Assignment in Brittany

by Helen Macinnes

  In the farm-house kitchen he found Henri sitting at the smaller table, his elbows on the hard wood, his eyes firmly closed. There was the sound of a piano.

  Albertine’s face was like a thundercloud. “He came in without a word and sat down and went to sleep,” she said. “Not a word out of his head, not a word. And after me worrying myself to death over him, and all the work left undone.” She stopped abruptly. “What’s wrong?” she asked, her voice unexpectedly softening.

  “Nothing. Not many Germans so far. Just some flags and some large notices plastered on the walls. Where’s the American?”

  Albertine smiled and pointed to the ceiling above her head. Hearne listened more intently. It wasn’t well played, and it was softly played, but there was no doubt about the tune. It was I Can’t Give You Anything but Love, Baby.

  9

  PAGES FROM THE LIFE OF BERTRAND CORLAY

  When Hearne awoke next morning, his legs stiff, his arm cramped in the deepness of sleep into which his exhaustion had plunged him, he noticed first his muddied boots lying drunkenly on the floor, then his clothes abandoned in a heap beside them, and last of all the half-open door leading to the store-room. A chair scraped; something moved. Hearne, suddenly very much awake, pulled on the nightshirt lying at the bottom of the bed and crossed quickly to the door.

  It was the American, sitting on an uncomfortable chair in front of the open window. On his crossed legs he balanced a book and some sheets of paper. He saluted Hearne with his pencil.

  “Sorry if I woke you,” he said. “But I had to get up to stretch my legs.”

  “Very difficult,” Hearne answered, looking at the mass of objects which were hoarded in the room. “This place looks like a furniture shop. We never throw anything away.”

  “Some people would pay a lot of money for much of this stuff.”

  “But they seldom do.”

  The American grinned. “I guess not. We are all bargain-hunters.”

  “How is your writing getting on?”

  “Not so hot. But I am getting the stuff on to paper: that’s the main thing.”

  “It must be very interesting.”

  “It’ll sell, anyway.”

  “Won’t it be dangerous to take notes along with you?”

  “I’ll abandon them if need be. Meanwhile I get everything in order, and I’ll remember the facts better when I see them written down. That’s the way my memory works.”

  “Are you comfortable? Did you sleep well?” Hearne was being the polite host.

  Myles laughed. “After three weeks of straw, if I was lucky?”

  Hearne smiled wholeheartedly. Then Myles wouldn’t have heard him last night. Not that he had made much noise: the door had worked smoothly enough after proper coaxing. He had left the house at ten when every one seemed asleep, and he had returned before dawn. Myles hadn’t made any joke, either, about the clothes on the bedroom floor. Perhaps the curtained window had blocked enough light so that the American had only noticed a crumpled heap instead of mud. And dampness couldn’t be seen; it wasn’t likely that anyone moving quickly through another man’s bedroom was going to stop to touch things. Hearne waited for a stray allusion; if Myles had noticed anything, now would be the time for one of his cracks. But Myles was smiling placidly, trying without much success to ignore Hearne’s nightshirt. Chapter nineteen, thought Hearne: “The Bretons at Home.” He looked down at his knees, wondering how they’d appear in print.

  “I’d better get dressed. I seem to have slept very late,” Hearne said.

  “It’s almost ten o’clock. I suppose that’s almost the day over in this country.”

  “Almost. I’ve been ill, so Albertine lets me sleep half the day. Now I’ve got some work to do. I write, too.”

  “What’s your line?” The American was interested.

  “Oh, only small things.” Hearne was charmingly modest.

  “I’d like to see some of them.”

  “Thank you. We must compare our different styles.” Hearne smiled and nodded towards the pages of notes on the American’s knee. “Now, if you will excuse me...” He bowed as gallantly as he could in the short shirt.

  “Of course.” Myles was being equally gallant. He saluted again with the pencil. He was trying valiantly to hide a private joke. Hearne kept his face straight with difficulty. This was a moment when he would have liked to discard this French-intoned English for his own voice to say, “Go on, old man, have your laugh. It’s on me.” He bowed again.

  “Hope I’m not disturbing you,” Myles called after him. “This was Albertine’s idea. She wouldn’t have me downstairs in case anyone looked through a window. Which reminds me— did you see many Germans yesterday?”

  Hearne came back to the door. He had pulled on his crumpled trousers and the harsh wool sweater. “Not many, so far,” he said. “There were some officers in the hotel, and a handful of soldiers. But not enough to patrol the farms. Not yet, anyway. I think you’ll be safe.”

  “As long as I keep away from the main road and that railway. That’s how I found myself on your farm. Two nights ago I was down in the valley. It wasn’t so healthy, so I came up on to the hillside.”

  “I wonder what the Boches want down there?”

  “It’s a main line from North-eastern France to the coast. I’m telling you I saw enough stuff being rolled over these tracks to set up whole airfields.”

  “But couldn’t they fly planes? Why do they send them by train?”

  The American was very patient. He was, decided Hearne, a decent sort of chap. And he liked to explain. “You fly planes, certainly. But then there are the spare parts, and the oil, and a hundred other things to fix up an airport.”

  “But we had some aerodromes near here, I think.”

  “If they weren’t destroyed completely, they are only being fixed for decoys. The Germans are building others. And this part of the country is good. It can’t be shelled from the English coast, but it’ll make a good spring-board against Southampton and Plymouth. These airports are springing up everywhere. I’m telling you I saw them with my two eyes. I could name ten places I’ve come through, all of them with new camouflaged airfields. They are so well hidden—netting and leaves over the planes, lying well spread out beside clumps of innocent trees, with little runways to hayfields which are the real taking-off point—that I almost got caught at one of them. I had been coming through a thicket of trees, and there was a path ahead. At one end of the path was a plane all in fancy dress; at the other end there was a hayfield. I had been avoiding a big hangar and a fine airfield about three miles away to my left. It must have been a dummy. I guess the idea is that the British will probably find out there’s an air base beside village X. They will come over and bomb X, and will naturally aim for the flying field. The Germans at point X, but just a mile or two from danger, will smile and rub their hands and go on bombing Britain.”

  “It would be very important, then, for the British to find out—” Hearne halted and shrugged his shoulders. “But it would be too difficult.”

  “It would be important. And not too difficult. I myself could tell them of several places which would interest them. And I’m willing to bet the British have ways of their own for finding out.”

  Hearne shrugged his shoulders again. “It seems so hopeless,” he said.

  The American smiled. “The British don’t know what that word means. They can drive an American nuts with their slowness and self-complacency. But they never think anything’s hopeless.”

  There was a pause.

  “How are the feet?” Hearne asked politely.

  Myles looked at them in their white linen wrappings. “Doing nicely, I think. This was Albertine’s idea, too. She covered them with some kind of paste which her grandmother used. It certainly looked mouldy enough, but it’s working miracles. They don’t even hurt now when I stand on them.”

  “Good,” Hearne said, and turned towards his room. “I must work now, if you’ll excuse me.” He
bowed gravely. The American saluted again with the pencil; his eyes weren’t at all grave.

  * * *

  It didn’t take Hearne very long to jot down in his private shorthand all the particulars he had noted last night. He considered that journey merely as a kind of introduction to the countryside round the railway. Tomorrow he would explore westward and watch the roadway from Rennes to Saint-Malo on the coast. Once he got accustomed to short cuts and patches of good cover, he would travel more quickly. But even judging from what he had seen tonight, his job might be quite useful. That idea cheered him; he wrote quickly and continuously. When the time came to get a report sent out from Mont Saint-Michel he could choose the most urgent of these points. Meanwhile, like the American, he was noting everything down.

  Myles’s remarks had only confirmed his own observations. There was some terrific construction work going on up there to the north of Saint-Déodat. He remembered that the railways ran through the old town of Dol before it swerved north-west to the coast. And northward above Dol the land was a flat plain, miles and miles of plain, most of which had been reclaimed from the sea. The more he thought of Dol, the more interesting he found it. First, there was the railway direct from the east to Dol. Secondly, Dol was connected to Dinan by a good road, and Dinan was at the end of the canal from Rennes. Thirdly, there was a main highway from the east which ended at Saint-Malo on the coast, and that highway cut across the road from Dinan to Dol. So Dol could be served three ways if the traffic were heavy towards that town. And Dol, lying back from the sea-coast, commanded a long stretch of plain. Yes, this job he had to do might be quite useful.

  He finished his last entry, and looked round the room for some place to keep these notes safely. The empty bookshelves yawned at him from the corner. “Stop gaping at me,” he told them. “I’ll soon have you filled up.” His words gave him the idea: the safest place for his sheet of paper, and the sheets which would be added, was the inside of a book. He looked at the rest of the furniture: this table on which he had written, with its one unlocked drawer kept obviously for writing material; the chest beside the bed; the wardrobe; the concealed wash-basin affair. None of these was practicable: Albertine had access to everything. The only thing which wouldn’t interest her would be the contents of the bookcase. He rose and walked over to the bed, pulling the cover aside. He felt the mattresses: straw, feather, wool, in that order. No, he decided: they’d only ooze if he split them, and their depths could lose anything they were hiding. It would have to be the bookcase.

  Unlike the rest of the furniture, it was a rough, amateur piece of work. Whoever had made it had been impatient. The shelves hadn’t been sandpapered sufficiently before the first undercoat of stain, and the varnish had been scantily applied. The top and sides had been finished well enough; viewed that way, it wasn’t a bad job at all. But the man who had made it hadn’t bothered about the rest of it. He had probably thought it didn’t matter because the books themselves would hide his unfinished work. At the moment, standing empty as it was, the bookcase looked as hideous as a child with ringworm.

  By dinner-time the task of sorting the books was only half done. Albertine, bringing some food to the American in the store-room, halted in amazement at the litter surrounding Hearne on the floor. He followed her obediently downstairs, and ate his meal in silence. His thoughts would have increased Albertine’s amazement. After some attempts to talk about the potatoes which he had bruised yesterday in his digging, she was left to concentrate on the fire and the soup-pot. “Back to your old ways,” she had said sourly, and the remark only added to Hearne’s thoughtfulness. He finished the food hastily, hardly concealing his impatience to be back in his room. As he mounted the stairs, he found his excitement growing. Albertine was calling after him something about pictures on his wall. He paused on the top step to shout down “Later! Later!” and then he was once more among the piles of books.

  But he wasn’t alone. The American had hobbled to the connecting door as he heard him return.

  “Hello,” he said in a mixture of surprise and pleasure as he looked at the books on the floor. “Can I help?”

  “No. It’s all right. It will be bad for your feet; you must rest.”

  “As you like,” Myles said stiffly. “Thought I could lend a hand, that’s all.”

  Hearne relented. He lifted the small pile of fairly recent novels which he had discarded as being of no interest to him, and carried them into the store-room. “Here’s something to read,” he said. “You shouldn’t try to walk about so much.”

  “To be perfectly frank, that was all I wanted...just something to read. Thanks.” He looked at the novels. “If,” he added, “if my French will take me that far.”

  “It will be good for you to read French. You’ve still a journey to make.”

  “Yes, I wanted to ask you about that.”

  Hearne looked at his watch. “I’ll be finished in one hour, or perhaps two hours at the most. I shall come and talk with you then. Okay?”

  Myles laughed unexpectedly. “Okay,” he echoed, and laughed again.

  Hearne closed the connecting door firmly behind him. “Now,” he said to himself with considerable satisfaction, and sat cross-legged on the floor.

  The books were indeed a strange collection. As he had pulled them out of the wardrobe that morning, Hearne had noticed two things. One part of this small library was formed of old books, badly printed in eye-straining type. Their bindings ripped at a touch, the paper was yellowing not so much with age as with cheapness. But the other part, and by far the greater part, had been bought within the last two years. Handsome volumes they were, with binding and paper and type to shame the older books. The first thought that struck Hearne was that Corlay must have been making money then with his teaching. The older books, obviously second- or third-hand, were a monument to the days when Madame Corlay had pinched and scraped to let her son stay at the University. Then, when he had a job, he had begun to buy himself some new books. It was just after this solution that Hearne saw the signature on each fly-leaf, together with the date when Corlay had added each book to his bookshelves. The solution crumbled away. Hearne examined all the new books methodically; his mind was a strange mixture of excitement, dawning suspicion, and dismay.

  The earliest date on any of these newer books was the twentieth of January, 1938. By that time Corlay had been out of his temporary teaching job for over six months. For six months he had been living on the farm, dependent on Albertine’s work for his food, on his mother’s generosity for his pocket-money. Hearne had seen enough of the life on this farm to know that there was little pocket-money for anyone. Madame Corlay’s dress had been of the ageless variety, of a cut and colour which a careful woman would wear for years. Her one piece of jewellery, the gold chain and brooch, had obviously been inherited like the house and furniture. The piano was a relic of the hard years in Rennes. There was no wireless set, the usual consolation for an invalid.

  Hearne rose on impulse, and went over to the wardrobe again. He counted the jackets and suits thoughtfully: more than he would expect for a man in Corlay’s position. He fingered the materials; they felt as new as they looked. Cheap clothes, imitation smart clothes, none of them any older than two years. Hearne was thinking. I don’t like this at all. Perhaps Corlay had saved enough money somehow; perhaps there had been a legacy; perhaps he had won a lottery. Perhaps any of these. Perhaps. Hearne shook his head slowly, and walked back to the books.

  The second thing which had startled Hearne that morning was that Corlay had rarely finished reading a book. Or else the man was a genius and could read through uncut pages. In the whole collection, there were only about ten books with the pages entirely cut. The rest had pages cut for the first chapters, and occasionally some pages cut at the end. But not one of these books had been read right through.

  Hearne found himself looking at the bookcase. I bet he made that, he thought; made it, and then lost interest in it before he had it properly finished.
The wood was sound, and the design was an attempt at a piece of modern furniture. Corlay must have seen some pictures of Swedish modern. That was what he had copied. Grand ideas he liked. Grand ideas... The phrase haunted Hearne. He shook himself free of speculation and went back once more to the books. The beginning of the riddle would be solved with them, he felt.

  He would begin with the earliest volumes, and here Corlay’s passion for inscribing his name and the date would prove invaluable. Hearne laid the books in rough groupings, according to the date on their fly-leaves. Each heap of books on the floor represented a year of Corlay’s intellectual life. The first book belonged to 1928: a school prize for ancient history. Next came 1930: a school prize for medieval history, and three text-books on French history, with the sections on Brittany closely underlined and annotated. By 1932, Corlay was at the University of Rennes; and for the next four years the books were texts on either French literature or history, or potted biographies of famous Bretons such as Jacques Cartier, Surcouf, Mahé de La Bourdonnais, or abridged cheap editions of Chateaubriand, Lamennais, Brizeux-Renan, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Abélard. And these were all Bretons, too, reflected Hearne.

  It was just at this point that Albertine had appeared with food for the American, and had reminded him sharply that dinner had been ready for half an hour. If only, he had thought, as he followed Albertine downstairs, if only people would stop being well-meaning, if only they’d leave him alone.

  But now, at last, both Albertine and the American had been settled.

  “Now,” he said to the books with considerable satisfaction. “Now...”

  10

  POEMS FOR E.

  Hearne adjusted himself comfortably on crossed legs, and reached for the 1937 pile of books. There were magazines, too, in this lot, but the subject was uniform. It was politics.

  Corlay had definitely been interested in Breton nationalism. That was hardly surprising after his earlier choice in history and literature. But he had also now branched into Royalist ideas. Perhaps he had thought that Brittany’s cause could be best served by a restoration of a King in France. And then, in the summer of 1937, he had ended his subscriptions to Royalist publications as if he had had a sudden revulsion. After that summer, there were no books or magazines on the Royalist side. In fact, from the summer of 1937 until the twentieth of January, 1938, there were no books bought at all. That was when he was unemployed. Then, in January of 1938, began the new series of books—first editions, modern, well-bound, well-printed. But, Hearne reminded himself, Corlay was then still unemployed. He sat and looked at these recent additions to the library, the witnesses of Corlay’s unexpected prosperity. As a last excuse, he thought that a friend might have sent them to Corlay. A friend...but a peculiar kind of friend. For these books dealt with the decadence of democracy, the future for men of action, the new order in economy and politics.