Cloudless May (52 page)

On his way to the Prefecture he puzzled over Piriac's statement that he had had no orders yet to expect the active defence of the Loire. If it were true, it could only mean that the General Staff did not expect defeat on the Seine. His heart sank. If he were not, after all, to be in the front line. he would have to go on struggling with his colleagues and his patron Thiviers. . . .

Lucien Sugny was in his room, at the telephone. Sighing with relief, he handed over the receiver. “Paris is coming on the line, sir.” It was Bergeot's only close friend in the Government. All the Ministries were packing to move to Tours this evening. ...

When he put the receiver down, Bergeot's eyes sparkled; his face was one triumphant smile, as his tired little body was a rod of ambition. He told Lucien the news. “Now for it,” he said calmly, joyously.

Lucien could not speak. He was suffocated by his admiration.

The first thing Labenne saw when he went out the next morning, were Bergeot's notices. They had been posted overnight. He read one through, catching hold of a passer-by to read it with him. “Do you see yourself with your wife's broom sweeping up German tanks?” he asked him. “I'm lucky, I have my Louis-Philippe cannon”—he jerked his head at the gun mounted in the courtyard. The man laughed. Good, Labenne said to himself, he'll repeat that as his own.

He went directly to Thiviers.

“Have you seen the new mobilisation notices?”

“What mobilisation?”

“Our gallant Prefect is calling up his storm-troopers. It's the next move—with the Germans in Rheims and across the Marne. They'll be in Paris before the end of the week. The right moment to begin calling out the mob!”

He watched Thiviers's cheeks pale and his hands seek each other as they did when he was agitated. A little astonished, Labenne saw signs of indecision on his long face. What's he up to? he wondered. Thiviers's voice was calm.

“The Government is at Tours,” he said.

“For how long?” Labenne jeered. “And do you think they will have time there to attend to Monsieur Bergeot? Not a minute. When they're not in the closet they're playing musical chairs—last in takes over the Government. I have my money on Pétain, he's more used to danger than the others, poor little bed-wetters.”

Thiviers winced. Looking steadily at Labenne, he said,

“If General Weygand is planning to stand on the Loire, Seuilly will be part of the defence. In that case, Bergeot is the right man in the right place.”

So that's where we are, Labenne thought. He paused a minute before beginning to speak in the soft voice he used in his public speeches to give greater effect to the deeper tones which vibrated like gongs and produced in his hearers the delirium of savages.

“And you're prepared to sacrifice Seuilly? Why? Shall I
blow up the Prefecture and the Town Hall and this house—to save time? And my friend Marquet, who is mayor of Bordeaux—ought he to be sinking ships in the harbour and driving steam-rollers through the vines? You must want to make quite sure that France is crushed before making terms. So that we have no choice except to become a German colony. I wonder whether future generations will think you as noble as you think yourself. Forgive me for talking in such bad taste. I'm the son of a village butcher and peasant, I don't understand the difference between good taste and suicide. Or—when you think of the lives that will be cut short—murder.”

He's taking this well, he thought, looking at Thiviers.

Thiviers stood up and walked to the window, where he could see the garden, and the tree which, he believed, had been planted by Balzac. Attributed to Balzac. A jet of water glittered against the sunlight, the birds quarrelling under it babbled like children.

“I suppose it's foolish to think we might go on.”

Labenne let his voice rise with his anger. “If murder as a point of honour is foolish. As a simple Frenchman, I should call it wicked.”

“And if the soldiers decide that Seuillv is to be defended——?”

“Do you mean Piriac?”

“Certainly not.”

Labenne decided to strike brutally.

“If such orders are given, your duty is as clear as mine. We must try to make them impossible to carry out. Piriac is not one of your implacable politicians, he's an old soldier, that is, he hates bloodshed: the sight of women and children being killed in the streets by German guns, an air-raid or two, the hospital bombed, will finish him. He'll surrender the town—whatever his orders. I know him. Our duty is to see that Bergeot is discredited before he can empty the hospital and send away children and mothers. Seuilly must be made more, not less vulnerable.”

He paused after this last terrible sentence, to see whether Thiviers could swallow any more or if he must have a rest. The look of mingled embarrassment and stupor on the banker's face amused him. You'd think I'd invited him to take his
mother to our slaughter-house. The image gave him fresh energy. “Do you want to save the town, or watch it bleed to death? You can choose, you know.”

“You're asking me to behave treacherously . . .” Thiviers said.

Labenne's contempt almost choked him. He spoke in his pleasantest voice. “You can decide for yourself where the treachery comes in. Who is betraying Seuilly? Prudent men who want to save it from the fate of Arras—they say it's still burning—or an ambitious prefect who wants to burn it for his own glory? And if that were all, we might, if we were cowards, let him sacrifice it. But do you know what his future plans are? He intends to go into politics and become head of a communist government—confiscate money, property, everything. If you think it's not possible, remember what happened in Russia when the country was exhausted by a war it was losing. All this affects you more than me.” He grinned. “I can always dig.”

“But do you think he has any chance——?”

Labenne pushed with fierce gestures at the shirt he had worked loose during his speech. “The best in the world,” he said. And now, he thought drily, ask me to prove it.

Thiviers was silent. His face paled still more, to show all the marks of his inner travail. An acute eye—he was sitting close to the most deadly ambush in Seuilly—could follow exactly the movements of his heart between fear and honesty, between prudence and a vestige of courage. He looked round the room, then fixed his glance on the bust of Corneille, to whom, by a supreme effort, he was trying to attribute avarice and bad faith.

“And you believe that the prudent thing——” he began.

“Is to assassinate Monsieur Bergeot,” Labenne said energetically, “before he can stab us. I speak metaphorically. What I propose is to prepare a statement for the press—that is, the
New Order
—and have handbills printed showing him up as a self-styled patriot who has a fortune abroad—” he saw the movement Thiviers controlled at once. “As well as the story of Madame Prefect's flourishing little business selling places and honours. From the Prefecture! . . . Ah, I see you didn't know about that. My dear fellow, any woman who plays at politics is
unscrupulous—women see through the game too easily—but Madame de Freppel can give points to her friend the Vayrac woman, who only runs brothels.”

Thiviers made a gesture of disgust. “As you like,” he murmured.

“But—before we go to these extremes—we must try to use Piriac. I have a weakness for acting through other people. And could you have a nobler screen?”

He smiled affably at his joke. Thiviers, he could see, was prostrated by his anxiety. I'll leave him to recover, he thought.

He went home. On the way he caught sight of Bergeot himself, walking with Colonel Rienne. They were in front of him, and they turned down a street leading to the hospital. Which of them, he wondered, will be the first to realise that the other is suspect, and drop him? It won't save either.

He found his wife crying. She had been listening to the radio, and was distraught. She begged him to let her take the children to a relative at Bayonne, to be near a frontier.

“Windy, are you?” he said unkindly. “When I decide what to do with the children, I'll tell you. But you'll stay here in any case.”

He had been turning the problem in his mind for several days. At one moment he considered sending them to Spain or even America, but he could not bring himself to place his dearest property so far out of his sight. During the morning he decided to send them to Thouédun, to the château. He would send two servants with them, with orders to take them into the cellars under the courtyard at the first sound of firing or bombs. He announced his decision at lunch. Henry looked at him blackly.

“Let me stay with you. I can look after you when the Germans come.”

“You'll do as you're told, you young sinner.” He hid his delight in the boy's anxiety for him.

His wife gave him an imploring look. She was afraid it would provoke him to one of his fits of sour rage. But I shall die if I stay here, she thought. Terror gave her the spirit to say,

“Their mother ought to be with them.”

“And a wife's duty to be with her husband?” Labenne said.

He behaves to me, she thought, as if he were still a peasant.
He's a brute, though not to his children. Why hasn't he any kindness for me, I'm certain there isn't any other woman? . . . She sighed. She had enough shrewdness to know that her husband regarded her as the implement he had used to plant his family. Once planted, only the family was important. He was keeping her with him out of indifference. Without hope, resigning herself, she thought: He's the master, it will be his fault if I'm killed.

The secretary of the hospital had telephoned Rienne that morning that a patient was anxious to see him, and if possible, that is, if Colonel Rienne could persuade him to come, the Prefect.

Mathieu had been brought into the hospital during the night. He was unconscious; one leg was broken, his back was still bleeding where the flesh had been laid open, most of his ribs were fractured. When he could answer a question, he said that three men he did not know had called on him at eleven o'clock; without speaking—their faces were disguised by a muffler drawn up to the eyes—they threw him down and began beating him. Thinking of the shock it would be to his old landlady, he asked them to finish the job outside the house; and with a complaisance which would have been out-of-the-way if there were any accounting for the impulses of human beings, of even inhuman human beings, they took him into the dark little street and there handled him until he fainted. A neighbour coming home at midnight fell over him and fetched the police.

His head was uninjured. It lay on the pillow as if attached to his body by a splint. Rienne had the impression that it was the only part of him he allowed to feel. The rest, his torn body, had been silenced: it suffered and he refused to listen to it. Let it keep its vulgar pains to itself. He was not even willing to talk about his accident—he called it an accident, and Rienne saw that he was as little surprised as a soldier who has been wounded.
You place yourself or are placed in front of the enemy. Naturally he tries to kill you. “Have you an enemy?” the police had asked him. Mathieu smiled. “What do you think? I'm a Jew.”

“Didn't you recognise any of the men?” Rienne asked.

“There was a fourth,” Mathieu said. “He looked on. I thought it was Derval, but I may have been wrong. So I shall say nothing.”

Rienne tried to read his thought in his eyes. They were too calm. Everything in Mathieu's mind which concerned only Mathieu had been sunk to a depth where it was out of sight. But what, thought Rienne, has he to sink? He has no house, he has no wife or child. He can face calmly the destruction of other men's houses, and the terror and death of their children, if it becomes necessary to barricade the Republic with these frail objects. The more people suffer for the Republic, the more honourable it seems to him. As his race seems to him an honour because it has to be paid for, by derision, insults, massacre. He counts everything, even his drops of blood. How much is France worth? Answer: Exactly as much as Frenchmen will pay for it. . . . This Jew was willing to pay limb by limb. He was not insensible, the kernel of his life was horribly sensitive; but he had so covered it by contempt for his own humanity that he accepted all injuries, all risks, for himself and the forty million other Frenchmen, as merely what they owed for their luck in being born French. Men were common and replaceable, France was unique. Men were cowardly, greedy, untruthful; France gave everything, endured everything, and was no more capable now of lying to the world than when she spoke to it through Rabelais and Montaigne. To keep it alive, poor shortlived Frenchmen must make a habit of dying. So Mathieu believed. His worst anxiety was rooted in a calm so severe that it resembled death, his icy inhumanity and his strength drawn from the same deep source where love of France and hate of himself were like myrrh and vinegar together.

It wasn't me he wanted to see, Rienne said to himself. Stepping back, he pushed Bergeot near the bed, so that Mathieu could talk without raising his voice. Bergeot had hesitated about coming, he only agreed to please Rienne and because he was ashamed. He hates illness, it disgusts him, Rienne thought. For the first time, Émile's egoism chilled him.

“You know that Paris has been put in a state of defence?” Mathieu murmured. “This means everything. It means that we're not going to capitulate. Yes, yes, there was a moment when I thought we were. . . . It means that every town will defend itself. What are you doing to prepare Seuilly for the worst?”

He means the best, Rienne thought. Even he obeys certain conventions.

Bergeot sparkled with energy and happiness. Looking with forced pity at a broken Mathieu, he reassured him. Yes, he was taking all measures. Chemists, food shops, bakers were being taken over; he had ordered the Prefecture cellars, sunk in the rock, to be equipped as an air-raid hospital; he was at last organising civil volunteers, as firemen, rescue workers. . . .