Cloudless May (42 page)

Smiling and eager, he began one of his interminable speeches, larded—he was his mother's son: Mme Garnier, a native of Bourg-en-Bresse, was noted for the richness of her food—with names of the important people he knew: he never said that he had walked along a street, he said, “As I was walking along such and such a street with Monsieur de Thiviers,” or “As the President said to me when we were walking . . .” or with an easy simplicity, “As I told the President . . .” Mme Huet cut him short brutally. She drew him into a room at the side, empty except for an old lady peacefully asleep; her head rested on the stone gryphons of the chimney-piece, but she was smiling, as though they were part of her innocent dreams.

“I must tell you, Monsieur l'Abbé. You have, I know, influence in ecclesiastical circles. No, no, don't fall back on your modesty. . . . I want to warn you. This is between us?”

“Of course,” Garnier murmured. He stretched a sober face over his joy. The story was already crystallising in his mind! As Madame Huet said to me . . .

“We have lost the war! My husband knows it on the highest authority. It's a question of time. But time is all-important.
Are we going to let this folly go on, devouring money?—I could weep when I think of our money pouring out, every minute, into the pockets of Americans of all people. They have everything already and they're all, I'm told, atheists and savages, and it's our money. Or are we going to negotiate? You're not going to tell me, Monsieur l'Abbé, that it would be wrong to make peace, when it lies, you can trust Monsieur Huet, between peace and a second Commune. Better Hitler than that! If only my husband were in office. Less than a week before this fatal war, a high German official—you can guess his name!—told me that Monsieur Huet could do everything for peace. And he could! Forgive his wife for saying so. But if he were appreciated here as he is in Germany—I have it from Monsieur de Ribben-trop's lips, you've met him, of course? he adores my husband—that Germany didn't want to fight us, it was he told us that the Führer admires France, and my husband replied in a long letter to the Führer, telling him frankly that our country had neither the desire nor the means to injure his. What an unutterable blunder certain persons made in distrusting the Führer! What a responsibility rests on certain, I won't name them, heads! Not, thank God, on mine or Monsieur Huet's. Our hands are clean.”

For the first time during one of the confidential talks he fed on—in his village, he would have become a famous gossip—Garnier felt uneasy. No peasant disapproved more angrily of communism. But something which had been born in him in a shady village in the Morvan revolted against her praise of Hitler. It was—he sought for an exact word—it was servile. One can be servile from policy—yes, but not with this religious ardour. It was perhaps heresy. It was very unseemly.

His discomfort grew. To his great relief she left him suddenly. She paused just long enough to say rapidly,

“I saw you talking to Madame de Freppel. Be careful, she's an unbalanced woman. She will get into trouble.”

Stupefied, Garnier had not answered. He watched her brush aside her guests; after a moment he followed her into the other room, and saw her take Saint-Jouin by the arm. She led him to the end of the room.

Mme Huet was in so nervous a state that she broke all her own rules. She reproached Saint-Jouin. He had not been near
her for a week, three times he had said he was coming but never came—what in heaven's name was wrong?

“Nothing,” Saint-Jouin answered. He glanced at her and said cruelly, “Don't scold.”

“I?” Her pain made her smile. “I never scold.”

“That's all right, then. My dear Andrée, I've been on duty. And I've had a severe disappointment.”

“Oh, what?” Her sleepless nights had rolled themselves into a hard ball at the base of her throat. It dissolved, she trembled with relief and joy. “Tell me.”

Saint-Jouin yawned and began to tell her that his concert, his wonderful concert of Parisian actresses, had been cancelled. Because of the situation. “Don't try to console me,” he cried, “I'm inconsolable. After all my hard work—the delicious Madeleine was coming, my sister got her for me, I'd chosen her room at the Hotel Buran and ordered supper—it's frightful. . . .”

Properly awake now, he chattered on. Mme Huet listened with an unfamiliar grief. At first it had nothing to do with her. It was an impersonal grief. He is worthless, she thought. Frivolous, a spendthrift, living for pleasure. With the cruelty of a stroke, she was felled by the certainty that she would not recover from her love for him. He was not her first lover. The others had fed her vanity or her ambitions, and—she would not have admitted it—her sensuality, but had not touched her heart. Suddenly the shell had split, and the minuscule kernel was suffering. And for what? He would not even feel sorry for me, she thought.

This thought saved her. She began to pity herself and her grief became that much less deep. She would never drown in it. She caught sight of herself in a mirror, haggard, a self-pitying smile nailed on her face. How I suffer, she thought, startled.

“So you see I couldn't find the time to come,” Saint-Jouin smiled.

“I understand.” She smiled ironically. “But don't apologise, my dear boy. In a day or two I shall be in Paris, and not in need of distraction. The provinces always bore me.”

The young man blushed. She left him before he had recovered his impudence. Noticing an inquisitive look on her
sister-in-law's face, she punished her by landing on her the Abbé Garnier, spluttering with affability.

“Monsieur l'Abbé, you must talk to my sister-in-law. Her home, I daresay you remember, is in Paris, but she feels that Seuilly is much safer. Léa, my dear, you still look very yellow and haggard.”

Mme de Chavigny was good-natured, she allowed Garnier to bore her with his anecdotes without relaxing her bright smile. Garnier admired in her her wealth, her husband's name, and, strangely enough, her race. Since she came to Seuilly she had given two thousand francs to the restoration fund of the Minster, and so much practical devotion in a Jewess touched him. He felt drawn to her by a bond which had something to do with her large hands and thick strong ankles. His voice lapsed into the drawling idiom of his boyhood. At the climax of his story—”. . . as I informed His Eminence . . .” he was harshly interrupted.

“What, you here?”

Garnier frowned. He mistrusted Labenne. The Mayor never missed a chance to let it be known that he was an atheist. With him it was a brutal article of faith. For some reason he pursued Garnier with a mockery the poor Abbé found very painful: he disliked figuring in unofficial speeches as “our Morvan saint.” When Mme Labenne asked if she would be allowed to do penance for her husband, Garnier soothed her, but he was not appeased. His resentment was the warmer because, in spite of himself, he feared Labenne. He still sometimes dreamed about a savage bull which had chased him when he was a boy; sometimes it had his father's hands and sometimes the gross body and wide sallow face of Labenne. To look into the Mayor's red-veined eyes gave him a feeling of dissolution and terror.

“Good-evening, Mr. Mayor,” he said frigidly.

Labenne looked down at him with a malicious smile.

“Ought you to be here? With the war going as badly as it is, you should be on your knees. To think that I should have to remind you!”

He walked off. Trembling with indignation and a shameful fear, Garnier felt his arm seized by Léa de Chavigny. She was pale. Her body shook so much that her pearls quivered.

“Is it true?”

“Is what true, Baroness?” Garnier asked gently.

“Have we lost the war? Are the Germans coming here at once?”

Before Garnier could reply, a hand was laid on Mme de Chavigny's bare shoulder. In his drawling voice Ernest Huet said,

“My very dear Bobo, don't distress yourself. The Germans are not coming. Properly handled—if, yes, if our government of war-makers can handle anything properly, if it decides to make peace in time—they never will come. Or if they do it will be as friends. I might almost say, allies. To help us to put our house in order.” He looked at Garnier with condescension. “I'm sure Abbé Garnier agrees with me.”

Garnier felt himself start. It was so seldom that anything Huet said reached farther than his ears; the deputy's tortuous egoism followed a path giving little foothold to Garnier's small social vanities. He had learned to hold his tongue in Huet's presence—a village brook cannot easily force its way across a torrent. Suddenly, an icy jet sprang in him, with the discomfort he had felt when Mme Huet was talking about Hitler. He could taste it on his lips. It tasted of tarragon, which his mother was very fond of; she put it in all her soups.

“I don't——” he began.

Léa de Chavigny interrupted him. Eyes widely open, lips parted to show her superb teeth, she had fallen into an ecstasy. She spoke softly.

“You know I went to Nuremberg. I was crazy about going, I simply besieged the Foreign Office until they got me an invitation. And you know, when
he
spoke I went quite mad. What a voice! What power! My dear Ernest, he's just a lovely boy, a genius. Long before he finished I was crying with excitement. It was how I felt at the first Russian ballets. But Diaghilev was a babe, a mere babe, beside him.”

Huet smiled. “My dear Bobo——” he began affectionately.

Abbé Garnier stood up.

“Allow me to say that I disagree,” he said quietly. “It's true that our house needs to be put in order. But not by pagans. . . . Please excuse me, Baroness. I wish you good-night.”

He felt terribly distressed. How had it happened that in one minute he had offended Mme de Chavigny and the deputy?
Before his eyes danced the shabby parish church in his own village, dragging with it the dusty road and the elms, the Café du Commerce, the school, and dragging the old parish priest, a proper figure of fun watering his herbs and his cassock with the same maladroit gesture. They shan't change it, he said to himself. A sharp pain seized him. What did I say to them? he asked himself wretchedly.

Mme Huet was between him and the staircase. He stammered his goodbye. She did not answer; he slipped away, crushed for the time being.

She had not even seen him except as a pencil-mark on one of the pillars supporting the ceiling. She was leaning on this pillar. Deafening her, the voices of her guests tore strips of calico, blew out and sucked back the walls. She could see Saint-Jouin at the other side of the room with Mme de Freppel. She had said something to make him laugh. He was all energy and virile charm. With despair Mme Huet saw this image of him join all the others she would see when she was alone. So long as he was in the room she could endure her unhappiness. As soon as he went, the pains of jealousy would begin; one Saint-Jouin after another would deceive her, until her racked body broke down in tears. But only when she was alone. Before her husband, her pride would keep her quiet. And her real affection, and need of him.

She watched Mme de Freppel move away, leaving her daughter to talk to the young officer. So that's it! she thought with bitterness. It was more than she could bear. Throwing away her dignity, she started to cross the room, and at this moment General Piriac came in.

She could do nothing. She was forced to sit talking to the old general, with an anguish that had never been brought as close to him: he had a special sense for warding off the anguish of others. A few yards away her husband was talking to Labenne. She tried to beckon him. If he would take Piriac off her hands for a minute! . . .

Labenne had silenced the deputy, and by the simplest means. Each time Huet opened his mouth to speak, Labenne, his hand on Huet's lapel, twisted it viciously. Huet saw his dress jacket being ruined, and since an expense his wife objected to loudly was the expense of clothing him he had
learned to care for his clothes—all the care in the world could not prevent his jacket being frosted thickly with scurf a minute after he put it on. He was trying to wriggle loose from his tormentor. Labenne held on.

He was boasting about his château at Thouédun. Rolling his lips, he dropped that he was spending a million francs only to put it in order. The finishing touches would come later, after the war. Huet was impressed; his eyelids fluttered like dirty rags as he tried to comment. For the first time, Labenne thought, delighted, he realises that I'm a very warm man. When I'm ready to take a hand in their politics in Paris, he'll lick my road for me. . . . His throat hardened. . . . And then, my friend, and then—I shan't need you after the first week. Nor your constipated wife. I'll swear she is.

“Why don't you buy land?” he said. “Your money—beg pardon, your wife's money—could melt overnight. It's a risk!”

Huet seized a chance to injure the absent Bergeot. It was a quite needless stroke of mischief, but he could not resist it. He had only to see the tail of an intrigue, and his clouded eyes, of which one always had an air of being out of focus, fastened on it so narrowly that quite often he ran into the hole he had scooped for another.

“Well, well,” he drawled, “our dear Prefect was right. You're a peasant, Georges. A greedy peasant.”

“Is that what he says?”

“Hardly,” Huet said, smiling. “His exact phrase is: An unscrupulous grasping peasant. And he doesn't trust you an inch. He even finds you gross.”

He was gratified by the anger in Labenne's eyes. I've ruined Bergeot with him for good, he thought. . . . In a year of Sundays it would not occur to him that every time Labenne remembered the phrase he would only see Huet's face and pleased smile. At this moment, Mme Huet made one of her desperate signals for help. Labenne saw it and growled,

“Your wife is making heavy weather of old Piriac.”

“Ah! Is she? Well, come with me, my dear chap.”