Cloudless May (63 page)

Piriac's mind opened like a pair of compasses, and formed a vault. A dead soldier lying there on his back, hands on his stomach, was as little impressive as a rag dropped in a field. . . . He saw Thiviers again. Looking dejected and grave, “Leave it to me,” he was saying, “I can persuade him to resign—and before the Germans arrive. I must say that that alarms me far more. Are you sure there will be no incidents? No attempts at resistance?”—“You can leave that to me,” Woerth said: he spoke with coldness which would have mortified anyone except Thiviers.

Although he did not understand what they were talking about, Piriac saw that his chief of staff had been vexed. He felt pleased. He's a conceited fellow, too clever by half, he thought: I must keep an eye on him. But the warmth, and the lime trees so alive with bees that it sounded like the endless distant murmur of heavy guns, pressed his head down on to his chest. Rest, he said to himself, rest; I must rest. . . . Suddenly, a flash from one of the guns. He opened his eyes. “What they don't realise,” Thiviers said “is the cost of mechanising an army. We never had the money.”

“All the same, it might have been better to find it,” Piriac said.

He saw, with satisfaction, that he had startled them. They looked at him, the banker inquisitively, Woerth with that reserve which was less caution than pride. Piriac felt absurdly happy. . . . Ah, they thought I was asleep. . . . He moved his arm, over the Dordogne, over the Gironde, bringing it back to lie on the table, the wrinkled palm of the hand upwards, empty. I shall be blamed for losing them, he thought, troubled.

Woerth spoke to him. Vexed, he said,

“What's that? Speak up, my boy. I can't hear you for the noise . . . the bees. . . . What is it?”

“I was only reminding you, sir, that I'm flying to Bordeaux this afternoon.”

“Oh? Why?”

“You agreed yesterday, sir, that we ought—”

Piriac cut him short. “Nothing of the kind,” he said, suspicious. His mind had cleared; he remembered with a dry malice that Woerth was in the habit of finding himself at G.H.Q. when decisions were being made. With such excellent habits, an officer can go far. He's too ambitious, Piriac thought: he meant that at sixty-four Woerth was young enough to be a danger to his seniors. . . . Why is he so anxious to be in Bordeaux? What does he hope the Government will do for him?

“I shall go myself,” he thought aloud. “I shall see Pétain—”

He was alert enough to see the fury in Woerth's glance before it was masked. The door opened. An officer came in with one of the slips of paper on which telephoned and wireless messages were written—he had made it a rule that they must be written out, signed, and countersigned, before he would notice them. He took the paper and held it between his hands for a minute before he looked at it. Verdun had been taken.

“Verdun,” he said, looking at Woerth.

He was terribly distressed. What has happened? he said to himself; what have I done? . . . The Dordogne rushed away from him; where it met the Gironde he heard confusedly the sound of bullets rippling through branches. He knew Verdun well, he could find his way about the fort, the tunnels, but when he thought of it he saw the square at Bourg, the white-hot sky, the old shuttered houses and their burden of poverty, malice, hope. He could hear an aeroplane. Or is it my heart beating? he thought. Am I going to die?

Woerth asked him if he felt ill. He shook his head, he was angry, his heart beating quickly now with dislike of Woerth.

“Go to Bordeaux,” he growled. “Go. You may get something.”

But this is the end, he thought. . . . He felt lighter and cooler. He could hold his eyes open. He was alone in his room, the other two had gone: he noticed that the light coming through the shutter had moved, trying from another angle to force this
room where for twenty years, the lifetime of a recruit of this war, he had held out against all forms of change, against the most seemingly innocent—punishing a servant who altered the position of a chair—as rigidly and intolerantly—refusing to read newspapers in case he stumbled on a sentence shocking to his belief in an absolute monarchy—as against the appalling proposal that a soldier going up to attack should carry less on his back.

This time, he thought, I've really been asleep. He pulled himself up. . . . If Verdun has fallen, everything is finished, it will be impossible to save the army; but by the grace of God we shall save France. . . .

Colonel Rienne came in. Would he see the Bishop of Seuilly, who was outside in his car, waiting?

“Of course. At once.”

He waited with a quiet pleasure. The Bishop was his oldest friend, born in the same month of the same year, 1870, and only a few miles from Bourg. They were schoolfellows in Bordeaux. When, once a week, they met to play chess, they moved easily and happily in a past which was at the same level for both of them: the quays, the bridge, the port, were not smaller or older for one, and when Piriac, as he did during every visit to his house near Bourg, went into Bordeaux, he could be sure that the sudden gaiety he felt crossing a street where one day he had burst a balloon directly behind an old colonel, or in front of the shop where he bought pencils and ices, belonged just as much to his friend. It was very comforting. It took away part of the anguish of growing old—when you have to sit silent, or try, uselessly, to explain why some words, the word sunflower, for instance, or the word reverie, make you uneasy or senselessly happy. Yesterday, his sister had sent him a photograph of the Place des Quinconces in Bordeaux, taken in 1882. Smiling to himself, he took it out of his pocket and laid it face down on the desk. It would be a delicious surprise for his friend. . . . The Bishop's first words ruined it.

“My dear friend, good of you to see me. I wanted to tell you, myself, that I shall do everything a very old priest can, to help you to resist the Germans. When do you expect them?”

Folding his hands, he spoke as though he were asking about the arrival in Seuilly of a Minister who wanted to place one of
his week-end speeches at a point half-way between the shopkeepers of Paris and the wine-growers of Guyenne. Piriac was disconcerted, then sad. A fear, vague still, crossed his mind, that for the first time in more than seventy years he was going to have to change his habits—the way he walked, an arm and clenched fist behind his back, his trick of sleeping on his right until midnight and on his left from midnight until he woke at five o'clock.

“Resist?” he said slowly. “There's no question of resistance. But you can certainly help me by telling people how to submit. You'll like that,” he added cunningly, “you, a bishop.”

The Bishop scarcely moved his body, but he was no longer leaning in his chair. “Submit to the Germans? You're not serious?” he said in a placid voice. “Why, my dear Eustache, I'm prepared, not to fight, I'm a year or two too old for that, but I shall be wherever your front line is, to give the help I can.”

“It's useless,” Piriac said. “This time they're too strong.”

“Nonsense!”

Piriac was vexed. He was still standing up; he sat down in front of his friend, so that they would be looking from the same height at the past, this time of France.

“How many times have we fought the Germans?” he said with simplicity and a little anger. “You ought to know. Don't you remember your first essay for Father Bouriac?—it began,
The chariots of the yellow-haired Teutons crossed the Rhine in cohorts, as the Romans say; they went hack, as we say in my village, without stopping to bow”
This cleared off his anger. “Keeping the Germans out was never easy,” he said calmly, “even with Louis the Fourteenth; the last three times have been terrible. They've grown too strong for us to hold. If we had beaten them this time, would anyone have helped us to burn the root of the evil? You and I know both what that is, Father Bouriac explained it to us in the fourth; that passion of the Germans for unity, which must cover up a singular disorder, since each German takes so much trouble to behave like all the others. Or, as you would say in your village, to pluck the same hen. . . . And in twenty, in ten years' time, when they marched on us again, who would have helped us? Who has helped us this time, has even God helped us? Has there been another miracle of the Marne? No, no, it's an old soldier, it's your friend
Eustache Piriac who is talking to you, and I say that the frontier against Germany can't be held any longer. The dust of that past France must be almost all human. It's gone on too long. It's time we and they ended it. France can do with new blood—and goodness knows they can do with a little civilisation. Yes, my word, it's time for that! Together, France and Germany together, we shall be unconquerable. It will be a Fourth Empire—for us both.”

He believed what he was saying, but he was not saying all he believed. He watched anxiously: if his friend agreed, he would make some sign before speaking, he would lift one eyebrow, or crack the joints of his left hand—two signals they used when an exasperated master made them sit at opposite ends of the class-room.

After a minute's silence his friend smiled maliciously.

“But your Fourth Empire won't be French,” he said. “You can't really believe they'll leave us our bread and wine—they won't like the taste of it.” Still smiling, he quoted, “
‘Gloire à notre France éternelle!' . . .”

Without hesitating for a second—hadn't they learned it together, under the admirable Father Bouriac?—Piriac rushed ahead of him. “
‘Gloire à ceux qui sont morts pour elle!' . . .
Shall I repeat the whole poem?—I can,” he boasted.

“If you want to,” the old Bishop said drily. “It's your last chance. The Fourth Empire will cerrtainly cut Hugo out of its text-books.”

Piriac's arm dropped. “Yes, yes,” he muttered, “but what can I do?”

“Resist.”

“What would be the good?”

The Bishop looked at him. “That I should have to tell a soldier what it is a people learns by resisting!” he said sadly.

He rose to go. Although he was disappointed that his surprise had fallen flat, Piriac held out the photograph. And it worked. Smiling with grief, with joy, with longing for a province his spirit had never left, the Bishop looked at it carefully. He pointed out in a corner two nearly invisible figures, which could at will be two twelve-year-old schoolboys carrying their satchels. Piriac's happiness was at its height.

“But of course they are us! Look at your blouse, torn as usual.”

“How delicious Bordeaux was that year,” the Bishop said. “Do you remember the scent of limes on the Quai Richelieu in June? It smells of petrol now.”

“Everything was better then,” Piriac said, “even the mulberries tasted better.”

His friend reminded him of a poor little vineyard near Bourg, which they had thought glorious, because they were allowed to help in August. But after a time Piriac began to feel that they were talking about two different vineyards, not about the one he would recognise by its scent from all the other hundred vineyards of the district; and then that they were not talking about the same France. He made his friend look again at the photograph of the Place des Quinconces, and stooped over it with him. But he imagined now that while he had been looking only at the trees and the monument the Bishop was staring obstinately at the port. He tried without a word to make him look round. It was no use. Snatching the photograph, he put it in his pocket. Another second and the two indistinct figures would have separated, one going home by the embankment and the other past the theatre and the shops. I couldn't bear that, he thought sadly.

He sat down heavily and closed his eyes. Best not look, not think. When he roused himself, his friend had gone.

During the night and early morning the Germans crossed the Seine at Melun, attacked violently in Champagne, pushed their light forces to the Saône, the Aube, the Yonne. They were not amusing, these light forces. In the early hours as at midday they weighed terribly on the dry soil, the blackened stones and wood ash, the trees crushed at the side of the road, and on the backs of children. It was not a picnic, the bread and cherries eaten in a ditch, suddenly swelling between tongue and throat when the horizon began its stammer. The child calling on the ground to hide it . . . sometimes had its wish. The day, strengthening,
brought with it a darkness of its own, a darkness full of flashes between the eyeballs and the hand pressing on them. Fear had become an element in everything, in the single young leaf falling, loosed by the shrapnel, the ears of corn eaten by caterpillar wheels, the cart overturned at a cross-roads, the deserted places where women had washed clothes, the hayrick on fire in broad daylight, no one putting it out, the rooms where women and old men listening to the wireless repeated the names—“Sens—Troyes—Dijon—no, they can't be coming so near as that. And my niece at Sens—”

Marguerite pressed her hands on her eyeballs and tried to pray. She found that it is harder to pray first thing in the morning, the house stretching itself, the sun quarrelling outside with the Loire. She was distracted, and she could not feel easy in making promises for the future while with the livelier part of her mind she was planning the indocile now. No more than a traveller looking over the steely roughness of waves believes in the colour and smoothness of hills docile in sunlight on the other side of the bay. If she might lie, trick, seduce, for a few more days, she would ever after be good and simple. But this is not a prayer. Even the petitioner feels no confidence in it. It might even bring bad luck.

Ashamed and impatient, she stood up, determined to waste no more time. She was in black, because Thiviers once said that only a skin of clear amber could support a black without light in it. She had not made a clear plan: she still hoped to find some way of subduing him that would not humble her too much. Subdue him she must, whatever the means. It ought not to be difficult, he was neither flippant nor experienced. But she felt uncertain.