Cloudless May (28 page)

“Defeat?” Mathieu said. “Surrender?”

Agathe was silent.

Rienne lifted his head. “Émile is too self-willed to be influenced by a woman.”

Are you a good judge of that?” Mathieu said coldly.

Agathe trembled so much that she could not hold her glass. If she must protect her brother she could only do it with one of her convictions, and they were not used to public life.

“My opinion,” she said timidly, inexorably, “is that women should not influence men. A mother, a sister”—she did not dare speak of a wife or mistress—“is there to soothe him if he is hurt. If, for example, one of his experiments has gone wrong. Men must experiment, even if they kill themselves, or others. Think of the awful trouble our Lord brought on His mother. The poor creature, how she must have suffered. And if Judas Iscariot had a sister, how she must have cried over his body when they brought it home—and tried to make it look peaceful. If you ask my opinion—Monsieur Mathieu asked it—the world is no better for women running about in it as they do. It would be better if they kept quiet, and simply loved.”

Her brother and his guest both smiled at her. She saw that they smiled with so much kindness because they thought she was an ignorant old woman, and for the first time in her life—and the last—she felt that she was wiser than they were. The feeling shocked her so deeply that she left the table and took over to the window the sheet she was mending. You can't darn fine linen except in a mood of humble self-abandon.

Rienne was not staying the night in his house. He and
Mathieu walked back. It was ten o'clock, not yet dark, but all the life had withdrawn from the daylight, there was no feeling any more confidence in it. The air up here now was fresh; a young blackcock came to the edge of a field: he must have guessed that the poachers in the village had all been sent to the Maginot. Rienne walked very slowly.

From the foot of the hill they took a short cut through the farm belonging to a peasant proprietor called Viard. Jean Viard. There was no more nearly complete property on the Loire. Like Noah, Viard had provided himself with a sample of everything. Near the house he had vegetables and wall trees of pears and figs; vines at the other side of his wheat, an apple orchard, meadows running down to the stream, a workshop where he repaired his own tools. Beyond the house, in a square of grass bordered by young poplars—the only trees in the estate that bore merely for themselves—were the tombs of his two sons: they had died of their wounds after the last war; his sense of possession was so strong that he would not hand them over to the church, to other, earlier Viards of the commune. His one living child was a daughter. He had brought in two young nephews from outside, from Bourges; in a few years they were bored and went off to work in a factory in Paris. After that he closed his doors against strangers, even of his family.

He had been walking across his fields. He halted before he reached Rienne and Mathieu and looked at them from his sunken eyepits with an air of coldness and irony. He had imagination, this peasant. He was not only a block of ignorance, good sense, tradition. If he had wanted it he could have played a part in local politics. In a revolutionary army, such as the first army of Napoleon, he would have made his fortune and taken good care not to fall with his master. . . . But he had too much sense to step out of his own place in a society dominated by civilians whose tricks he could not understand.

He was short-sighted. As soon as he recognised Rienne he became friendly and, for him, trustful.

“Monsieur Mathieu—he edits the
Journal,”
Rienne said.

“Ah, Monsieur Mathieu,” Viard repeated, on a note of irony. “I read you. You're in a panic about this war.”

“We could lose it,” Mathieu said.

“You think so?” Viard said. “And do you think that will
affect me? I've paid my widow's mite.” He turned his head towards the field where he had buried his sons.

“You don't,” Rienne said, “want Germans here giving you orders.”

“No one gives me orders,” said Viard. “The Germans can come. This is where I live, I drink my own wine, I don't open my door to people I don't like. Let them come, your Germans. They won't keep me awake. They'll have to shoot me to get me out—and what good would that do them? Who else could work this farm practically alone? I have three women and one broken-down old fool. My son-in-law has been in Alsace since before the harvest. Why Alsace? Do I want Alsace? I tell you, Monsieur Mathieu, if I had been in charge there would not have been war. Who profits in a war? Men who work in towns, who despise me, who make fun of me—what is it they say?
as stupid as a peasant.
They say that, and they depend on me! Who feeds them? Me. Jean Viard. And they could only work forty hours a week! My dear sir, when I read that, I knew who it was crucified Jesus Christ. Not poor peasants. Not peasants from Galilee. But men living in the town. The lazy thieving rats!”

“Monsieur Viard,” Mathieu said, “what are you afraid of?”

“Afraid? I? Who are you talking to?” The lines on Viard's face, the arched line of his nose, became cruel.

“To a rich farmer,” Mathieu said coolly. “To a farmer who made money in the Great War. . . . Don't tell me you haven't a sackful of bank-notes and defence bonds. You're afraid of losing it.”

The look on Viard's face changed. No, it was not a look of cruelty; it was the hardness and railing patience of Anjou; this land which grows a strong eager wine and scandal-loving peasants.

“And my sons?” Viard said.

“Were they the only ones?”

“I sold them, eh?” Viard said. “Listen, Monsieur Mathieu: in my young Denis's company ten workmen were recalled to work in the factories. They got good wages. My son—and the other peasants—stayed where they were and got their deaths. That's all. And now. . .”

“And now you're for anyone who will promise you peace
and your property,” Mathieu said. His voice was inconceivably harsh.

“That's enough,” Rienne murmured.

Viard laughed. Jerking his thumb at Mathieu, he said,

“Don't worry yourself, Colonel. I and this gentleman aren't soft, we don't show marks.” He stretched his arm out as though it could embrace the fields and the orchard. “Here,” he said tenderly, “we have everything—except men. The garden of the world. My God, I'm for anyone who'll make Frenchmen do the work they were invented to do. Let the others rot in factories.”

His voice altered again.

“And let them starve there, by God!”

A child had come out from the house; a little boy, thin, sunburned. He stood close to Viard, listening with the absorption of a child who is always with adults and has to keep himself in place in the middle of so many strong currents. His thin shoulders moved slightly like fins.

“My daughter's boy,” Viard said. The bitterness dropped from his voice.

“Have you other grandchildren?” Rienne said.

“No. He will take on the farm.”

Viard rested his hand on the narrow shoulders. The boy flinched a little under the weight of so much anger, prosperity, prudence, immovable will. The weight of ten generations of Viards, and the weight of the future.

From the Seuilly road, Rienne glanced back. They were still standing there, Viard and his grandchild, and now the child was scarcely visible apart from the old man's thick erect body. Only one of his hands stuck out; it held all he had of his own, all that was not family or inheritance.

Labenne watched his son—unseen by the boy or his tutor—at work. He had discovered in the wall of the room he had given them as a schoolroom a grating he could see through by getting up on a chair. On the pretence of placing the boy's desk nearer
the light, he arranged it so that the angle of vision through the grating fell directly on them. He was not spying. He needed to keep an eye on the boy by the same instinct as a miser fingers his gold. With an intoxicating joy he heard Henry's voice—a deep voice for a boy of twelve—stumbling along the lines of the
Aeneid,
and saw his glance shift impatiently to the open window. How the boy hated to be shut up—but he was learning his Latin! He was the first stage in the refinement of sound peasant stock. He had the hands and body of a peasant, and he would have the manners of, at any rate, a mediaeval baron. He would know how to give orders. If his better-born wife found him uncouth, he would govern her. Labenne despised writers, but he was giving Henry the bare rudiments of classical knowledge so that he would not be at a loss in any society. The rudiments only. A young man who will inherit land and money needs other tricks more urgently.

He himself was teaching Henry the meaning and value of property. Labenne had no intention of trusting the future of his family to money. There must be money, but the earth it sprang from must be real earth—wheat, vineyards, mines.

He stepped down from the chair. His turbulent love of the boy had swollen in his stomach and he needed to walk about to become calm. His son was more than a fine boy. Henry was his stock, his roots in the ground of a province, his future. When Labenne thought about his son, he was thinking of France. The future of France, the safety of France, was the same thing as Henry's safety, the safety of the virile Labenne stock. A narrow passion, raging the more deeply. The real passion of his life. His cool pleasure in his power to play the god with people and society only served it. Without scruples, the Talleyrand of a province, he used his brute of an intellect to serve his loyalty to France, that is, to his son.

Putting on his jacket, he went off to the Prefecture, to attend an unofficial Committee of Civil Defence called by Bergeot. It promised to amuse him. There, with the Prefect, he found General Piriac, M. de Thiviers and Mathieu. Thiviers was standing up, his elegance pressed in relief against a window; he had the air of a good man condescending to be good company. It was too much for Labenne: to show his contempt he undid
the buttons of his shirt on a growth of black sweating hair. He settled himself to watch Bergeot.

Confidently, without too much emphasis—as if he hoped to slide them past any doubts, Bergeot outlined his plans for communal feeding if the town were disorganised by raids, for the control of shelters, for information posts where citizens would be advised, for sending away at short notice children, invalids, old people. He was precise and eloquent. Labenne saw that he had involved his soul in the scheme; he would be mortally hurt if it were rejected. Coldly, like a surgeon able to read disease in the patient's gestures, he noted that Bergeot was honestly afraid of failure. Failure to him was disgrace, and disgrace moral death.

The moment Bergeot finished, Labenne said,

“Splendid, my dear chap, splendid. A magnificent scheme.”

He watched the effect of his praise. I've made him feel that he can sway anyone, he thought cruelly.

Piriac was speaking. He spoke slowly, in a voice of extreme bewilderment. Behind the bewilderment, a spinal column in the confusion and slowness of his mind, he had the massive assurance of his own integrity. Labenne could put his fingers on the nodes of this spine—loyalty, belief in God, disinterest, simple cunning. He despised an integrity which is at the mercy of less scrupulous men. What virtue is there in it, if it can be defeated—if I can defeat it? He felt a raging contempt for soldiers. They were only good for fighting. And war—if it is anything but devilry—is simply the confession of a failure. How Piriac quavered!

“Seuilly will be defended . . . of course . . . if the Germans reach the Loire . . . but they won't reach the Loire. If they do, it is—perhaps—the end. . . .”

During this display Labenne turned his gaze on Mathieu. He felt a shock in the centre of his body, as if he had slipped when he was crossing a plank bridge. His mind slid off Mathieu's. That icy surface gave him no foothold. Labenne knocked against a contempt and a lack of sensitiveness equal to his own. And because he felt that Mathieu was his equal in will-power, intellect, and even in cruelty—but what is cruelty when mere heaps of mud, water and a little energy are concerned?—he was able to hate him.

Piriac had stopped. Putting out all his charm, Bergeot said,

“My dear general, your advice, extremely——”

Labenne interrupted him brutally and coldly. “Mr. Prefect, your scheme is admirable. No doubt you've taken into account that as soon as you begin sending people away there will be panic. And nothing less than a riot if you ask them to declare their stocks of food.”

“So you don't think it's worth trying to fight this war?” Mathieu said.

“What do you mean?” asked Labenne.

“I mean, Mr. Mayor, that if you won't prepare people to resist, you are preparing them to give in.”

“You have a romantic idea of war,” Labenne said.

“At least,” Mathieu said, “it is an idea of war, not obviously an idea of defeat.”

“Offer your advice to the General Staff,” Labenne said contemptuously.

Mathieu smiled. “If I were on the General Staff I should lock you up, as a danger to public safety. Possibly, since I'm a romantic, as a traitor.”

“And since you're not a Frenchman, but a Jew,” Labenne said easily, “you're possibly less interested in the safety of France than in some other end of the war.”

Mathieu answered with his normal coldness. “You may be confusing the safety of France with your own.”

This terrible penetration, as arrogant as his own, struck Labenne. He did not let it be seen that he had been touched. Pursing his thick lips, he showed the whites of his eyes like a clown, so that his threat might seem a joke.

“Don't count too much on the safety of an editor,” he said.

Mathieu's indifference was not a pretence. He turned to the Prefect and said drily,

“Your scheme is a good one—and months too late.”