At one moment Emile had come in and put a log back into the fire, and the Premier had had no suspicion of all these furtive comings and goings. Yet he would have sworn that he had all along been aware of sitting supine in his armchair, with his lips parted and his breath whistling through them.
Had there really been a temporary separation between his mind and his body, the latter sitting inert while the former, still agile, flew in circles like a bird, sometimes into unknown worlds, sometimes through a universe not far removed from reality?
How could he have known, for instance, that when the effort became too exhausting he knitted his bushy eyebrows, or that he occasionally groaned at his helplessness? Yet later on they confirmed his impression that he had frowned and groaned. So what about it?
His own conviction was that he had got far enough outside himself to return and take a look at the almost inert carcass which was beginning to seem alien to him, and for which he felt more revulsion than pity.
During those two hours he had seen a vast number of faces, and had gone in pursuit of some of them, wondering what they were doing at his bedside. Others were familiar, but all the same he couldn’t understand how they got there, the presence of the stationmaster of a little town in southern France, for example, where he had spent a brief holiday several years in succession.
Why was he here today? The old man knew the stationmaster had died long ago. But that little girl, whose hair had been arranged in ringlets and tied with a wide tricolor ribbon so that she could present him with a bouquet? Did her being here mean that she was dead too?
That was what had been worrying him most, while Gaffé waited, watching him, not daring to light a cigarette. He was trying to disentangle those among all these people who were still alive and those who were already in the other world, and his impression was that the frontier between life and death was hard to trace, that perhaps, even, there wasn’t one.
Was that the great secret? He knew that during those two hours, when he had been intensely alive despite his body’s inertia, he had a dozen times been on the point of solving all problems.
What made the job so difficult and disheartening was that he could never remain for long on the same plane. Perhaps his mind was not nimble enough, or lacked balance. Or could it be a question of weight? Or of habit? He was going up and down, sometimes gradually, sometimes by leaps and bounds, coming out into different worlds, some of which were fairly close to what is called reality, fairly familiar, while others were so remote and unlike that neither people nor objects were recognizable.
He had seen Marthe de Créveaux again. But she wasn’t at all as he remembered her. It was not only that, as the papers had said when she died, she weighed no more than a little girl, but she looked like one, she had a little girl’s innocence, and she was stark naked.
At the same time he blamed himself for remembering her only in order to clear his conscience, not so much from the business of the tailor as from the affair of the Legion of Honor. For it wasn’t true that he had never shown partiality. That was a legend he had built up, like the others, the legend of the upright, uncompromising politician, doing his duty without fear or favor.
All the same, he had given the Legion of Honor to one of Marthe’s protégés, an obscure country squire whose only title to such distinction was his ownership of a pack of hounds.
And a few days later hadn’t he given an official reception to an African potentate who must be propitiated for degrading practical reasons, though his proper place was in prison?
He had never asked pardon of anyone, and he was not going to begin at his time of life. Who but himself had any right to judge him?
He went on struggling. Of the faces that approached, glancing at him as thronging passers-by, in a street, cast a glance at the victim of an accident and go on their way, most were vacant-eyed, and he kept trying to stop one and ask whether this were not a procession of the dead that he was witnessing.
If so he too must be dead. And yet not quite, for they refused to treat him as one of themselves.
What was he, then, following zigzag flight like some clumsy night bird?
Very well! If it was because of Chalamont that they were coldshouldering him, he would leave Chalamont in peace. He had understood. He’d understood long ago, even perhaps at the Hôtel Matignon, but he had refused to show pity then, because he believed he had no right to do so.
He hadn’t shown himself any pity, either. Why should he have shown any to his assistant?
“Time to pay, gentlemen!”
A voice shouted the words, like the attendant in a cheap dance hall who calls out in the intervals:
“Pass along the money, please!”
Had he been indignant when Chalamont had informed him that, after careful consideration, he had decided that his career would benefit if he were to have an established position, in other words if he married a woman with enough money to enable him to live in some style?
He’d been so far from indignant that he had attended the wedding as one of the witnesses.
Everything derives from everything. Everything counts. Everything helps. Everything changes. There is no waste. The day the wedding took place, at Saint-Honoré-d’Eylau, the die was cast and the Premier ought to have known it.
The moment had come when Chalamont had been summoned to pay for his situation, to repay his wife and his father-in-law, failing which he would be displaced in their esteem. . . .
Just as Marthe de Créveaux’s lover had had to bestow a decoration on a stag hunter.
All this was on the lowest level, where he kept returning and getting bogged down. But in the course of the two hours he had made other discoveries, explored regions where he felt so much a stranger that he was not even certain what he had seen there.
He had felt cold, and that, too, was an attested fact, for the doctor was to tell him, later, that he had shivered more than once. Now it was his meeting with his father and Xavier Malate that had made him feel cold. He couldn’t remember where he had met them, or what had passed between them, but he had seen them, and what had particularly struck him was that they had seemed to be on such cordial terms.
He had not expected that. It bothered him. It upset all his notions of human values. And why did the two of them, who had nothing in common except the fact of being dead, look at him with one and the same expression? It wasn’t pity. That word had been withdrawn from circulation. Neither was it indifference. It was—the expression was inaccurate and bombastic, but he couldn’t find a better—it was a sublime serenity.
In his father’s case that might be all right. He was willing to concede the point. But that Malate should be endowed with sublime serenity, merely because he had died under the surgeon’s knife! . . .
He didn’t know what would happen next, and wondered whether he was going to wake up in the Louis-Philippe armchair at Les Ebergues. He was not sure whether he wanted to, but all the same he felt a little anxious.
They had caught him unawares, giving him no time to prepare for his departure, and it seemed to him that he had a great many things to do, a lot of questions to settle.
It was a pain in his right arm that proved to him that he was still in the body, and he opened his eyes, to discover, without surprise, that facing him sat Dr. Gaffé, who felt called upon to give him an encouraging smile.
“Had a good sleep, sir?”
Night was falling, and the doctor, at last able to move, got up to turn on the light. Milleran stirred in her office next door, walked quietly out to the first room, doubtless to tell Madame Blanche that he was awake now.
“So you see,” said the old man gravely, “it appears that I’m not dead.”
Why did Gaffé think fit to protest at this, when he was expecting it to happen from one day to the next, and there was no reason why it shouldn’t be today?
The Premier had not be
en joking, he had merely taken note of a fact.
“Did you suddenly feel unwell during luncheon?”
He almost began to put on his usual act, replying in ambiguous or boorish monosyllables. But why bother?
“For no sufficient reason I lost my temper, so I took two sedative pills.”
“Two!” exclaimed the doctor, relieved.
“Two. Now the effect has worn off.”
Except that he was left with a nasty taste in his mouth, stiff limbs.
“Let’s see your blood pressure. . . . No! Don’t get up . . . Madame Blanche will help me to take your coat off. . . .”
He submitted meekly and didn’t ask about his blood pressure, the figure of which, for once, the doctor forgot, or preferred not, to tell him.
In addition to this, Gaffé paraded his stethoscope over his chest and back, with the dedicated air he took on at such times.
“Cough, please . . . Again . . . Good . . . A deep breath . . . ”
He had never been so biddable, and neither the doctor nor Madame Blanche could guess why—neither could Milleran, pricking up her ears in the next-door room.
The truth was that in his secret heart he had decided that it was all over. He couldn’t have said at what precise moment this feeling of detachment had come over him, but it must have been during the strange journey of exploration he had made while his carcass lolled motionless and he was temporarily released from it.
It hadn’t been painful, much less agonizing: he felt rather like a bubble rising to the surface of the water all of a sudden, for no apparent reason, and bursting, to mingle with the atmosphere. An easy separation, bringing him a relief so great that he could have cried out in delight, like a child watching the ascent of a red balloon:
“Oh!”
He would have liked to joke with them, in gratitude for their attentiveness and all they were doing for him, but they wouldn’t understand and would probably have thought he was lightheaded.
He had never been lightheaded. So he had no standard of comparison, but he felt convinced that never in his life had he been so rational as at present.
“I suppose,” said Gaffé quietly, after a glance at Madame Blanche, “that if I asked you to go to bed you’d dislike the idea? Simply as a precaution, of course. You yourself admit that you’ve been under a strain just lately. . . . ”
He had said nothing of the kind. Milleran must have told the doctor that, while he was supposed to be asleep . . .
“There’s frost in the air. It’s going to be a very cold night, and there’s no doubt that twenty-four hours’ rest in bed . . . ”
He thought it over, as a straightforward suggestion, and responded with an equally straightforward one:
“Suppose we put it off till this evening?”
In point of fact he was tempted to do as Gaffé wanted, but he had something else to see to first. And both the doctor and Madame Blanche would doubtless have been astonished if they could have read his thoughts.
He was eager to get away from the lot of them, Milleran, Emile, Gabrielle, young Marie. He was tired. He’d done his share and now he was giving up. Had it been possible, he would have asked them to put him into clean pajamas and lay him down in his bed, close the shutters against the fog outside, put out the lights, except the tiny moonlike disk of the night light.
Then, with the sheets up to his chin, curled up in utter, self-contained silence, in a solitude broken only by his weakening pulse, he would ebb slowly away, a little melancholy but quite without bitterness, and very rapidly, released both from shame and pride, he would settle his last accounts.
“I beg your pardon . . . ”
Whose? That, as he had discovered, did not matter. There was no need of any name.
“I did my best, with all the strength of a man and all a man’s weaknesses. . . . ”
Would he see around him the attentive faces of Xavier Malate, Philippe Chalamont, his father, and others as well, those of Eveline Archambault, Marthe, the stationmaster, and the little girl with the bouquet?
“I realize it’s nothing to be proud of. . . . ”
They gave him no encouragement. He didn’t need encouragement. He was all alone. The others had been merely witnesses, and he had learned that witnesses have no right to set up as judges. Neither had he. No one had. . . .
“Forgive me. . . . ”
No sound of any kind, except the blood still pumping jerkily through his veins, and a crackling of logs in the next room.
He would keep his eyes open to the very last.
CHAPTER 8
“MADAME BLANCHE, WOULD YOU MIND going to the kitchen and waiting until I call? I have things to see to with Milleran. I promise not to take long, and not to get excited.”
Gaffé had granted him his respite and given him an injection to pep him up, saying he would come back about seven o’clock.
“To be quite frank, as you’ve always asked me to be with you,” he had said, “there’s a slight wheezing sound in your bronchial tubes. But I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, for your temperature and pulse don’t suggest there’s any infection so far.”
They were not accustomed to finding him so meek, and it made them uneasy, but what could he do to avoid worrying them? Whatever line he took it would not stop their exchange of anxious glances. There was no understanding, any longer, between him and them. Or rather, he still understood them, but they couldn’t follow him any more.
“Will you come with me, Milleran, so that we can have a big cleaning-up?”
She followed him, bewildered, into the first office, where he did not bend down right away to the bottom shelf, but took out Volume III of Vidal-Lablacbe, where there was a document of disastrous import to a man who had been in past Cabinets and would doubtless be in future ones.
Still holding this, he put back the book and went on to another and yet another, plucking out now a letter, now a scrap of paper that had been crumpled, as its creases still showed.
“Why have you turned so pale, Milleran? You look as though you were going to faint.”
Yet he wasn’t looking at her. He simply knew. Then, turning at last to the Pierre Louÿs volume, he went on again, in an encouraging tone with no shade of blame or anger:
“You knew all this, didn’t you?”
Thereupon, as he straightened up again, adding Chalamont’s confession to the other papers in his hand, she burst into tears, took a few steps toward the door as though to run away into the darkness, changed her mind, came back to fling herself at his feet, and tried to grab his hand.
“Forgive me, sir . . . didn’t want to, I swear I didn’t. . . . ”
This immediately restored his peremptory, authoritative manner, for he could never abide tears, bursts of emotion, any more than he could tolerate certain kinds of rudeness or silliness. He wouldn’t have any woman writhing on the ground, kissing his hand and dropping tears on it.
He commanded her:
“Get up!”
Then, his tone already gentler:
“Steady, Milleran . . . There’s nothing to be excited about. . . . ”
“I assure you, sir, that . . . ”
“You did as you were told to do, and quite right too. By whom?”
He was in a hurry for her to recover herself, to emerge from this melodramatic atmosphere, and in order to help her he went to the length of patting her shoulder, an unusual gesture with him.
“Who was it?”
“Superintendent Dolomieu.”
“When?”
She hesitated.
“When I was still in Paris?”
“No. About two years ago. I had a day off and went to Etretat, and he was there, waiting for me. He said it was part of his official duty, he was giving me instructions on behalf of the government. . . . ”
“The g
overnment was quite right, and I should probably have done the same myself. You were asked to copy the papers?”
She shook her head, and another sob jerked out. There was still a shiny, damp track down one of her cheeks.
“No. Inspector Aillevard has a photostat machine in his room. . . . ”
“So you used to give him the papers and he returned them next day?”
“Sometimes only an hour later. Not one is missing. I took care he gave them all back to me.”
She couldn’t understand the Premier’s attitude, couldn’t manage to believe in it. Instead of being angry or downcast, as she would have expected, he showed a calm she had seldom known him to display, and his face was lit by a smile.
One would have thought he found it a good game, which amused him more than anyone.
“As things are now, it won’t matter much if we destroy these papers, will it?”
She was trying to smile too, almost succeeding, for there was something detached and airy about him which was infectious. This was the first time he had ever seemed to regard her as an equal, so that their relationship took on a personal touch.
“Perhaps it would be better, all the same, for the originals to be got rid of. . . . ”
He showed her the Chalamont letter. “Did you find that?”
She nodded, not without a shade of pride.
Funny thing! If Chalamont has chosen an inquisitive fellow as his Minister of the Interior, and if the chap happens to send for his chief’s file . . . ”
He knew Dolomieu, who had been under his orders and was Director of General Information at the Rue des Saussaies. Would he take advantage of Chalamont’s access to power to get himself appointed Director of the Sureté Nationale, or even Prefect of Police?
What did it matter, after all!
“Since you know where these papers are, come and help me. . . . ”
In the first room she only missed two, whose places of concealment he pointed out to her with childish satisfaction.
“So you hadn’t found those?”
In the second room, she had found all his hiding places; in his study she had missed only one.
The President Page 13