Part 16

Brent looked at her. Her eyes had darkened. There are things that no woman likes to see dragged into the hard light of a law court.

“Let us leave it alone,” he said. “I have a feeling that we have finished with Bibi. I hate stirring up mud; life’s been so clean here.”

She made a sudden movement towards him; and Paul sat up, took her face between his hands and kissed her.

“Good God,” he said, “it seems a lot for a man like me to ask for! All that I know is—that I’m going to make good here. Will you let me prove it?”

Manon’s eyes held his.

“You are too much afraid of people, Paul. If we are partners, let us be honest. Why should we not tell old Durand and the Casteners and people like that——”

“What shall we tell them?”

“Mon ami, you are making me the man.”

He drew her face to him again, and kissed her slowly and with great tenderness.

“All right,” he said; “but I’ll not marry you till this place is all that I want to make it.”

She laid her hands on his shoulders.

“What queer things you men are, some of you. If it was not for that, I would——”

“Tell me,” he said, his hands on her wrists.

She gave a quick, defensive smile.

“No, show me what is in that bundle. It’s so exciting, this new home.”

XXX

It seemed to Paul Brent that peace and the spring came suddenly to Beaucourt, and that even in this war-scarred country there was a beauty that had a mystery and a strangeness of its own.

The fruit trees in Manon’s orchard were big with bud. Brent had joined her in reclaiming the garden; the rubbish and broken boughs had been cleared away, the wall mended, the fruit trees pruned and cleaned, the soil dug over. Seeds were in with neat little labels showing the rows—lettuces, beans, peas, early potatoes. Paul had rescued and nailed up the hardy vine that grew on the south wall of the house.

He was happy. He liked to wander down to the stream, and see the willow blazing gold, the young grass lushing up, the purple woods ready to burst into leaf. The great chestnuts in the avenue at the château were beginning to open their brown buds. Paul found violets in flower on a sunny bank, and came back with a child’s handful of them to Manon. He heard the wryneck in the woods, and soon the cuckoo would be calling, and as for the blackbirds they sang to him night and morning. The war had been merciful to Beaucourt in passing over it so lightly, and the spring seemed to call for the brown faces and the strong hands of the peasants.

It would seem that the world has to rediscover the great truth that it is the simple things that matter in life. The sap in the stem of a young oak is worth all the orchids that ever were pampered. Paul Brent was fortunate in his happy drift into the simple and innocent life, with its elemental needs and primitive triumphs. He was to escape so much of the disillusionment of the years after the war, nor was he to become the victim of that strange physical apathy that flamed now and again into feverish erotism. Men had had the strong drink of an abnormal excitement snatched away from them. They were pushed back to the bench and the desk and the coal seam, and life seemed a damnable dulness. Money meant escape. There were thousands who were mad for money.

Brent fell straight into the lap of nature, with a fresh handful of simple ideals ready to be sown, and he sowed them in Beaucourt and watered them with a happy, human sweat. He did not want to slack and talk and theorize; the days were too short for him. He loved the work of his hands, the simple sensations, the smell of the sawdust, the crisply-curled shavings his plane ripped from a plank, the new nails he hammered in, the paint, the clang of his hammer, the snoring of his saw, the smell of the soil. Life was good. The whole house was re-roofed; he had more leisure to enjoy the true craftsman’s love of accurate detail; he could stand in the middle of the road with his hands in his pockets, and Manon beside him. They were never tired of looking at the house, the new roof which Paul thought of tiling or thatching some day over the galvanized iron, the windows with their neat yellow panels of oiled linen, the front door which Paul had painted a gay green.

They were as proud as a couple of children over a sand castle. And Brent had fought for his castle and held it.

“Looks fine, doesn’t it?”

And Manon’s eyes were full of the spring.

In the matter of the more spiritual things these ideals count, and Paul—that simple fellow—kept his panache. Perhaps there are no English words capable of expressing the subtle personal pride of a Cyrano de Bergerac, or the emotional exultation of the chivalrous soul that has stooped to no foul compromise. Paul kept his panache. He had never heard of the word, but he was the master of all that it expressed.

He was in love with Manon. He looked love at her, but he did not make it, and Manon had the heart to understand. He was one of those natural gentlemen, bricklayer, shepherd, fisherman, what you will. He had his notion of chivalry, a chivalry that could give, wait, hold back. He did not rush to pick the flower and flaunt it in his buttonhole. Such men are laughed at by the shallow and the dirty-minded, but somehow they keep the love of a woman. You may find them in cottages, villas, country houses. They have escaped the curse of wanting to be self-consciously clever.

Paul and Manon went to church each Sunday, and stood for a few minutes under the shattered roof. They were not religious people as religion was understood in the Victorian days. Their sacrament was a little silence, a pause, a looking backwards and forwards, a holding of hands, a gentle generous emotion. They thought of the dead, of the children, of seed-sowing and harvest, of good comradeship and the peace thereof that passeth understanding.

Paul had his ideal, his task.

“I’ll ask her to marry me when I have made the place good,” was his thought.

And Manon accepted this, even though she might have to face little humiliations in the acceptance. She kept her eyes on the man’s broad ideal. It was a big tree that would grow; it was strong, slow, hardy. If casual tongues dropped a few seeds of discord, of gossip, they were but little bitter weeds which the tree would smother.

“I love him,” she said to herself.

And Paul loved her with each nail he drove, each joist he fitted, each barrow-load he cleared from the place. He loved her in washing, in eating, in cutting wood for her stove, in looking at the white clouds sailing over the new roof, when it rained, when it blew, when the sun shone. She was in every corner of his life, and he in hers.

Sometimes he was greatly curious to know what that other man of hers had been, this Gaston Latour who had been killed early in the war. Manon had been married less than a year. She had a photo of her first husband somewhere, and one evening Paul asked to see the photo. Sometimes, he had an uncomfortable feeling that he was wearing a dead man’s shoes; he wondered, too, how he was filling them.

Manon took a candle down to the cellar, and brought back the photo.

“Gaston was a good fellow; we agreed quite well.”

Paul looked at the man’s picture. Gaston Latour had been one of those sickly Frenchmen, cold, pale and prominent of eye, with a big forehead and a weak beard. He stood with his hands resting on the back of a chair, staring straight in front of him.

Manon had been watching Paul’s face, and with a sudden, quick but quiet motion she took the photograph away from him. It is possible that a woman does not like to see her lover repelled by the face of the man who had first possessed her.

“That was nearly five years ago,” she said; “and, if you please, we will forget it.”

“I’m sorry,” Brent told her; “weren’t you——?”

“It was a very excellent marriage; our parents arranged it, and my father died six months later. No, this house always belonged to us, not to the Latours.”

She took the photo back to the cellar, nor did she return for some minutes, leaving Brent warming his hands at the stove. She had said so little, but enough to make Paul understand that her first marriage had not been happy, that it had left no delicate roots behind it. If Brent was guilty of a secret gladness, he hid it, but the gladness was there. He felt sorry in an impersonal way for that cold-eyed fellow who lay dead somewhere in France, but the human part of him was with Manon. He hoped that it would come all fresh to her, as fresh and as rich and as generous as it seemed to him.

April came, and it rained hard for two days, driving Brent indoors. At dinner they sat and looked at the roof, watching for drips, and exulting when no drips appeared. Paul had been fixing the floor of the room above the kitchen.

“It is a splendid roof,” said Manon; “it is you who rain sawdust.”

“I can’t taste it.”

“Look in your potage. I was away only half a minute, but you managed to drop that wooden salt of yours into the saucepan.”

Brent gave her an oblique, laughing look.

“Supposing we put up the ceiling. It will be rather like laying a carpet upside down.”

“That canvas?”

“Yes.”

“How delightful! But can you do it alone?”

“No. Two hands to stretch it, while the other nails.”

“Let’s begin at once,” said Manon.

And that is how Anatole Durand found them, perched up on the joists, Manon stretching the canvas while Paul drove in the tacks. They were so busy hammering, talking, laughing, and the rain made such a patter on the iron roof that they had not heard his car. But Anatole Durand was an event. He had not happened for three weeks.

“Hallo, mes enfants!”

Two faces looked down at him.

“Monsieur Durand! But what do you think of our ceiling?”

“Magnificent!” said Anatole, and, in a hurry to get out a dramatic cry of his own, “And what do you think of my American dump?”

“Comment, monsieur?”

“I have bought it,” he said, shining like a little sun-god. “I have bought my American dump!”

They had come down after that, for a canvas ceiling could not suppress such a little excited, restless sun. Here was an event, a sensational episode in the history of Beaucourt! Manon brought out her wine, and they sat round the table, and talked—at least Anatole Durand talked. He opened his fat note-book on the table and began to roll off figures with the voice of a curé chanting the mass.

“Yes, I have bought it, but I had to race around like a comet. Just listen, my friends.”

He chanted triumphantly of timber and iron sheets and rolls of felt by the thousand, tins of preserved meat, fruit, milk, salmon by the tens of thousand, coffee in hundreds of kilos, blankets, tools, barbed wire, buckets, candles, soap. Wine and honey in Canaan! The oration was Biblical, exultant.

“It must have cost you a fortune, monsieur,” said Manon.

Durand would not boast about the money he spent.

“Oh, I have plenty left. It is the best bargain I have ever made in my life.”

“And where is the dump, monsieur?”

“A hundred miles south of Chalons, perhaps. But I have arranged for the hire of a dozen lorries, and we will have it here in no time. Now see what it is to be thorough. I have here the cubic space of the dump, and the cubic space of the cellars at the château, you know what good cellars they are, and all the food and the blankets can be stored in them. The timber and the felt and the iron sheeting can be stacked in the courtyard.”

“You are a wonderful man, Monsieur Anatole.”

“I’m just an old boy,” he laughed.

She poured him out another glass of wine, and he sipped it, looking round the room with eyes of appreciation.

“You two children know how to work. You are quite chez-vous here, already.”

Manon glanced questioningly at Paul. Brent nodded.

“And we are fiancés, monsieur.”

“Why, that’s splendid!” said old Durand holding up his glass; “your very good health, and good luck to us all.”

They drank.

“And that fellow Louis Blanc seems to be out of the picture. The Coq d’Or was full of the gossip.”

“Tiens, what has happened to Bibi?”

“He is in hospital at Amiens, and they have taken out one of his eyes. It is said, too, that he may go blind in the other. When they asked him to explain how it happened, he said he had had a quarrel with some English soldiers, and that three of them set on him.”

Paul and Manon exchanged glances.

“Shall I tell him?” her eyes asked him.

Brent nodded.

“That is not quite the truth, monsieur. You are our friend, and you can keep a secret. Bibi came by those wounds in this very room.”

“Tonnerre—here?”

Very simply she described to Anatole Durand all that happened, and so vivid were her words that the old man found it difficult to sit still. His eyes lit up; he had the eyes of a fighter.

“But it is incredible! What a wild beast! You did very well, Monsieur Paul, to thrash that stallion.”

He jumped up and clapped Paul on the shoulder.

“So you wish me to say nothing of this?”

“It is not a pleasant tale for Manon to tell.”

“And the fellow has got his deserts. I am ready to wish he may lose that other eye, and be harmless for the rest of his life. But let us talk of something more pleasant.”

He lit a cigar, and, walking up and down for a moment on his brisk legs, paused abruptly in front of Manon.

“I have some good news for you.”

“You are full of good news, Monsieur Anatole.”

“Well, listen. When I was in Amiens I fell in with a gentleman who is planning excursions to the battlefields. He wanted to know of a place where the richer sort of people might be able to spend the night, and get the atmosphere of a devastated village. ‘My friend,’ said I, ‘I know the very place in my own village, a little hôtel that will be ready to receive such people in a month or two.’ He jumped. ‘It will be very simple,’ said I. ‘The simpler the better, my dear fellow. We want the proper atmosphere.’ So, my dear, if the idea pleases you, I will drive you over to Amiens in a day or two, and you can make arrangements with this gentleman. It should be quite a prosperous enterprise.”

Manon jumped up and kissed him, and Durand did not appear to object. He was a democrat, and the new Beaucourt was going to be very democratic.

“What a good friend you are.”

“I’m just an old boy,” said Durand.

XXXI

That evening, when the sky had cleared, Manon and Brent opened up a hole under the wall where Manon’s treasure lay buried, and carried the silver into the cellar. Anatole was to drive over again next day and take Manon to Amiens where she was to meet the gentleman who was promoting these pilgrimages in Picardy, and also deposit her valuables with the “Société Générale.” Paul was shovelling the earth back into the hole when Manon came back along the path, walking slowly, and stroking a black eyebrow with a meditative forefinger.

“Dear soul, look!”

Her face flushed a sudden excitement. There was a vivacious buoyancy in her pointing finger. Paul was head up on the instant, ready for some dramatic event.

“What is it?”

She was pointing at the brown soil behind him, and there was a child’s delight in her eyes.

“The little green dears!”

Paul turned and looked, one hand on the handle of his spade, and he smiled. Strung between two of the white seed pegs stretched a thread of green thrown into vivid contrast by the rain-darkened soil, nothing more nor less than a row of lettuce seedlings just opening their twin leaves. A string of emeralds would never have seemed so innocent or so precious.

“The first of our children,” said Brent, “the little fellows!”

He looked shy, but Manon snuggled up and in some silent way made him understand that her hand wanted to be held.

“Is it not wonderful?”

“Everything’s wonderful,” said Brent, with a glimmer of blue between half-closed eyelids.

“Here’s where we began, over that hole in the ground. Just because you happened to catch me playing with a spade. And now—a year afterwards—these!”

“Like a live bit of ribbon, isn’t it!”

“And a few weeks later we shall be eating lettuces!”

“Méchant!” she said. “Be serious. How do you like Anatole’s idea?”

“It’s an inspiration.”

“Very well, we will have supper early, and then we will sit down and make plans. Oh, I didn’t tell you, Marie is giving me six pullets.”

“So we shall sit down and make plans for the pullets.”

“Be serious! No, we must arrange the rooms and the furniture, and see how much money we can afford.”

“Oh, that’s it? Well, look here, I put my money into the business or I go on strike.”

“But, Paul——”

His hand closed firmly on hers.

“It’s got to be. I’m a man. Don’t you understand?”

She looked up at him with soft, consenting eyes.

“Oh, yes, I understand perfectly. But who is to handle the firm’s money?”

“You, of course,” said Brent. “I always was an idiot with money. I’ll take my share, keep a little pocket money, and put the rest back into the business.”

“Do you understand pigs?” she asked him with quiet irrelevancy.

“I did keep one once.”

“And cows?”

“I dare say I could learn to milk a cow. I’ve studied more difficult things than that.”

With supper over, Manon cleared the table, lit two candles, produced a writing pad and pencil from the cupboard. They drew two chairs up on the side of the stove, and sat with their heads close together, Manon sketching out a plan of the house. There would be seven rooms in all, four on the ground floor, and three above, but the rooms on the other side of the passage were rather small, and one of them could only be reached by passing through an outer room.

“The visitors would have to take their meals here in the kitchen, unless we arranged to let them use the public room on the other side of the passage.”

“English people might not like that. Let them sit and see their own food cooked; it would amuse them.”

“I should have to engage a strong girl to help.”

“That wouldn’t be difficult, would it?”

“I am thinking of the bedrooms,” Manon said. “We shall have only four, even if we use the little ground-floor room that looks out on the garden.”

She scribbled lines and crosses on the paper, frowning on the problem.

“Supposing we were to give the girl that little room.”

“Yes.”

“Keep the public room where it is, and turn the back room into a little salon for the visitors or ourselves. But that would only leave us one spare bedroom.”

She continued to scribble on the paper.

“When we get married,” she began, “it will save a bedroom.”

“Yes, that’s so,” and he also looked at the scribbles on the paper, scribbles that meant nothing; “meanwhile I might rig myself up something outside, or sleep in the cellar. But I suppose we shall need the cellar.”

“We might put a partition across that room,” and she pointed upwards with the pencil; “but it would be so much simpler——”

“All right,” said Paul; “we’ll think about it. Now, what about furniture?”

They made a list of the furniture that would be needed, Manon writing the name of each article under such headings as “Salon,” “Girl’s room,” “Visitors’ room,” “Our room.” The list began to frighten them not a little.

“Hold on,” said Brent; “I can make tables, cupboards, wash-stands, if we can get some decent wood. Bedsteads and bedding seem to be the main problem. I expect the prices are up in Amiens.”

“I have about seventy thousand francs. Sixty thousand are invested in Rentes. That leaves ten thousand for furniture, and stock and current expenses.”

“I can put a thousand to that. Not much, is it?”

“You are putting in more than money, Paul. It will be yours as well as mine. All this could never have happened without you.”

Paul went to bed with his head full of the new enterprise, and the hundred and one inventions and ingenuities it suggested. He remembered having seen somewhere a room decorated with arched trellis-work painted a soft green, the arches hung with mauve wistaria made out of paper. Then his thoughts jostled against the problem of “baths.” Would English tourists of the richer sort expect and demand baths? Brent’s enthusiasm could not see itself rising above hip-baths and one can of water heated up in the corner of an outhouse. Fuel—like bedrooms—was going to be precious, and Paul went to sleep thinking of that particular bedroom and Manon’s simple solution of the difficulty.

“A good solution, too,” said Brent; “but I’ll stick out till I have finished the house.”

Durand’s De Dion was with them early, but not so early that Manon had not been able to help Paul finish the canvas ceiling of the kitchen. She was below in the cellar, dressing, while Brent loaded the valuables into the car.

“Any news of Louis Blanc?”

“Nothing,” said Durand. “By the way, do you know all the wells in Beaucourt?”

“No.”

“Then I will send old Prosper Cordonnier over with my sanitary expert; he knows them all.”

“You are having all the water tested?”

“We should look fools if it turned out bad, hey? Hallo—now, voilà le printemps!”

Paul turned and beheld the miracle of a French working woman in her Sunday clothes. It was not that he had never seen Manon before in that little black chapeau, black velour costume, and those neat suède high-heeled shoes. He could remember her going to church in those same clothes when he was billeted in Beaucourt during the war, but now they seemed different. They had a more personal and a more intimate meaning for him. He was aware of her small feet, of the quiet, sleek chicness of her clothes, of the roguish sedateness of that little hat. His thoughts went back fifteen years. He was thinking of a certain fair-haired girl with a razor-edged nose and mouth, coming out of the back gate of a big house, and wearing a blue plush hat covered with red cherries, an electric blue dress and the yellowest of yellow boots.

“How you stare!” she said.

Paul’s thoughts came back from that other life.

“Monsieur Durand used the exact word.”

“And what was that?”

“Printemps;” and he added, “this April seems to belong to me—somehow.”

They drove off, and Brent went to work, but the sun was shining, and his thoughts got in the way of his hands. He was so happy that he seemed to pause and to look suddenly at this happiness of his with the eyes of a man who was afraid of losing it. He had been nailing down the floor boards on the joists of the upper room that was to be their bedroom, and this sudden inward questioning of his own dreams sent him idling into the sunlight. He crossed the street, sat down on the doorstep of the stone house over the way, and looked with serious blue eyes at the café.

It occurred to him again that it would need a sign and that he would paint it. But might not the painting of that sign be about the last piece of work he would accomplish in the reconstruction of the “home”?

He lingered over the word “home.” It was very sweet to him now, but would it always be so sweet? Certain panic thoughts gathered round him like officious and penny-wise old women. He was an Englishman; would he be happy living as a Frenchman? When the house was finished, every stick painted, and the little farm without a weed, might not a sudden restlessness seize him? Would he be content to live all his life in a French village? That other home of his in England had never been a home in any spiritual sense; he could remember going out one night in a miserable and lonely rage and throwing bricks through a little greenhouse that had been his particular pride. But surely this would be different? Manon was different; he was different. And yet, at the bottom of this panic mood was a horror of hurting Manon, of falling short of her some day in the measure of his happiness.

“Fudge!” he said, and got up suddenly; “it’s just cowardice, that’s all. Haven’t I seen it in the war, chaps who were always looking for things to go wrong? It’s the same with the fellows who write books, books in which everybody gets into the gutter and all the world’s wrong. Just funk—Hallo!”