Cloudless May (47 page)

“Schnerb and his place—and Sadinsky and all that—” Marguerite made a confused gesture. “I won't touch them again. . . .”

“Why should you, my dove? But since you have their money you may as well spend it. You can't give it back. Can you?”

She watched Mme de Freppel roll the diamond in its covering and lay it carefully in her bag. She felt the sudden easing and lightness of her own heavy body. A familiar contempt, sly and loving, possessed her; she put her arms round Marguerite.

“There's a dear girl,” she said tenderly, “a dear good silly girl. You mustn't let things upset you, we all have to live as best we can—not the life we should like. That's how life is.”

Stroking Marguerite's neck, she smiled at her. “Now we'll go into the other room and eat. . . .”

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Towards ten o'clock, Marguerite left. Mme Vayrac telephoned to Labenne at once and asked him to come and see her. He told her he had just come home from giving dinner at Geulin to “a pair of half-wits”: he had no objection to spending an hour with her. “At least you have both eyes open,” he growled.

In the quarter of an hour before he came Mme Vayrac did not think about Marguerite. Not even when she was rolling into a ball years of tenderness—of protecting and making use of Marguerite as she would have used and protected a sister younger and stupider than herself—and the contempt that went with it, and rolling them to one side in her mind. She was sunk by her one great passion. Against it, neither weakness nor loving friendship weighed a puff of air.

Labenne came in smiling, his shirt out, shoulders rolling like a bear's. Taking his glass of brandy in one hand, with the other he plucked his clothes away from his body.

“I'm running like a candle,” he grinned. “What weather!”

“You should sit quietly at home,” Mme Vayrac said. “As I do.”

“And what would that do for me? Tell me that!”

“You would be cool.”

“Cool?” Labenne mocked. “Not a soul in the town is as
cool as me. Very few in France. . . . My flesh may burn, but I, I'm as cool as a knife. What did you want?”

She was silent for a moment. She respected his energy, but she knew men too well to hope he would do anything unless it suited him. He is a monster of egoism, she thought pensively; and sometimes I admire him.

“You're really anxious to get Edgar released?” she said at last, placidly.

“He could be useful to me.”

“Did you know that Mathieu has been warning the Prefect against you? He told him you were helping Edgar—and that Edgar, poor boy, had worked for the German Government.”

“Who told you?” Labenne asked. “Madame Prefect, of course.”

His eyes, except for a ray spurting between two folds of skin, disappeared. He stretched his arms. Fascinated, Mme Vayrac looked at the hairs springing from tiny black holes in the strong flesh. What an animal! Corruptly tolerant towards men, as Circe in middle age may have felt towards her herd, she believed in gripping them by their vanities. A man's vices and lusts alter, his vanities never. There are ways of flattering even a peasant—she felt certain that Labenne came to her only to be flattered. Why else should he come? A faithful husband, he never asked to see her nieces, though once he had interfered when it was a question of a police visit. He was too careful to have direct dealings with the people she called “my good little rats”—creatures who in Seuilly or Paris formed the same civil abscess. It was obvious—he came here to be comforted, morally.

“My dear man,” she said affectionately, “you can break Bergeot any time. That smooth fellow Thiviers has been sending money to the States for him. You've only to threaten him with a prosecution——”

“So that was it,” Labenne interrupted.

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.” He looked at her. “Is that all? Come, old girl, you have something else.”

She was keeping her hands folded heavily over a packet of letters in her lap. With a curious feeling of sickness, but deliberately,
she handed them to him—a dozen of Marguerite's letters, written on Prefecture notepaper. She had picked out the most compromising, those where Mme de Freppel agreed to help one person to a job, another to a decoration. It would be easy to involve Bergeot. He was discredited by a dishonest traffic carried on from the Prefecture. Labenne read through them without surprise, folding each on to the pile balanced on his knee. When he had folded the last, Mme Vayrac snatched them deftly from him. He looked at her with anger.

“What's this, Léonie?”

“I didn't intend you to keep them,” she said, smiling.'

She let one of them slip to the floor. Before she could stoop, Labenne put his foot on it. Shaking it open, he read:
Now for your friend Schnerb. I shouldn't mind touching his five thousand francs.
. . . Putting it in his pocket, he looked at her with a teasing smile.

“Thanks for your intention. D'you know what that young monkey Derval told me? People don't drop things by accident. Ergo, you meant me to keep one. . . .”

She shrugged her shoulders. She knew better than to appeal to him. Why give him the happiness of refusing? . . . She was surprised by an obscure thrill which was certainly not grief. Did I want to punish her? she thought, confused.

Labenne was smiling broadly. He had drunk so much at dinner that his head was throbbing with words. He felt an easy contempt for her—a discreet loose woman. He could talk to her.

“Listen, old girl,” he said, in his charming voice, “you needn't worry. Sooner or later I should have ruined them without your help. D'you want to know how? I never assassinate people, I encourage them to commit suicide. It's my speciality. . . . What? Every man except me has his obsession; it may be a very noble one, a pure ideal, the League of Nations or pacifism, but it ruins him quicker than a woman. He goes for it like a bull, don't you know. Other people and events get only the tail of his eye. That's what it is to nurse an obsession, good or bad. But, but, but, events have their own energy—and one day they rush on our poor little bull, and drop him between the shoulders. And I drag out the body. . . . Our dear Prefect has sworn to defend Seuilly. Splendid, my dear friend,
I say to him, splendid—what nobility! And the moment when Seuilly refuses to be defended will guillotine Bergeot for me as safely as if I had pushed him under the knife. And papa Piriac—if I order him a crown of thorns from the florist he'll spend the rest of his life posing in it for his monument. What? I can find uses for a monument. . . . And Huet—Huet has studied political science, he knows everything about politics except how to get on in it, he knows every Minister and bores them to death, he talks without listening, always about himself, he intrigues frantically—he enjoys it, it would be indecent if it weren't amusing—not a soul trusts him, he has only to make an honest move for honesty to look like the worst sort of lie. If he were in my way—he isn't—I should only need to give him an infallible tip for ruining his oldest friend, if he has a friend, and he'd strangle himself to do it. . . . Don't imagine, my dear girl, that I shall ever ruin myself. I have no weaknesses. I know I'm a brute, a liar, unscrupulous, greedy, as ambitious as the devil. But a cold devil. I have no ideals. I have no illusions. I haven't a vice, unless it's gluttony. The vices of a peasant. In this dry time, primitive virtues. I am a peasant. Don't I feel the ground before moving a foot? I've learned to deceive people without being deceived. By God, that isn't all. . . . My friend, I've learned that I can spit on people's ideals while they watch me, if I simply go up to them and say: Dear old chap, I'm spitting on your faith in democracy or justice or goodness or what not, but you understand me, don't you? Then they don't believe their eyes! Simplicity itself, eh? Do you know what, old girl, I could crucify every Frenchman between twenty and thirty and get myself put on the committee of enquiry afterwards! How? By being known as a clever ruthless fellow and, after all—
after all,
the modern man's grace—the only man who understands what happened. . . .”

Mme Vayrac had turned pale. She felt in her wrists and joints a weakness she had not known since she was young and believed in sin. Speechless, she watched Labenne wipe his face on his sleeve, legs grossly apart, eyes covered in oil from the thick lids. Not even flattery finds a hold on him, she thought. Where other men think of loyalty or affection he sees only himself and his family. He will make use of me, without conscience—and betray me or Edgar, coldly, as he says. And then forget us. A
monster of egoism—yes. And intelligent. Abominably intelligent. . . . She shuddered.

Labenne got up to go. Mme Vayrac could not move. She was pinched by regret for having handed her friend over to him. . . . A worm of shrewdness lifted its head in her mind.

“Don't forget, I've done everything I can to help you,” she said in her deep coaxing voice.

Labenne patted her shoulder.

“Trust Georges Labenne,” he said, smiling.

Bergeot was speaking to the workers at Thiviers's aircraft factory. He made his speech from a bench in the yard, and Lucien stood immediately behind him, afraid at every moment that he would step backwards. How should he know that even in the excitement of speaking Bergeot did not lose sight of his dignity? If only I could see better, he mourned. The evening sun was directly on his glasses, he could only squint sideways at the crowd, and he wanted desperately to see the effect on it of the Prefect's eloquence. On Lucien himself it was terrific. If he had not had Colonel Rienne's promise in his pocket he would have despaired. To be safe here when the Germans were ploughing over the graves of the last war. . . . Bergeot was telling them about a village he had fought through during that war: on one day eight thousand were killed in its ruins; since then, eight thousand dead Frenchmen had shared the village with a few hundred of the living. Yesterday, he said, the Boches sent their tanks over the poor narrow street of cottages put up hurriedly in 1919 to house the living with the dead, and never bettered because there had not been time. Since 1919 there had been scarcely time to put the fields in order. And today. . . . When he thought of the Germans, Lucien felt a trace of pity for their obedient minds and thick violent bodies. Scarcely any hate for the wretched invader. He had no room for it in his mind beside his impatience to reconcile himself with the eight
thousand who were holding the village. . . . The Germans, Bergeot was saying, can be held. On the Marne. . . . If I only get there before they begin going back, thought Lucien anxiously. What a disgrace to arrive in time for a pursuit! . . .
At Gezaincourt today a union was effected between the Ninth Battalion of the 53rd and eight thousand men of the last war.
. . . In decent words, they met—and the eight thousand spotted at once that Private Sugny had spent his war running after a broken enemy. Horrible!

Dodging the sun, he fixed his gaze on the nearest worker. An oldish man, sun-blackened face parted by his scythe of a nose and cracked everywhere into deep lines. He stood a little in front of the rest, arms hanging. His eyes had been watching anything but the yard or the speaker—the lettuces he was growing at home, his own chair in the doorway, the tables of the bistro where at this moment his neighbours must be saying: What's kept old Pigoult? After some minutes he turned his eyes slyly and unwillingly to the speaker, he began listening. He listened. Watching him, Lucien saw suspicion, doubt, anger, respect, pity, and again anger, and last of all the shadow of a young grief reflected on a dry poor face. Strangest of all were his eyes; through all this, they smiled, with patience, with kindness, with an absence of hope which went far past sadness: it was not sadness, it was a kind of silence, the silence of poverty, the silence of unnumbered generations of poor people, the silence of men as common as the earth. There was pride in this silence. And as Bergeot went on speaking, the narrow bleached eyes became almost joyous. Lucien could see how moved he was only by the strengthening of this weak glow of joy. You might be my father, he thought. He looked at the man's hands, clutched a little in front of him. Yes, there were the very marks—the skin calloused, the scars of old chilblains and hurts.

Bergeot stopped. A crowd of the workers pressed round him. Noisy with the excitement he had released in them, they shook his hand, patted him. Lucien repeated foolishly, “You were splendid, magnificent.” He hoped for the chance to say something friendly—but what, unless it could be one of the jokes he had with his father?—to the elderly workman. But the man had not pushed his way to the front. When Lucien looked round
before getting into the car, he saw him still in the same place, looking towards Bergeot with the same air of joyous grief and respect.

“Oh,” he murmured, “there was one man you ought to have spoken to.”

“Where?” Bergeot said. He had leaned back and was mopping his face. “Did it go all right?”

“It was magnificent,” Lucien stammered. He was giddy with admiration and happiness. “You've never spoken so well. If they don't make fifty aeroplanes this week it won't be your fault.”

“It won't be altogether theirs,” Bergeot said. “I heard yesterday that they don't get supplies, and then men are laid off—in fact there's a devil of a muddle. And some deliberate slackness.”

“Why don't you go to Paris and put it right?”

Bergeot smiled at this. He was still excited by his success with the workers. His secretary's belief in him touched him. He was not in the least afraid of disappointing it, and its young energy and warmth flattered him.

As soon as they were back at the Prefecture he gave Lucien a note to take to Mme de Freppel, and told him he could have the evening off. And—“Here—” he took a fifty-franc note from his pocket: “go and buy yourself dinner at Buran's. You work too hard.” He knew that his secretary needed a great many things more than a good dinner, and slammed the door on his thanks with a comfortable feeling of pride. He had made one of the young happy.