I don’t want to. It’s just that I haven’t got the time.’
‘There’s always time,’ Dubreuilh countered.
‘For you, yes,’ Henri said, laughing. ‘But me, I’m just a normal human being; I can’t work twenty hours at a stretch or go without sleep for a month.’
‘And neither can I!’ Dubreuilh said. ‘I’m not eighteen any more. No one is asking that much of you,’ he added, tasting the punch with a worried look.
Henri looked at him cheerfully. Eighteen or eighty, Dubreuilh, with his huge, laughing eyes that consumed everything in sight, would always look just as young. What a zealot! By comparison, Henri was often tempted to think of himself as dissipated, lazy, weak. But it was useless to drive himself. At twenty, he had had so great an admiration for Dubreuilh that he felt himself compelled to ape him. The result was that he was constantly sleepy, loaded himself with medicines, sank almost into a stupor. Now he had to make up his mind once and for all. With no time for himself he had lost his taste for life and the desire to write. He had become a machine. For four years he had been a machine, and now he was determined above all else to become a man again.
‘I wonder just how my inexperience could help you,’ he said.
‘Oh, inexperience has its advantages,’ Dubreuilh replied with a wry smile. ‘Besides, just now you have a name that means a lot to a lot of people.’ His smile broadened. ‘Before the war, Samazelle was in and out of every political faction and all the factions of factions. But that’s not why I want him; I want him because he’s a hero of the Maquis. His name carries a lot of weight.’
Henri began to laugh. Dubreuilh never seemed more ingenuous to him than when he tried being cynical. Paula was right, of course, to accuse him of blackmail; if he really believed in the imminence of a third world war, he would not have been in so good a mood. The truth of the matter was that he saw possibilities for action opening before him and he was burning to exploit them. Henri, however, felt less enthusiastic. Clearly, he had changed since ’39. Before then, he had been on the left because the bourgeoisie disgusted him, because injustice roused his indignation, because he considered all men his brothers – fine, generous sentiments which involved him in absolutely nothing. Now he knew that if he really wanted to break away from his class, he would have to risk some personal loss. Malefilatre, Bourgoin, Picard had taken the risk and lost at the edge of the little woods, but he would always think of them as living men. He had sat with them at a table in front of a rabbit stew, and they drank white wine and spoke of the future without much believing in what they were saying. Four of a kind, they were then. But with the war over they would once again have become a bourgeois, a farmer, and two mill hands. At that moment, sitting with them, Henri understood that in the eyes of the three others, and in his own eyes as well, he was one of the privileged classes, more or less disreputable, even if well-intentioned. And he knew there was only one way of remaining their friend: by continuing to do things with them. He understood this even more clearly when in ’41, he worked with the Bois Colombes group. At the beginning things didn’t go very well. Flamand exasperated him by incessantly repeating, ‘Me, I’m a worker, you know; I think like a worker.’ But thanks to him Henri became aware of something he knew nothing about before, something which, from that time on, he would always feel menacing him. Hate. He had taken the bite out of it; in their common struggle, they had accepted him as a comrade. But if ever he should become an indifferent bourgeois again, the hatred would come to life, and with good reason. Unless he showed proof to the contrary, he was the enemy of several hundred million men an enemy of humanity. And that he did not want at any price.
Now he had to prove himself. The trouble was that the struggle had shifted its form. The Resistance was one thing, politics another. And Henri had no great passion for politics. He knew what a movement such as Dubreuilh had in mind would mean: committees, conferences, congresses, meetings, talk, and still more talk. And it meant endless manoeuvring, patching up of differences, accepting crippling compromises, lost time, infuriating concessions, sombre boredom. Nothing could be more repulsive to him. Running a newspaper, that was the kind of work he enjoyed. But, of course, one thing did not preclude the other, and as a matter of fact they even complemented each other. It was impossible to use his paper as an excuse. Henri did not feel he had the right to look for an out; he would only try to limit his commitments.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I can’t refuse you my name. I’ll put in a few appearances, too. But you mustn’t ask much more of me.’
‘I’ll certainly ask more of you than that,’ Dubreuilh replied.
‘Well, at any rate, not straight away. From now until I leave, I’ll be up to my ears in work.’
Dubreuilh looked Henri straight in the eyes. ‘The trip still on?’ he asked.
‘More than ever. Three weeks from now, at the latest, I’ll be gone.’
‘You’re not serious!’ Dubreuilh said angrily.
‘Now I’ve heard everything!’ Anne exclaimed, giving Dubreuilh a bantering look. ‘If you suddenly got an urge to go somewhere, you’d just pick yourself up and go, and you’d tell people it’s the only intelligent thing to do.’
‘But I don’t get those urges,’ Dubreuilh replied, ‘and that’s precisely wherein my superiority lies.’
‘I must say that the pleasures of travelling seem to me pretty much overrated,’ Paula said. She smiled at Anne. ‘A rose you bring me gives me more pleasure than the gardens of the Alhambra after a fifteen-hour train journey.’
‘Travel can be exciting enough,’ Dubreuilh said. ‘But just now it’s much more exciting being here.’
‘Well, as for me,’ Henri said, ‘I’ve got so strong an urge to be somewhere else that I’d go by foot if I had to. And with my shoes full of pebbles!’
‘And what about L’Espoir? You’ll just take off and leave it to itself for a whole month?’
‘Luc will get along quite well without me,’ Henri replied.
He looked at the three of them in amazement. ‘They don’t understand,’ he said to himself. ‘Always the same faces, the same surroundings, the same conversations, the same problems. The more it changes, the more it repeats itself. In the end, you feel as if you’re dying alive.’ Friendship, the great traditional emotions – he had valued them all for what they were worth. But now he needed something else, and the need was so violent that it would have been ridiculous even to attempt an explanation.
‘Merry Christmas!’
The door opened. Vincent, Lambert, Sézenac, Chancel, the whole gang from the newspaper, their cheeks pink from the cold. They had brought along bottles and records, and at the top of their voices they were singing the old refrain they had so often sung together during the feverish August days:
We’ve seen the last of the hun,
The bastards are all on the run.
Henri smiled at them cheerfully. He felt as young as they, and yet at the same time he also felt as if he had had a small hand in creating them. He joined in the chorus. Suddenly the lights went out, the punch flamed up, sparklers flared and Lambert and Vincent showered Henri with sparks. Paula lit the tiny candles on the Christmas tree.
‘Merry Christmas!’
Couples and small groups continued to arrive. They listened
