Cloudless May (5 page)

“Well,” Rienne said gently, “what do you want me to do? You didn't tell me all this for nothing.”

“Have I ever asked you to help me?”

“Never.”

“I'm asking now. . . . The only man here who could help Uhland is Émile Bergeot. A few interned men have been released by local authorities. It can be done. It has been done. But I don't want to speak to Émile myself. Since we were at school I've never asked him for anything. . . .”

“You want me to ask?” Rienne said.

“If you will.”

Rienne still hesitated. Why ask Émile to choose one out of all the wretched creatures shut up in the “cess-pit,” and save him? It was scarcely just. Just? But you cannot save everyone. Out of this vast injustice which is human life, why not try to save one?

“Are you quite sure of this Prussian ex-officer?” he asked Mathieu.

“As sure as I am of myself,” Mathieu said in a low voice.

“Very well,” Rienne said, with his slight smile, “I'll speak to Émile about him.”

“Thanks.”

Rienne got up. He laid five francs on the counter and knocked on the door of Marie's room. “Good-night, Marie, we're going.” She answered him in a voice that sounded as though she were crying again, and did not come out. They
heard her running to put the chain across the door when they were outside.

It was well past midnight. Everything was quiet, not a sound, not an aeroplane. At the other side of the country, Rienne thought, somewhere near the Vosges, a patrol was creeping up to a German outpost, the only men at war in France this night. The others were waiting—to be sent here or there, to move against the enemy, to retreat. Ignorant, patient, docile, men whose hands remembered some woman, who knew how to prune vines, balance a ledger, bake bread for a village, they waited, with all they had learned to do for their fellows held in suspense in them, as the country itself was suspended between night and day, dying and living. It was inhuman and necessary; it was a war. He turned to say goodbye to Mathieu: and saw that he had gone. He listened for footsteps, but the other must have been gone some minutes, there was not a sound. And now he remembered hearing Mathieu say good-night, but he could not remember that he had answered.

Émile Bergeot woke early. He got up, opened the shutters, leaning out as far as he could into the freshness. It would be another cloudless day. The long shadow of the Prefecture across the garden was the only stain he could see on its surface, already cleansed and varnished by the light. The colour of the trees was dazzling: a bird, followed by another, and another, flew up like a jet of smoke from a bush close to the window.

He looked at his watch—a handsome gold watch given him by Thiviers. Scarcely five o'clock. Pulling on trousers and shirt, he went out and strolled down the carriage road towards the town. The tomb-like houses below the Prefecture were open, people had begun living. A child crawled to the door of a house and looked up at him with enormous dark eyes.

“What are you doing?” Bergeot asked him.

The child smiled. A young woman snatched him up. She was bare-armed, with big firm arms and a strong throat. In the
strong light the fine down covering her arms and nape turned suddenly golden. The centuries-old walls of France can still ripen a superb fruit. The voice of another child, and the voice of an old woman, murmured on in the dark room, a cavern, behind the window. The young woman noticed Bergeot's glance at her arms and throat, blushed, and disappeared into the house.

He walked on and down, and came out at last on to the Quai Gambetta. After the darkness of narrow streets, the sunlight slapped at him like a sail. He steadied himself between the white fronts of houses and the Loire, still, below its sleek surface, wrinkled by the night. Every plane tree and lime along the edge of the quay gave out its purest light of the day. He heard a church clock strike the quarter, and then another: a full minute later, the town hall clock decided to confirm the rumour. It did so suddenly, like an alarm-clock. A shutter was flung open in the nearest house and a housewife shook out her bedding at the head of a column of women rubbing their eyes and fastening the gaping plackets of skirts.

Except for a few workmen—old men, boys too young to be called up yet—Bergeot was the only person breathing an air as clear and living as a young Loire salmon. He felt a familiar joy and confidence. If only he could embrace the town, with its old houses, churches, barracks, its bridges across the Loire, its sun. He felt under his hand on the wall of the embankment the veins starting off to join it to all the other towns and villages of France and to the living wall of men on the frontier, placing between themselves and an invader their memories of just such days as this, just such houses as that one with its shabby iron balconies and narrow door, just such a light, firm, bounding, as was falling on all the rivers of the only flawlessly human country in the world.

He heard a man's voice behind him, slow, tender, broken up by chuckling intervals. Turning round, he saw that a very old man had seated himself on a bench under the trees. He had with him a small mongrel, to whom he was reading aloud from yesterday's
Journal.
He read monotonously, carefully, like a child, stumbling over many of the words. Now and then he impressed a point on his dog by turning to him with an admonishing glance. . . . “Listen to this, old chap. . . .” The dog lay on the seat with his head held aside. He was bored. The old
man glanced up when Bergeot's shadow fell across the newspaper.

“What do you think, sir?” he said, in his almost extinguished voice, “can there be more than a dozen human beings, among all the millions trapped in it, who actually want to be at war-on a day like this?”

“I daresay a dozen,” Bergeot said.

“Yes. Then who are the lunatics? All the other millions 'who are getting up this morning—in this sunlight—to kill each other.” He had not lifted his finger from the line he was reading, and now went on patiently, with an imploring smile at his dog. “Do just listen, old fellow. . . .”

Towards the middle of the morning, when Bergeot was busy with his correspondence, M. de Thiviers was announced.

“Send him in,” Bergeot said.

He looked over his desk swiftly. Was there anything he was ashamed of? Nothing—but he thrust out of sight a letter from his sister, a widow living rather poorly at Troyes. There was always this moment, before Thiviers came into his room, when he felt in himself like a scald all the awkwardness of the boy who ran about barefoot in summer to save money.

Thiviers came in smiling and elegant, carrying himself with the assurance of a good-looking woman. In his narrow shoulders and well-filled-out body there was in fact something womanly; he had a trick of pursing his lips. Or it was perhaps a priest he reminded you of; there are priests who have the faces of matriarchs, filed down by suavity and a civilised gentle innocence.

He seated himself and looked at the Prefect with the affection Bergeot found flattering and embarrassing. He was embarrassed because—for all his gratitude—he did not return it. He loved two people, Rienne, Marguerite, held to each of them by a different nerve, and for each of them he was a different being. For his other friends, admirers, enemies, he was a wholly or partly fictitious character. When he was able to press heart or mind into this put-on character, he was a success, he won the approval he craved; he felt safe. His enemies were the people he had not managed to convince.

Thiviers had come to complain about the
Journal
and its editor. Mathieu had published an attack on him, so injurious
that even a convinced liberal, a man to whom the suppression of newspapers was a lay blasphemy, could not rest under it.

“What do you want me to do?” Bergeot said in a lively voice.

“Suppress the paper and arrest Mathieu. We are fighting for our lives, we can't afford weakness.”

Bergeot was silent. He did not want to upset the banker's idea of him as a man of ruthlessness and energy. But he did not want to start suppressions. He saw a way out by accusing Mathieu and leaped at it.

“My dear Robert, I know all about Louis Mathieu. He's discontented, ambitious, a Jew. I have my eye on him. But don't ask me to put him on his guard at this moment.”

Thiviers opened his eyes.

“You know something about him?”

“I'm keeping him under observation.” Bergeot felt uncomfortable. He went on recklessly, “You can be sure I shall know when to cut him off. Just now it's useful to have him at large. . . .” He saw Mathieu on the day some of his schoolfellows decided to punish him mildly for having been born a Jew. They were content to knock him into the gutter. Mud from head to foot, he limped away, only saying to Bergeot, who had been watching it with disgust and fear, “You could have stopped them. . . .”

“Very well, I leave it to your judgement.” Thiviers smiled. “There was something else I had to say to you. About your investments——”

“Oh, that I leave to your judgement,” Bergeot cried. “Do what you like with my money. If it weren't for you I shouldn't have any. I don't pretend to be able to make fifty francs into a thousand.”

Mme de Freppel's voice made them both jump. She had come into the room through the second door, at their back. There was no keeping her out of the Prefect's room when she wanted to see him; his clerks had given up trying. If she chose, she could reach it by a second staircase.

“No, you're an idiot about money, my dear Émile!”

She came forward quickly. She had bare arms, as delicate as a girl's, and a light dress. Standing in front of him, her hands behind her back, body thrust forward, she repeated sharply,

“Yes, an idiot. I believe you would really rather be poor. You
think it's a sign of honesty. It's nothing of the kind, it's stupidity and conceit.”

Bergeot pointed at his desk.

“Look at my work waiting for me.” . . .

But as soon as he was alone he felt restless. He had failed—he would always fail—to be simple and dignified. He had had to exert himself, to tell lies, to be familiar. He was always straining to cover the gap between himself and what people expected of him. I should like to know no one, he thought, discouraged.

It was a lie. Already his confidence was pouring back. He looked round the room—at the Renaissance fireplace with the arms of the Duc de Seuilly, at the panelled cupboards. I'm here, he thought, stretching his arms. I, Jean-Émile Bergeot. He felt ruthless and gentle, serious and gay. One of Marguerite's gloves was lying under the window. He picked it up, small, a little shabby. She had a habit of putting new things away for a year or two before taking them into wear. It was ridiculous and miserly. It belonged to her past, which he knew to have been difficult. Poor child, he thought, folding the glove.

The door opened softly. Lucien Sugny poked his head round. When he saw that the Prefect was alone he came in, carrying a pile of opened letters.

“What, more of them?” Bergeot said joyfully.

When Mme de Freppel went shopping, if it were only for a reel of cotton, she felt all the anxieties of a peasant. She tried to see everything at once, every ambush. Caught at the right moment, even her enemy, the manageress of the fur department at Caillemer's, could be outwitted. This morning when she went in, she knew, from the sight of a curtain twitched aside and the reddened eyelids of the younger saleswoman, that it was a bad day. But she had half an hour to put in. A fox cape lying across a roll of black foulard delighted her; she was
pinching it when her enemy came up. “Good morning, Madame.”

“Good-morning. You're not showing much, are you?”

“If Madame wishes to see furs,” the woman said. Pretending to rearrange it, she whisked the cape from Mme de Freppel's hand.

“That's not a bad cape.”

“It's a finer cape than Madame could buy in many Paris houses. The furs are chosen, each is perfect. When shall we see another like it? Not while this war lasts.”

“This terrible war,” Marguerite said: “let me try it on.”

She looked at herself in the long glass, her glance seeking, probing her likeness for some reassurance—she had no idea what, but she could stand for a long time looking at herself in a glass, and forget that there was anyone else in the room. She noticed that the light in the fur took away the slight sallowness of her skin, but that was not the reassurance she wanted. She wanted some sign, to tell her who she was. Who it was stared back at her from eyes clouded by too many tricks, calculations, necessary lies. This body she had brought so far on her road mocked her; it knew more than she did; and stood there keeping its secrets. . . . She sighed, and came back to herself, to the over-warm room and the dislike and hovering watchfulness of the other woman. She stroked the fur with her gloved hand.

“Yes, it's not bad.”

A too familiar greed seized her, with the illusion that she had never coveted anything as she coveted this fur. It would give her courage and protect her. Taking it off with a pretence of carelessness, she handed it back. “What are you asking for it?”

“Twenty thousand francs.”

“Preposterous.”

The thought of giving away so much money frightened her. She was torn by two savage claws. To possess something without a flaw, to be truly elegant! But to rob herself of twenty thousand francs—oh, impossible. She smiled. “It would be dear at fifteen thousand.”

The manageress was replacing the cape. “Madame is mistaken. It is priced under rather than over its value.”

“Nonsense. It's no use talking to me like that. I might manage seventeen thousand.”

The manageress spread her hands without answering. Marguerite turned away with an air of decision and went out; she felt uncertain, almost ill. When she stepped out of Caillemer's into the blinding sunlight, she noticed a wretched mongrel limping along the gutter. At the sight of it, and because the sun was pricking her eyelids, she slipped back twenty-five years: to a moment—she was fifteen—when she was kneeling in a dusty road, crying over the body of just such an ugly starved animal. She had bare feet, covered with dust, her dress was almost indecently ragged, her eyes ached from crying in the strong sun. The man who had always said he was her father was watching her. “Come, that's enough, you may pull the cart yourself now,” he said impatiently. He fastened the harness to a belt he took off and put round her skinny waist; they set off down the road into Nantes, her body under its rags chafed by the belt, her eyes dry now with dismay. . . . Mme de Freppel's hands shook a little as she opened her sunshade: she was not ashamed of the fifteen-year-old girl, she thought of her often, always with the same astonishment that she had been able to escape. And pride. She felt herself becoming rigid with pride; an insane excitement filled her. Turning blindly and quickly, she went back into the shop.