Cloudless May (9 page)

He held out his other hand with a sprig of thin greyish-green leaves on the open palm.

“Look at that. Smell it.”

He held it under Bergeot's nose.

“Southernwood,” Bergeot said.

“By God, it's rich, isn't it? Did your mother grow it when you were a boy? Mine cherished a bush of it in the yard near
the jakes. The right place, eh? I used to pull a sprig and stick it behind my ear when I carried the customers' orders out after school. Y'know, to me the scent of southernwood means summer itself, and winter is a smell of frozen blood off the joints of meat I was handling, and off my own paws. I was eight. Childhood, eh?”

He stretched his eyes, usually half shut. For a moment his face assumed an air of innocence, the more striking because it was drawn from a wide gross mouth, spreading nostrils, eyes twinkling, under coarse black eyebrows, with craft and appetite.

Bergeot felt an impulse to make his own childhood out harder that it had been. It was straitened, yes. In the room stuffed with pieces of furniture, inherited, and resisting the change from a town to a village, he and Bonamy were always under someone's legs. When they became schoolboys, they took their books and ink-bottles into the scullery: Bonamy, who had a horror of blackbeetles, squatted on the copper. Between themselves they talked with an Angevin accent, as he still did when he was surprised. More than the smell of southernwood or garlic, more even than the sight of men arguing over glasses of cloudy yellow wine, it was the accent itself of his childhood. When she was dying his mother had turned back into it, and so it was also the language that the dead of the province talked to each other with their faces against the roots of yews and poplars. . . . He distrusted and envied Labenne, who was enormously wealthy now, but whenever they met, Labenne's voice, rich with the village tones, seduced him into something like affection. He felt at home, and modest—as you must be at home, where even your bed belongs to the family.

“I can't say I regret having been brought up roughly,” he said.

“I should hope not,” Labenne exclaimed. “Would you rather be us or Monsieur de Thiviers? A man who has never been cold or hungry has one sense missing, the best of the lot. For that matter, Thiviers is flabby, I daresay he's a coward. In any case, he has delusions. People need, he says, to suffer. Isn't that just what would occur to a man who's never sweated his shirt wet and then had it freeze to him?”

Bergeot opened his mouth to defend Thiviers, and closed it. He had stepped into the role of hard-headed peasant to put
himself on terms with Labenne, and he had not the self-assurance to drop it and risk Labenne's contempt. With a slight discomfort, as though he had over-eaten, he let Thiviers pass as a half-wit.

“Well,” Labenne said, “I've looked through the notes you sent me yesterday. I'm bound to say I don't think it's the right time to talk about civil defence. In fact I don't know whether it's any good at all, at any time.”

“What do you mean?” Bergeot said. He suppressed his irritation. How like Labenne to reject an idea he hadn't thought of himself.

“Don't you know how little chance the war has of reaching the Loire? Long before the fighting could get as far as here, our generals would have given in. Not to speak of the politicians. . . . Think of it. The Aisne would be gone, the Marne, Paris, the Seine, Picardy, the Île de France, the Beauce plain. D'you suppose the country could fight with one arm gone? My dear fellow, be sensible. I know all about the soul of a great nation, and the rest of it. But if our line up there breaks, we're lost.”

“What nonsense!” Bergeot said. His plan was too dear to him to be given up so easily as he gave up Thiviers.

Labenne threw his arms up in the gesture of a clown.

“And you believe that people in Seuilly will thank you? You don't know them. Like everywhere else, they're sick of the war and they don't want to be reminded about it. It's a sound instinct. Why? Because, without being told, they know that if it goes on it'll end badly. You can't deceive peasants about the weather or small shopkeepers about supplies; they can smell what sort of wind is blowing out of Germany, and they know we can't stand it. My boy, you've only to ask the midwives! Ask them how many children they've brought into the world since 1918! Ask your old schoolmaster whether he's had to drag the desks closer in front of him, leaving the ones at the back empty. If you took a census now, of everybody except the contractors, you'd find them solid for peace. Every blessed soul.” Labenne thrust his lips forward in a grimace. “Do you want us to wait until we're forced, yes, forced to give in? Are you dreaming about crushing monsters with your bare fist? Do you want to jump over a cliff to save yourself the trouble of walking home? I'm right!”

“Your voice reminds me of my father,” Bergeot said. “Except that he hated the Germans.”

“What the devil has my voice got to do with it?”

Bergeot did not answer. Impossible to explain the repugnance he felt when he imagined a German giving orders in his village. No doubt the German would be a simple fellow, a villager himself, and would recognise his grandmother's black-seamed hands in the fingers of an old woman scraping grease from a pan. None the less, his heels would cut off the voices rising under the roots; he would crush, because he was deaf to them, the real memories of the village, those which are its silences, its mute gestures, the way one woman lifts her bread from the oven, frowning and tapping a thimble on the crust, the earth worn to the bone under the centuries-old walnut, the used turf, the way one man crosses his field, pressing lighter on one foot than the other, so that in the darkness a neighbour could say, “There's Buret coming home; they're all the same, those Burets, they walk like a lamed mule.” All these habits, ancient and new in every infant, this metal in the harsh soil, the invader would insult by his ignorance. He would force a silence on chemist and schoolmaster which was not the silence they had inherited, coming from their life before they were born and stretching into their life after they died from the village. The silence would become a real silence, not a fountain of sounds. And after all these hundreds of years the village would cease.

Strange, Bergeot thought; I shall never go back to Thouédun, and yet I've never left it. He looked quizzically at Labenne.

“I think you're wrong,” he said: “we have to fight. It's not an army fighting an army. It isn't even the word death against the word
Tod,
or the word Voltaire against the word Goethe. God forbid. It's to save the smile of Voltaire—and, if you like, the smile of Goethe. . . . I don't mind including him.”

“Are you sure you're not only anxious about your own career?” Labenne said. He sat up with his sudden charming smile. “Don't be angry with me.”

“I daresay I think about it,” Bergeot said simply. “Why not?”

Labenne sunk his head and looked up, pious and vulpine.

“Y'know, people say I began my career as a socialist and turned when I made money. The bare truth is I abandoned the
socialists because they're either fools or cowards, they daren't fight for power but they hinder the others, the born masters. By God, you won't deny this country needs mastering! What a mess!”

So you dream you can go on climbing! Bergeot thought. He looked at Labenne with curiosity. The other read his thought. His face became vacant, then he laughed.

“Well. . . you insist on your scheme, do you?”

“I do. And I want your full and willing help,” Bergeot said.

“You won't get it unwillingly,” Labenne answered. He stood up and began to push in the folds of white shirt that had fallen over his belt; the energy of his gestures always pulled it out. He buttoned his jacket, and by some trick of his thick body became the image of a respectable Mayor. He rested his hand on Bergeot's shoulder.

“Don't think,” he said in a serious voice, “that because I face facts I'm an egoist. The only time a man can afford illusions is when he's dying. Or a nation.”

“France is not dying....”

“Did I say it was? . . . I'll think over your scheme. I'll let you know what I can do. I'll do everything I can. After all, only France matters.”

He finished on the trumpet note he used in speeches. Then he pressed Bergeot's hand closely; his smile this time was eager and simple.

Although he had, it seemed, triumphed, Bergeot did not feel content. He was confident that behind his egoism and his slyness Labenne was sound. The sprig of southernwood was there to prove it. Yet he felt depleted—as though he had been pouring his ardour into a bucket full of holes. He went over to the window facing north and leaned out, grasping the stone on either side. Reassurance came to him from the stone itself: his hands were the latest in a series adding up to five centuries, beginning with the stonemason's hands.

Mme De Freppel was at home, expecting her daughter. Catherine had been at school in Paris for four years; except for the shortest visits, she had not been at home during all that time. Now that she was coming for good, Mme de Freppel had given her a large room instead of the little one where she slept on her visits, and furnished it at more cost than she would ever spend on herself. Looking round it, she felt excited, eager to have her daughter under her roof. She refused to admit another feeling, waiting behind her love and eagerness. It was familiar. It was the feeling that had driven her to send the child to a foster-mother when she was two years old. Until then she had looked after her devotedly; she did everything, prepared her meals, bathed her. Abruptly, with only the excuse that the child needed a change, she handed her over to the other woman. Why? Her husband was going to England and she went with him, desperate to be rid of her settled life. The calm she had thanked heaven for when she married Comte de Freppel was making her ill. When they left behind the dull little château near Blois, she felt a burden roll from her. Yet she missed her child, and wept bitterly when she thought about her.

As soon as they went back, she hurried to bring Catherine home. And a year later left her again, with a nurse, when she went to Switzerland for two years: this time the excuse was her husband's health.

Less than a quarter of Catherine's childhood was spent with her mother. She was eight when her mother went off to stay at Seuilly with her friend Mme Vayrac. Mme de Freppel went for one week. At the end of five months she came home only to say she Was not coming; she had had enough of the Freppel life, the only thing she now wanted from it was her daughter.

M. de Freppel refused. Then began the terrible scenes the child felt without seeing them. She saw her father come out of the library where he had been talking to her mother for three hours. It was her mother's voice she had heard, talking, talking, weeping. A servant who passed the french window said that M. le Comte was backing across the room, his wife clinging to him by her arms, her head fallen back, her body dragging on the
floor. After this scene, Mme de Freppel left the house, with her daughter, without any of their clothes—she was afraid he would change his mind. . . .

Looking round her daughter's new room, Mme de Freppel hoped, with a guilty confusion, that Catherine would not make too many demands. The girl must stay at home now. A young woman of seventeen cannot be handed about like a parcel. She opened the cupboards where she had hung dresses for Catherine to try, and looked into the drawers with their piles of underclothes and silk stockings. She had never bought so many things for herself.

She heard the carriage and went down. Catherine was coming into the hall. Hurrying forward, she took the girl in her arms. Catherine was smiling gaily. She kissed her mother, then drew back.

“I'd forgotten what the garden is like,” she said.

It was as if she had said, I don't want to answer questions. A child had gone away and a young woman had returned. There would not be any need for her mother to pretend to be interested in boring games, no need to make an excuse for having to go out or go away.

As they went upstairs together, Mme de Freppel was thinking, At last I have her, she's only mine; she's here. She would not admit yet that a friendly young woman is not a daughter. . . . Now that no demands were made on her, why did she hope for them?

“Do you like your room?”

“It's beautiful,” the girl said lightly. She walked to the window without looking at anything. “Oh, you can see the river.”

“I thought you'd like that,” her mother said.

She began to open drawers and cupboards. “I've bought you new things.”

Catherine turned round. “That's very kind of you, mother,” she said, smiling.

“Come and look at them.”

The girl praised everything—as though she knew that her mother, because she had been very anxious to do things well, must be praised. Then she walked about the room a little. Pleased, her mother saw that she was graceful. Charming, too,
with dark eyes and a pale skin. Her mouth—with the light emphasis of a signature—was a clear scarlet.

“You must never use a lipstick.”

“I don't. But why not?”

“You don't need it.”

She drew Catherine in front of the glass. There was a likeness between them—thank heaven, the girl had neither the long Freppel nose nor the Freppel sallowness—but the differences were as clear. All she had never had, or had lost early, of smoothness, freshness, elegance, her daughter had and with it a certain young delicacy, ardent and appealing. Mme de Freppel did not say: She is what I might have been—because it never occurred to her that her life could have been different. She was not willing to exchange a day of her past, not even the most ignominious, against an easier. She had been given as her counters hunger and stratagems—very well, she had not wasted them, and her youth, ah, her youth, had, because of them, a taste sharper than happiness.