Cloudless May Read Online Free PDF Page B

hurried to the inner door, then turned back, with a slight smile. “I can do better than that, I can give you soup if you’d like it.”
    Mathieu spoke for the first time.
    â€œSplendid.”
    She started at the brutal harshness of his voice, and looked at Rienne, who nodded. She went away. Mathieu looked round the small room with its few tables and the counter in one corner. It was clean, the floor had just been scrubbed; but for the first time Rienne saw it as a bare place, without any of those pitiful or feminine touches he had imagined on his other visits. When Marie came back he asked her whether she had heard from Pierre. She put down the tray with the bowls of soup and drew a letter out of her pocket. She did not offer it to him to read, but held it while she said,
    â€œHe is well, he wants to come home for a day, it’s eight and a half months since he went, and all this time he has done nothing except mix concrete. Pierre. He says the Germans fire for a quarter of an hour in the evening, and ours fire back, and that’s all, they hear the Germans singing their songs. The Germans put up notices—
Go home to your wives, we don’t want to fight you.
Pierre says if only he could.”
    She hesitated. The colour that had come into her cheeks ran over her face and throat. She turned to go away.
    â€œSo long as he’s well,” Rienne said.
    The young woman turned back. She was weeping like a child, uncontrollably, without lifting her hands to her face.
    â€œIt’s not that,” she said. “He should be at home. When will this war end? Do you know?”
    â€œNot better than you do,” Rienne said gently. “It’s for the safety of France. And to make this home of yours safe.”
    â€œHow did it become unsafe?” Marie asked. She stopped abruptly. “I must get on with the work. Excuse me, please.”
    She disappeared into the room at the back, the only other room beside the kitchen. Rienne supposed it was the bedroom; it would be almost filled by a double bed, and there would be a chest and a large cupboard holding all they possessed, apart from themselves, of pride and pleasure. He glanced at Mathieu, who was frowning.
    â€œWhat’s the matter, Louis?”
    â€œDo you suppose women cried as much in 1914?” Mathieu said coldly. “I’m quite sure they didn’t. They held their heads up, and when they had to wear black they bought it with dry eyes. Something is wrong with a country at war when women cry to have their husbands sent back.”
    â€œBut it’s natural,” Rienne said.
    â€œOne doesn’t ask women to be natural in a war. They’re asked to be unselfish and quiet.” He lifted his slender hand and brought it down like a knife, edgewise. “They might remember they’re unimportant: France is made up of myriads of dead French men and women and a handful, a few million, of living. If some of these join the rest it can’t matter much.”
    â€œThey think it does,” Rienne said, with a smile.
    He reflected that Mathieu had as few possessions as a professional soldier. But had he no memories? Since it is by their memories that men cling to life, clinging to the curtain of glass beads hung across a doorway in their first home, to the ray of light reflected in a cupboard, to the smell of a leaf or of their toothpaste, to a word, to a ship’s whistle. Mathieu had eyes of the kind we call piercing: what prevented him from seeing with them the appeal as well as the weakness of Pierre’s Marie, with her childish arms and the memories of a wife? At some moment in his life he must have turned against himself and his own humanity. He had hated himself—but why?
    â€œAt least a dozen people living in this town,” Mathieu said, “ought to be shot at once, before they turn the rest into cowards.”
    Rienne shook his head. “They couldn’t do it by themselves, my dear