HE NEVER REALLY expected an offer: hysteria and not hope had dictated his behaviour, and now it took him a long moment to realize that he was not being mocked. He repeated, ‘Everything I’ve got.’ The hysteria peeled off like a scab and left the sense of shame.
‘Don’t laugh at him,’ Lenôtre said.
‘I’m not laughing. I tell you I’ll buy.’
There was a long pause as though no one knew what to do next. How does one hand over everything one possesses? They watched him as though they expected him to empty his pockets. Chavel said, ‘You’ll take my place?’
‘I’ll take your place.’
Krogh said impatiently, ‘What’ll be the good of his money then?’
‘I can make a will, can’t I?’
Voisin suddenly took the unlighted cigarette out of his mouth and dashed it to the floor. He exclaimed, ‘I don’t like all this fuss. Why can’t things go natural? We can’t buy our lives, Lenôtre and me. Why should he?’
Lenôtre said, ‘Calm yourself, Monsieur Voisin.’
‘It’s not fair,’ Voisin said.
Voisin’s feeling was obviously shared by most of the men in the cell: they had been patient with Chavel’s hysteria—after all it’s no joke to be a dying man and you couldn’t expect a gentleman to behave quite like other people: that class were all, when you came down to it, a bit soft perhaps: but this that was happening now was different. As Voisin said, it wasn’t fair. Only Lenôtre took it calmly: he had spent a lifetime in business and he had watched from his stool many a business deal concluded in which the best man did not win.
Janvier interrupted, ‘Fair?’ he said. ‘Why isn’t it fair to let me do what I want? You’d all be rich men if you could, but you haven’t the spunk. I see my chance and I take it. Fair, of course it’s fair. I’m going to die a rich man and anyone who thinks it isn’t fair can rot.’ The peas rolled again on the pan as he coughed. He quelled all opposition: already he had the manner of one who owned half the world: their standards were shifting like great weights—the man who had been rich was already halfway to being one of themselves and Janvier’s head was already lost in the mists and obscurity of wealth. He commanded sharply, ‘Come here. Sit down here.’ And Chavel obeyed, moving a little bent under the shame of his success.
‘Now,’ Janvier said, ‘you’re a lawyer. You’ve got to draw things up in their proper form. How much money is there?’
‘Three hundred thousand francs. I can’t tell you exactly.’
‘And this place you were talking about? St Jean.’
‘Six acres and a house.’
‘Freehold?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where do you live in Paris? Have you got a house there?’
‘Only a flat. I don’t own that.’
‘The furniture?’
‘No—books only.’
‘Sit down,’ Janvier said. ‘You make me out—what’s it called?—a deed of gift.’
‘Yes. But I want paper.’
‘You can have my pad,’ Lenôtre said.
Chavel sat beside Janvier and began to write: ‘I Jean-Louis Chavel, lawyer, of Rue Miromesnil 119, Paris, and St Jean de Brinac … all stocks and shares, money to my account at … all furniture, movables … the freehold property at St Jean de Brinac …’ He said, ‘It will need two witnesses,’ and Lenôtre immediately from force of habit offered himself, coming forward as it were from the outer office just as though his employer had rung a bell and called him in.
‘Not you,’ Janvier said rudely. ‘I want living men as witnesses.’
‘Would you perhaps?’ Chavel asked the mayor as humbly as if it were he who were the clerk.
‘This is a very odd document,’ the mayor said. ‘I don’t know that a man in my position ought to sign …’
‘Then I will,’ Pierre said and splashed his signature below Chavel’s.
The mayor said, ‘Better have someone reliable. That man would sign anything for a drink,’ and he squeezed his own signature in the space above Pierre’s. As he bent they could hear the great watch in his pocket ticking out the short time left before dark.
‘And now, the will,’ Janvier said. ‘You put it down—everything I’ve got to my mother and sister in equal shares.’
Chavel said, ‘That’s simple: it only needs a few lines.’
‘No, no,’ Janvier said, ‘put it down again there … the stocks and shares and money in the bank, the freehold property … they’ll want something to show the neighbours at home what sort of a man I am.’ When it was finished Krogh and the greengrocer signed. ‘You keep the documents,’ Janvier told the mayor. ‘The Germans may let you send them off when they’ve finished with me. Otherwise you’ve got to keep them till the war ends …’ He coughed, leaning back with an air of exhaustion against the wall. He said, ‘I’m a rich man. I always knew I’d be rich.’
The light moved steadily away from the cell; it rolled up like a carpet from one end to the other. The dusk eliminated Janvier while the clerk sitting by Voisin could still find light enough to write by. A grim peace descended, the hysteria was over and there was no more to be said. The watch and the alarm clock marched out of step towards night, and sometimes Janvier coughed. When it was quite dark Janvier said, ‘Chavel.’ It was as if he were calling a servant and Chavel obeyed. Janvier said, ‘Tell me about my house.’
‘It’s about two miles out of the village.’
‘How many rooms?’
‘There is the living-room, my study, the drawing-room, five bedrooms, the office where I interview people on business, of course bathroom, kitchen … the servants’ room.’
‘Tell me about the kitchen.’
‘I don’t know much about the kitchen. It’s a large one, stone paved. My housekeeper was always satisfied.’
‘Where’s she?’
‘There’s no one there. When the war came I shut the house up. I was lucky. The Germans never hit on it.’
‘And the garden?’
‘There’s a little terrace above a lawn: the grounds slope and you can see all the way to the river, and beyond that St Jean …’
‘Did you grow plenty of vegetables?’
‘Yes, and fruit trees: apple, plum, walnut. And a glass-house.’ He continued as much to himself as to Janvier: ‘You don’t see the house when you enter the garden. There’s a wooden gate and a long curving gravel drive with trees and shrubs. Suddenly it comes right out in front of the terrace, and then divides: the left-hand path leads off to the servants’ quarters, and the right round to the front door. My mother used to keep a look out for visitors she didn’t want to meet. Nobody could call without her seeing him arrive. My grandfather, when he was young, used to watch in just the same way as my mother …’
‘How old’s the house?’ Janvier interrupted.
‘Two hundred and twenty-three years old,’ Chavel said.
‘Too old,’ Janvier said. ‘I’d have liked something modern. The old woman has rheumatics.’
The darkness had long enclosed them both and now the last light slid off the ceiling of the cell. Men automatically turned to sleep. Pillows like children were shaken and slapped and embraced. Philosophers say that past, present and future exist simultaneously, and certainly in this heavy darkness many pasts came to life: a lorry drove up the Boulevard Montparnasse, a girl held out her mouth to be kissed, and a town council elected a mayor: and in the minds of three men the future stood as inalterably as birth—fifty yards of cinder track and a brick wall chipped and pitted.
It seemed to Chavel now his hysteria was over that that simple track was infinitely more desirable after all than the long obscure route on which his own feet were planted.