Cloudless May (70 page)

“You're forgetting that there are well-officered divisions, which have not fought and are not disorganised,” Woerth said coldly. “They will deal with mutinies and disorders, including civil ones. . . . Your works are safe.”

Labenne put the receiver down, gently, to give Huet the pleasure of talking to himself for a few minutes. “I'm informed that Piriac is going to defend the town.”

Woerth's eyebrow gave him away. “You are informed—?”

“There are no military secrets now,” Labenne said. “Political ones, perhaps—but I'm beginning to think I understand even those.”

“The fact that Marshal Pétain has asked for terms implies surrender on any terms. Therefore it would be useless to defend Seuilly. General Piriac will see this for himself.”

“You could all the same point it out to him,” Labenne said, grinning. “His eyesight is none too good.” He knew that he was repulsive to Woerth; it gave him a delicious pleasure.
“And naturally he's sensitive about his honour. You could explain to him, perhaps, that the soaking of our fields in blood—even those which are used to the trick—the crushing of towns which escaped last time, and all the delights of invasion, the dead children—true, it's one way of ending war for ever—communism and more killing, really cancel out his honour as a professional murderer. No offence to you, my dear general. But you soldiers are very like saints, and saints, like all exiles, are shockingly bad citizens. They don't believe in the happiness of common men. . . . I hope at least that the Marshal has his head out of the clouds. A saint will be a poor hand at armistice terms. Offer him a cross to climb on, and he'll hand over France complete to the smallest village!”

Thiviers interrupted with his gentle tact—to give Woerth time to ignore this provocation.

“Who is the Marshal's financial adviser? Monsieur Baudouin, of course. Excellent. I know him, and I can assure you he'll consent to nothing I wouldn't consent to myself.”

“And of course you wouldn't consent to anything that would damage you,” Labenne said, with his charming smile. “You're too generous—and it would be ungenerous to harm so good and charitable a man. . . . I think you'll find the armistice very precise about aircraft works.”

“Really?” Thiviers looked at him closely. “I hope—I'm convinced the terms will be honourable. After seventy years of injustice between France and Germany it will be pleasant to see a little justice.”

“Justice, injustice,” Labenne said with contempt. “I admire these mediaeval symbols as much as I admire history. History is written to assure the successful that they succeeded. History will say—of me, for instance—that I was wise and far-sighted; it won't say anything I could tell it about my bad habits. . . . And justice—Monsieur de Thiviers, I would sooner be the man who decides what is just than the people he is deciding for. . . .”

Thiviers was silent. He had wakened this morning with a confidence in himself which nothing, not even Labenne's grossness, could shake. Never had his courtyard, with the fountain, seemed so tranquil, so sunk in the past of the province, and the pigeon tumbling from the shade into the sunlight so
clear a promise of the future. Never had he felt so sure, not only of himself, but of everything he touched; his table—for the first time, he could not doubt that it had been Diderot's—the paperweight from Ferney, the ink drying on his latest authentic sentence. A delicious freshness brought the farthest poplar so close to him that he believed he had been given back his young eyesight, even, when the sun on his head made him smile with joy, his young senses. . . . He attributed his joy, his tenderness when he thought of the future, the calm which had obliterated all memory of his despair and all desire, except this childish desire he felt to take fountain and pigeon in his arms and peel strips of moss from the old stones, to the armistice he expected. This morning the tension of centuries had given way. The aching nerve in France, which was Germany, had ceased to ache—from today, from the moment of surrender. Never again would the frontier with Germany open in France's side, and blood and gold pour out. Finished, it was finished. The sun—he stretched his arms in it—had risen for the last time on an old agonised woman; this evening it would set behind the child who would turn to smile at it. . . . He attributed these figures of speech, unfolding in him one after another like the moss-rose he saw opening below his window, to the new flowering of his genius. A new France, he thought, smiling—and I promise to live for it.

“We shall have a strong Government—the first for three hundred years,” he said. “It means the end of fear.”

“How well you put it!” Labenne said. “But will people be happier? They'll be quieter . . . it's something!”

After they had settled between them the several measures to be taken to keep Seuilly quiet under the Germans, Thiviers said,

“The Germans in Paris are behaving very decently. Obviously they mean to let us down lightly. Very wise of them. It may be Italian influence—our impetuous Latin sister—but I prefer to believe it's due to what I call my Germany. That delicious country—mediaeval if you like, but still young—of gables, Town Hall clocks which bring out our Lord and eleven of the disciples at midday, keeping Judas back to appear alone at midnight, and sentimental friendships. I should find it very difficult to live without this irrational Germany to balance my
logic. . . . I feel certain—I said as much to Marshal Pétain when I had the honour of talking to him a week ago—we shall have peace.”

Certainty you'll have peace, Labenne thought coldly, and it will be brutal and pitiless. Ninety-nine men out of a hundred will become German serfs—there's your Middle Ages for you! So much the worse for them. . . . Labenne intended to be an ally, a governor of the French province of the German Empire. He was convinced that France, like his wife, was past the age of child-bearing. The future had the hands of the prolific Germans. Why not, since it was springing from German bodies? Very well, he would be a German. But a German with a French stomach, who lived in France. Exchange a Loire salmon, peaches from his wall at Thouédun, wine from his vineyard, for anything watered by the Rhine? What a bargain! He felt the deepest contempt for Thiviers's sentimentalising about Germany. And his ignorance . . .

“I have a protest to make,” Thiviers said, smiling. “I saw the fellow you sent me yesterday—Edgar Vayrac. I don't care for him. I thought him very unpleasant.”

“He is,” Labenne said. “Extremely unpleasant. Precisely why I'm keeping him. You don't realise—words stupefy you—that the changes in France will be a revolution. When a new society takes over, what is it except a revolution? Of men, laws, ideas. . . . The minor agents of the revolution are not men, their characters and sentiments are irrelevant. If such men weren't what they are, if they weren't Vayracs, they would be useless to the authorities who have to use them—”

“But why use them?” Thiviers said.

“They're invaluable to the authorities in applying their new justice. A society in the making can't afford weakness. Afterwards, when they're no longer useful, they can be dropped.” He added reflectively, “I can't imagine any sort of police which had no use for a Vayrac.”

“I hope our society—”

Labenne rolled his eyes. “You should be hoping that the Germans will purge it.”

Since the serious discussions ended, Woerth had not been listening. His skin was yellower than usual, and he was worn and haggard. This was not due entirely to the pilot of his
aeroplane. Like Thiviers, like Labenne, he felt today at the height of his genius—and indeed was. Unlike them, in that he was not happy. Far from soothing, his certainties tortured him. He believed that, for now, Germany was unconquerable, that Europe—in which out of spite, only to delete her, he included England—could only submit: there is no arguing with a miracle of metal, imagination, will. He blamed the Republic bitterly for France's weakness, and the rest of the world with contempt because it had not, in 1919, formed itself into a shell to protect France while she struggled out of her dead skin. The operation would take place now, under German eyes, in the full anguish of a German victory.

Not that he was in any pain for the future of France. It would equal exactly its past of egoism and greatness. . . . In France a great man has no need to become, like Goethe, a European: the more boldly he interprets the universe to itself, the more firmly and casually he remains French. . . . Not for a moment did Woerth doubt that France would reconquer Europe—in her turn. It was his own future he doubted. Flying across France from Bordeaux, he looked with a personal anguish at villages which from this height were only the buttress of a church, and the tapestry of vines. . . . Can I live long enough to see the Renaissance? . . . He felt only a modest comfort in the thought that his bust would face that of Foch in the new Panthéon. Shivering with fever, ambition, and hate, deep and religious, of the conqueror, he stepped out on the airfield feeling, for the first time in his sixty-four years, an old man.

He distrusted Labenne. He knew that Labenne intended to lord it over the Department. Was that the end of his ambition? Each time he saw the Mayor he was forced, rigid with distaste, to recognise that he was looking at an intelligent and brutally fearless man.

“In the end,” he said drily, “we all have the same interests. They are the interests of France.”

“An unusual coincidence,” Labenne smiled.

The telephone rang. He listened. “For you,” he said to Thiviers, “a Dr. Charles-Gouraud. Excited or very angry.”

He watched Thiviers frowning nervously at the instrument. . . . “No, no,” he was saying, quietly, kindly, “I assure you . . . at least a fortnight, probably much longer. . . . We have
plenty of time. . . .” Labenne would have known he was lying, even if he had not seen the frown contradicting the soothing voice.

Thiviers put the receiver back, smoothed his forehead, and sat down. He is repairing his make-up, Labenne thought. “Will the Government stay in Bordeaux?” he asked.

“I think not,” Woerth said. “Never believe anyone who tells you that claret is a safe wine—three of the Under-Secretaries have twinges of gout already. . . . I'm interested. I've been offered a place in the new Government.”

“You'll accept?” Thiviers hid his envy. He did not want office, but all power wielded by others seemed robbed from him.

The news did not surprise Labenne. This morning he had learned that since the middle of May, Woerth had been secretly in touch with Weygand. He congratulated Woerth, as one cunning fellow to another. “No, you won't stay in Bordeaux,” he added slyly. “The terms include the handing over of all that coast—down to the Pyrénées.” He saw that he had chilled them. . . . Just as well to let them know—I too have friends. . . .

“You listen to the German wireless?” Woerth said, mocking him.

Labenne hid his resentment. This was one of the moments when he detested the other two for no sharper reason than that they were of good family. For good or evil, he was a peasant. Loyalty and treachery were rolled together in his peasant's soul. Had he been a simple traitor, he would have had fewer victims in his eye, lived less easily, and been unworthy to appear alone . . . at midnight. . . . He was loyal to one thing, his land; and he was as certain as death that in alliance with Germany the land itself of France would be safe—no more invaded. The fierce light could reach no deeper in him than this knot of lust and faith, inextricably tangled. It did not even reach the child who used to roll in the earth itself, trembling with love of it, of its warmth, scents, richness. . . .

Although Woerth had never spoken to him of his plans, he suspected them. He determined, as soon as he was in the Government himself, to get rid of him. In the meantime, he Would warn the proper German authority.

The telephone rang again. This time it was Woerth's Personal Assistant, Colonel Stoffel, to tell him that Piriac had
sent three tank groups across the bridge to reinforce Colonel Ollivier; he had also given orders for the Geulin bridge to be destroyed at eight o'clock. . . .

The general got up at once—he must see Piriac and have the orders countermanded. Thiviers left with him.

The sky had clouded over; a light warm rain was falling. At the corner of the Quai d'Angers, the car had to creep round people standing outside the terrace of the Café Buran; there was a wireless, dumb at the moment. The crowd had an air of waiting, suppliants in a furtive tragedy, for the priest to speak and tell it why it was being punished, and its children and houses, and denounce the guilty. In these faces there was no understanding, only bewilderment and bewildered relief. Two lost soldiers, loosed towards the barracks by the military police, were waiting there with the rest. One of them caught sight of Woerth.

Either ashamed of himself, or out of bravado, he shouted, “You could at least have given us a few guns.” The other swung round, hiding his face. Woerth did not glance at them.

“I've just learned,” Thiviers said, “that the officer commanding the troops at my works is a Lieutenant Aulard. I happen to know—and from Monsieur Bergeot himself—that he holds very unsound views. I should say he was completely unreliable.”

Woerth folded his hands. “I'll see to it.”

As soon as his visitors had gone, Labenne rang.

“Is Monsieur Vayrac waiting? Send him in.”

From the window in the next room, Vayrac had watched Thiviers and the general cross the courtyard. He wondered how much longer these two would think of Labenne as an ally. Not long. Where Labenne probed instantly to the weakness of a rival and pressed on it to ruin him, Vayrac's less powerful and subtler mind saw his strength. He was drawn to attack just here—partly because it was dangerous, partly because he knew that a man can recover from the humiliation of being a liar or
a coward, but not from having surrendered his secret strength, it might be kindness, or a refusal of honours (in the plural), or simply a delight in being alone or obscure. If I were a Minister and wanted to ruin Woerth, he thought, I'd help him to absolute power; in six months his subordinates would be forced to get rid of his justice even if they had to guillotine him.