Cloudless May (37 page)

Outside, the daylight flicked him like a hot wind. The stones, a bench, every object which had not been touched by Piriac's mysticism, burned in its own light. He crossed the courtyard where a groom was leading, in the widest circle possible, at the slowest pace, a mare which belonged clearly to one of those lines crossed with a gazelle, known only to mediaeval painters. Its movements, and those of the groom, had become instinctive through a ritual fixed generations ago. They must, Labenne thought, have been stepping round here during the last invasion, and the one before; and the one before that. What nonsense! Time it was stopped. . . . In the perpetual shadow of one corner, a chestnut was still flowering. Which century am I in now? he thought drily; I've just left the fifteenth, was it? And which war?

He walked to the office of the
New Order.
The door was open and the editor's room empty. A letter lay on the desk. Labenne picked it up and began reading half-way down the page.

“. . . the bed of tarragon. Clear days, with no wind. I've been sent, from Paris of course—who else gets these ideas?—a document assuring me that there is more nutrition in a kilo of mushrooms than in a whole ox. I shall buy a kilo of mushrooms instead of an ox, it will be cheaper to keep. The valley looks kind, also the vines and wheat. Given fine weather, we shall have a decent harvest. I am only sorry you are not here to enjoy the air, which is stronger here than where you are. Like our wine. Don't talk to me about your outlandish Angevin growths. . . . As for the war. Pray heaven none of our vines, not even the wretched little vineyard outside Nantes belonging to your mother's cousin, sees a Boche. Remember . . .”

Labenne turned the page.

“. . . La Fontaine—
J'aime mieux les Turcs en campagne, Que de voir nos vins de Champagne
—much as I despise modern champagne—
Profanes par les Allemands. . . .”

The Turks—that's me, Labenne grinned. . . . He knew that his clerks spoke of him as “our carpet-seller” and of his hat as a fez. . . . No land I get my hands on is going to be, what's the word?, desecrated by Germans. . . .

He dropped the letter. Derval came in. Labenne was amused to see him whisk it out of sight under the blotting-paper. He asked for the petty-cash book and went carefully through the items. Five francs were unaccounted for since last Monday. He scolded Derval like a peasant, like one of the women he used to hear haggling with his father over the price of a few bones. The young man hung his head and pouted, almost crying with mortification. Taking no notice of him, Labenne said,

“Now, my boy, your orders. After tomorrow we're going to make patriots—for our Saint Eustache-Anne Piriac de la-Gironde to lead to Orléans. . . .”

He paused and spread his arms. His shirt flew out from the band of his trousers like a flag, a nearly white flag. He gave Derval a look of malice. “Monsieur Derval, what is it you want? Do you want to live in the provinces all your life? Speak out?”

Derval hesitated. He felt afraid of Labenne. A terrible current of energy sprang from his gross body across France, sweeping away trees, vineyards, human beings; an arm flung up clutching a tattered Horace. . . . He shivered. Can I keep my head above it?

“I've always wanted to edit a Paris newspaper,” he murmured. He had the impression that he was plunging into space.

“Why not?” Labenne said, with a smile. “Under a new régime you'll make an excellent editor. None better.” He smiled more broadly. “But you must promise me. No quotations. No classics. No—what's the fellow's name?—no Monsieur la Fontaine.”

Friday, May 24th. In the evening an Inspector—of the Political Police—called on Mathieu. He was an old ally. It would be absurd to speak of a friendship; the Inspector himself would not have used the word of an association founded—on his side—in deep respect. And on Mathieu's side? Without feeling any affection for the man who had for years been taking risks to
warn him when one of the lines run out by politicians and their friends and patrons was going to foul an essential line of decency and justice, Mathieu relied on him.

He moved the chairs in his room so that the Inspector could sit with his back to the light, and—sign of supreme trust—seated himself first, thus throwing away the advantage his severe formality gave him over his visitors.

He was happy this evening. His happiness puzzled him. He could not find a name for what he felt; he explained it by an unusual weakness in his muscles; he had difficulty in holding himself upright. He was restless. As soon as the Inspector began talking, he got up, and ran his fingers along the row of books. He straightened the map marking the old provinces of France, the only ornament—it was properly an idol—in the room. In black, his lean body and grotesquely long arms spread across the map, he seemed as anxious as a spider. He sat down, and listened to the Inspector telling him, with more proofs than would have been needed in the High Court to find the accused guilty, that Huet was acting for a peace party which was not entirely a party of Frenchmen.

“. . . you can say, Monsieur Mathieu, that this animal, this mongrel, has its tail in Paris and its head in Berlin. What a head! But what a tail! I ask you, has there ever been such a compound of slime, learning, conceit, as Ernest Huet——”

“Yes,” Mathieu interrupted. “It's a favourite model.” He lifted his hand. “I don't call traitors those poor fools who sell something for money, and are invariably cheated.”

“Talking of money . . . our Deputy pours at every lamppost. I know the precise figures. To tell you the truth, the man I have in that house is not stupid, I can rely on him. And I happen to know it's not his wife's money. There are times—no one knows why—when she keeps him very short. This is one of them. But he spends, on the lice who carry his typhus, ten times more than his income. .. .”

Suddenly Mathieu interrupted again. He pointed to a small kitchen jar on the table, holding a handful of flowers.

“My landlady left those here,” he said. “What do you call them?”

The Inspector was stunned; he pulled himself together.

“They're pinks.”

“Indeed! . . . Go on, please,” Mathieu said sternly.

A little unsettled, as if he had laid his hand on a rug, and felt it move and walk off, the Inspector recited a list of the sums of money Huet had sent abroad in the last month. And a second list for Georges Labenne. He repeated “abroad” . . . Mathieu saw a square in a German city, filled with sunlight which sprang either from the blue sky or from a fountain in the middle; women selling jonquils and daffodils, every colour of gold in their starved fingers, stood close under the fountain; for the only time in his life he bought flowers, and walked off carrying them into a street where everything, including his heart, beat at a smooth light pace. What did I do with them? he wondered; I can't have carried them far. . . . He realised that there had been a silence; the Inspector was waiting. He had to make the effort to feel ruthless. He only felt a strange lightness, as though wherever he had dropped his jonquils twelve years ago he had let fall a burden, a distress. But why only notice it now?

“I shall expose them in the
Journal”
he said.

“Another thing,” the Inspector said. “Labenne and our Deputy are using every line leading to the Minister that they can lay hands on, and threatening the magistrate with an old scandal—poor sinner, he might have hoped it was sprouting by now—and flattering him—Madame Huet has gone so far as to call on his wife. All to get a provisional release for Edgar Vayrac. You know how provisional it will be. Provisional on the Day of Judgement.”

Release. The word rolled across Mathieu's mind, and split open; light poured from it in a dozen jets, he felt a spasm of joy. When will he be released? Joachim von Uhland's voice began one of its precise measured sentences—So I have you to thank. . . .

“Vayrac?” he said, in a brutal voice. “I can settle him. Once, when I was in Germany, I saw a large rat nailed by a farmer to a post—it was still alive. But in fact I would only shoot Vayrac.”

They are both cruel, thought the Inspector. Mathieu and Vayrac. But Vayrac enjoyed the act of cruelty, he would torture the weak, where Mathieu would attack rudely and directly the strong criminal and threaten the weak like children with one more chance. “I shan't,” he said slowly, “be able to protect
you if Messrs. Labenne and Huet retaliate. They are both well placed to retaliate.”

Mathieu was not interested. His eyes, fixed coldly in front of him, rested on the map pinned above his desk; he was searching for the joint—surely not between Anjou and Touraine?—through which treachery had slipped into the country. He had not explained it to himself yet. He thought he had seen this war without illusions. He knew that in the last hundred years France had grown continually weaker: contemptuous and ignorant of the ideas of other peoples, it had let its own become dry and brittle; it lived in them like an ageing woman who sees that her skin has lost its resilience, but she can do nothing. Without belief none rises from the dead; and France believed in nothing except its past. So that its past was its grave, only its grave. . . . And knowing all this, knowing the extremity of the danger, and knowing that his countrymen were clinging to the hope of peace as a woman to her dead child, he expected the war to be fought with the courage and tenacity he felt in his own ridiculous body, he the Jew. He had no reason for believing except belief, which with him, and where France was concerned, was an instinct. But he had no reason for not believing—since everything in France which was not mortal, its gaiety, its sense of the possible, its human logic, was opposed at the salients to what in the enemy was weakness and a disease; civility was opposing barbarity. He believed that civility is the stronger.

He had been crushing one of his landlady's pinks. He dropped it. Again he felt the muscles of his chest and his wrists giving way. This time, but he did not know it, what he had felt was pity.

“And there are leakages of information to the enemy,” said the Inspector.

“There are always leakages,” Mathieu said curtly. “They occur between the Cabinet and the sort of staff officer who from vanity can't keep his tongue quiet.”

“I daresay.” The Inspector hesitated. A little nervously, looking at the window—there was nothing to see; Mathieu's room faced the wall of a dark court—he spoke about a certain Sadinsky, an alien whose papers and credentials, he was sure, were forgeries. He was sure, but he could not prove it; the man had powerful protectors. He had been brought in by a fellowcountryman,
also a doubtful type, who had a Minister as intimate friend. Unknown to himself, the Minister was now protecting Sadinsky. And it was precisely this Sadinsky who in a few weeks had become the business associate of Mme Vayrac and Georges Labenne.

Mathieu's feeling of weakness vanished.

“Now you're talking of real corruption,” he said. “Nothing is more corrupt than a bad Jew, because nothing is nobler than a good one. In another week, you'll find him embracing Monsieur Huet.”

“The war is going badly,” the Inspector said gently.

Mathieu did not answer. He glanced at the map. He knew almost to a field which provinces of France had passed to Germany; the Germans had reached the sea, no doubt they were already, though the wireless was silent about it, across the Somme. More than treachery had passed through the joint: cruelty, evil, death—and the blood of the innocent and guilty pouring out to make room.

“Did you hear the Prime Minister on the wireless, Monsieur Mathieu? France, he said, cannot die; if he were told that only a miracle could save us he would reply: I believe in miracles because I believe in France.” The Inspector smiled slyly. “You don't accept miracles?”

Mathieu lifted his head. He said coldly,

“But, my dear sir, there are two sorts. The false miracles—which are not miracles at all, but a dialect of nature. They spring out in the moment when an historic force crosses a current of human courage, and you get the so-called miracle of the Marne. Or of human cowardice—and what you got then was the miracle of Munich.. . . And there are the few, the very few, real miracles—which are acts of pure grace.”

He stopped suddenly. The door, he thought, will open, tomorrow evening or morning, and he will see the kind of room I live in, at least as shabby but not so cold as his in Berlin. . . . This was the only time he realised the poverty of his room.

The Inspector had hidden his stupefaction when Mathieu's harsh voice, colder and sharper than usual, dropped the word grace. He stood up to go. Mathieu allowed him to open the door himself. He did not even, as he always did for his visitors,
stand on the landing with the stump of candle he kept ready to save them from breaking their necks on the dark staircase.

As soon as he was alone, he began clumsily and gently to arrange the room. He pulled chairs away from the wall, and tidied book-shelves. The furniture was not his, he had nothing of his own. Without looking at it, he had taken this room and the tiny bedroom opening from it because they were near his office. Now he saw that the room was not simply shabby, it was mean and pretentious. The worst taste could not have created such a wretched place; it must be an accident that nothing in it was solid, or charming, or clean except on the surface. The oil stove which warmed it a little in winter was rusty. His books, instead of offering an air of scholarship, might be lying there to be sold off. He felt ashamed. After another minute or two of ungainly effort, he lost interest. At least, in this room he was free. In no room in France was freedom more at home. If Joachim did not notice it, if he only noticed shabbi-ness and bourgeois poverty, so much the worse for him.

He was surprised to find he could not work. He went out. After his room facing the damp shaft, he felt the hands of the evening warmth passing over his face. He noticed a woman in tears. A workman, so tired that the layer of dust on his clothes seemed weighing him down, and a young soldier on leave—certainly his son, he had the same hurt patience, the same hands curved round the glass—were sitting at a table outside a café. The father lifted his head. “Good-evening, Monsieur Mathieu,” he said. Mathieu halted beside the table. He wanted to say something, but in the end all he did was press on the young man's thin shoulder as though he expected the words to spring out. I must be ill, he thought, walking on. Never in his life had so many emotions, joy, bewilderment, pain, brushed him, and left this seared blister. He had never before seen. His eyelids felt bruised. His ears and his head were both throbbing.