Shortly after seven o’clock he was in Thouédun. Crossing the bridge over the little river, he was forced to stop the car. His head was swimming again. He got out and leaned on the bridge, but the warmth, the calm, pressed too heavily on him; he could not admit it into a mind still full of a weight of unreality. Michel, lighter than he was, had reached Thouédun already, though he had never seen it: dead, he must be adding his friend’s memories to his own.
He passed the blackened rubble of houses destroyed in the raid. Two women and a young thin boy were working there, piling by the side of the road stones which could be used in rebuilding. They had seen a good deal of use, these stones. . . . He stopped at the vicarage. Letourneau looked at him and said, “Why not sleep for an hour?” Sitting at the table, he put his head on his arms and slept. At the end of an hour Letourneau’s hand on his shoulder drew him from a smooth darkness he left with reluctance, but found himself when he opened his eyes calm and restored, his mind clear. Mourey had come into the room, and Letourneau was opening a bottle of wine: he took a loaf out of his cupboard and dusted the plates with his sleeve.
Rienne told him he was leaving France: he had hoped to take a friend, Michel Ollivier—“but he preferred to stay with his Group.” Would either of them come?
“And leave my scandal-loving peasants?” Letourneau said, smiling. “With no priest to make fun of? Impossible.” One of them, he thought, may be feeling already the awful loneliness of men without God, and could be pushed by it to despair or violence. . . . And the Germans would be in the village. Even without brutality—harder to do with than brutality—one of them might be kind; a girl or a woman might come to like him: and what then, if there were no one to explain to her that they were both the victims of their own goodness and the justice of men, and try to turn the bitterness to another Justice?
“And you, Jean?” Rienne said.
“I have my own very small place,” Mourey said after a moment. “I may be wrong about us, this may be the end. If it is, I must try to save a little—by slipping it into the children’s memories.” For years, he thought, the heart of this rich land has been failing. . . . Even here. . . . Perhaps a weariness too profound to be cured had fallen on them all. They had had to work incredibly hard, not to better themselves, only to keep their delicate balance between the natural and the human—in short, to remain French. The effort had become intolerable. It was easier to let go, to sleep. Neither their fear of invasion, nor the envy of certain of them for the wicked efficiency of the Germans, would have prevailed if it had not been for their weariness of being French, of their endless labour to be French. . . . Mourey did not believe this, but it was possible.
“No, I can’t leave France,” he said.
“Is that all?” Rienne asked.
“And Michèle,” Mourey said. “Do you think I could leave her any more easily?”
Rienne saw him—in a future already too clear—risking himself and his honesty and his indestructible faith in the old civilised France against all the officials of a Government of Woerths and Thiviers. Risking his poor career and his poor pension. Risking even Michèle. . . . If anything good of the past were saved, it would be between the hands of these two of his friends. The future might come from other hands.
“So I can’t take any of my friends?” he said lightly.
“Be careful,” Letourneau said, smiling. “You’re responsible for us. . . .”
When he told Agathe he was going, she said nothing. This second separation was harder than the first because she knew now what she was losing—a kindness and a good-humour which were truly of her family. The twenty-five years following after the week when she had nursed him were a thin wadding between two happinesses. . . . I am sixty-three, she thought: what is in front of me is eternity. . . . If he comes back in October . . . three months to settle with the Germans, and a month to get back—she had only the vaguest notion where England was. . . .
“The autumn is very beautiful here,” she said.
“I know,” Rienne said.
“If it were a little later—if you come back in the winter—I can make a hare pâté, with a little laurel and a glass of Vouvray. I shall make it in the square earthenware dish, it’s more convenient than the other.”
“You’ll be alone, Agathe. Is there anyone you would like to have with you during the war?”
A dark stain spread under the old woman’s skin. “No one here.”
“If you could——”
Hesitating, she told him about a day—how long since? forty years?—a young cousin had spoken to her and taken off a ribbon she was wearing to give it to her. She went away next day, and Agathe never saw her again. But if friendship was a warmth, a brightness as dazzling as the first rays of the sun on the horizon of the Loire, then Agathe knew all about it. . . . She asked timidly,
“And you, brother? Would you like to have one of your friends?”
“He was killed this afternoon.”
Agathe did not dare ask his name.
“I hate war,” she murmured. “The last one was bad enough. I felt such despair. I used to wake at night and think: They’re killing each other over there. I know you wouldn’t murder anyone, but I can’t help thinking that men who kill each other are murderers.”
“They are,” Rienne said.
“And now,” she said softly, “the village has been bombed, we have lost the war—we shall have the Germans here. But I don’t despair any longer. I feel afraid—but, if you were not going, I should be happy. I am happy. Whatever is coming will not be too much; we can manage hunger and misery, I hope.”
Rienne looked at her with a little surprise. A clumsy big-boned woman in black, a peasant, her skin lined and blackened—with the railing gentleness of Anjou on her dry lips. She was the strength he was leaving, the courage he would return to seek. . . .
He left very early in the morning. The air was clear, with a feeling of rain. The village was still in its last night of independence, the last when an untimely knock on the door could only be a neighbour whose wife or his cow was ill. Everything was quiet. Everything was smooth, fresh—with the freshness of the Roman stones thriftily built into the parish church. He had only to close his eyes to see, with any of his other senses, the wall separating the Marie-Tillier’s field from their cousins the Tillier-Debraye’s, and Dellac the poacher stopping to make signs through the window to Dellac the village policeman. A child wakened by the car looked at him from a window; he knew its name because he knew which family belonged to this house. The same with those geese, great-great-grandchildren of the geese he remembered rippling under this gate.
Agathe had watched him from the doorway. He turned. She waved and went in. He heard the door of his house shut. . . . He heard two other sounds—a rake smoothing the gravel on a path, and, faintly and distinctly, the réveillé sounded in the barracks. At the other side of the Loire, the Germans had heard it. . . . His village was giving him, once more, these two French sounds, before it opposed to the invaders its silence and the lighter silence of its dead.
He had his back now to it—as he would always have.