Cloudless may, p.6
Cloudless May, page 6
“This war,” she said, with despair.
Poverty had its clear image in her mind: the bed with tumbled sheets pushed against a wall, the noises of the street splitting her skull as though her skull were the walls of the room, the print on the soles of her feet of the stringy carpet. To be tumbled back to it, she thought: at my age. She knew she had lost the resilience and greedy strength of her body.
She tried to lose herself in an image of the Loire, flowing in darkness at the other side of the shutters, in the night of France, offering—to the Atlantic on one side, on the other to the enemy—its valleys and high pastures, its cathedrals, old and new houses, vines, olives, walnuts, its Maginot line of thrift and freedom, and the bodies of its men and children. But her nerves were on edge. She began to be angry with Émile… . It was after midnight when she heard him coming along the corridor, and at once forgot her annoyance in the urgency of what she had to say to him.
He was tired. He seated himself on the side of the bed and said vehemently,
“That old fool Piriac. What d’you think he wanted?”
“Flattery.”
“Of course. He read me his speech to the League of Frenchwomen next Tuesday. About Joan of Arc, of course, and terribly muddled. I think he believes sometimes that he’s fighting the English. I tried to talk to him about the war, but it was useless. After two minutes he was hearing voices… . Rest me.”
He leaned back, with his head on her shoulder. Putting her hand on his forehead, she felt the blood beating in his temples. “You do far too much. When is this war going to end?”
“I don’t know. Not for years.”
“We ought to think about our future,” she said calmly. “Thiviers thinks we ought to put some of our money in America, so that we’re not ruined at the end of the war. Or if we’re defeated. He can arrange it for us. I told him to send as much of mine away as he can, at once.”
Bergeot frowned and sat up. “Do you know what you’re doing? It will be a frightful scandal if you’re found out. I couldn’t protect you. And apart from that, it’s abominably unpatriotic. You’d better see Thiviers tomorrow and tell him you’ve changed your mind. You must.”
She did not answer. What did he see when he thought of poverty? Not a shabby dress, stained under the arms, not his wife bending over a pan at the sink, her nails scraping into the cracks. Patriotism—a cloud floating at a great height, and men gaping at it.
She slipped easily into her part, the more easily that she was absolutely sincere.
“Why have you moved? Please listen, my darling. We’ve had four years. We’ve been happy. Why? Not simply because we have each other, but because you have your work. Would you be satisfied with an ordinary life? Never. And you need money, enough to be independent: it’s the same in politics as in everything else, if you have money, and don’t need help, people will offer to help you. You want to get on in politics, don’t you? You won’t do it as a poor man. You must be safe—and for us, too, so that we can be happy, and grow to look like each other. Old husbands and wives do, you know… . Let Robert send part of your money to the States. You can trust him, he’s fond of you.”
She let two tears roll over her cheeks. “Have you a handkerchief?” she said, smiling. She turned her head away, so that her tears ran into the pillow. She was crying without a sound. “My life hasn’t been easy,” she said, with her poor little smile.
Émile bent over her. “My dear love. What is it?”
“You could make us safe,” she said, pressing his cheek against hers. “It’s much easier than listening to an old idiot pretending to be Joan of Arc. You haven’t a great deal of money, it will make no difference to the country—and to me, all the difference between happiness and a dreadful anxiety.”
“Very well,” he said quietly. “I agree.”
She was afraid of rousing mistrust and resentment in him if she showed her thankfulness. But her relief was so great, now that she had relaxed, that it showed in her face; it became paler and older. He saw it; and the conviction that he had made a grave mistake vanished, in his pity for her. To reassure her—she might think he had made a sacrifice—he turned brusquely to something else.
“What did you do today?” he asked.
“I had lunch with Léonie,” she said gratefully. “She wants you to speak to your friend Mathieu about Edgar. If the police were sure they could do it quietly, they would release him—provisionally—” She was deliberately being clumsy, so that he could get rid on Léonie of his resentment and doubts. And she would be able to tell Léonie that she had done her best.
“My God, I like her impudence,” he said, with sudden fury. “The fellow is a common swindler. He hasn’t been charged with spying or he wouldn’t be sitting comfortably in prison. But I shouldn’t be surprised if he were a German agent—at least an Italian one. And I’m told he had a brothel in Nantes. And she wants to loose him on society again. I won’t do a thing to help her.”
“He’s her son,” she murmured.
“Then she’s responsible for him,” Bergeot said. “Don’t let’s talk about him.”
He undressed and came back to her. Almost as soon as he lay down he fell asleep, but she was awake for a long time, reluctant to move the arm she had stretched under his head. With her free hand she felt his side and shoulder and the back of his head. The bones were very close under his skin: she felt afraid; it is so easy to kill men; their thin covering of skin is no cover. An accident, a trifle of violence, and Émile’s courage and nervous life would slip out. Take care of him, take care of him, she said soundlessly—speaking to the featureless severity she believed in. She felt heavy with her faults, lies, cowardice, greed. Nothing in her was sound except her love for Émile, her ambitions for Émile, her pleasure in Émile… . She moved, drawing away her arm.
Chapter 8
Lucien Sugny took his morning coffee on to the north terrace. The sun—it was not seven o’clock yet—was already the same no-colour, the colour of molten heat, as the sky. Light sprang back from the roofs of houses at the foot of the cliff, from the Loire itself, and ripples of light were beginning to mask the town and the fields beyond the town. Lucien thought, as he did every morning at this time, that his life was perfect: he would have run the length of the terrace if he had not been afraid that even out here, at this hour, he could be seen. He sat still, the figure of a sober secretary… . Seuilly had been taken by the Germans—except the Prefecture, which was holding out on its cliff: his job was to fire off the machine-gun at the head of the slope while the Prefect and Mme de Freppel, in the dress she had worn at dinner, slipped away. He was wounded. She came running back—Lucien, you’re hurt!—No, Marguerite, I’m dying. Or should it be, No, I’m dying, Madame …? Her lips brushed his, she leaned her warm body along his, rapidly growing cold … You could invent something more original, he thought angrily. Need you, because you’re not a soldier, become an idiot?
He rushed indoors and switched on the wireless in time to hear the communiqué. A patrol encounter east of the Moselle ended to our advantage. There have been more artillery actions east of the Vosges. The German High Command states that two British planes were brought down in the North Sea… . That was all. Except for the French and the Germans, the two invariable actors, Europe had nothing it wanted to say: there were no signals from Norway: in Spain, no Republican peasants had been released from prison to work in the olive fields; the Italians, except an orator who demanded Marseilles, because it was Roman—why not the whole of France, to the Loire?—were quiet; Poland and Czechoslovakia were as quiet as death. All Europe—apart from a patch of ground near the Moselle, another in the Vosges, and an undefined patch of the North Sea—was perfectly peaceful; men stretching themselves in the early sun, women moving about their houses… . Lucien switched off. He went out again. The sunlight tickled the back of his neck; he turned round to feel its fingers on his face … What am I missing by staying here? Obviously nothing.
Later in the morning, Mme de Freppel came into his room from the Prefect’s. He jumped up, dropping a file of papers; it opened, they slid over the floor and he had to stoop, knocking his glasses off on the edge of the chair. He groped for them with a cry of horror.
“Are they broken?” Mme de Freppel asked.
“I don’t know. No. Thank heaven.”
“But, child, they could have been mended,” she said, laughing at him.
Lucien did not care to explain that by the time he had sent two-thirds of his small salary to his mother to help her with the younger children, what was left scarcely mended his shoes and bought him half an hour at a café twice a week. There was no virtue in his generosity; it was habit; before he could speak, when he was cutting his teeth on his father’s clumsy silver watch, he had noticed that everything went round in the family circle. He blinked politely at Mme de Freppel, then put his glasses on and saw her clearly again. She was still beautiful. And he had nothing to give her. He looked at the window and offered her the immense bell of the sky tolling sunlight, with the branches of the magnolia across the dusty panes and half-open shutters.
“A magnificent day.”
“You ought to be outside,” Mme de Freppel said kindly.
Did she mean he ought to be in the army? But he knew that. Closing his eyes, he said rapidly,
“If you would only persuade the Prefect to send me away. It’s all nonsense about my eyesight. I saw a tank officer in glasses yesterday. After all, you sit in the tank, you drive it over everything, it’s not a question of avoiding things. In a tank I couldn’t conceivably go wrong. …”
He heard her laugh. When he looked at her, she patted his cheek with a cool hand.
“Goodness, Lucien, you’re burning,” She laid her hand on his forehead. “No, you’re all right, it’s only your cheeks.”
The young man felt himself turning giddy. He stood still, enduring his uncomfortable happiness, beating his mind for something to say. She would think him a bore.
“You agree that I ought to be fighting?” he said stiffly.
“Not for a minute.”
“All my friends are in the army. I don’t like to sit here in luxury when they … why must you laugh?”
“Your idea of luxury, my poor child. Shut up here to wear your suit out. They could at least give you a leather chair. Shall I ask for one for you? I’m very good at asking.”
“You ought not to need to ask,” Lucien said quietly, “you should be given … everything … you’re too good.”
“That’s charming.”
Lucien was seized by a rash self-confidence. “I should like to get into the army,” he said, frowning at her, “because of the others. For everything else, I would rather stay where I can see you.”
“Now you’re really talking nonsense,” Mme de Freppel said lightly. “I came to ask you for something, a little notepaper—no, not the plain. I want something impressive. Give me some sheets of your official notepaper.”
Lucien handed over a packet. He felt extremely uncomfortable, but dared not refuse. Besides, if he had done wrong, it was for her; that itself was exhilarating. When she had gone he felt the room too small to hold him and rushed to open the shutters. Let the sun try to knock him down. He took his jacket off; then, remembering the neat patches on his shirt, put it on again quickly. …
Mme de Freppel wrote two letters:
“Léonie, my love, I spoke to Émile last night about Edgar. He’s not enthusiastic, he seems to know something, perhaps you’d better have fewer nieces to stay with you for the next month or two, if you can curb your generous soul. I’ll talk to him again, I’ve no doubt I can bring him round in time. Léonie, what strange lives we have had. Sometimes I dream I’m young, I see myself in a glass, my face smooth, and such colour, too. Last night I dreamed we were in a field, I caught my foot and fell, there was water under the grass and I was choking, drowning. I thought you would drag me out. But you didn’t move …”
Why am I writing such nonsense? she thought, frowning. She tore off the last lines and scribbled, “Now for your friend Sadinsky. He means to go into politics, I can see that. If I help him to get his spoon into the dish, what is there in it for me? Love. M. de F.”
To Sadinsky she wrote civilly that she had been thinking about his Joan of Arc League. Was the deputy’s wife really the best patroness? The way to approach her would be to make a gift to one of her war charities, a handsome gift. “But do not give away any money until I advise you. If you have money, you can buy anything in France. Believe me, I shall do my best to help you.”
Signing her name, she smiled. I’m cleverer than most people, she thought, excited.
She went out on to the terrace. It was too hot to stand here, and it was happiness. All the roads of the province, she could see two of them sauntering to see what they could pick up in the way of trees, villages, small woods, all the fields in which only women and old men were left to labour, the empty village streets, blanched by the sun, came to an end in her. She felt an impulse to take the train and look at the towns where she had been starved as a child; she would show them that compared with her they were helpless. And, too, there she had been young.
One of these days, she thought, Émile and I will be living in Paris.
Chapter 9
Rienne finished the letter he was writing to his sister, and placed it at the side of his desk, for his orderly. The man would look here and nowhere else. He knew Rienne’s habits—for the matter of that, they had not changed since the Poly-technique, where he taught himself to keep on two shelves all he possessed. He picked up the book he was reading: a bound copy of Servitude et grandeur militaires. Absurd to say that he was reading it; he had read it only once, the first time, when he was a cadet. Since then he listened to Vigny as an older experienced friend, they were together in the last war. He saw to it that Vigny shared all his tastes, for simple classical music, Anjou wine, black honey. Thanks to Vigny, he had never fallen into the error of hoping to be rewarded for making courage his profession: since it was his duty to kill men, he killed, but he never pretended to be their judge.
After a minute, he put the book away on its shelf, took up his tunic and was fastening it when Bergeot came in. They dined together at least one evening a week.
“I’m late.”
“You’re always late,” Rienne said. “You were late every time I bought tickets for a play. The whole time we were in Paris together, when you were at the Law School, I never saw a first act——”
“And you always said it must have been the best,” Bergeot grinned. He sat on the edge of the bed, amused and alert. As always, his friend’s monastic room roused in him an impulse the rest of his life cancelled. Why not give up everything, the distractions, the frightful nuisance of other people? With miserly care he could live on the interest from his savings. He could write—he had always wanted to… . And Marguerite? … His impulse mocked him. You living out of sight! Without excitements, ambition, notice. You a poor scholar! He rushed back head-first into the appalling confusion of his life.
“Where shall we go?” Rienne asked.
“We always go to Buran’s. Don’t you like it?”
It vexed Rienne to have to explain that he no longer felt comfortable in the Hôtel Buran, where none of the prohibitions were obeyed, and you could order anything you liked. The orders, he knew nothing about it, might be silly, but they were orders. Outside the hotel they were enforced: a workman could not sit drinking brandy every day of the week.
“Very well.” When they were crossing the courtyard he said, as if it had just struck him, “Why not go to Marie’s for once? She needs the money.”
Bergeot shrugged his shoulders. “If you like.”
It was still airlessly hot; the evening had stretched itself along the Loire, without finding there any freshness. They sauntered. “I have something to ask you,” Rienne said. “You know the internment camp at Geulin——”
Bergeot made a wry face. “Too well. The medical officer reported this week that sixteen more of the men have died. Influenza. I ask you—in this weather! I asked him why he didn’t inoculate the rest, but it seems there’s no serum, or none to spare. Well, they must die. I can’t save them.”
“There’s one man I want to save, an ex-Imperial officer called Uhland. Joachim von Uhland. Mathieu vouches for him. I want you to get him out.”
An ironical look crossed Bergeot’s face. “Louis? Why doesn’t he come to me himself?”
“You know as well as I do. He can’t bring himself to ask favours.”
“He asked you… . No, no, let him ask.”
Rienne smiled. “When are you going to forgive him for taking the history mentions away from you? Good heavens, it’s thirty-three years.”
Bergeot frowned with annoyance and resentment, then shook himself and burst out laughing. If he had not laughed, he would have suffered: his self-esteem was nearer the surface than any of his other qualities except a nervous pity, the mildest touch reached it.
“Very well, I’ll find out about your Boche,” he said boisterously: “if he’s in order I’ll slip him out. But tell Louis not to dodge me. As for his history medal—it hasn’t got him very far, Has it?”
They had reached the café at the end of the embankment. It was closed. A scrap of paper had been fastened to the shutter —Open tomorrow. Marie came out, followed so closely by a soldier that he knocked into her when she stopped to speak to Rienne. Only two evenings ago she had been shabby. Now, when she no longer needed it to heighten her colour, she had tied a scarlet handkerchief at her throat and covered her white blouse by a jacket with scarlet buttons. She was radiant. Hatless, she had smoothed her hair with a piece of silk until it shone. As soon as she saw Rienne she moved her hands in the gesture of a young woman showing off her child.
“You see, he’s here. He came this afternoon. Until tomorrow. We have until then, but first we must go and see his mother.” She caught sight of the Prefect behind Rienne’s shoulder, and turned the colour of her handkerchief. “Excuse me,” she murmured.
