Cloudless May (19 page)

She was right.

People said of Bergeot, “He's extraordinarily modest. Anyone can see him. He takes as much trouble with an old farmer as he would with an important deputation.” What no one realised was that this was part of his vanity. There was nothing he enjoyed so much as handling people. He played his man like a clever angler, and it was only with one person at a time that he could use all his arts freely. To be with a great many people hampered him. What charmed one would disgust another, or make him suspicious. When no one else is listening, a man will swallow any amount of flattery, and Bergeot flattered almost without meaning to, it had become so much a habit with him.

Whenever he could, he saw people singly; even, when he wanted to talk to the mayors of the communes on a matter affecting all of them, preferring to see them one by one. He invited a man, gave him an ardent attention, and sent him away convinced that he and he only knew the Prefect's mind, ready out of this feeling to admire the Prefect fervently and do all he asked. It had always worked. Bergeot saw no reason why it should not work now: he sent for this man and that to come and see him, and laid before each his plans for what he
had begun to call the civil mobilisation of the Department. Few of them when they arrived were convinced that there was any need to prepare Seuilly to stand air raids or find homes for its children in the villages. One by one, bullying a little, coaxing, playing on this man's fears and that man's vanity, he got each to agree. He had one triumph after another. He was delighted. After an interview when he had won over a man who neither liked nor trusted him, Lucien found him strutting up and down the room, almost crowing.

“I fixed him. Lucien, my boy, he's ours.”

It had never occurred to him that none of these men was committed in any eyes but his own. There were no witnesses. Any one of them, in the comforting certainty that only the Prefect knew it had been given, could go back on his promise.

This evening, at nine o'clock, he dismissed his last visitor, seeing him to the door with a hand on his shoulder: the man—he was the doctor who was leading the opposition to Bergeot's plan for the hospital—felt on himself the weight of all Bergeot's trust in him, affection, hopes. Turning in the doorway, he said, “Count on me, Mr. Prefect.” He marched off. Lucien passed him in the corridor, and saw that he was frowning in a puzzled way.

“Lucien, my child, I'm going off now,” Bergeot said. “You look tired. What time did you go to bed last night?”

“One o'clock, sir,” Lucien said happily.

“I know. I left you all those drafts. What in heaven's name should I do without you? Don't let me find you still here when I come back.”

He was not going to spend the night with Marguerite; he had arranged to see Louis Mathieu at the Prefecture between half-past eleven and midnight. The next morning would have done as well, but he wanted Mathieu to know that he worked late.

He told the chauffeur to take the road by the Loire, and to drive slowly. The river was clear and placid, as though refusing any part in the life on its banks. Instead of soothing him, it forced him to think about the one thing he had been avoiding all day—the bad news. In this moment of her greatest danger, her rivers themselves were letting France down. There—where the Romans used to try to discourage savages from
offering a human sacrifice to the floods—century after century, almost generation after generation, the sacrifices have been offered; to the Somme, the Aisne, the Marne. This time it might be the Loire. Bergeot closed his eyes. . . . Suppose the Government were to move to the Loire, to Seuilly? I might become a Minister. Why not? Why not even Premier? It's only in times of great danger that the Prime Minister is allowed really to govern: I should be the Clemenceau of our day. . . . The car jolted; Bergeot opened his eyes. The Loire had retreated behind a thick hedge and a field. What a fool you are, you might be a schoolboy, he thought angrily. Then comforted himself with the adroit idea that he was purely a man of action: any man who wants to prevent his mind from dropping into infancy or idiocy when he is idle has to spend his whole life learning to control it; he had no time for that, he had to rule.

He had no time either to reflect that this is perhaps why every ruler since the beginning has been a failure. And always will be? . . . The car turned off the road, through the gates leading to the Manor House. Another car—it must have come by the shorter and worse road from Seuilly—was drawing up at the door at the foot of the tower. It was M. de Thiviers's. He got out, saw Bergeot's car, and waited for him.

“I came here to find you,” he said, smiling. He held his hat in his hand; the breeze from the river ruffled his hair with its three waves.

“Why?” Bergeot asked.

An irrational suspicion seized him, so strong that it was almost a warning. The next instant it had vanished, swept off by another of his little vanities. It still pleased him when a man like Thiviers showed that he knew about his liaison. It made it seem important. . . . Surely an innocent vanity?

They went in, and Bergeot led the way to a room on the right, with charming narrow panels and furniture of old walnut. “This is my room,” he said fatuously. “I work here when I want peace.”

His gesture was that of a bored husband. He looked like a husband, a correct middle-class spouse. But he was saying: We are visiting my mistress together. M. de Thiviers was shocked and offended by this bad taste. In an obscure part of his mind, Bergeot knew he was giving offence. He felt uneasy—
but could not save himself. The unceasing effort he made to seem the man of the world, to wear the right clothes, to speak in a ruling-class voice, took its revenge on him: at moments it forced him to obey an impulse to rebel and shock. He obeyed with his eyes shut—and never understood why his words were received badly. Since he had always disowned this mocker, this lewd fellow, he had very little idea what he would say, and none at all of the effect on other people. These outbursts were the worse received always because they came from a man who had seemed correct, safe, polite, too polite, almost insinuating. . . .

“What is the latest news?” Thiviers asked stiffly. “The country is facing a terrible moral crisis.”

His solemn voice and face annoyed Bergeot: he gave way recklessly to temptation.

“We could protect ourselves against a crisis of morality! We need only call on our symbols, all those remarkable idols the rest of the world worships with us—because we insist—Montaigne, Pascal and the others. No nation has ever sold itself and its culture so successfully to the rest of the world. But this, my friend, is a crisis of shells and intelligence. It's really serious! Our guns, tanks, the General Staff, are all out of date. Perhaps our intellect is, too. We've constructed a moral Maginot out of our painters and writers—very impressive, but can we hold it? In any case, we can't frighten the Germans into submission by quoting Baudelaire to them. Only the English and Americans fall for that now. We really need more tanks—and a few better generals.”

“You can make a joke of it!” Thiviers said coldly.

Bergeot turned adroitly. “No, I'm not being flippant. I'm stunned. But it's no use wearing sackcloth; nothing is any use except an effort of will. My God, I wish I were in the Government!”

He really believes, Thiviers said to himself, that the one thing needed to save France is to make him Premier. “We need men like you in Paris,” he said politely.

Bergeot was deceived—or he deceived himself. He began with energy to talk about the need to mobilise the whole country, to make it a working model of fraternity and equality. For the time being we could manage without liberty; no one is
free to be safer than anyone else; or to make profits for an Interest; war has something to teach peace. But when was France at peace? Never; there had never been a time when a peasant of Picardie and the Île de France could look at his children, thinking, It's settled, it won't be their turn to dig trenches on the Marne. There were no innocent words; all of them, even the name of the smallest village, the name of a cross-roads, could, given the moment, spell terror, hate, death. . . .

Thiviers listened with a fine reserved smile. His eyes—they were paler than usual, a curtain had been drawn across them—noted the signs of the other man's exhaustion, his pallor, the newly-drawn lines of excitement and fatigue below his eyes. He interrupted suddenly, in a drawling voice.

“You know how carefully I look after my workers. They're like children to me. And since I'm childless——” He waited for the gleam of sympathy on Bergeot's face, and in the same equable voice went on, “Many of them were ruined, morally, by the socialist government, and I feel about those poor fellows as though a son had gone wrong. You can believe me.”

A little exaggerated, Bergeot thought pityingly. His faint contempt blinded him to Thiviers's hatred of his prodigal sons. He ought to have guessed it from the words Thiviers chose. Of all men, a father has a right to obedience; if he is defied it is an outrage.

“The police,” Thiviers went on sadly, “have arrested another batch of communists in the works. But I swear they didn't catch the ringleaders. The real sinners are in ambush; they'll seize their chance, and they're more dangerous than what you like to call Interests, my dear Émile. Some of us, you know, have a vested interest in France itself.”

He smiled. I've gone too far with him, Bergeot thought. “You've only to point out anyone you suspect,” he said swiftly, “I'll deal with him.” He scarcely realised what he had promised. Deftly, he picked up what he knew to be another excellent card. “After all, you did everything one man could to prevent the war.”

“I did,” Thiviers said. He spoke condescendingly and in good faith. “When I look back on it—on my journeys to Berlin, Prague, Brussels—I regret nothing. I played a unique part. My
position was unique. I was listened to, not as a rich man, but as a scholar, a fighter for peace.”

Bergeot listened with a warm smile. After all, what a solemn good ass, he thought affectionately; absolutely sure of his right to rule, morally unable to rule against his own interests—which he can't help confusing with the interests of society. . . . He was exhilarated by his ferocious cleverness in seeing through this poor Thiviers. I can handle him, he exulted. Émile, my boy, there's no holding you—and when I think where you started!

In fact, even when he started, he had perfectly clearly imagined his coming triumphs: he had always been able to charm people; always, by a mixture of intellect and instinct, got his own way. The one thing he had never imagined—trivial but quite possibly fatal—was that any number of intelligent young men of the lower middle-class are able to see through the motives of financiers and Secretaries of State; they flatter themselves that it proves them to be superior. Poor young sinners! Some of them in the end make very respectable little careers for themselves: the rapacity of human beings is less surprising than their everlasting modesty—most of them are content with so little.

With his gentle smile, Thiviers reached the end of his speech. “. . . there is one consolation. This war may teach us by suffering that we are all members of one another.”

“Why not?” Bergeot said. “We are a good little race. We're vain, but in the end we justify it.”

He had been touched by Thiviers's obvious sincerity. He's almost a saint, he thought, with a half smile. But not a leader: the dirty work of a crusade would have to be done by men like me.

Mme de Freppel's voice reached them from the hall. Thiviers stood up quickly. “Do you mind, Émile? I'd like to speak to Marguerite—about her investments.”

Bergeot remembered that Thiviers had transferred his money to the United States for him. To cover up an acute feeling of discomfort, he cried,

“My dear fellow, of course. Would you like to see her here? I'll clear out.”

“What nonsense! This is your work-room.” Thiviers was
moving towards the door. He turned round, with an affectionate timid smile. “War or no war, I must look after you two children.”

Mme De Freppel crossed the hall in front of him—with that slow springing step she had learned when she had sometimes to walk to the very middle of a café before the people drinking and talking at the tables noticed her. The banker could not have guessed this. He had accepted without question her account of herself as the daughter of a rich shopkeeper, married, too young, to the Comte de Freppel. There is always a gullible or at least a weak place in your Napoleons of finance and industry—or else they would be really dangerous to society and not merely an appalling nuisance.

She was in black, a dress which left her shoulders naked and fitted everywhere else. Thiviers saw, as though he were being reminded of them, her small breasts and ridiculously thin waist; springing below it, rounded thighs and legs. He felt a sharp pain over his heart: pressing his hand there, he felt his pocket-book and a phial of chlorodyne and opium.

He bent over her stiffly, like a good-tempered elder brother, and kissed her forehead. Marguerite smiled, then turned adroitly so that she was out of reach. She seemed to move by turning the upper half of her body—it was very narrow, and she never wore a corset.

Thiviers moved, for him, quickly. He seized Marguerite's hand and held it while he stroked her arm and across her shoulders to her back.

“You are the only woman I know who has a perfect back and shoulders,” he said, smiling. “All the others are misshapen, or a bad colour, or too bony or too plump.”

“Thanks.” Marguerite said. He showed no signs of releasing her. She made a face. “But do look at that cat,” she cried.

Thiviers turned his head. “What?”

The animal had arched its back and with a delicious sly
pleasure was rubbing it across and across the velvet base of a couch.