The Age of Reason (18 page)

‘But apart from that,’ said Brunet, ‘what are you doing with yourself?’

Mathieu felt embarrassed: he was in fact doing nothing with himself. And he answered, ‘Nothing.’

‘I see. Fourteen hours’ teaching each week, and a trip abroad during the long vacation.’

‘That’s about it,’ said Mathieu with a laugh. He evaded Boris’s eye.

‘And your brother? Still a member of the Croix-de-Feu?’

‘No,’ said Mathieu. ‘His views are changing. He says the Croix-de-Feu aren’t dynamic enough.’

‘He sounds about ripe for Doriot,’ said Brunet.

‘There’s talk of that... in point of fact, I’ve just been having a row with him,’ added Mathieu, casually.

Brunet flung him a sharp, quick glance. ‘Why?’

‘It’s always the same. I ask him to do me a service and he answers with a sermon.’

‘And then you have a row. How odd you are,’ said Brunet ironically. ‘Do you still think you can alter him?’

‘Of course not,’ snapped Mathieu.

They fell silent for a moment, and Mathieu reflected sadly that the interview did not seem to progress. If only it would occur to Boris to go away. But he showed no signs of doing so, he stood bristling in his corner looking like a sick greyhound. Brunet was sitting astride his chair and he too was staring heavily at Boris. ‘He wants him to go away,’ thought Mathieu with satisfaction. He stared at Boris straight between the eyes; perhaps he would at last understand, exposed to the twin fires of both men’s gaze.

Boris did not move. Brunet cleared his throat.

‘Still working at philosophy, young man?’ he asked.

Boris nodded — Yes.

‘How far have you got?’

‘I’m just taking my degree,’ said Boris curtly.

‘Your degree,’ said Brunet abstractedly. ‘Your degree — that’s first-rate...’ And he added briskly: ‘Would you detest me if I took Mathieu away from you for a moment? You are lucky enough to see him every day, but I... Shall we take a turn outside?’ he asked Mathieu.

Boris walked stiffly up to Brunet. ‘I understand,’ said he. ‘Please stay: I will go.’

He bowed slightly: he was offended. Mathieu followed him to the outer door, and said cordially: ‘This evening, then. I shall be there about eleven.’ Boris returned a wry smile: ‘This evening,’ Mathieu shut the door and came back to Brunet. ‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his hands. ‘You got him out!’

They laughed, and Brunet said: ‘Perhaps I went rather too far. You didn’t mind?’

‘On the contrary,’ laughed Mathieu. ‘It’s a habit of his, and besides I’m so glad to see you alone.’

‘I was in a hurry for him to go,’ said Brunet in a calm tone, ‘because I’ve only got a quarter of an hour.’

Mathieu’s laugh broke off abruptly. ‘A quarter of an hour!’ he added vehemently. ‘I know — I know, your time isn’t your own. Indeed it was very nice of you to come.’

‘As a matter of fact I was actually engaged all day. But this morning, when I saw your dreary face, I thought I must absolutely have a word with you.’

‘Did I look awful?’

‘You did indeed, my poor chap. Rather yellow, rather puffy, and your eyelids and the corners of your mouth were twitching. So I said to myself,’ he went on affectionately, ‘I must do what I can for him.’

Mathieu coughed. ‘I didn’t know I had such an expressive face... I had slept badly,’ he went on with an effort. ‘I’m worried... just like everybody else, you know: just worried about money.’

Brunet looked unconvinced. ‘So much the better, if that’s the only trouble,’ he said, ‘you’ll get out of that all right. But you looked much more like a fellow who had just realized that he has been living on ideas that don’t pay.’

‘Oh! ideas,’ said Mathieu, with a vague gesture. He looked with appealing gratitude at Brunet and he thought: ‘That is why he came. He had his day full, a number of important meetings, and he put himself out to help me.’ But all the same it would have been better if Brunet had come for the simple reason that he wanted to see him again.

‘Look here,’ said Brunet. ‘I’ll come straight to the point. I’m here to make you a proposal: will you join the Party? If you agree, I’ll take you along and it will all be settled in twenty minutes.’

Mathieu started. ‘The Party — Communist Party, you mean?’

Brunet burst out laughing, screwed up his eyes and showed his brilliant teeth.

‘Well, of course,’ said he, ‘you don’t imagine that I want you to join La Rocque?’

A silence fell. ‘Brunet,’ asked Mathieu quietly. ‘Why are you so keen on my becoming a Communist? Is it for my own good, or for the good of the Party?’

‘For your own good,’ said Brunet. ‘You needn’t look so suspicious. I haven’t become a recruiting-sergeant for the Communist Party. And let us get this quite clear: the Party doesn’t need you. To the Party you represent nothing but a little capital of intelligence — and we’ve got all the intellectuals we want. But you need the Party.’

‘It’s for my good,’ repeated Mathieu. ‘For my good. Listen...’ he repeated brusquely. ‘I wasn’t expecting your proposal, I’m rather taken aback, but... but I should like you to tell me what you think. As you know, I live among schoolboys who think about nothing but themselves, and admire me on principle. No one ever talks to me about myself, and there are times when I can’t seem to get hold of what I am. So you think I need to join?’

‘Yes,’ said Brunet, emphatically. ‘Yes, you need to join. Don’t you feel so yourself?’

Mathieu smiled sadly: he was thinking of Spain.

‘You have gone your own way,’ said Brunet. ‘You are the son of a bourgeois, you couldn’t come to us straight away, you had to free yourself first. And now it’s done, you are free. But what’s the use of that same freedom, if not to join us? You have spent thirty-five years cleaning yourself up, and the result is nil. You are an odd sort of creature, you know,’ he continued, with a friendly smile. ‘You live in a void, you have cut your bourgeois connexions, you have no tie with the proletariat, you’re adrift, you’re an abstraction, a man who is not there. It can’t be an amusing sort of life.’

‘No,’ said Mathieu. ‘It isn’t an amusing sort of life.’

He went up to Brunet and shook him by the shoulders. He was very fond of Brunet. ‘You are, in fact, a blasted old recruiting-sergeant,’ said he. ‘I’m glad to have you say all that to me.’

Brunet smiled an absent smile; he was still pursuing his idea. ‘You renounced everything in order to be free,’ he said. ‘Take one step further, renounce your own freedom: and everything shall be rendered unto you.’

‘You talk like a parson,’ said Mathieu, laughing. ‘No, but seriously, old boy, it wouldn’t be a sacrifice, you know. I know quite well that I shall get everything back — flesh, blood, and genuine passions. You know, Brunet, I’ve finally lost all sense of reality: nothing now seems to be altogether true.’

Brunet did not answer: he was meditating. He had a heavy, brick-coloured face, loosely featured, and his reddish eyebrows were very pale and very long. A Prussian cast of countenance. Mathieu, every time he saw him, was conscious of a sort of uneasy curiosity in his nostrils, and he sniffed a little, in the expectation that he would suddenly inhale a strong animal smell. But Brunet had no smell.

‘Now you are very real,’ said Mathieu. ‘Everything you touch looks real. Since you have been in my room, it seems to me an actual room, and it revolts me.’ And he added abruptly. ‘You are a man.’

‘A man?’ said Brunet with surprise. ‘It would be awkward if I wasn’t. What do you mean by that?’

‘Exactly what I say: you have chosen to be a man.’

A man with powerful, rather knotted muscles, who deals in brief, stern truths, a man erect and self-enclosed, sure of himself, a man of this earth, impervious to the angelical allurements of art, psychology, and politics, a whole man, nothing but a man. And Mathieu was there, confronting him, irresolute, half his life gone and still half-raw, assailed by all the vertigoes of non-humanity: and he thought, ‘I don’t even look like a man.’

Brunet got up and walked towards Mathieu. ‘Come, do as I did. What prevents you? Do you suppose you can live your whole life between parentheses?’

Mathieu eyed him dubiously. ‘Of course not,’ he said, ‘of course not. And if I choose, I must choose your side, there is no other choice.’

‘There is no other choice,’ repeated Brunet. He waited a few moments, and then said: ‘Well?’

‘Let me breathe a little,’ said Mathieu.

‘Breathe by all means,’ said Brunet, ‘but make haste. Tomorrow you will be too old, you will have acquired your little habits, you will be the slave of your own freedom. And perhaps, too, the world will be too old.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mathieu.

Brunet eyed him, and said quickly: ‘We shall be at war in September.’

‘You’re joking,’ said Mathieu.

‘You can believe me, the English know it, the French Government has been warned: in the second fortnight of September the Germans will enter Czechoslovakia.’

‘Gossip of that kind...’ said Mathieu irritably.

‘You don’t seem to understand a thing,’ said Brunet with annoyance. But he recovered his composure and added mildly, ‘It is true that if you did understand I shouldn’t have to clamp everything down for you. Now listen: you are a footslogger like myself. Suppose you go in your present state of mind. You’ll burst like a bubble. You’ll have dreamed away your thirty-five years of life, and then one fine day a shell will blow your dreams to bits, and you will die without ever having woken up. You have been a hide-bound official, you will make a ridiculous hero, and you will fall without having understood anything, solely to help M. Schneider to maintain his interests in the Skoda Works.’

‘And what about you?’ said Mathieu. He added with a smile: ‘I’m very much afraid, my dear fellow, that Marxism won’t protect you from bullets.’

‘I’m afraid so, too,’ said Brunet. ‘You know where they will send me? To the Maginot Line. That’s a sure and certain knockout.’

‘Well, then?’

‘It’s not the same thing, it’s a deliberate risk. Nothing can now deprive my life of its meaning, nothing can prevent its being a destiny.’ And he added briskly: ‘Like every Comrade’s life, for the matter of that.’

He sounded as though he dreaded the sin of pride.

Mathieu did not answer, he leaned his elbows on the balcony, and thought: ‘That was well said.’ Brunet was right, his life was a destiny. His age, his class, his time — he had deliberately assumed them all, he had chosen the leaded stick that would strike him on the temple, the German shell that would shatter him to pieces. He had joined up, he had renounced his freedom, he was nothing but a soldier. And everything had been rendered unto him, even his freedom. ‘He is freer than I: he is in harmony with himself and with the Party.’ There he was, extremely real, with an actual savour of tobacco in his mouth, the colours and the forms with which he filled his eyes were more actual, more intense, than those which Mathieu could see, and yet, at the same moment, he reached across the whole earth, suffering and struggling with the proletarians of all countries. ‘At that moment, at that very moment, there are men firing point blank at each other in the suburbs of Madrid, there are Austrian Jews agonizing in concentration camps, there are Chinese buried under the ruins of Nanking, and here I am, in perfect health, I feel quite free, in a quarter of an hour I shall take my hat and go for a walk in the Luxemburg.’ He turned towards Brunet, and looked at him with bitterness. ‘I am quite irresponsible,’ he thought.

‘They’ve bombarded Valencia,’ he said, suddenly.

‘I know,’ said Brunet. ‘There wasn’t an A. A. gun in the whole town. The bombs fell on a market.’

He had not clenched his fists, he had not abandoned his measured tone, his rather sleepy attitude, and yet it was he who had been bombarded, it was his brothers and sisters, his children, who had been killed. Mathieu sat down in an armchair. ‘Your armchairs are insidious.’ He got up quickly, and sat on the corner of the table.

‘Well?’ said Brunet. He seemed to be watching him.

‘Well,’ said Mathieu. ‘You’re lucky.’

‘Lucky to be a Communist?’

‘Yes.’

‘What a thing to say. It’s a matter of choice, old boy.’

‘I know. You’re lucky to have been able to choose.’

Brunet’s face hardened a little. ‘That means that you aren’t going to be equally lucky.’

Well, an answer must be given. He is waiting. Yes or no. Join the Party, inject a meaning into life, choose to be a man, to act, and to believe. That would be salvation. Brunet kept his eyes on him.

‘You refuse?’

‘Yes,’ said Mathieu in desperation. ‘Yes, Brunet. I refuse.’

And he thought: ‘He came to offer me the best thing in the world.’ — ‘It isn’t final,’ he continued. ‘Later on...’

Brunet shrugged his shoulders. ‘If you’re counting on an inner inspiration to make up your mind, you may have to wait a long time. Do you imagine that I was convinced when I joined the Communist Party? A conviction has to be created.’

Mathieu smiled sadly. ‘I know that. Go down on your knees and you will believe. I daresay you are right. But I want to believe first.’

‘Naturally,’ ejaculated Brunet. ‘You’re all the same, you intellectuals: everything is cracking and collapsing, the guns are on the point of going off, and you stand there calmly claiming the right to be convinced. If only you could see yourself with my eyes, you would understand that time presses.’

‘Certainly, time presses; and what then?’

Brunet slapped his thigh indignantly. ‘There you are. You pretend to regret your scepticism, but you cling to it. It’s your moral support. The moment it is attacked, you stick to it savagely, just as your brother sticks to his money.’

To which Mathieu replied mildly, ‘Is there anything savage about my demeanour at this moment?’

‘I don’t say...’ said Brunet.

A silence fell. Brunet seemed mollified. ‘If only he could understand me,’ thought Mathieu. He made an effort: to convince Brunet was his sole remaining chance of convincing himself.

‘I have nothing to defend. I am not proud of my life, and I’m penniless. My freedom? It’s a burden to me; for years past I have been free, and to no purpose. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound certainty. I would have asked nothing better than to work with you, it would take me out of myself, and I need to forget myself for a bit. Besides, I agree with you that no one can be a man who has not discovered something for which he is prepared to die.’