Cloudless May (66 page)

“Don't,” Bergeot said. He was full of pity for her, and for himself. And too done to help her.

“I love you so much,” she said in a dry voice.

He knew this was true. He had never been so sure of her, never, as now, felt himself touching the solid and simple base of their “marriage.” It was after all not unlike a marriage. It was full of disappointments, almost dull, and it was irreplaceable. But he felt this coldly, without any impulse to comfort her.

“I've quarrelled with Thiviers,” he said. “I insulted him grossly.”

“He'll punish you,” she said with despair. “What did you say?”

He made a vague gesture. “It was unforgiveable.”

After a minute she said again, in the same almost unpleasant voice, “I really do love you. Do you believe me?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. He did not look at her.

“And it doesn't make any difference?”

“Very little.”

She waited a long time, two or three minutes. He did not move. He had never, he thought, known what it was to be tired. Marguerite got up and went into the next room. He heard a drawer opened. In the same instant he remembered that she kept a revolver in the drawer of her desk. Suddenly alive, he ran into the next room, rushed to her and twisted her arm cruelly; she cried with pain and dropped the revolver. He pushed her without kindness into a chair. He was so angry that he couldn't speak.

She began to cry: while he looked on, she cried until she was ugly, her swollen face lined and blotchy. Her crying became a feeble hiccough. He felt an agony of grief, disappointment, love. Everything was spoiled, everything was beginning.

“Aren't you ashamed of yourself?” he said with the greatest difficulty.

“I can't cry any more,” she stammered. “I can't.”

He put his arms round her, forcing his body against hers.
Let her feel the weight of his disappointment and his crushing love. “I'm going to resign. You were right, you're always right. It's foolish to go on. I'll resign. We'll go away.”

He felt her relax. Her face seemed to have fallen in, and he had the impression that her mind was as shrunken and empty.

“Is it out of pity?”

“No,” he said, “only love.”

He had no idea whether the tears scalding his eyelids were for himself or her. “I must go back,” he said. He got up clumsily. She was lying in her chair, half dead. She mumbled something. He bent over her. “What did you say?”

“There would still be time to join with Labenne.”

He said nothing. She will never change, he thought.

Just as he was at the door, he thought: Would she have killed herself? He would never be sure. . . . He knew now that she held him as much by her dishonesty. The truth was no longer important.

•   •   •   •   •   •   •   •

When he left the house, he was surprised to find that it was only late afternoon. He thought he had been in Marguerite's room for hours—long enough to be cured of one illness and catch another, this time dangerous. The sunlight was still dazzling; if the shadows of trees and telegraph poles were a finger or so longer, it was the only sign the outer world gave of having noticed that a time had ended and another begun. No doubt the world was right. There are no divisions in a life, it is always, in every moment, breaking down, the illusion or the truth always coming nearer the surface. The moment of discovery is hardly worth marking. Besides, the ugliness or the grandeur is only declared at the end, before God.

He drove back by the shorter road. It had nothing of his past that it had been keeping for him, and could not have answered any questions. All the same, it had kept something in reserve. There was a point where, from a slight rise, he looked down towards Seuilly—not as he could look down on it from the Prefecture, seeing only its flock of roofs herded by the river, but seeing it with its houses planted strongly in the ground, holding to it by their weight of patient obscure memories, with no triumphs except such small ones as could
be held in a humble pair of hands, no superb joys, no griefs that would do worse than sharpen the lines of a face and press the shoulders a little nearer the ground. He was seeing it for the first time with its own eyes, part of it, one of its children, not an ambitious man using it to brush his path. He had no impulse to say “my Prefecture,” “my streets.” Nothing was his. From the Abbey spire to the washing-place where the women kneeling under the thick plane trees chattered as they wrung their linen with strong hands, Seuilly belonged firmly to its past and its future; he was its servant, to whom it promised a life of effort and rest at last in his own field. He comforted himself with this promise—until he remembered that he had thrown away his birthright; he was going, leaving his dear field to Labenne and Thiviers.

He shrugged his shoulders. What else could I do? he thought.

It was at this moment he felt the full shock of Thiviers's words. . . . “You fool. I would have made you a Minister . . . Premier. . . .” His disillusion was complete. So, all the years when he believed he was impressing Thiviers with his audacity, the banker was learning to distrust him. Everything he had done since he came back to Seuilly as Prefect had undermined him. He had prepared his fall.

He was stunned. He could see only that he had been a fool. All his hidden doubts of himself mocked him. . . . And now, the thought that he was leaving was an immense solace. All he wanted was to hide from the people who had seen him fail. Never feel their eyes on him again. . . . It was his way of killing himself.

When he told Lucien he was going to resign, the young man turned pale instead of his usual crimson, and looked at him with horror. He shut and opened his large hands as though he were trying to start his circulation. It started apparently with a jerk, all the blood rushing to his face and eyes. For a moment Bergeot was looking at a stubbornly angry peasant. Then it was only Lucien Sugny again, with his poor smile and his poor mug of a taciturn respectful young man.

Bergeot tried to surprise in him the reverent affection which had so often bored him. But Lucien's air of respect was immovable; it surrounded him like the turret of a tank; from it, he watched the Prefect deploying all his ironical charm, and
his face only became duller and more morose. At last Bergeot was tired of trying to charm the young man into admiring him for running away. He sat down at his desk and let the sense of his failure roll him over and over at the end of his strength. He began to talk to himself, almost truthfully—that is, with a sincere discouragement diluting his self-pity.

“I worked very hard; my ideas were good. When all is said and done, I haven't been any more dishonest than I was forced, to make imbeciles believe in me. I've helped a great many people. And none of it has been any good. In the end, I'm no one. I've made a mess of my life.” He gave Lucien an indifferent glance. “You don't know yet how life disappoints and cheats. Your youth is only stupidity.”

Unable to put up with his secretary's air of respect any longer, he sent him off.

Rienne left the barracks about ten o'clock; he meant to walk out to Thouédun for half an hour. Outside the barracks he saw Lucien Sugny. The young man came up to him timidly; he had been waiting for three hours in the hope of seeing him. They walked towards the High Street.

Lucien was suffering. He made the gestures of an old man, of his father coming home slowly, at dark, from his field. Like his father, he would not after this evening recognise his youth if it met him in the road.

“I don't understand,” he murmured, when he had finished telling his story. “Why is he doing this? What has happened?” He hesitated. “I can't feel any confidence in myself. Compared with him, I'm nothing. And if he runs away—”

Rienne had listened to him in silence. He was mildly sorry for the young man. Real as it was, deeply as it cut into his life, Lucien's grief would heal quickly. A few weeks, perhaps only a few days of action, and it would begin to trouble him so little he would not notice the day when it was only a light scar—
which never reminded him that it was there. For his own grief . . . he accepted it and placed it to one side, to be looked at as soon as he had time. It would make its own place in his mind, leaving him room to enjoy hunger, weariness, sleep, a June morning at Thouédun. It would enter into all of them as a shadow, and he would become used to it. He could not help a moment of anguish before he spoke to Lucien.

“Don't think about it very much. It's foolish to measure a life by one act—even an heroic act. You know, I've seen so many men become heroes in an excited moment—or because at that moment there was nothing else they could do. All the same—a lie of that sort is worth something. . . . Less, of course, than the everyday choices.
He
made so many good and honest choices—you know that. What you don't know yet is that an illness can turn a hero into a coward.” He saw that Lucien was listening avidly, and smiled. “I don't know how to account for this illness. It's everywhere, like influenza after the last war. . . . We're not allowed to talk about honour. And yet as soon as you prefer anything to it—security, or power—you fall ill. And to be well you needn't be successful or lucky. I advise you to keep your heart to yourself. Don't bet with it on another person—who has always the right to let you down. I'm not saying, Don't love anyone. I don't want you to starve! I'm only warning you not to expect so much.”

To console Lucien, he had said more than he cared to. He was now tired of the young man's company. Lucien noticed it, and with an awkward phrase took himself off.

The narrow street leading to the High Street had become a dormitory. People were trying to sleep, some in their cars or carts, others on the pavement. Between the houses it was almost dark. Rienne had to step over these bundles; they made him think of the casualties at a clearing station, young men with grey faces and an M on their foreheads. Two men were talking in low voices . . . “I'm our village baker.” . . . “Which is your village?” . . . “Oisemont near Abbeville.” . . . “And who is baking bread for the village now?” . . . “If you'd tell me where all of them are. ...” A child looked up at him from under a deep forehead. Her back against a house door, a woman feeding her baby smiled with satisfied love: another woman was lying between two sleeping children; her face wooden, carved
out of a block of fear, she stared blankly at the passers-by-seeing what? Another child, a boy, fair-haired, with large eyes half-open in the face of a mediaeval angel, smiling and candid . . . another . . . and another . . . their heads floating on the darkness. Rienne felt a profound weariness. This war is too nearly murder, he thought.

In the High Street he came on a straggling half-dozen soldiers who had managed to dodge the military police at the bridge. They were drunk; none of them had his rifle. He let them stumble past. Steadying himself after an impulse of anger, he tried to think calmly about the disaster they symbolised, how far it had gone, how quickly it could be repaired.

He turned back, to the Quai Gambetta, to look at the river. Looking up-stream, he watched the poplars darken and the mass of willows turn the colour of dead cinders; the light was leaving with regret all the shapes it had amused itself by living in during the day. It withdrew from level after level of the river; its place was taken by a sharp scent of seaweed, dry grass, and of water after the sun has been on it. The whole valley of the Loire was breathing as gently, as sensuously, as that woman with her infant.

For a moment he confused Émile's failure—failure of the good clever little Émile—with the failure of France. Both of them had refused to fight. What Thiviers said, what Labenne said, what any leader said, was only the word of millions of Émiles. The moment he had thought this, he felt France protesting in him against such a foolish lie. There was another France—a child a thousand years old, a seed which was a tree with its seeds—living, unborn, immortal.

He gave the sleeping Loire a polite friendly smile, and turned towards his village.

It was close on midnight when he reached it and the vicarage, but he knew that neither Letourneau nor Mourey would go to bed before two or three. He knocked on the window. Letourneau opened to him, without surprise.

The moment he was inside the room, he told them that Émile was resigning. He thought he was explaining it by his illness; in fact, with more than his usual coldness, he was saying that Émile was too anxious to be approved of—poor child, he had all the intellectual courage in the world and very little
emotional courage; he had never understood that public opinion, rewards, were not worth the trouble.

“. . . It is perhaps my fault. I was always encouraging him. I didn't think.”

“He's a politician,” Jean Mourey said delicately. “He has been playing a fine political game, and hoping that events would save him from having to oppose Monsieur de Thiviers and the others.” He hesitated. “And then her influence.”

He kept out of his voice the contempt he felt for a sterile love.

Rienne did not answer. He thought of Marguerite with pity: lately he had guessed at a profound uncertainty under her air of confidence. She could have been a good creature, he thought.

“Women have more need of stability,” Abbé Letourneau said. “An unstable woman does so much harm.” In his childhood, in a village in the melancholy Sologne, he had believed that succubi exist; he still half believed it. This woman had fastened on Bergeot.

There was a silence, then Mourey said,

“What is happening?”

Rienne said coldly, “I was wrong to be pleased when we attacked in May. I didn't realise our weakness. G.H.Q. was completely outmanoeuvred. We had an excellent plan, with one flaw—any German N.C.O. could foresee it and make a counter-plan. We—without imagination, without aeroplanes, with only our poor Meuse and our poor generals. . . . When we've thrown the Boches out, we can divide the blame between treachery and incompetence. I don't believe in treachery, it's not French.”