Cloudless May (58 page)

“Not as you do,” Mathieu said, with the same coldness. “Not into the hands of Germans and the German police. You can see what they have made of their own country.”

“I can. A country which has defeated Europe.”

“A concentration camp,” Mathieu said.

Labenne did not answer for a moment. He sat with hands in his pockets, and a face like a heavy mask—which slowly altered its expression to one of simplicity and friendliness.

“The fact remains,” he said in a quiet voice, “that the Government will surrender. What then? What is the duty of people like us—who will have to go on living here?”

“To prepare a resistance.”

“Of unarmed men?”

“Of all that the Germans will try to destroy—of the memory and habit of freedom.”

“You're talking in metaphors,” Labenne said, with a smile. “I don't understand them, I'm only a peasant.”

“I'm only a Jew,” Mathieu answered. “But you understand everything you want to, you understand that, in this town alone, it will depend on a few men whether the Germans are treated as conquerors or as the enemy. You, as Mayor, will set an example. Of loyalty or treachery. If you insist on being a peasant, I can put it more simply. Of faith or a lie. For instance, it will be a lie if you tell people that there is
anything in common between French civilisation and the German State.”

“Why, Mathieu,” Labenne said with an air of simplicity, “do you believe there are two sorts of courage in the world, German and French?”

Mathieu's face twitched. “Why don't you ask me if I know the difference between invader and invaded?”

“Can't I persuade you to come down to my level for a few minutes?” Labenne said. His eyes sparkled. “I only want you to agree that all of us who care for Seuilly must act together—after the armistice. For the sake of order, incidentally for our own sakes. You, as a Jew—forgive me if I speak brutally—will scarcely be happy under German rule. You may not even be safe. But you have an influence . . . your reputation as an honest man . . . and no doubt as a journalist you know a great deal about a great many people . . . I feel sure I could convince even a German commander that you ought to be well treated.”

The silence this time was broken by a boy whistling in the courtyard—a song, he must have learned it from father or brother, of the last war. The sound flew up the narrow shaft. Mathieu seemed to listen. At last he said,

“Just now you called yourself a peasant, and I saw you, when you came into my room, look round it like a man who knows the price of things. I'm sure you do——”

“Well?” Labenne said almost merrily.

“You couldn't know my price.”

“I don't know it yet,” Labenne said with his charming smile.

“It doesn't matter,” Mathieu said, “you couldn't pay it. You'll find it cheaper to buy your own safety from the Germans, even if that costs you everything you have. It will.”

Labenne stood up. During the quarter of an hour he had been in the room he had been turn by turn a number of men. They were all tossed back into his mind. He looked at Mathieu, his thick lips pursed a little, his eyes, except for a pin-point of light in the upper half of the pupil, well guarded. For the rest, the lines of his face were drawn downwards. He was considering, with the professional coolness of an executioner, a possible subject.

“A pity,” he said. “Yes, a great pity.”

“What a word!” Mathieu said drily.

Edgar Vayrac had been released this morning. As soon as he was in the house he asked for a bath, and he let his mother wait on him, sponging his feet and back, as she used to when he was a boy, long after he was old enough to attend to them himself. She was foolish with happiness. If the water had been cut off in Seuilly this morning, she would willingly have licked him over. She examined his handsome body for marks made on it by his eight months in prison. There were none. It was still a supple machine of brown flattened planes; since she was surprised, he told her that from the end of the first week he had been treated almost as a guest, allowed to exercise in the Governor's walled garden, even to lie there in the sun. Ah, his mother thought, I did that. At this moment she felt strong enough to carry him on her back: it did not seem impossible that she had given birth to a human being stronger and taller than herself. Her body was still a defence for his, she felt it heavy with pride and contentment, and the certainty that from now on his life was safe, the points had been changed, to become famous he had only to go on living. She tapped his forehead.

“What a box!” she said, laughing. “What have you in it?”

“My tools.”

When his mother left him, Vayrac stretched himself in the bath, letting the last vestiges of his life in prison float from him. During these months he had had time to meditate. He believed he had shed the last of his sentimentalities in prison, the last of his illusions that success will come easily to a young man without scruples. That had been a serious weakness; he was vexed that he had let it delay him so long. At twenty-nine, he had nothing to show for his years except a trapper's familiarity with the sordid undergrowth of politics; he found his way about in it by instinct now, knowing which blackmailer was protected—at eight removes—by a Minister, able without a warning to catch the light change of the wind when a receiver turned police spy. To think that he had been proud of these talents! The only item he could still put to his credit was his
alliance with Labenne and Huet. It was on this he must build. Only on this.

He was not even sure which of the two men would be more useful to him. Now that he knew what to look for, he would soon find out—but without betraying either of them prematurely. A thing he had learned about himself during his eight months' meditation was that he had a weakness for vilifying and betrayal. It was obviously a weakness—to be curbed if he meant to succeed. There is always time to ruin an ally, but rarely time or means to restore him if the betrayal has been ill-judged.

Another stroke he had planned was to climb into society by the quickest path. That is, by some woman. Until now, he had only made use of women—apart from business—during a rare brutal access of lust. He did not like or respect them. All the respect he was capable of towards a woman he had given to his mother. He was devoted to her. She doesn't know me, he said to himself; it doesn't matter, she would help me even if she did. . . . In prison he had considered carefully the benefits—money and social connections—he could hope for as the lover of a rich woman. He did not overrate the influence of women in politics; they functioned, he knew, more as irritants than as minds. But, he said to himself, once in that world I can amuse myself comfortably anywhere else.

He dressed, and went downstairs to lunch with his mother. His first meal, she thought, smiling. He disappointed her by eating only the plainest of the dishes, a fillet of beef with young peas. “But you sent me so many langoustes and so much pâté and cold truffled chicken that this is all I want,” he said, teasing her: “it's admirable, I see that you haven't let the war interfere with you.”

“Oh, the war!” she said.

She rarely listened to the wireless or looked at a newspaper. She was indifferent. She had her son. Doubly sunk in her maternity and her senses, she could not imagine that the end of the war would affect her in any way.

After their meal, he told her that he was going to see Labenne.

“Be careful with him,” she said, “he's very cunning.”

“I know. He can teach me a few tricks. In a year or less
I shall surprise him. Trust me. . . . And this evening I'm dining with Huet and his wife.”

“Really?”

“Why not? Now that I've suffered, as they say, for my convictions, I'm interesting enough for Madame Huet to want to look at me. She shall look.” He kissed her and went out, turning in the doorway to ask, “What have we in the house?”

“A charming girl, quite beautiful, from Bordeaux,” Mme Vayrac said. Did you think, her expression said, that I should let your first day at home find me short of anything?

“Good.” He smiled. “I hope she's not any of your écrevisses á la crème.”

“A fillet,” Mme Vayrac said, “a good sensible little fillet.”

   .   .   .   .   .   .   .

Sitting facing the Mayor, and a young man, the editor of the
New Order,
he had not met before, Vayrac listened closely while Labenne told him what was going on in Seuilly, and what, “if things take the right turn,” he intended should go on.

“Isn't it possible,” Vayrac asked, “that the war will go on—from Africa?”

“Possible and impossible,” Labenne said. “The decision has been taken. I have that on authority. But there are sure to be a few protests—from the blind, the halt and the deaf. And that brings me to our Prefect, to Monsieur Jean-Émile Bergeot.”

Derval's excitement disgraced him at this moment by a shrill laugh. He blushed when Vayrac looked at him. Taking no notice, Labenne went on,

“In certain circumstances—which you can imagine—he would be a public danger, and we should have to get rid of him. No doubt a number of prefects will be dismissed, but it might be wiser to push his business a little further for him . . . a trial for treason. Even if he were not shot—if he only got a life sentence—he would be ruined.”

“The best thing that could happen to him,” Derval cried.

“The best and too good. Too unsafe,” Vayrac said drily.

Labenne looked at him with reserve. “What would you do?”

“I should kill him.”

“We must be prepared to do anything for our own good and
Seuilly's,” Labenne said, with a pious grimace. “But you're speaking metaphorically.”

“Oh, of course,” Vayrac said in his quiet voice.

“Are you really?” Derval had the fatuity to sound disappointed. What an ass, Vayrac said to himself, surprised. Labenne noticed his surprise and the younger man's nervous excitement. Tapping Derval's arm, he reminded him that he had not yet shown up the draft of a handbill he was writing. “You run along and do it now, my boy.” My boy was reluctant to go, every movement of his spruce body showed his resentment, but he went off with smiling promptness. As he was going, he gave Vayrac a cool glance; the thought crossed Vayrac's mind that for all his excitement he was fairly self-possessed. Not dangerous yet, he decided. He frowned. That was twice he had changed his mind about Derval in as many minutes.

“One moment,” Labenne shouted.

Derval came back, one hand on his hip in the pose of a dancer. Labenne gave him another order. He was to insert in tomorrow's
New Order
a paragraph expressing the hope that the aliens at Geulin were well guarded; some of them might be enemy agents, spies, waiting to cut telegraph wires and send false orders.

“You're going to hand them over to their own police?” Vayrac asked.

“Who else would want them?” Labenne said.

“Oh, quite!”

“They're worthless and trouble-makers. Frankly, I can't imagine a better use for them—or indeed another use. I don't think I need to prove my good faith—it ought to be obvious—but, damn it, I like to fill my basket. . . . Besides, they're all socialists, and I've worn the radical-socialist label so long that it's time I rubbed it out.” He looked at Vayrac under his eyelids. “You see how prudent I am!” Stretching his arms, he added, “They ought to be used to a little unpleasantness by now.”

Vayrac nodded. He was anxious to see the effect on Labenne when he told him that he was dining with Huet.

“There's a four-letter man for you,” Labenne said drily.

“He came to see me in prison, about three weeks ago. Do
you want to know what he said about you? That when it was to your own interest you would help him to get me out.”

“Ah, I'll remember that,” Labenne said, with a cold rage. He hid it under a gross laugh. “Monsieur Huet ought to stick closer to me than a brother. How many times do you suppose I've kicked him? Publicly and privately. And if he's faithful to anyone, it's to the politician who is insulting him most cynically at the moment. He admires, I believe he loves his enemies! He must love his own bottom, to turn it up so often. I tell you, the surest way to make him despise you is to try to help him. Treat him as a friend—can anyone?—and he'll do his best to ruin you. He really enjoys ruining a colleague, especially a man he suspects of being honest. . . . Have you ever heard him speak? He's eloquent—he runs over like burned milk—and always off the point. Unless he's the point himself. At the end of his speech you realise that he's been subtly—it's gross but it's subtle—undermining the very cause he set out to defend. Any cause he takes up is doomed. Perhaps he does it unconsciously—he may have been born in two minds about living. Mind you, my friend, I commend a careful politician. But it's fatal to let people see that you're thinking in two opposite directions at once. When Ernest Huet is slandering a friend, he insists that he's doing it out of kindness or a sense of justice. Oh, he's a fox—except that a fox smells of himself. But what Huet smells of, what peculiar treachery or vanity, even I can't make up my mind.”

Vayrac was satisfied that Labenne meant to help him. For his own purpose, of course. And Labenne's sole purpose, he would bet on it, was his power. Why else was he-surrounding himself with men who had nothing to commend them but their ambition and rapacity? . . . He wants us to shark for him; while we swim round him he'll keep us alive and fat. All right, Monsieur Labenne, I can wait. Not too long. . . .

“Monsieur Huet won't fox me,” he said lightly.

“Good.”

Without warning, Labenne began to speak in a curt voice. His air of peasant good-humour was gone, he no longer troubled to treat Vayrac as an equal; he gave him orders. They were simple enough. He was not to quarrel with any of his old friends—or with any new ones. With Huet, for instance. “Go
everywhere, listen, and make your reports to me. Except to me, keep your mouth shut.”