched on the wireless. The Prime Minister was speaking. They listened, with an air of constraint and obedience, like children before a headmaster, until the words, “It is not true that the Government has decided to leave Paris. . . .”

“Do you think things are going badly?” she asked, in a brusque voice.

“I shall know when they do,” Lucien said. He spoke with a poor clumsy air of confidence. “I have a friend—at least, I know Colonel Rienne—he's promised, if things do begin to go badly, to get me into something at once. I should prefer tanks. In a tank you needn't see far.”

Catherine shut off the wireless. The false confidence of Reynaud was replaced in the room by the ignorance and sincere vanity of youth.

“Will the Germans bomb Paris?”

“Of course,” Lucien said.

“I ought to feel sorry,” Catherine said. “But the truth is I never think about Paris. I've seen two photographs, one of a twelfth-century house, the other of children's hoops being sold in the Tuileries. In between, nothing. I shall be sorry if the Germans destroy the house, I might have gone there one day and touched something a woman touched when it was new. When I do that, I believe in history. All the rest must be lies. . . . Perhaps they'll bomb Seuilly.”

“Let them,” Lucien said vehemently. “We're the only truly inventive nation in the world. We can invent another Paris, and another Seuilly. We can invent the future.”

He forgot himself so far as to flourish his arms. One of them caught a vase, it reeled and Catherine caught it. She tried to reassure him. He was stupid with horror. He stammered.

“Oh, my God.”

“Not at all,” Catherine said. “But do sit down. Why did you come here?”

“I—I'm waiting for the answer to a letter.”

“From—from Émile?”

Lucien opened his eyes. “Do you call him that?”

“What ought I to call him?” she said calmly.

He said nothing. Cruelly pretending to examine the vase for signs of damage, she studied him eagerly. She guessed that behind his simplicity he was obstinate and intelligent. He had the air of a peasant. His skin was fair, fairer than her own. He's obviously strong, she thought. What a pity he's short-sighted. It must be misery for a child to be short-sighted, but then his mother could keep him close to her and show him everything—for instance, magpies. She shook herself guiltily. Quick! She jumped up.

“Shall we go out?”

“The letter——” he said, hesitating.

“Just across the lawn to the river. If you won't, I shall never ask you again.”

The sunlight had gone and the light was going, but Catherine preferred to think it was early morning. She noticed a yellow bindweed and ignored the bushes of peonies; the bindweed was new and small, that is, handsome and impressive: the air was fresh, stinging, clear, as it is towards dawn, it had innocence, energy; it was the first day of her life, that is, the most beautiful. When the Germans destroy France, she thought, and Lucien has rebuilt it, it will be like this.

“Do you see those magpies at the other side?” she said hastily.

“Yes.”

“Take off your glasses. Now what do you see?”

“Only the evening, which is like the evening, and the Loire—which is like the Loire.”

“Péguy said, Ô
Nuit, tu es la nuit.”

Lucien looked at her admiringly. “How much you must have read!”

“It's the only line I know,” she said after a minute. She blushed.

“How honest you are!”

They stood side by side, watching the light taking refuge below the surface of the river. I could work eighteen hours a day for my children, Catherine thought. And I shan't send any of them away. She felt a confused sense of joy.

“The other day,” Lucien was saying, “you despised and hated me.”

Looking at him ironically she said, “Do you like explaining yourself?”

“No!”

“Neither do I. What a mercy!”

“I must go back to the house.”

“You couldn't for once forget how important you are?”

“No.”

“If I asked you——”

“Certainly not,” Lucien shouted.

He glared at her. How stupid he is, she thought. How stupid. How commonplace. How strong. How handsome. She yawned, to show that she was bored. They went back to the house in silence. Catherine left him outside the french window of the library and ran off to the left—direction of the heart—through the courtyard, and turned back to the kitchen—direction of the instincts. She found her friend and ally skimming bowls of milk ranged on the stone shelves of the dairy. Throwing her arms round Sophie's neck, that yellow bundle of tendons, she asked,

“Sophie, my angel, do children take after the mother or the father?”

“Sons after the mother, daughters after their father.”

“You're sure?”

“Perfectly. I've always heard it. These things are well known. But—who is it you're hugging?” Sophie grumbled. “Let me be. You're strangling me.”

Rienne woke happy. He remembered that the news was bad, German armoured troops were pouring through a breach opened in the Maginot dam, but he was happy. He took it as an omen. Today, he said to himself, they will be turned back. Leaning out of the window of his room, he was offered omens on every hand. It was six o'clock. The air on this side of the courtyard was still cool, it promised victory and freshness: the stone ledge, a handsome infant of a hundred and fifty years, spoke about newness, a new beginning—as if France were about to begin, as if the word France were going to be spoken for the first time, in an attentive world. In a world so young as this, tragedy was a child's moment of grief—endless and nothing.

When he went into his general's room, he found, as usual, that Ligny had been awake for hours, and was reading. Ligny closed the book.

“Listen, my dear boy. . . .
Mes s
æ
urs, I'onde est plus fra
î
che aux premiers feux du jour.
. . . How old I am, and how young everything else is! It's desperate.” He laughed. “Come along now, we're going to have breakfast in the nursery.”

Rienne followed him into General Piriac's room. Woerth was there already, seated at one side of the bare table, between the table and the window. The room was as empty as Rienne's own, except for more shelves, with books and files drawn up on parade, and an iron crucifix on the wall at the foot of the camp-bed. On the table were bowls of coffee, four rolls, a dish of honey and a very little butter. Piriac broke his roll into his coffee and sucked it through the edges of his moustache. Very like an elephant at play, he was teasing Woerth because an anonymous admirer had sent the chief of staff a formal bouquet.

“I've sent for an interpreter,” he said, “he'll read you the language of flowers and you can compose a reply.”

“With what?” Woerth said. He was taking it well.

“I have a window-box,” Ligny said. “Water-cress and nasturtiums. Do you want to cool her off or inflame her?”

The three of them elaborated the joke with the innocence of subalterns taking part in manæuvres—except that subalterns
are a little less innocent and manæuvres a serious matter, infinitely more serious than a war. One's future may depend on solving the exercise set with a stream which represents the Meuse and a village representing Sedan. The true Meuse, the true Sedan, are less important. Besides, they were already—by this morning—lost. Suddenly Rienne felt himself old, as old as France; all his careful hard-working peasant ancestors pinched his bones with their gnarled fingers.

Piriac's servant went out of the room, and Ligny said,

“What's wrong with your man, sir? He looks as though he'd been drinking all night.”

“You mean his eyes?” Piriac said calmly. “Oh, he's been crying, I suppose. His wife is dead. He wanted to go and see her when she was ill, and now she's dead he wants to go to the funeral.”

“You're letting him go?”