JULES BEGAN THE JOURNEY sitting up, but with the jogging of the car, for Moissac drove as though the fire were behind and not inside him, he again became faint. Gabrielle made him stretch out on the seat, his knees in the air. She sat on her heels on the floor, and made sure his arm was secure. Her discomfort was its own solace, and she was grateful to travel with her back to Moissac. The prefect, outside of an occasional inquiry as to the boy’s condition, did not try to talk to her. Nor was she questioned at the several checkpoints where they stopped on command.
Jules began to cry, and his mind wandering, he called for his mother. Over and over. Then, lucid again, he would beg Gabrielle, “Don’t tell my mother, don’t let them tell Maman, please…”
“For the love of God, talk to him,” Moissac shouted back to her. “Say you’re his mother. You say you are a Christian, say you’re his mother. He’ll believe you.”
Gabrielle glanced over her shoulder at the prefect. His face was a dark red, the color starting in his neck where it bulged at his collar. You say you are a Christian…
She brushed the boy’s forehead with her hand, and she said, close to him, “It will be all right. There will be a doctor waiting to fix your hand. Everything will be all right. Jules, would you like me to pray out loud? We could pray together.”
“No, do not pray…I do not want to die…”
“Yes,” Moissac called back. “Fray. I want to hear you pray.”
The man sounded mad, and again she thought: You say you are a Christian. She was confused: to pray now seemed a betrayal of Marc. A Catholic prayer and the policeman would know…What would he know? What did he know?
“He does not wish it. I will pray quietly,” Gabrielle said. To Jules she said, “I was not going to say the prayers for the dead. You are not going to die. You must be brave. Your mother would want that. My brave little Jules,” she crooned.
And then the boy himself was praying, “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women…”
She said the words to herself.
Gabrielle felt rather than saw their approach to the Convent of Ste. Geneviève. She tried to keep her eyes averted, concentrating on Jules’ face, a sweet face really, the pain strangely softening it…but at the last moment, catching sight of the wall out of the corner of her eye, she looked, and then strained to see through the gate when they passed it. There was no one in sight, not a solitary figure. “Thank you, God,” she murmured.
Moissac caught her just before she turned away. “That’s a convent,” he said, “nuns…sisters. The Sisters of Ste. Geneviève. Did you ever hear of Ste. Geneviève?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
She was saying it to please him, to placate him. “One of the sisters died at the hospital the other night. I was there. I helped get her to the hospital, I got the doctor out of bed, I brought the Reverend Mother, and then afterwards I drove her out here again…”
Gabrielle listened as though to a voice in a dream. He had spoken of Reverend Mother but she could not even bring that revered face to mind. Then for an instant she had it: as she had looked round at her in the barouche on the way to the station.
“…The nun…She was a novice actually—that’s a young nun, a nun before she takes the vows—she was going to be all right. Then something happened at the hospital and she died.” He maneuvered the mirror to get her in view. “Maybe it was the will of God, but I have the feeling somebody at the hospital didn’t care if she lived or died, her being a nun.”
Please, God, make him stop talking like this.
“…A communist maybe. Maybe a secret Jew. You come on them once in a while, you know.” He saw her bow her head and bite her lip. He was satisfied then to concentrate on his driving. As he turned into Rue Louis Pasteur he began to sound the car horn regularly, clearing the road before him.
As soon as they stopped at the hospital entrance, Jules sat up and swung his legs to the floor. He looked out to see where he was. Moissac opened the car door. Gabrielle did not move for a moment, watching the boy.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said. “We’ll all come and see you when we come back to St. Hilaire, and you’ll be healed by then.”
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “It’s my left hand.” Then, “I shouldn’t have left it lying around.” He gave a short, hurt laugh. “Will you tell them I said that? Remember.”
“I’ll tell them.” She got out and beckoned him, coaxingly, to follow.
“Tell Jean. He’ll think it’s funny. And Antoine. He will really understand it. Antoine can bring my guitar. And if he wants to play it, tell him I said he could.”
At the desk when they asked for his identity card before allowing him to proceed up to the surgery, Gabrielle got it out from his wallet for him. The admissions clerk repeated the name as he copied it: “Jules Laffite.”
Sister Marie Gabrielle: Sister Agathe would have said it when the clerk asked the name of Marc’s wife, and somewhere the records showed Sister Marie Gabrielle to have died. As clearly as though he had human voice, the devil implanted the words on her consciousness: And so you are free, Madame Daridan.
But in fact it was Moissac who had spoken to her, using that name for the first time: “Let us go, Madame Daridan.”
She stood and watched Jules disappear with the attendant who brought the elevator down for him, Moissac waiting behind her. Marc had said, If you are ever in trouble…Marc was in trouble now, his identity known. But if that was so, why had he not already been arrested, or charged, or taken prisoner? The prefect then could not be certain. He would be hoping now to get his information from her, counting on a woman’s weakness.
“Madame Belloir!” he said in that voice that made the softest of words sound like a growl.
But he had called her Madame Belloir again, and so she turned and went with him out the hospital door and into the car.
Moissac maneuvered the Peugeot carefully past the cars crowding the driveway, all official vehicles of the Occupation, some medical, some military. He remembered that the second floor of the hospital was occupied entirely by the Germans. He stopped suddenly as an officer backed out of his car. He slammed the car door, saluted Moissac, and then stooped to look into the car at the woman as the prefect drove on.
“The Germans are everywhere,” Moissac said. “That was Captain Mittag of the Gestapo.”
Gabrielle said nothing at first, feeling that there was a threat implicit in the identification. Then, as she felt Marc would likely have done in the situation, she asked clearly: “Do you know him, monsieur?”
The boldness of it, the nerve, the calculated insult. And yet it only excited him more. He would not have wanted a wilted, beaten creature. It was one thing to go to a tired whore. This was to be something quite else. “Shall I say, madame, they have forced their acquaintanceship upon me?” There was an answer, Moissac thought, the woman remaining silent. If he could give such parries to his peers, they would no longer be his peers.
He drove alongside the river, avoiding the Old Town. It crossed his mind that Maman might be somewhere on Rue Michelet: he would not have wanted her, prisoner or no, looking out at him just now. He could not help feeling, now that turning home he thought about her, that she was enjoying her captivity. She would be counting on her domination of her son to insure the safety of René. Perhaps, if she had seemed to be enjoying herself too much, they would have dumped her home this morning.
The fear of that possibility became so vivid that when he reached the house he had the woman wait in the car a moment while he went up to see. There was no one and no new message. Going down through the garden, he glanced surreptitiously at the windows of the nearest neighbor. The drapes were drawn. They always were on the Moissac side.
“Now, madame, if you will come with me please, I will ask you to wait for me in the house. My mother is not home, but you will be more comfortable there than sitting in a public place in a hot automobile. I will not be more than an hour. I know how anxious you are to return to your husband. And I know how anxious he is for your return.”
“They will have gone on by now,” Gabrielle said.
“We shall follow them.”
It seemed most plausible, the way he said it, and seeing the man in his own garden, stooping to pull up a weed as he came along the walk, made of him a human being, that and the mention of his mother. She was further reassured, going up the walk, when she saw a little grotto to Our Lady among the marigolds and lupin.
Moissac said, not going into the house at all himself, “Perhaps you will be good enough to look in the larder and put together a lunch we can take along with us. There’s bound to be something there.”
But in the house alone, hearing only the buzzing of flies and the droning of bees about the honeysuckle bushes at the window, and no sound at all from the clock which had stopped at a quarter past two, she thought again about his having called her Madame Daridan. Or had she imagined that he said it, so thinking of herself at that very moment? Which was a sin. Or the very gravest of temptations. The trouble was she had no real measure of what was evil, except in herself. It was a peculiar thought, but she sat down at the scrubbed, bone-white kitchen table to think about it when it occurred to her: Christ and all His saints were human. Why wasn’t the devil human also?