Cloudless May (16 page)

“Have you any news?”

“No. The usual reports from the Dutch frontier.”

Mourey cut himself a slice of cheese and pressed it on bread. He ate slowly, feeling the rough smoothness of the goat cheese melt against his tongue. He relaxed. The faces of his friends, the room, the cube of evening sunlight blocking the door, seemed fixed in a moment outside time. I am happy, he thought: time is at an end. He drank a glass of the cloudy Vouvray and took a handful of strawberries. He watched Rienne's long narrow hand resting on the table, fingers at the stem of his glass, and thought: It is really a soldier's hand, or a saint's; I've seen it on a score of tombs; thank God there will always be hands like his in France.

Rienne was looking at his garden. Suddenly he stood up, and carrying his glass he went out. The other two followed him. The garden was filled with a drone of light, like a multitude of bees. Already the sun was behind the trees, throwing them darkly up to cover his retreat, and a pigeon flying above them was weighted with all the warmth of the day. It flew heavily and slowly.

“All the same,” Mourey said softly, “we shall hand on to our children only the ruins of a civilisation. Wait until Paris has been dealt with like Warsaw. And Chartres. . . . Oh, well.
Je regrette l' Europe aux anciens parapets....”

Letourneau moved clumsily in his chair; its bones cracked.

“It might,” he growled, “have been possible to refuse to fight. If our society had been Christian . . . we could have gone into the darkness for a time. Into catacombs. There are things that can't be saved by fighting. When our children's
great-grandchildren came out, they might have found them intact. . . . But—Christian or not—some men will always fight. Could we have deserted them?”

“You couldn't,” Rienne said.

“This—of all wars—was forced on us. We were choosing between it and barbarism. . . . So Chartres may perish—but the faith it sprang from, and the love, will have been saved . . . again . . . and by your son and father and their wife-mother, Bonamy. ...”

“Do you think so?” Mourey exclaimed. “I wish I could believe that men rise from the dead. Especially the young dead.” He looked at his companions, from one to the other. “You're too much alike—you two.”

Rienne smiled and shook his head.

“No. To tell you the truth, I hate war,” he said.

“Oh, so do I. But if these swine win they'll educate our children—and foul their minds. That's unbearable.”

“Every reasonable man,” Letourneau said, “Christian or pagan, must hate war.”

Rienne shook his head again.

“Neither of you knows war as I do,” he said. “I have no other life. I was educated to make war, my life hasn't any separate meaning. It happens I can tell myself that our enemy hates the very things that are more important than my life or a million lives. The Germans hate liberty, they hate the idea of equality and justice. The fact remains—we can't choose our weapons to defend them. Modern weapons are inexcusably hideous. Modern war is inexcusable.”

He had spoken in his usual quiet voice. He was not, like Mourey, living between despair and curiosity. His mind was steady on its course, like a compass. But he must have held something back from his surrender of himself. In spite of itself his voice gave him away.

The priest did not look at him. “Tell yourself,” he said, “again, what it is the enemy believes. He believes that force rules the world. So he denies all the agony of civilisation, all the sweat of men's minds. But he goes further. He denies the agony of Christ—he denies love.” He turned his head to look at Mourey. “Your dead young men are dying for Christ, who died for all men.”

“And what if we're defeated?” Mourey said in a dry voice.

Agathe, who had come out with the half-emptied basket of strawberries, dropped it. The small crimson berries ran over the grass and stones. Mourey made a move to help her to pick them up.

“No, no,” she stammered, kneeling, “let be, let be, I can do it.”

“If the human spirit goes down into poverty and suffering, and takes love with it,” said Letourneau, “it can do as much as was done by a handful of fishermen. Why not?”

“Then why fight?” Mourey said, with bitter energy.

“Nothing for nothing, my dear Jean! We French must fight to the last French boy, to deserve a new life. . . . It's not only France. . . . Though the world isn't anything we care about, we must save the world. . . . Don't be afraid, Christianity won't perish—the only question is what a Christian must do to help. It's easy to die. It's hard to kill.”

“Yes,” Rienne said. He was silent. “If I were a young officer,” he said at last, “I should work a transfer to the Air Force—as a bombing pilot. Since someone must do that job, I'd rather do it myself.”

“That's not humility,” the priest said, with a quick smile.

“No. I know. But it's not pride. I'm a professional soldier. If things like this must be done I ought to do them.”

Mourey looked at him with a smile that was all affection.

“My dear Bonamy,” he said warmly, “not a single one of our leaders—ministers, politicians, bankers—would have the faintest idea what you're talking about.”

“You're too cynical,” Rienne said. “Think of a man like Emile Bergeot. There you have an official—a politician, if you like—who is absolutely incorruptible. He's intelligent, hardworking, brave. I sincerely wish he were head of the Government. You'd soon see a change in France.”

Neither of his friends said anything. They didn't contradict him, they let him talk.

The light was going, leaving behind it only deceit and the scent of Agathe's herbs. A cock crowed. A calm warmth rose from the dry earth. Bent strongly above the countryside, the sky loosed one bird, then another, and another, directly at the pike in the mill-pond: distant trees pretended to come nearer:
the fields at the other side of the Loire became so smooth and unwrinkled that there was nothing for the eyes to rest on. Rienne closed his; he felt himself safe between his friends, the schoolmaster and the priest, as between the two arms of the country. They were not even sceptic and saint, because both were poor and devoted. Both were arrogant, humble, quickwitted. He relied on them. They were his war comrades. They were not, like Émile Bergeot, a nerve joining him to his childhood.

His sister had finished her work and come out again. She moved about the little garden, stooping over the patch of herbs and touching the rim of the well with her old woman's thickened hand. Now and then she said something. She was talking about Rienne. He had always been good. No, he never cried. When he spread his hand out, all five fingers apart, it was not like any ordinary hand, it was more a flower.

“What can you be talking about, Agathe?” Rienne said.

“About you when you were a boy,” the old woman said calmly.

She had an endless store of memories and anecdotes about his childhood, but they all related to his first week, and she was too simple and truthful to invent others to fill the gap between her last glimpse of him in his foster-mother's arm and her next, when he was a young man of twenty-five. One long day separated the two, filled with events she never troubled to sort out. She had been cold, scorched, hungry, sleepy, her back ached, the ends of her fingers split open, she altered a dress, took the pins out of her hair, noticed that it was dry and losing its colour, smiled, groaned, rubbing her knees, and carried a sprig of thyme to church in the palm of her black gloves.

“He was sitting facing the door when I came in,” she said, “and so tall I thought he would strike his head when he stood up.”

She went back into the house. Mourey and Letourneau got up to go away. Until they went she could not go to bed. She had fastened the shutters of the room already and it was nearly dark there. Rienne stood in the door to watch them go away together, Mourey marching like a soldier and the priest slouching along beside him. He turned back into the house and took his candle to climb up to the loft where he slept.

“Good-night, Agathe,” he said.

“Good-night, sleep well.”

He slept as soon as he lay down. When he woke—at four o'clock—he looked out of the loft door, his window. An unusually clear dawn—unusual in that the mist from the river had already vanished, without leaving a mark on a cloudless sky or any other colour except the colour of light—set everything in its proper place; the sounds—a jay chattering, a far-off aeroplane; the sights—housetops, a neighbour's few vines, the roof of the well. Nothing was distorted or diminished: wherever he looked, there was only colour and logic. For once, a day had started off properly, without a hitch. Rienne breathed in the scents of this familiar countryside. Nothing, he thought, can go badly today. He felt a solid assurance of happiness. It came from every side, from the invisible Loire, from the fields and vineyards, and from his newly alert senses. Wakened by his footsteps overhead, Agathe was already making the coffee. He smelled it. How fatuous to talk about defeat, he thought, stretching his arms.

He went down, drank his coffee, and set off to walk to Seuilly. It was almost six when he reached the barracks. A slip of paper was laid on his table. General Ligny wanted to see him at once. He went, and Ligny read out to him the message received an hour since. The general read very slowly. Rienne had time to notice the title of the book Ligny had been reading in bed. It lay face downward on the blanket, open.
Les Voyages de Gulliver.
Where had he been escaping to when the news reached him that the Boches had invaded Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland?

Ligny folded the message neatly and placed it in his book as a mark.

“Are we going to wait until they attack us?” Rienne asked.

“No,” Ligny said. He sighed. “I had a presentiment when I woke this morning that something disagreeable would happen.”

“I can't say I had, sir.”

“Ah,” Ligny said, smiling, “you haven't learned to read backwards. Wait till you're my age. By then you won't have anywhere else to look. Have some coffee.”

A Week later, on Wednesday evening, Rienne went to the Prefecture. Bergeot was out when he arrived, and his secretary had no idea where he was.

“He's doing everything possible to kill himself,” Lucien said. “He starts work at six. He's still at it at midnight, alone in his office. Yesterday, at the Council meeting, he turned giddy and everyone noticed it. He won't let me work after ten. The truth is, I fell asleep one night when he was dictating to me. Next morning I woke lying on the floor, under a rug, with his jacket rolled up under my head. I shall never forgive myself.”

Rienne smiled. He saw that the young man's pride had suffered from his failure, and said gently,

“It's so much easier to keep awake at my age. How many nights had you been up?”

“Three,” Lucien said. “If I had been a sentry I should have been shot. Shouldn't I?”

“Yes. You don't imagine that the Prefect would rather have had you shot for being human than lend you his jacket? . . . What is he doing?”

“Preparing the town for air raids. You know, not a tenth enough cellars are ready. And arranging to move children and old people, and the hospital—only if things get worse. And all his usual work, of course. He wants the town to be able to stand a siege—so to speak.”

“Why not the Mayor——?”

Lucien frowned. “Didn't you know? He's ill. He has sciatica. I may say it hasn't spoiled his appetite. I went there with some papers yesterday, and when I was waiting outside the room his servant came out with the head, tail and backbone of a salmon. He must have eaten the whole of it, and drunk a couple of bottles of claret. You're not going to tell me he couldn't do a little work!”

Rienne did not answer. He suspected that Labenne had always grudged Bergeot the credit for energy and devotion, and meant to hinder him. If at the same time he did the town harm he would excuse himself by pretending that the Prefect
had usurped his place. Labenne was the perfect egoist. He did not even want to be popular. He only wanted power.

“Tell the Prefect I came.”

Lucien walked with him into the courtyard. It seemed that the splendour of this spring was going to last for ever. Week after week of cloudless blue, an unflawed warmth resting on the ground like an enamel, on the trees, on the bodies of human beings. These could be excused for thinking that nature was standing aside to avoid getting in the way of events. Rienne looked at the chestnuts, the tarnishing of their flowers seemed the effect of a painter, and at the sky—at nine in the evening almost as tyrannical as at midday.

“Perfect tank weather,” he said.

Lucien looked at him and said diffidently,

“According to the wireless, the Boches have crossed the Meuse. Is it serious?”

Rienne did not know what to say to him. He forgot for a moment that Lucien was not a soldier, and saw him, with his smooth brick-red skin and clumsy hands, simply as a young Frenchman, ignorant, obedient, reasonable. Say to him that in a few days, almost in a few hours, he had been separated rudely from his past, from all the Frenchmen, obscure or known to him, of that past—from Molière, Rodin, Foch, as brutally as from the faceless dead of the last war? Rienne thought steadily for a minute about the scene in General Piriac's room this evening. Ligny was there, but not Woerth. He had been ordered to read aloud the message from Paris. He began. The bridges across the Meuse were not destroyed, and German tanks and guns crossed them in column after column. On this side they found a few ill-trained badly-led troops. . . . Piriac stopped him by the same gesture of his hands that he made when he was scattering salt on his food. Did he think the news needed it?

“Hand me over the paper,” he said.

He read it to himself, his lips moving slightly, tracing the words with a finger, like a child pretending to read.