Cloudless May (64 page)

Even during the moments of crushing sunlight between her car and the orangery, where Thiviers wrote in summer, she felt cold and trembled. As soon as she saw him—as soon as she walked from the wings on to the stage—her confidence revived. Fortunately, she could not know that in Thiviers's eyes her own image of herself was dulled by an inner shadow. She is showing her age, he thought.

He felt satisfaction, pity, surprise. “Why have you come to see me?”

“To tell you that you were right.”

He tried to see the thoughts in her eyes. It was like looking at the reflections in wet sand—an illusion of depth and light, and no depth, no light. “Right?”

“About the war. About Émile.”

“Ah.” He could not resist this cry of triumph. At the same time he was watching her closely, and he did not detect any annoyance. It made him suspicious. To be guarding herself with so much care—she must be very anxious.

“You didn't come here only to tell me that.”

She looked at him with a noble candour. She seemed a little confused. With the hand lying on the table she twisted her handkerchief. But, he thought, she never makes clumsy gestures. She is lying. . . .

“Of course not. I came—to ask you to help me.”

“But what did you think I could do?”

“How do I know? You always seem able to do anything you want to. And you can read the future—”

Without giving him time, she knelt beside him and rested an arm on his knees, taking both his hands. Hers were cold and dry, but they gave him an impression of feverish weakness. He felt an extreme grief and triumph. He was not in love with her. What he felt was compassion. It was compassion beating in his wrists, scorching the back of his eyelids, pinching him, confounding his head and nerves. It was his mind that felt, while his nerves, suffering every form of logic and concept, proved to him with words like appearance, belief, truth, that he had grown out of his infantile desires, and desired only—what? To show his compassion—by touching her, by rolling her between himself and the floor, by laughing, by giving way to tears. There are so many ways, sly or violent, of showing compassion. He freed one of his hands and touched her hair, then the base of her throat.

He felt her revulsion. It was immediate and unwilling. Her will fought against it. For several seconds she tried to endure his hands. Her smile of pleasure became a grimace: he felt her fingers, then her arms, then her whole body becoming rigid. When he took his hands away she got up quickly and clumsily—this time her clumsiness was certainly not deliberate—and backed away from him until she knocked against the desk, whimpered, and sat down in the nearest chair.

He had great difficulty in moving his tongue. “What possessed you?”

“I don't know.”

“Nonsense.” He walked towards her. “Of course you know. Tell me.”

“1 don't know,” she repeated.

“You came here for help,” he said, stooping over her. She must have thought he was going to touch her: leaning forward, she made an arch of her body.

“I came to ask you to save me,” she said quickly. She hesitated.

“Well, go on.” He moved his arm; it was reflected in her face by the shadow of her revulsion moving across it.

“Don't touch me,” she said, with fear. The pupils of her eyes disappeared upwards for a second. “You must help us. Now that I hope to have a child I intend to live differently—and I need to be safe.”

He knew why she had told him. To protect herself against his compassion. She was no longer able to use her instincts to trick him and dominate him: they were using her. He felt a hateful satisfaction, and a bitterness he could not have endured if he had not turned it, instantly, to contempt. She is a loose woman, he said to himself: it would be wrong to let her off lightly; a little punishment may make her repent.

“You have no right to children—a woman like you.”

He saw that he had only succeeded in making her sorry for him. Smiling a little, she said,

“My poor Robert, you'll never forgive me for leaving you. But you ought to feel satisfied—you did everything for me, turned my miserable scrap of money into a fortune, a small one by your standards, but still a fortune; you managed my investments; you do still. You gave everything and I nothing. Why can't you feel that all the credit is on your side and forgive me?”

At this moment he felt only hatred. “Yes,” he said quietly, “I could still ruin you.”

The threat gave her back her assurance. He watched it moving from her eyes to her hands; they gave up fumbling for each other: tired, she settled herself in her chair like an old woman, too old to be in any danger. I never knew her, he thought, with despair.

“What is it you really love? Your money? You have enough in America—if you can get there.”

“I hope I shan't have to go to America,” she said quickly. “Over there I should be nobody.”

“It's that you want, is it? You like to play at power? I'm sorry for you, my dear. You won't be Prefect much longer. If you must have that sort of excitement, Émile is no good to you. He's finished.”

“I don't believe it.”

She was disconcerted, but she had become sullen and obstinate. She is going to tell me the truth at last, he thought.

“So you really care most of all for Émile?” he exclaimed. “Do you want to save him from being shot by the Germans?”

“I want Émile to go on living,” she said coldly. “Myself, too, of course. And I want him to have a life, a position, where his energy and intelligence are used—”

Ah, he thought, despairing again, I shall never know whether your kernel is ambition or love; or whether they are so grown together that neither alone is real. Looking at her, he saw that for the moment she was not thinking. She was watching him as a child watches grown-ups, trying to surprise in them the answer to some question it can't form clearly. Her eyes, too, like the eyes of a very young child, or an animal, were focussed on a point not on the surface of his face. At this moment she had an extraordinary innocence. Is she, he thought, still in some way innocent? Anger cured his despair.

“Do you think you have a right to happiness? A woman like you?”

“It's because Émile and I have been happy together—in spite of my temper—that you disapprove of me. If I had been unhappy you would have less to say about my immorality. Or if you were capable of happiness yourself.”

She was speaking calmly, almost without contempt. He saw that she was nearly exhausted. Her nostrils were pinched; she gave him the impression again of being much older than she was. He was startled to find himself thinking that she would die before he did—although no one knew better the toughness of her body, with its double joints. He felt real pity. It astonished him—and flattered him subtly. I'm not insensitive, he thought.

“My dear girl,” he said warmly, “I can see one chance of
helping you. Yes, yes, I know it won't be any use to you unless it helps Émile, too. I'm serious. If you can persuade him to resign at once, really at once, today, at the latest tomorrow, I promise you faithfully to look after him, and either bring him back when the country is quiet again, or find him some other foothold. . . . He can resign because of his health—a nervous collapse. . . . Don't interrrupt me. I have only one condition. He must make a clean breast of all his foolish plans, so that they can be cancelled everywhere, and he must tell me—in confidence, of course, the names of all the persons who were most eager to help him. That's all.”

At this moment he was sincere. He meant, if Bergeot would submit, to help him out—out of pity for her loss of her looks. Or simply out of pity. He was so confident that he could afford a disinterested emotion. “Do you agree?” he said gently.

She answered him at once. “Yes.”

Now that he was kind she was afraid of offending him. She said anxiously,

“One of the most dangerous of Émile's friends is Rienne. Colonel Rienne. It was he made Émile arrest Derval. Did you know?”

“Yes, I knew.”

She stood up. “You're being generous,” she said stiffly. She was always ungracious when she had to thank someone for a kindness, It was as though she felt diminished by it. She was not generous enough to admire generosity when it descended on her.

Near the door of the orangery she stopped and looked at him, this time directly in his eyes; she was only anxious and tired. She asked,

“And there will be peace?”

He smiled at her. “Yes, yes, there will be peace.”

Stepping into the heat of midday, she put a hand over her eyes to shut out with her fear the blinding light.

Thiviers decided to see Bergeot at once. During the last few weeks he had dropped, one after another, all the pretences he had been holding between himself and the energetic successful Prefect. He had pretended that Bergeot feared to lose his friendship and help; that he admired the triumphs of Bergeot's tact and energy, even though they were blows at his own influence in the Department: finest and most necessary of all his pretences, that he had forgiven him for taking Marguerite, and that on her part it was more self-interest than love—she had expected to marry Bergeot and make him an ambassador or a Minister. . . . Why all these pretences? Because without them he would be at the mercy of his real feelings, a terrible thing for a man of his dignity and with his love of virtue. Terrible indeed. Now that he had admitted his feelings, he never knew what they would make him say when he was with Bergeot.

Just as he was leaving his house Dr. Charles-Gouraud arrived to see him. Dr. Charles-Gouraud was the physicist at the head of his celebrated laboratory, which cost him a great deal of money, and was worth to him every year half a dozen invitations from learned societies, to address them on the alliance between science and industry, or the metaphysics of finance; and by which he hoped to be recognised one day as the French Rockefeller and apt to receive a Nobel prize. . . . He was surprised to see that Charles-Gouraud had come out, in this sun, without a hat, and even without putting down the things he was holding when the idea of calling on his employer seized him. Fie had a length of glass tube in one hand, and in the other a duster. He was wearing list slippers. In this state he had walked at least a mile from the nearest tram. It was unusual. There had never been anything in his conduct to suggest that Charles-Gouraud would try to make himself famous as an eccentric. Correct in his dress, even elegant, with a precise way of speaking, and a distinguished record as a physicist, he had for Thiviers the great merit of being without personal ambition. And here he was, caught in the act of creating a legend.

“You had something to say to me?” Thiviers asked coldly.

The explanation was simple. For the past fourteen days Dr. Charles-Gouraud had been busy with a series of calculations which kept him at the laboratory all day and all night: he slept in an ante-room and had his meals brought in to him. None of his assistants had had the idea of talking to him about the war. His work finished, he glanced at a newspaper he found lying about and read the communiqué. The Germans, whom he had left a little over a fortnight ago at their old habit of fighting on the lower Somme, were nearing the Loire. He was stunned. He had in his laboratory an apparatus designed partly by himself and constructed at great cost—he usually spoke of it as “my wealthy godchild”—of the greatest, indeed of inestimable value, and unique. It must—it was the first thing he thought of when he had grasped the meaning of the communiqué, he put aside his delicate wife and his three daughters, whom he adored—be sent away at once, out of reach of the Germans; they have also a habit of theft, which they might not have changed. In his precise voice, unembarrassed by the objects he now discovered in his hands—“Witness,” he said, smiling, turning the duster between his fine fingers, “my anxiety”—he explained that he would want packing-cases and a lorry. He would need two or three days to take the apparatus down and pack it with the care necessary. No doubt M. de Thiviers would have no difficulty in providing the lorry. . . . Thiviers listened to him with impatience.

“I hadn't suspected you of being an alarmist,” he said, smiling insolently. “When I can agree that any action is needed, I'll let you know.”

He left the scientist standing, with his witnesses, and went out to his car.

At a crossing he was held up for twenty minutes by the traffic. On both sides of the street cars and tradesmen's carts were standing against the curb; running frantically between them and the houses, their owners threw in bundles with as little care for one that whimpered as for the bronze of Foch. It was as though in every house that morning, at the same moment, a woman had gone into her kitchen and seen death standing at the stove or the sink, or waiting patiently for the pan to boil. . . . Get out—before it moves. Better not know where you will
sleep tonight than try to sleep in your own bed, with that downstairs. Better the roads, better the heat fastened as closely as a shroud, better anything than holding your breath, listening. . . . Has it moved? Did you hear anything, didn't you hear it cough?. . .

Thiviers watched, coldly at first, with the eyes of the memorialist. It was as a chapter in his memoirs—the chapter Peace—that he read these hieroglyphs of panic. Then he saw a child put its hand out of a car as the door was pulled shut, trapping its fingers. The car had started: it travelled until it was held up in the stream before someone opened the door. He heard the child's cries above the delirium of gears and wheels. They upset him, they were no use even as a footnote.

He was calm when he reached the Prefecture. A pity that the end of the war and the beginning of peace were costing so much unhappiness, even pain. But it was the small change of history—paid and forgotten. He felt a quiet confidence, secure as he was in his cloak of history—lined with piety. Without giving Bergeot time to speak, he said,