Cloudless May (71 page)

He went in to Labenne. “Did you see my friends?” the Mayor said, smiling. “One of them is a pious fool and the other a rascal of a general.”

“One of them is enduring and the other honest,” Vayrac said.

“You don't say so!” Labenne said ironically. “Why don't you add that our honest general has his uses? I'm told that the Germans are having to fight at Orléans—no doubt they'll destroy it—and that the bridges from Orléans to Nevers have been blown up. Your honest general is going to see to it that the bridge here is intact, so that the Germans can come in peacefully, as friends, without doing any damage as enemies.”

“When?”

“I should think tomorrow—the 18th. . . . We shall see whether Woerth's vanity is much good to him, and how Thiviers endures being put in his place. And our dear Huet—have you discovered that he is honest? Or only charming? . . . Here, look over these notes I've made—billeting, precautions, police, and the rest of it.”

Vayrac read slowly. He had been surprised by the bitterness of Labenne's hatred. He knew that the Mayor's ambition was without bounds, but he was a good father; that he could be bribed, but he was at bottom careless and mistrustful of money; that he considered himself infinitely more important than any idea—the idea of freedom, for example, or justice—but he was not vain. Yet he had just shown himself resentful and vindictive—in Vayrac's experience these were always the marks of an outraged vanity. Without looking up from his papers, he said,

“You don't trust Thiviers and the other?”

“Of course not,” Labenne said calmly, “they are not small enough.”

Vayrac was content. He had discovered Labenne's strength—his gift of sight: he measured men by their relative sizes, not by anything else he guessed in them, not even by their vices,
which he saw and used. . . . Now if I want to assassinate you, Monsieur Labenne, I shall take care to choose a day of blinding sunlight when everything, every building, every fingernail on a man's hand, is so clear that you look through them and don't see what is going on in my hand. . . .

“Have you finished?”

“Yes, Monsieur Labenne.”

Labenne took a sheet of notepaper out of a drawer and pushed it across the desk. “No romanticism,” he said quietly. “We're both sensible mature men, we don't get rid of people for frivolous reasons. But there are certain men in Seuilly who must be made harmless. I'm not in favour of imprisonment at the present time, it has always seemed to me one of the indulgences a society can afford itself when it is perfectly secure. In times of breakdown like this it's much wiser to make sure of your opponents—even the unimportant ones. . . . And when the Germans will shoot them for us. . . . I want you to write down some names. No, no, not names like Woerth or Huet. A man like Woerth has to be killed openly—an assassination, a bomb thrown into his car . . . in spite of all police precautions. . . . As for Huet, I can ruin our good deputy when I like.” He scratched his armpit. “You can only blackmail a man once,” he said meditatively.

“You think so?” Vayrac said.

“To be effective.”

“What are your names?”

Labenne scratched his arms. “Yes, yes, begin. Mathieu, Louis. . . .”

•   •   •   •   •   •   •   •

When he left Labenne, Vayrac thought he might call on Mme Huet. She received him, this time, in her own sitting-room; full of bowls of white scented roses; and darkened, although it was raining, by sun-blinds. While she talked, she stripped a rose of its thorns. She tried on him all her graces of the provincial aristocrat finished in Paris. It amused him for a time. Bored, he wanted to see how she would behave when she was frightened.

“I saw your friend, Saint-Jouin, as I came here.”

“Oh, he's back?” Mme Huet said, turning the rose in her fingers.

“He was acting as maid of honour to General Woerth.”

“Very suitable,” Mme Huet smiled.

Vayrac glanced at her. “Don't laugh at him, you're very fond of the fellow, I know that; I'm not blind.”

“Perhaps not, but you're stupid, and a little ill-bred,” Mme Huet said.

“You don't ask me how I knew. From Saint-Jouin himself.”

He watched her eyelids quiver—that was the shock to her pride. She smiled—that was real grief. And a touch of fear. Her hands were steady, she held the rose away from her, examining it in the weak light. Very easily broken, Vayrac thought: destroy her pride, force her to submit to brutality, make her need it, neglect her and let her lie sleepless, afraid to cry because that wrinkles the eyelids, give her time to look at the ugly residue of herself but not time to do without me—until the day when I can do without her; which pray heaven isn't too far off. . . . He took her hand. She made a slight movement, then let it lie passive.

“Saint-Jouin is a young scoundrel, without any intelligence or kindness. You have very beautiful hands, my dear . . . Andrée.” It was true.

Mme Huet did not answer. She was silent not because Vayrac attracted her, nor only because she was thinking anxiously of Saint-Jouin's indiscretion. But she had felt, suddenly, the void in her life. She had made it herself when she decided to turn her back on most of her past: on afternoons in the warmth of a rough garden shaded by elms, on her music mistress tweaking her pigtail when she played wrong notes, on her first theatre, her first great man—she would never be able to say again, “The day I met Manet”—her first love-affair—with the son of the doctor in the village, he was killed in the last war—on her mother and foster-mother, on all the scattered shards buried in the oldest layers of her past, meaningless, except to her, enduring, since they alone, in her neglect of them, would survive her other memories. All these were now lost. . . . She looked up and saw Vayrac in front of her.

Bergeot was looking through papers in the room Marguerite had always called hers. It had the advantage that he could go into his own room, take an armful of files, and carry them easily the short distance to hers: the disadvantage that he knew each time she rang up—and before he heard his secretary's voice slide from formality to a desperate coldness . . . “No, Madame, I can't disturb him, he refuses to be disturbed. No, there is no other message except the one I . . . no, Madame, he can't see anyone. . . .” Bergeot blocked his ears. Ashamed, he took his hands away and forced himself to go on reading. He heard Lucien put back the receiver. His pity for her became anger. That she could go on torturing him and herself. . . . Then exhaustion—there was nothing more he could feel.

The heap of letters and papers he intended to burn before the Germans came in—he supposed, even if Piriac did resist, that it would only be three or four days—was already large. Every letter which could bring the writer under suspicion, either by the Germans or Labenne, must be found and destroyed. The normal work of the Prefecture had stopped. When he went out of his room he saw little groups of clerks and officials standing about talking. A number of them were missing, they had left Seuilly with their families. Most of them treated Bergeot with cautious respect, but a few were markedly rude. He took no notice of either demonstration.

Suddenly he decided to telephone to Labenne about the shortage of bread—so many bakers had left. He would find out from his answers whether Labenne believed that Piriac was going to fight. After Lucien had rung up several times, the Mayor came to the telephone and said he had no time to speak to M. Bergeot.

Towards seven o'clock, one of the clerks who had left to go home came back and said the police had posted notices announcing that the Germans would enter Seuilly tomorrow. The notice ended with the terrifying words: “Citizens are advised, in their own interests, and to avoid any undue severity, to keep calm. . . .” Calm was the only emotion not started. The
most sensible, the calmest, were the first to begin running home to collect their goods and families. It means us, they said—what they had seen printed was the sum of their repressed fears. The clerk had said that in one street, where the people had broken into shops in search of food to take with them, soldiers were keeping order.

Furious, Bergeot telephoned to the police. The only person able to speak to him was a certain Inspector Drigeard. Bergeot ordered him to remove the notices,

“They came from the Town Hall,” Drigeard answered politely: “the Mayor gave the order to post them.”

“I am cancelling the Mayor's order.”

“No one,” Drigeard said, “could be sorrier than I am to doubt whether you are in a position to give orders.”

Before Bergeot could reply, he was cut off. His anger was frozen in him by despair and his feeling of humiliation. Leaving his papers, he went into Lucien's room and sat there without moving, almost without thinking. His mind had ceased to be in touch with his feelings.

His secretary went on turning over the files, trying to pick out the incriminating letters and documents. He mistrusted his knowledge. But he was afraid to talk to Bergeot. A little after nine o'clock, the porter came upstairs, and beckoned him.

“What is it?” Lucien asked.

For answer, the old man drew him out of the room towards the stairs. “I can't manage her,” he murmured, “you must come. . . .” Mme de Freppel had followed him. She was coming slowly along the corridor. As soon as she saw Lucien she quickened her step and marched on him. Lucien drew back. Desperate and ridiculous, he stood in the doorway of the Prefect's room; he was crimson, his heart seemed to be beating at the back of his knees. He looked anywhere but at her face. She was wearing a fur cloak; he looked at the drops of rain glittering on it.

“Where is the Prefect?”

“He's not working in his room—for the very reason that he doesn't want to be interrupted—”

“That's enough,” Mme de Frefppel said. “Tell him I'm here.”

“I can't”

“Are you trying to keep me out?” Mme de Freppel said, with contempt. “You must have gone off your head—or are you playing at soldiers? Tell Monsieur Bergeot at once.”

Lucien was surprised by his indifference to her. “I can't,” he repeated; “the Prefect's orders—”

“Lucien,” Mme de Freppel said, in a gentler voice, “look at me.”

He looked, and saw a worn face, almost ugly. His indifference melted in pity: stammering terribly, he tried to tell her that she must go away for her own sake, when the Germans came they wouldn't let anyone leave, she would be trapped.

“And do you think I'm going to leave without seeing him—without one word? What you must think of me!”

The young man defended himself against this voice with difficulty. He was in despair. It was despair that made him—when she laid her hand on his arm and asked, “Why can't I come in?”—answer,

“For the sake of Seuilly.”

Mme de Freppel took her hand away and boxed his ear with it. She had an astonishing force in her wrists. It threw Lucien off his balance for a moment; during this moment she sprang past him into the Prefect's empty room and ran to look in her own. It, too, was empty. She came back into the middle of Bergeot's and looked round her with eyes reflecting nothing. Lucien watched in horror. He had never felt so incapable. The responsibility he thought he had gained deserted him; he was only ashamed of his efforts to defeat her. Have I the right? he thought, trembling. He felt himself ignorant, a lout. An obstinacy deeper in him than his pity and even than his feeling of shame kept him from speaking. Mme de Freppel did not look at him again. She went just outside the door, into the corridor.

“Émile!” she called. “Émile!”

Lucien shuddered. If this is a tragedy, it is almost bestial, he thought. He tried not to listen.

Mme de Freppel came back into the room. Now she seemed calmer; its dullness was leaving her face; she looked simply unhappy and anxious. She took off her fur cape and, handling it as if it were a child, laid it on a chair.

“Tomorrow, you'll see that this is returned to Caillemer's,” she said drily. “I can't pay for it.”

Lucien heard the Prefect's steps in the corridor. She heard them at the same time and did not move. Bergeot came in, looking at her. They stood and looked at each other in silence.

Neither of them heard Lucien go out clumsily, knocking against the chairs. He blundered along the passage without noticing that the porter was still there. “Yes, you may cry,” the old man grumbled. So that is what's the matter with me, Lucien thought, as if it explained everything. . . .

Bergeot, too, was seeing a worn tired woman, almost ugly. But he saw a woman he had made ugly and unsure of herself—without recognising the pleasure this gave him. He pitied her and did not move towards her. Even if it would comfort her—it did not occur to him that it might—he felt drily that it was foolish to take this beaten disappointed woman in his arms.

“My poor girl,” he said.

“You were going to let me go alone,” she answered in a rough voice. “Why?”

Bergeot made a despairing gesture. “How could I live with myself if I bolted the day before the Germans attack Seuilly?”

She caught the echo of Rienne's voice. Even in her exhaustion, she was too adroit to speak about him. That would only bring him into the room against her. “But what can you do here?” she said, with an air of simplicity.

“Nothing.”

He expected her to cry out against his selfishness, scold him for putting his false honour before their happiness and the whole of their life together: he stiffened himself to endure contempt, anger, pleading. But she looked at her hands and said in a humble voice,

“Did you think I could drive myself all the way to Hendaye? I'm such a bad driver.”

He had never thought about this. Disgusted with'himself, and overcome by bitterness—it seemed the only feeling left him—he cried,