Cloudless May (50 page)

A sudden hope drove him along the corridor to his wife's room. This had been one of her bad days, and she was lying down, covered, in spite of the warmth of the evening, by an eiderdown. Her lips were so pale that they seemed made of flesh older and drier than her face. She forced herself to smile at him.

Looking at her, he said, “Nini, I'm so unhappy.”

“What is it?” she said joyously, “what's the matter with my Robert? My poor Robert.”

“Your poor Robert would like to pray with you.”

“Yes, that cures everything,” Nini murmured.

She could not get up, but she closed her eyes and offered her silent prayer. Her aching body relaxed a little, she had a feeling almost of well-being. This pain in her back, this stiffness of her arms, were nothing really but the awkwardness of a young girl: the God she was praying to was the absent-minded God of those days, part of her life but not much concerned with her. Robert lifted his face from his hands; it was serene now, and she felt a thrill of joy.

While he was on his knees, Thiviers's fingers had closed over a feather on the eiderdown. Behind the prayers, behind his agonised appeals for calm, he felt the nearness of some other
feeling. It was a memory, an image, it belonged to the past; only to remember that he had been free once soothed him. . . . He was in the courtyard of his grandmother's house near Luynes, the house that was his now. Nothing was distinct or clear, the brightness round the little figure of the child was delusive, but the child was happy, someone had tickled the palm of his hand. What is it? he asked. A goose feather, they said, for a very little goose. . . . He got to his feet. In his relief, he smiled eagerly at his wife.

“Did it come right?” she said.

“Yes.”

It was not true. The despair, the torments, seized him again. He was too polite, too kind, to disappoint her: he smiled, and talked to her affectionately, questioning her about her day, had her sister called, was she pleased with the eau-de-cologne he had ordered? She was so grateful that he felt sad. I am defrauding her of the kindness I pretend to feel, he said to himself.

He went away. The feather was still clinging to his damp fingers. Brushing it off, he felt once more a breath, only a breath of the past, the sensation of ease and brightness. Someone must surely have lifted him up then, and carried him away. Where, where? . . . Oh, my God, he sighed, comfort me.

He was so tired when he reached his room that he undressed at once and got into bed. His pain had become a dull feeling that he was nothing. A failure. And now he did not even know whether he wanted to punish Marguerite or save her.

Rienne made time this evening to go to the Prefecture; it was on his conscience that he had done nothing for Mathieu's Prussian friend. He had spent the day, and the night before, with Michel Ollivier, visiting all the advanced posts. He had had less than an hour's sleep, and, as always with him, fatigue had so sharpened his senses that he had only to look at a scene to know what it was hiding. It was during a week of overwork and sleepless nights in January that he had learned the truth
about this war. The army, bored and inert, was waiting behind its Chinese Wall; Woerth had prophesied that this state of peace would last indefinitely, and was lecturing his staff to that effect. After one such lecture, Rienne went out into the streets, the singularly quiet streets, and heard the trees on the Quai Gambetta creaking with the wheels and harness of a regiment moving up to the trenches; a young woman passed him smiling, and he thought of Rheims in the last war; at Thouédun, when a farmer talked to him about the spring wheat, he saw the fields of beetroot of the Pas-de-Calais before they were trodden out of shape, and he saw the colour of the Marne in the Loire, and the frost of January 1916 covering the roofs in 1940.

This evening, the evening of June 6th, when the Germans had forced the Somme, everything reminded him of peace. He passed a line of tanks in a side street and noticed the tranquillity of the houses, grey pages covered with an old writing. Two young soldiers were lounging outside a house, listening to the wireless playing a foolishly languid waltz; a woman as thin and delicate as a spectre in broad daylight smiled at them between the curtains. The air was warm and soft. A salt breath came from the Loire, with the cries of swallows darting between the islands, the blond river stretching itself after a day of silence and heat, not even an aeroplane in the remote sky. At midnight there would be only a thread of darkness, not wide enough to keep the day from touching fingers with the day. Now and then a fugitive scent met him; it was escaping from the gardens behind the high walls and from vines outside the town.

Why this certainty of peace? It must be a promise, France giving up the stored riches of twenty years. But why now? Why at this moment? He was surprised to feel this peaceful scene stranger and more alarming than anything he knew about the war.

He found his foster-brother sitting doing nothing. Another break in the order of things.

Bergeot did not give him time to speak. “You've come about Derval.”

“About——?”

Seeing, too late, his mistake, Bergeot said jauntily,

“Oh, you didn't know that Derval was released this morning?
It's not important—but I thought you might be surprised, since you're not a politician and you don't understand the ins and outs——”

“No, I don't understand,” Rienne said. He was as calm as if he had heard of a defeat.

“I don't yearn to be a dictator,” Bergeot said, smiling. “Derval has learned his lesson, he won't give any more trouble; in fact he'll be so grateful to me that I shall be able to use him——”

An instinct made Rienne cut him short before he could say anything base. Always, in judging people, he allowed elbow-room to self-interest, meanness, cowardice: these were all purely human qualities, and he was so careful with human beings that he could afford to be implacable towards the effect, when one of them behaved with only too much nature. When it was a question of Émile, he turned to account even these human tricks, and praised him for being shrewd and cautious. . . . Without knowing what he was doing, he spoke sharply, to stop Émile destroying himself.

“What makes you think Derval will give up chattering about defeat? You can't believe it. You don't make misjudgements of that kind. You've been overruled. Who?”

Bergeot spoke with an air of relief and frankness.

“Thiviers. He insisted.”

“Why need you have obeyed him? Is he the Prefect?”

He listened closely while Bergeot explained what he called the situation. When a public man falls back on the situation to explain one of his actions he is hiding a motive he dislikes the look of. . . . “I'm responsible for order. I'm not Mathieu, I can't quarrel with a man of Thiviers's influence, and respected as he is. It would do more to shake confidence than any of Derval's indiscretions. You must see that, Bonamy. Even if you're so fond of Mathieu that you can't see the harm he does with his rat's teeth——”

You have every reason, Rienne thought, to be grateful to Monsieur de Thiviers. Without him, where would you be? . . . He was ashamed to be looking for excuses for Émile. All the more that until now he had had to defend him only against critics who accused him of too much energy. The very fact that Émile was making excuses for weakness and self-interest
made Rienne feel that he himself was guilty. It was horrible. I am horrible, he thought. Perhaps he is ill. . . . What is disgraceful about an illness, even a moral illness? . . . He felt ashamed because he could not, with truth, claim that he had behaved vilely or dishonestly for the sake of his career.

“You're overworking,” he said to Bergeot.

Bergeot looked at him in astonishment. . . . Has he heard a word I've been saying? . . . Contempt for Bonamy's simple-mindedness gave way in him to pity—for himself. He let his head and arms sink wearily.

“You think that having good ideas, a decent policy, is enough,” he said bitterly. “You couldn't be more mistaken. Without family or other connections, they're useless. Worse than useless. Harmful. At the moment I can rely on the Minister's support. Tomorrow he may be sacked.”

His bitterness shocked Rienne. How much energy that Émile ought to use against Labenne and Derval was being drawn off into it! If he had never gone into politics, would he have caught this illness? Of course not. He was healthy all through. . . . He closed his mind against the fear that Émile's illness had been born with him.

“You didn't always think like that,” he said.

Bergeot's face was distorted for a moment. “I've learned.”

“Thiviers——”

“I owe everything to Thiviers,” Bergeot interrupted. “You misjudge him. He's a patriot and honest.”

“Half a dozen men of his honesty can ruin France.”

Bergeot shrugged his shoulders. “You're impossible.”

“Since you won't see that Derval is locked up, I shall,” Rienne said sharply. To put himself in the wrong, he lost his temper. “I should like to shoot him to encourage other embusqués. And I have something else to say to you. Why was the order to release Captain von Uhland cancelled?”

“Cancelled?”

“Ah. Didn't you know?”

Bergeot frowned. “Yes, of course. There were reasons”—he hesitated—“of security.”

“But you were satisfied, and the police were satisfied.” Rienne gave him a calm look. “Did you cancel your own orders?”

“No one else cancels my orders,” Bergeot said furiously. “If you want my opinion, far too much fuss is being made about these foreigners. They came here to please themselves, now they think they have a claim on us. Absurd. I have too much to do to bother about them.”

“Very well.”

Bergeot's face changed suddenly. It took on an air of innocence and youth. He hurried across the room and laid his hand on Rienne's arm.

“Don't lose patience with me, Bonamy,” he said quietly, almost humbly. “I can't smash walls with my head. I'm doing my best. You're a soldier, you don't know the difficulties.”

Rienne felt hope and warm grief. It was bad that Émile had to defend himself. And a sign of grace. Again he felt that it was he who had failed. He suffered because—unless it was a little in his vanity—Émile was not suffering. In the end, his vanity may be more use to him than I am, he thought. “Take care of yourself,” he said, smiling.

He was going to see Jean Mourey. When he was hurrying down the lane from the Prefecture, a woman came out of one of the poorer houses. She hesitated when she saw this stick of a soldier, and half smiled at his thinness and his long fine nose and long arms. But he was so correct that he was reassuring. She asked him if there was any news.

What news? Rienne thought. That a vulgar illness is undermining one of the healthiest men in France? “What are you expecting?” he said gently. “You won't hear anything now until you hear about another battle of the Marne.”

She looked at him gratefully. If no other family in Seuilly slept quietly tonight, hers would.

This being Mourey's last night in his house, Abbé Letourneau had walked in from Thouédun to share it with him. When he came into the room and saw them both sitting there at a table on which were two bottles of wine and three glasses, Rienne stepped into any evening of the last war—and without a touch of the anger he felt today when he saw the children of 1919 in their clumsy uniforms. Here he felt consoled and safe. If nowhere else, here he would find a grief he knew by heart, gestures, a phrase, that the sickness of memory had not altered.

“Did you smell trees burning?” Letourneau asked him.

“No.”

“I could smell them when I came down the hill from the village. The Germans must have dropped incendiary bombs among the Seine woods. There's a very light breeze from the north-east. . . . Do you remember the acres of fruit trees they made time to destroy in '17, when they were going back? Even now I find it hard to forgive them for it. Who knows the patience and faith that go into a sound orchard? The life of two or three generations wasted. They don't respect life.”

“They destroy like animals,” Mourey said. “And we—we destroy because money is the only thing we respect. Nothing has any power here except money.”

He passed his hand over the stone fireplace. In the room above, his few clothes had been folded into a bag; down here were eight packing-cases of books and papers. He had been alone for three days, his wife had gone, taking the children to his sister in Bergerac. She would stay there a few weeks until he had found a house he could live in; in the meantime Letourneau would give him and his books a room at Thouédun. He was restless. He had not known that he would miss his wife, but now in every room he found traces of her printed lightly over the marks of the past. He realised that the third of his life she had shared outweighed the rest in warmth and kindness. Now he saw her, moving through the rooms with the absorption of a child in her tasks. In their bed where he used to come after a night spent on his book, knowing that he had wakened her only by her stillness, he was aware of her body as never when he could rest a hand on it. Oh, my love, he said. He wrote it to “her—but what sense is there in writing,
Oh, my love,
when you have not said it?

“That's true,' the priest said slowly. “In the last hundred years we've turned everything into money. Including our -future. We are too thrifty to have children. To save our property, to be better off at the end of our lives than we were at the beginning. Our prudence and thrift have ruined us. . . .' Avarice is the meaning of the last twenty years. It explains why we bought Allies. And it explains our treachery to them and our weakness. How can any country defend itself with a few regiments of only sons?”

“We are in fact defending ourselves,” Rienne said.