Cloudless May (69 page)

He smiled. After all, I have a family, he thought.

Why try to destroy this village? It was the oldest part of the village which was burning—almost five centuries of work and patience were feeding the flames. When he reached the end of the street, a cart was moving away with its load. A woman running past looked at it and cried out, then fainted. The driver stopped. Ashamed, he went into the nearest house and came out carrying a blanket, which he spread over the heap. “I should have thought of it,” he said to Rienne.

At the foot of the hill, Rienne saw Jean Viard coming out of his garden; it backed on to the road here. Viard stopped, and shouted, “They've killed our son.”

“Your grandson?”

“Of course. Who else should I be crying about?” His eyes were dry. “He was in the upper field. I ran up there when I heard them. Too late. He was as full of holes as a colander. . . . The war can go on for fifty years, I have nothing to lose. . . . But to kill a child . . . it's not war.”

“No,” Rienne said wearily, “it's not war.”

He found nothing else to say to the man. Viard looked at him for a moment and spoke in a lower voice.

“If I thought this war had done anyone any good; but you'll see. . . .”

He turned and went slowly up the hill to the village. Rienne got into his car. A car coming from Seuilly rushed towards them and drew up just in time to avoid the wreckage of a cart blocking the road. Labenne got out and started to run up the hill, gasping. He saw Rienne. “My children,” he said. “In the château.”

“I'm told it wasn't hit,” Rienne said.

He saw relief and the shadow of arrogance move across Labenne's face, wiping out the agony. It was not in the least pitiful. He remembered seeing something like it before, in
November 1918, when a deserter who had been sentenced to death was reprieved because he was able to prove that he had been at his post until an hour after the armistice. You could think that Labenne was feeling the same pride in having escaped, by a few minutes, a penalty he had earned.

Rienne reported to General Piriac: he had placed a guard, a corporal and two men, with machine-guns, at a point on the main road four miles north of Ollivier's headquarters. Here a rather poor road turned off west and followed the north bank of the Loire to Geulin. The refugees were being directed on to this road. At Geulin they could cross the bridge, where another guard would direct them to keep south-west to the coast. . . .

“And this evening?” Piriac said.

“The bridge at Geulin will be destroyed at eight this evening—”

Piriac interrupted. “But the refugees?”

“I shall have an officer there, telling them to find shelter in the villages—”

Piriac looked at him. “There's no difference between that and murder,” he said almost inaudibly. “We are murdering these people.”

Rienne saw that he had lost his resolution of early morning. This morning he had talked in a firm voice of a delaying action; his orders had been clear and sensible; he seemed younger, he was smiling, as though the decision to fight had given him in his lifetime some of the qualities of his legend—humanity, for example. Rienne felt despair and anger.

“They will be safer in the villages than they are on the roads,” he said quietly.

“I ought to spare them,” Piriac murmured. “And now that the Marshal has practically ordered me not to fight. . . . He must have meant me to interpret it that way. . . .” A look of fretful anger came into his face. “Where is Woerth? He should
be bringing me orders, not seeing what he can pick up for himself. I'll say one thing for you, Rienne. You are an honest man.”

Rienne was baffled. Piriac had not cancelled his orders, but clearly he had lost all heart for an action. Perhaps he was losing his memory as well. That would not be a bad thing! . . . The old general was fidgeting in a drawer of his table. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Three o'clock, sir.”

“He isn't coming,” Piriac cried suddenly.

“Who, sir? General Woerth isn't expected before this evening.”

“General Woerth can drown himself. Isn't this Monday?”

Rienne remembered that Piriac always played chess on Monday afternoon, with his friend the Bishop. So, in this selfish insensible old man, there was still something which felt and suffered. . . . At this moment the Bishop came in. Piriac's joy was almost violent.

“I thought you'd gone!”

The Bishop smiled at him tenderly. “Why should I go, and where?”

Piriac made a confused gesture.

“I'm a little late only because I've been talking to some of our people, persuading them to stay at home, or at least not to go far. I don't know why no one has told them on the wireless to stay in their houses. It seems to me that political shepherds are not really better than our poor parish priests.”

Piriac was not listening. “Why have you come?” he said softly: he was leaning forward at a dangerous angle. A single tear rolled down his left cheek.

“Isn't it our day for chess—?”

“But you know the Germans are almost here. They'll be here the day after tomorrow, even tomorrow”—he smiled, slyly and anxiously—“we are going to stop them. . . . Are you pleased with me?”

The old Bishop did not seem in the least surprised. “Ah, I'm very glad. Have you time for one game? If we begin at once?”

Piriac looked at Rienne. “You can go,” he said in a clear voice. “Be here at six. . . .”

For the first time in his life, Rienne neglected a duty—to go out to Geulin and see that his orders were being carried out. He went to see Bergeot. He half believed still that, at the last minute, Émile would discover himself, he would run his head into the angle of a trench, or only into the angle of an old wall where were hidden pages torn out of one of the poets they were not allowed to read in the third, and the shock would remind him of himself; the shrewd politician would find that he was a Frenchman, only a Frenchman. If that happens, Rienne thought, everything else, and the future, will be all right.

When he reached the Prefecture the old porter pretended not to see him, then to have a mouth too full of the nails he was knocking into a case to be able to speak. He waved Rienne upstairs. . . . Bergeot was not in his room. Lucien Sugny came in and said that he had not been in the Prefecture all day. He was at the Manor House. . . . Just as Rienne was leaving, he came.

He walked in with a jauntiness that only aggravated his air of collapse. A coarse thumb had pressed out hollows under his chin and at the side of his nostrils, the two places where age finds the clay easiest to work. His illness, as Rienne persisted in calling it, had reached its acute stage. He turned Lucien out of the room. As soon as they were alone, “You know I've resigned?” he said. “As quickly as possible, tomorrow or the next day, I'm going to take Marguerite to Hendaye. From there I hope we can get into Portugal.”

Rienne was surprised to find he could feel what, after seeing Viard, he hesitated to call anguish. “Don't you know that Seuilly is going to be defended? Piriac—”

“I don't believe it,” Bergeot interrupted.

“It's true.”

After a moment, Bergeot said, “Well, it has nothing to do with me.”

Rienne did not answer. He knew what to do. He had come without any plan, expecting the sight of Émile to give him one. It had. And—what he had not expected—it was intolerably cruel. Nor had he expected to have to pay for it with one of his few irreplaceable possessions. At forty-eight, you can't begin a second friendship which will-absorb the memories of a lifetime. Until this moment he had never doubted that he had
foreseen and accepted all the sacrifices he would have to make in the life he had chosen—or had it chosen him? An illusion—he had not foreseen this. To see it more clearly, he shut his eyes.

He opened them, and saw Émile looking at him anxiously, with a sort of timidity.

“Very well, it has nothing to do with you,” he said. “It has only to do with me and all the other men you are putting between you and the enemy. When you are in Portugal or America—I suppose it will be America. Since you have money there—”

Émile lost his head. “Who told you?”

“. . . you will be able to live without us. I don't grudge you your life—you know that. How could I? We carry with us exactly the same weight of school-books, the same number of lines of Corneille, the same voices of a village and poverty, the same memories—to an ounce. Until now you have never cheated.”

“Don't punish me, Bonamy.”

He has the right to say that, Rienne thought: I've taken so much trouble to seem hard and immovable that in the end I feel nothing—except this . . . hate of myself.

“Will you do one thing for me before you go?” he said.

“Anything,” Émile said.

“Then will you give me truthful answers to two or three questions—as truthful as if one of us was going to be shot?”

He saw the sweat forming on Émile's forehead. He took care not to pity him, because it would have been pitying himself. And in fact, Émile was losing less than he was.

Émile nodded.

“First question. How long have you known that Thiviers was willing to collaborate—let's call it that—with the Germans?”

“Since some time in May. I forget the date. The Germans were at Amiens.”

These questions weigh too much, he thought wearily, laying the second down in front of Émile. “And, about the same time, you suspected and then knew that Labenne was actively a traitor; you didn't denounce him because he was involved with Thiviers, and to move against them would bring down on
you all the props of your career? My poor Émile. Poor little comedian.”

Émile's anger made him speechless. He leaned across his desk, trying to control himself. Suddenly he paled and sat down. Rienne knew him so well that he could follow moment by moment the confusion in his mind between rage and honesty, he knew when Émile reached the point of saying to himself: I am a failure, and the next step when he said: I am a coward.

Émile looked at him almost with relief.

“You're making up for more than forty years of looking after me,” he said in a dry voice.

Rienne realised that, until this moment, he had hoped he was going to be let off dishonestly, without paying. “What are you going to do?” he said.

“Stay.”

“As Prefect?”

“As Prefect if my resignation is not accepted. In any case, I can stay here until they send my successor. After that, as a mere citizen.”

“Everyone respects you,” Rienne said. “As citizen or Prefect, you'll have an influence.”

“Everyone?” Bergeot smiled. “You for instance? Besides, I'm only staying for my own sake.”

He could not be certain he had cured Émile's illness. But, obviously, he had cured him of an old friendship. He felt himself to be hateful. His hands were trembling, he rubbed them a little. It was like the first few moments after an attack, when he had often felt, deeper than his pleasure in being alive, a certain contempt for himself and his life.

Bergeot rang. When Lucien came, he said coldly,

“You'll stay here to answer all my telephone calls. When Madame de Freppel rings up you'll tell her I've decided to stay here—and that I advise her, no, beg her, to leave Seuilly tonight, or at the latest tomorrow morning. Tell her to expect a letter from me at Hendaye, at the Eskualduna. If she comes here, I don't want to see her.” He turned a distorted face to Rienne. “You see what saving myself means? Sacrificing the only person who depends on me. . . . You'll move into this room,” he said to Lucien, “and I'll work in yours for the time being. Do you understand me? Am I putting too much on you?”

“No,” Lucien said.

“Good.”

Rienne had reached the door. He turned to look at his friend. Bergeot was staring at his desk, sunk. He did not lift his head.

Towards half-past three, Labenne received two visitors—General Woerth and M. de Thiviers. He had scarcely had time, since he came back from Thouédun, to change his shirt, from which he could have wrung fear, and tell Mme Labenne that
his
children were safe. Her laments bored him and he said nothing to her of the anguish he had gone through. Looking at her, he thought: You couldn't have given me other children: what use are you?

The peculiar genius of these days had the features of these three men. Each of them, today, was a little larger than life, and had an air of candour underlying his normal expression, his air of coldness in Woerth, his patient smile in Thiviers; in Labenne his joining of grossness to a brutal geniality. The light was so strong that it dissolved everything except the soul, with its deformations and the abscess which was its point of anxiety, hate, truth. As if aware that he was exposed, Woerth was trying deliberately to control his tics: he kept his hands under the table so that he should not grip the edge in his delicate fingers; he sat leaning forward to make it easier to keep his eyes down instead of looking at Labenne and being irritated by it into raising an eyebrow.

He was just back from Bordeaux; he had come straight here from the airfield, without seeing Piriac.

The telephone rang. Labenne listened; covered the mouthpiece and said, with a slight smile,

“It's Huet. He saw you both coming in, he feels sure we shan't mind his joining us; he has private information—and so on—”

“On no account,” Woerth said, with passion. “I detest the fellow.”

“He's still talking,” Labenne murmured. He amused himself by speaking to Huet in an affectionate voice. . . . “Any other time, my dear deputy . . . oh, no, no, not politics, a question of a will, yes, a legacy . . . a quite private affair.” He let Huet go on talking so that he could listen easily to Woerth. Without changing his rigid pose, the general was explaining to Thiviers in a low voice that the rout of fifty-one divisions was complete, the soldiers were throwing away their arms, even mutinies were not inconceivable. It was anarchy, the natural end of a Republic. The banker had an air of resigned solemnity. You croak together like washerwomen, Labenne thought, grimacing: ah, you wait; I have the two of you in my fingers, one rainy day I'll drop you in the gutter and drown you. Who would notice . . .? Thiviers was recalling the Soviets formed by Russian soldiers. Could one be sure that in Seuilly . . .? Idiot! Labenne said. If there were French Soviets, I should only have to look in a glass to see Lenin. But for the moment—reassure yourselves—I only speak French: give me two years, while the rest of Europe is learning to speak German, and I'll invent a faithful little language of my own; all these charming words you're using at this moment, and trembling—authority, ruin, massacres—will have the meaning I choose to give them, no other, the same for bankers, poets, generals. . . .