Part 17

A certain aggressively smart figure had swung round the corner, buttons and cap badge polished, chin shaved, puttees neatly rolled, boots black and glossy as the back of a rook.

“Cheer-oh, cove.”

It was Corporal Sweeney with the grey grouse out of his eyes, a proper man, well groomed.

“Bon jour, monsieur, comme vous êtes gai aujourd-hui.”

“Demobbed, demain, compris?”

The two men smiled at each other, and Sweeney cast an eye over the house.

“Your dug-out, what?”

Brent nodded, wondering if he might allow himself a little more English.

“A bit of all right. Blimy! You’ve got a roof and winders.”

“Entrez,” said Paul, and took him in and gave him red wine.

The corporal had cigarettes; he offered Brent one, and lay in the arm-chair and drank in the goodness of life.

“Wonder if you get me, bloke?”

He had begun to philosophize.

“Me for a bit of garden. Be home in time to get my pertaters in. Ever kep’ pigeons?”

“One time, monsieur.”

“Lot o’ sound gum in pigeons, and chickens. Make you feel sort of homy on Sunday mornings. Hear ’em cooin’ and cacklin’ and cluckin’. Got any kids?”

“Des enfants, monsieur?”

“Got it.”

“I get married this year.”

Corporal Sweeney gave a wise grin.

“Funny stunt—gettin’ married—but it’s all rite; yes—it’s all rite. Used t’ think it was kind of bloomin’ monot’nous. Well, I dunno. If you start goin’ round the corner with strange gals, well, it’s good-bye to the chickens and the pertaters. Besides it’s a mug’s game. Who’s your real pal? She as you have ’eard tryin’ not to scream out when she’s bearin’ the kid you’ve given ’er; she ’oo cooks yer Sunday dinner. T’aint slosh, it’s the truth.”

Paul smiled. He pretended to have picked some of the pith out of the man’s harangue.

“You talk good, monsieur. I tink I be ver’ happee here.”

“Course you’ll be happy,” said the soldier almost fiercely; “it’s inside a chap, ain’t it? ’Course there’s other things that count. So long as a chap don’t keep spittin’ down his own well! Bein’ happy is like keepin’ yer buttons polished. It’s a ’abit.”

Brent could have quoted an occasion when the corporal’s buttons were distinctly dingy, but he refrained. Mark Tapley might have turned into an average, decent, grumbling Englishman had he been stuck down at Harlech Dump.

“’Ere, bloke,” said the corporal before leaving; “what’s wrong with you having a little more paint and canvas for the ’appy ’ome. I shall be gone to-morrer. And you could do with it.”

Paul fell. He had a passion for paint, and he reckoned that the British Public still owed him money.

“Vous êtes très agréable, monsieur.”

“You come along back with me. I ain’t ’ad an eighteen pounder shell in my chicken-’ouse. You ’ave.”

XXXII

Over the great wilderness the cuckoo was calling, and the blackbirds sang deep-throated in the orchards. Cowslip time had come and gone; a richer season followed after, with all that wild world rushing into leaf, covering all ugliness with a film of beauty. The old orchards were white in the narrow valley where the stream ran through deep green ways; the trees were snow-trees—rose-edged—floating between the mystery of the woods and upon the blue distance of the horizon. Grass and weeds were springing up everywhere in the streets, in the ruins themselves, threading even the rubbish through with emerald wire. There were blue-bells in the Bois du Renard above the château, and masses of yellow broom waving on the uplands.

Beaucourt came to life with the spring. Wonderful things had happened when that droll, that little wizard of an Anatole Durand had flicked his wand hither and thither. Dust had risen on the roads. A string of lorries had lumbered up the street, and a gang of men had unloaded stores in the green-grey courtyard of the château. The cellars were full of food; the yard itself stacked with timber and iron. On the circle of turf at the end of the avenue of chestnuts stood a white tent with a camp-bed, a chest of drawers, a table, a washing basin, a chair, Anatole Durand’s home. He took his meals at the Café de la Victoire, where Brent’s hands were keeping pace with the buoyant rush of the year.

Men were repairing and cleaning the huts in the field on the road to Rosières, and a temporary camp-kitchen was being improvised. New winches and buckets had been fitted to the wells. A couple of tractors and light waggons had panted over the desert roads, and the tractors were at work, ploughing from dawn till dusk. Great strips of brown soil waited for a catch-crop. Old Anatole went about with his note-book, like a field-marshal or a parish priest, organizing, organizing.

Then came the day when the first batch of refugees returned. They arrived in waggons from Ste. Claire and many other villages, with their few possessions piled up, like a convoy of settlers in the old days travelling west. The carts and waggons collected in the field where the huts stood, and with them came Monsieur Lefèbre, the parish priest. Anatole Durand met them in the field. He and Monsieur Lefèbre kissed each other, the agnostic and the Christian.

There was a hot meal ready, iron coppers full of good stew; Manon was in charge of the hut where meals were to be served. But these peasants sat down on the grass in the open air like pilgrims on a feast day. They laughed and talked. One or two of the women wept a little. They had left the children behind.

Durand and Monsieur Lefèbre sat side by side on the tail of a cart. They talked; they looked straight into each other’s eyes.

“Do you remember, my friend, how we used to disagree?”

The priest smiled. He had jocund black eyes in a red face, and he was a good man, if fat.

“Our text is the same to-day. Go forth and recover the wilderness, and comfort my children.”

“I have a bed in my tent,” said Anatole; “you can use it.”

“That is brotherly of you, but I shall sleep with the men.”

Durand looked round at the peasants sitting on the grass, and his eyes blessed them.

“Monsieur, I wish to speak to these people presently. I wish to explain what I have done, what I have planned to do, what we all must do. You will speak to them also. What better place than the church?”

“In the old days, monsieur.”

Durand shrugged.

“Life is so big,” he said, “that we shall forget to knock our feet against the stones.”

When the meal was over, Monsieur Lefèbre got up on the cart and told the people to gather in the church. His jocund black eyes had always been more persuasive than his preaching, and nobody grumbled at being asked to go to the church. Monsieur Lefèbre was a good fellow; he deserved his place on the stage, and to these peasants the day had a religious meaning; they were attending the sacrament of the soil. Paul and Manon walked with the crowd, and stood under the broken roof of the church, with the blue sky showing through it, and grass sprouting through the stones on the floor. Manon was looking at many familiar faces. There were the Graviers who had kept the tiny boucherie in the Rue de Bonnière; the Crampons—Claude Crampon pulling his long nose in the same odd way as though to make sure he had not lost the end of it; the Guiveaux, Pierre with his huge flat butter-coloured moustache, and Josephine, whose red hair was always untidy; the Pouparts, who had kept a grocery shop, yellow as ever. Old Lebecq carried his cock’s head high in the air, and behind him his two big daughters giggled together. Philipon, who had been a blacksmith as well as a farmer, held his pretty little wife by the arm; his swarthy face was very solemn, and he frowned as though he wanted to get to work. Lacroix and his wife and boy looked thin as figures cut out of brown cardboard. Big Jean Roger was smiling at everybody and picking his teeth with a red match. His daughter Lucille seemed rather sad; her eyes were vacant; she had lost her lover in the war. There were one or two younger men who had recently been demobilized, and a few strong boys who were half inclined to make a joke of the whole affair. Philipon looked round at them with his fiery eyes and a gleam of teeth in his black beard.

“Shut up! The dead don’t make fools of themselves like that.”

There was no more horseplay.

Monsieur Lefèbre stood on the steps of the choir. His deep voice rolled out a prayer, and after the prayer he spoke a few simple words to the people. He was much moved; his chin shook a little; and the people were moved with him. They had come back to their homes and their fields; the blessed spring was with them, the green joy of the year. They would go out together, without jealousy, helping each other, planting in this ruined village the imperishable patience of a victorious France.

Lefèbre gave way to old Durand. Anatole’s grey hair seemed to bristle; he looked straight at them all with shrewd, smiling eyes; his enthusiasm had a flash of humour.

“My friends, we used to quarrel a little. Perhaps it was my fault. To-day I am happy; I feel that we have something better to do than to quarrel—work.”

Philipon gave a growl of applause.

“That’s it—work!”

He glared at the group of youths. Anatole went on.

“Bien. It is not my ground or your ground, it is our ground. It is our Beaucourt. What do you say? The women to the gardens and the rubbish heaps, the men to the saw and the hammer and the fields. But you know what to do. I am an old man, I am enjoying myself; I am spending what I cannot take with me. I do not stand here and crow; I want to be just a little old man in Beaucourt.”

There were cries of emotion from the little crowd.

“We understand, monsieur.”

“Without you it could not have happened.”

Durand made a face as though he were not far from tears.

“That’s it; we are all Frenchmen together. Now, then, let me explain.”

He went on to speak of the stores, material and tools that he had collected. They were to be divided equally and as the need arose. The tools and the seeds would belong to the village. He wanted a committee, a village council composed of both men and women to consider what was fair, and to decide all that should be done. He spoke of Manon and of Paul, and Paul blushed. Durand called him an expert, a practical builder. Let them go and look at the Café de la Victoire and see what Monsieur Paul Rance had accomplished single-handed, and the sight would cheer up any pessimist. Monsieur Rance had offered to give three hours a day to the community; and to put himself at the service of anyone who wanted advice. As for the canteen, well, Madame Latour had that in hand, but she would need women to help her.

“Now, let us finish with words. Let us choose our council before we break up. I suggest a council of four men and two women.”

“And a president,” said Philipon.

“I propose Monsieur Durand as president”—this was from old Lebecq.

Anatole was elected. They chose Philipon, Lebecq, Jean Roger and Monsieur Lefèbre as the men, Manon Latour and Madame Poupart as the women. The council agreed to meet three times a week at eight in the evening, and Monsieur Lefèbre suggested the sacristy of the church as their council-chamber. A board would be set up in the Place de l’Eglise on which the notices and the decisions of the council would be posted.

“Allons!—to work,” said old Durand.

Philipon echoed him.

“To work. That’s our motto.”

In the passing of half a day the whole atmosphere of Beaucourt had changed, and the familiar silence of the ruins was broken by the new life. Brent was planting potatoes in the field below the orchard, for Etienne Castener had brought his plough over in a cart and ploughed up half the field for them, and as he dibbled in the seed Brent could hear voices everywhere. The hollow shell of the village echoed with them; the place was like a comb full of working bees. Each family had gone to what had been its house, that brick ruin or shelter of timber, and for a while there had been silence. What problems, what discouragement! Where and how to begin? They had been told that Beaucourt had been more fortunate than the majority of villages—villages that had melted into mere piles of rubbish. The little groups stood about, staring, bewildered, lamenting, wandering through the wreckage and the gardens, standing on the tiled floors of what had been rooms. And in nearly all cases it was the woman whose instinct escaped first from that apathy of staring. The housewifely habit stirred in her. Perhaps she began to clean her kitchen floor, throwing old tins, broken bricks and tiles, rags, anything, out into the street. That was what Durand had advised them to do; he had planned to have the rubbish carted away and dumped in some field. Very soon the men were at work with the women, each cleaning his particular shell, uncovering his kitchen hearth. Their blood warmed. Beaucourt was full of the sound of voices, the clatter of tins and broken tiles. Figures appeared on the walls, or in the spider web of the sagging timber frames, scattering useless patches of tiling, or knocking down loose beams and joists. Beaucourt was at work. Anatole Durand found Philipon sweating like a swarthy Hercules in his little house in the Rue du Château, knocking down useless bits of wall with a big hammer, while his pretty wife carried off the sound bricks and stacked them in the yard.

“Thunder, but this is life!” said the sweating peasant; “I’m happy.”

Manon was walking back from the canteen when she caught sight of a little old figure approaching along the Rue Romaine. It was none other than Mère Vitry dressed in her rusty black Sunday clothes, and carrying a shabby bag. She had been left behind at Ste. Claire as too old to face the first struggle with the wilderness; but Mère Vitry had had no intention of remaining in Ste. Claire, and her indomitable legs had carried her to Beaucourt.

Manon went to meet her, greatly touched by this old thing’s courage.

“Mother, what are you doing here?”

But Mère Vitry was in no need of pity. She seemed to be overflowing with the sap of a renewed youth; her little black eyes twinkled; her weather-beaten face was all smiles.

“Here I am. Do you think I was going to be left behind?”

Manon kissed her.

“Come to my house. You must want something to eat.”

“I had my meal on the road, my dear. I would not quarrel with a cup of coffee.”

Manon took Mère Vitry home with her, and the old lady removed her cloak and bonnet, and sat down with an air of complete contentment. Her eyes observed everything; she was the most cheerful soul in Beaucourt. Her philosophy was touched with the irrepressible optimism of the spring.

Manon offered her her bed.

“No, I shall sleep with the others. They thought I should be a nuisance, no use; you shall see. I shall put on my old clothes here, my dear, and then go and begin tidying the house. It needs it.”

It did. There was but a third of the roof left, and no windows and no doors, and in the garden weeds and rubbish competed with each other. Mère Vitry put on her old plum-coloured skirt, and black and white check blouse, borrowed a broom and an old spade, and marched off to battle like the true Frenchwoman that she was.

Monsieur Lefèbre, taking a parochial stroll, found Madame Vitry sweeping out the rubbish from the tiled floors of her kitchen and bedroom. He stood and watched her a moment, a most human smile on his generous face, and then that plump right hand of his made the sign of the cross.

“So you are busy already, madame?”

She leant on the broom-handle, thin hands clenched, black eyes bright with renewed youth.

“One cannot be idle, monsieur, when there is so much to be done.”

“You have walked from Ste. Claire?”

“I feel very well, monsieur, very well indeed. To-morrow I am going to work in my garden.”

“Splendid,” said the priest.

Her face lit up.

“Come inside, Monsieur Lefèbre; I have something to show you in my garden.”

She led him through the house and into the garden where the new growth of the year was pushing up through broken bricks and coils of wire, old tins, the rusty frame of a bedstead, battered petrol cans, barbed wire, the wheel of a cart. The wooden frame and rusting springs of an old box-mattress lay across the path. But Mère Vitry was looking at none of this rubbish. She was pointing upwards and smiling at a gigantic apple tree whose limbs had been shot away. The tree was nothing but a torso, a huge, mutilated stump, but from one limb a young branch had grown out and brandished against the blue sky two little sprays of white blossom.

“That is fine, is it not, monsieur? He is holding up his flag; he is not beaten.”

She laughed.

“Here we are together, the old woman and the old tree. I flourish a broom, he waves a bit of blossom. What do you think of it, monsieur?”

The priest’s face was lit up like the face of a saint.

“It is France,” he said, “the very soul of my country.”

XXXIII

Manon had described to Paul Mère Vitry’s return to Beaucourt, and Brent had been so touched by it that he went down very early next morning to the house in the Rue Romaine. The old fruit tree welcomed him, throwing its white banner against the flush of the dawn, and he set to work at disentangling the miscellaneous rubbish from the dew-wet weeds. He had cleared away all the heavy débris and made a dump of it on the cobbled path between the cottage and the roadway when he was surprised by another enthusiast, Monsieur Marcel Lefèbre.

“Good morning,” said the priest; “it seems that I am a little late.”

His black eyes had a glitter of fun in them. He carried his cassock over his arm, appearing to the world like any good bourgeois ready for an hour’s work in the garden.

“That’s the worst of it.”

Brent touched the pile of rubbish with the toe of a casual boot.

“So you have left me nothing to do?”

“There is plenty left, monsieur. I thought I would come down and move the heavy stuff for the old lady.”

“We are beginning very well in Beaucourt,” said Lefèbre, “very well indeed.”

These two good men stood for a few minutes and talked. They were friends from the first smile, equally simple and courageous in their outlook upon life, answering at once to a generous touch of the hand. Lefèbre had the soul of a peasant, with all its shrewdness, its grasp of the elemental facts that keep men strong and wholesome. This return of the people to their homes and to their soil was to him a veritable sacrament. He knew that it is good for man to suck the milk from the bosom of Mother Earth. In the towns souls are hand-fed, dissociated from the great miracle of nature. Lefèbre hated the great towns. They gave babes strong drink, false appetites, parched mouths, the lust after lust. Men walked restlessly in the streets, men who are envious and unhappy after the long dulness of the factory or the shop. They had turned no soil, nor gone to bed happily tired.

“What can one make of this little house?”

He was looking at the patch of brown tiles and the bare rafters. His face was eager, inquisitive. Brent felt the thrill of his humanity.

“It could be made quite strong again.”

“You think so.”

“The roof can be covered with felt, and later it can be retiled. A door and some windows—and there you are.”

Lefèbre hung his cassock over the sill of one of the empty window spaces.

“I will go up to the château and get a roll of felt. Would you take down those tiles?”

“It would be better.”

“If you could spare five minutes later in the day for a little criticism?”

“I may be able to give you a hand,” Brent said.

Monsieur Lefèbre went for some tools, nails and a roll of felt, and when he returned to the Rue Romaine he found Mère Vitry standing in the garden under the old fruit tree. She was smiling, a child’s wonder in her eyes.

“Look, monsieur, a miracle! Someone has been here.”

“A friend, perhaps.”

“It was you, monsieur, who carried away all that rubbish?”

“No. But miracles happen, madame, even in these days. There is always the miracle of the good man.”

Mère Vitry crossed herself, and looked at the roll of felt under Monsieur Lefèbre’s arm.

“And you—you are going to work, too, monsieur?”

Lefèbre’s jocund face broke into creases.

“I am going to try and put a roof on your cottage. That will be another miracle!”

Manon had gone to the canteen which she and Madame Poupart were to manage with the help of two of the older women. They had had a boy assigned to them, a strong young rascal whose duty was to trundle the day’s provisions down from the château in a hand-truck, chop wood for the stoves, and to make himself useful in any way that God or Manon chose to order. He sulked the first morning, having promised himself the excitement of helping to pull down some of the ruins.

“People who are lazy get no dinner.”

He argued the point with Manon, and it required the dinner hour to convince him that these women were in earnest. When the file of men had passed to the tables with full plates, Master Jacques stood by the iron boiler, holding a tin plate that was empty, and inviting Madame Poupart to use her ladle.

“We had to cut the wood,” said the lady, “to cook your dinner. You refused to cut wood; we give you no dinner.”

The logic of the thing was so convincing, and Madame Poupart so determined, that Jacques went out and laboured to earn his plateful of stew.

Anatole Durand and Brent spent the morning making a pilgrimage through the village. They visited each house to which the head of a family had returned, Paul examining each building and giving his opinion as to what could be done. Anatole stood by with his inevitable note-book, jotting down the details of this tour of inspection, while Brent and the owner looked at walls and gables, sagging roofs, shell-bitten chimney-stacks and questionable foundations. Each problem differed a little from the other; each house had its own particular sickness. Some were dead, so dead that there was nothing to be suggested save that a new house or hut should be built in the yard or garden. Anatole made a note, “Try and buy huts.” There were stud and plaster houses with the timber framing fairly sound; the walls of these could be replastered or covered temporarily with felt. There were brick houses that a little ingenious patching would put into passable repair. There were mere broken shells that needed building up squarely before they could carry the cap of a roof. In many cases a crumpled mass of tiles and rafters would have to be removed before the actual work of reconstruction could be begun. The old houses built of the chalky limestone of the district were the most hopeless of all. When such a house had been wounded, it had crumbled, cracked, dropped masses of masonry, dribbled loose stones out of the wounds, bled itself to death. The war had taught Brent to respect the extraordinary tenacity of good brickwork. You could square up the ragged walls, fit a patch into the holes, and the house was as good as ever.

Beaucourt saw Paul Brent as a brown man with a short, pointed beard and friendly blue eyes. He seemed a pleasant fellow, capable, rather quiet in his speech, and with an accent that was vaguely foreign. He was a stranger and Beaucourt kept a critical eye on strangers, but Brent went so wholeheartedly about his job and was so obviously a man of his hands that these peasants accepted him. They were too busy to be inquisitive. Brent had sat up late for many nights dragging out of the dictionary the French for such things as plaster, felt, rafters, joists, mortises, concrete. He had made a list of all the technical words that he could find, learnt the names by heart, and made Manon hear his lesson.

“You ought to shout more,” she told him; “you English just talk to yourselves.”

He looked at her with the eyes of a lover.

“Shall I shout those dear words?”

“You may keep that soft voice—for me.”