Part 18

She had been a little anxious for her man, knowing that he had prepared himself to face a possible ordeal in this return of the natives. It was not only that he loved her and that he had come to look on Beaucourt as a home, but he had a man’s horror of betraying himself and of being damned as something worse than a fool. She knew that he would imagine that the humiliation would spread to her, and she could picture him packing his knapsack and marching off into the night.

He came back to her in the evening with the air of having spent a happy and a human day. There was laughter in his mood, not the laughter of ridicule, but laughter that had felt the pathos and beauty of the thing that had inspired it. He had been down to Mère Vitry’s cottage, and had discovered Monsieur Lefèbre on the roof, a sprawling, enthusiastic, happy figure with a distinct celestial shininess about the broad seat of its breeches. Monsieur Lefèbre was stripping the roof of its remaining tiles and lowering them carefully in an old bucket with a bit of wire fastened to the handle. Mère Vitry stood below, unloaded the bucket, and packed the tiles away in a corner. They were as absorbed as two children playing a game.

“It has been a great day,” said Paul; “I don’t seem to have puzzled anybody. And the way these people work——”

He sat down in the arm-chair and watched Manon laying the table. She was very good to watch, and every now and again her eyes gave him the glimmer of light that a woman gives to her lover.

“Let him pass—Paul Rance, a good Frenchman.”

“I believe I shall pass,” he said. “I like your people. They smell of the soil.”

She balanced a fork, pointing it at him.

“And remember, they will like you. You see, you are such a good fellow, and——”

He sprang up suddenly and caught her, and holding her face between his hands, looked long and steadily into her eyes.

“Yes, you are just my life. I had to fight for you, didn’t I? But I have been afraid, ma chérie, that these people might not want me here. I might be found out.”

“Do not run to meet troubles,” she said; “you will have very good friends in Beaucourt. Besides——”

She clasped his wrists for a moment with her two hands, and then moved gently away to lift a boiling kettle from the stove.

“Let us look at the house—afterwards, at everything.”

He stood watching her devoutly.

“It’s so good that sometimes I am afraid.”

“What is there to fear in Beaucourt?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

When the meal was over they walked out into the garden and looked at the green crops, those rows of beans and peas and lettuces paraded so exactly on the clean brown soil. The holes in the wall had been filled in; the fruit bushes were covered with a film of green, and the pollarded limes showed a thousand emerald tips. From the garden they passed to the orchard, and Brent stood a moment by Beckett’s grave. He had put a white wooden cross there, but he had never been able to persuade himself to paint up the lie of his own name.

Manon drew him away.

“Now we will look at the house.”

They went over it as though they had not seen the Café de la Victoire for three months. It still remained a perennial wonder to them, something of a miracle, a thing that grew and fed upon the labour of their hands. Already it had an atmosphere, the human friendliness of a place that is lived in. It was ready to be the secret home of their love and their memories.

Brent had put up a simple staircase to the upper rooms. They were still open to the bare rafters of the roof, but Harlech Dump had provided canvas for the ceilings, and all the floors were complete, save the floor of the back room on the right. Brent had used up all the wood that he had salved from the army huts.

Manon was dreaming the dreams of a housewife. She stood in the middle of the room that was to be hers and Brent’s, her back to the window, her thoughts busy with furniture, curtains, linen. In a week or two she would be able to go to Amiens and buy furniture for the new home. She looked at Paul.

“Come and hold my hand.”

“What is the problem?”

“I’m thinking. We will have the bed there, and a big cupboard against the north wall, and another cupboard with shelves in that corner. I should like one or two bright-coloured mats.”

“A little colour is good,” said Brent.

His left arm went across her shoulders, and they stood silent, thinking.

“There is only the floor of that room, and the ceilings——”

“And then?”

She looked up at him, and her dark eyes were intense.

“Promise me, you will never run away.”

“Run away?”

“Yes, don’t you understand? This is going to be ours, whatever happens. Besides, what is there that could happen?”

Paul kissed her.

“I almost wish——” he said.

“What do you wish?”

“That the village knew everything—that it could judge me as an Englishman who had made a mess of life in his own country.”

She held his arms.

“Mon chéri, perhaps, some day, we will tell them, but of what have you to be ashamed? Let us win them first. How I wish we had wood for that floor.”

Brent held her close.

“Yes, that was my promise. Do you think it is easy for me to hold out?—and yet, I’m going to hold out for six months. I’ll win Beaucourt before I ask you to marry me.”

She stroked his cheek.

“What spurs you wear on your conscience! Am I to agree? Well, what can a woman do? Who’s that?”

Someone had entered the house. It was Anatole Durand, an Anatole who wanted to gossip, and he stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up.

“Hallo!”

“Won’t you come and look, monsieur?”

He climbed up on his brisk legs, amused, smiling.

“Talking over the furniture, hey?”

“There is one room that needs a floor, and we have no more wood.”

“Wood—wood? Why, I’ll give it you.”

“But we have had more than our share in taking the wood from those huts.”

“Tiens,” said old Durand, “isn’t an old man allowed to be silly now and again? One can’t help having favourites, you know.”

XXXIV

There were two very happy men in Beaucourt during that miraculous spring, Anatole Durand and Marcel Lefèbre.

Things went well, amazingly well. There were no quarrels, very little jealousy, and no slacking. At the end of the first month more than half the people were out of the huts and back in their own houses, and though the roofs were of black felt and the windows of canvas, the critical period had passed. The Philipons had sent for their children; so had many others. Mère Vitry was back in her cottage, with the picture of the Sacré Cœur hanging on its nail, and in her garden were crops of lettuce, spring cabbage, peas, beetroot, potatoes. There were days when the whole village went out into the fields, with Monsieur Lefèbre heading the pilgrimage, and the seed-sowing was a public sacrament. Durand’s tractors had ploughed up hundreds of acres, and though the season was too late for wheat, these peasants, labouring from dawn to dusk, seeded those great brown fields with beans, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot, turnips, peas and swedes. The luck of the season was with them. It was sunny and dry, and the battle was with the weeds. A hundred hoes and a blazing sun fought and suppressed grass and charlock, dock, nettle, sorrel, buttercup and poppy.

The orchards had only missed one year’s pruning, and promised well. Even flower seeds had not been forgotten. Manon was to have beds of mignonette, marigold, Virginia stock, red linum, gaudy nasturtiums. There were buds on the old rose trees, and Paul had done some pruning. The Bois du Renard was in full leaf, and the château chestnuts had had a wonderful display of white wax candles. The white thorn, too, had looked like snow. Old Durand had had lilac in bloom, and he had sent Manon a mass of it for the big bowl in the window. Paul had found her burying her face in the blossom, and he had caught her in his arms and kissed her.

“You smell like the spring.”

She had ruffled his hair with her hands.

The village continued to take its principal meals at the canteen, for this public kitchen saved time, labour and fuel, and allowed the women to spend the whole day about their houses or in the gardens and fields. Other families were returning, and, to relieve the congestion in the huts, some of the people who were more forward in their houses arranged to do their own cooking and to eat their meals there. The école was turned into an additional rest-house for the new-comers; they took their share of the work, food and material; the Council of Beaucourt administered a patriarchal justice. There were no gendarmes in the village.

Civilization began to re-erect its old landmarks, and Beaucourt made quite a jest of the new post-office when Madame Bonpoint, who was very fat and very red and a little severe, made Beaucourt think of a broody hen sitting on a clutch of eggs in a coop.

Pierre Poirel, the village farceur, put his head inside her doorway and crowed like a cock.

“Comment?” said the lady.

“Are the letters hatched yet, madame?”

It was Pierre Poirel, too, who scrawled on the doorway of his eccentric-looking cottage, “Villa des Nouveaux Riches.” And all Beaucourt laughed at the joke. The village had recovered its sense of humour, which was an excellent symptom, for a community that can work hard and laugh has no social sickness to fear.

Durand restarted a carrier’s service between Amiens and Beaucourt, and three times a week a carrier’s cart left the Place Vogel, carrying passengers and parcels. Beaucourt used to take its relaxation in an evening gossip on the Place de l’Eglise, about the time the carrier’s cart rolled in. Anatole would be there, Monsieur Lefèbre, the patriarchs, the women. You could buy _Le Petit Journal_ or the _Echo de Paris_. For a few sous, too, you could get a good cup of coffee at the house of Manon Latour, and ask the advice of that fine fellow, Paul Rance.

Paul was growing popular. His day was full from dawn to dusk, and when he was not working at the café or in the garden, he was helping some villager with his house. Paul tackled all sorts of problems. He rescued derelict roofs, underpinned dangerous walls, patched broken chimneys. Manon’s man was a good fellow, a much better fellow than the rather querulous and thin bearded Gaston who had been Manon’s first husband, and Beaucourt approved of the betrothal. It accepted Paul. He could use his hands.

Brent had a share in preparing one of the great sensations, Beaucourt’s first shop. The enterprise was Madame Poupart’s. Paul built the shelves, the counter, the window stage, and, since the venture was a private one, he was paid good money for the work. He took the notes home and handed them to Manon.

“Put them in the partnership bank.”

He was very happy over that money, and Manon was happy with him.

Few people could get near Madame Poupart’s shop when first it was opened. The window was only six feet square, and you had to push hard to obtain a glimpse of it. Not that Beaucourt was in mad haste to spend its money, or to buy the cheap pipes, sweets, picture postcards, reels of cotton, brown crockery, matches or lead pencils that were arranged in the shop-window. It was the fact that Beaucourt had a shop. People crowded like children to stare at it.

Animals began to arrive and they could not have created more interest if they had walked out of the Ark. The Philipons had a brown cow; Monsieur Talmas, the messenger, kept two horses; the Lebecques had a pig, but the idea of keeping a pig was soon plagiarized by other people. Hens clucked and scratched, and cocks crowed. Someone gave Mère Vitry a cat.

Nor was the Café de la Victoire without its live-stock, and Philosophe—a very useful beast—soon had to acknowledge rivals. Etienne’s blue cart arrived from Ste. Claire, carrying a calf secured under a net, a coopful of young chickens, and Marie Castener in her Sunday clothes. Etienne and Paul were left to man-handle the calf, while Marie stumped all over the house, making Paul’s new floors shake, and talking as she had not talked for years. She kissed Manon in nearly every room as though she were sealing a blessing, quite forgetting that she never could abide people who were impulsive and sentimental.

“And when are you going to be married?”

“Very soon, my dear; in three or four months, perhaps.”

“Three or four months! What are you waiting for? If I were that fellow Paul I should not be able to keep my hands off you.”

“He is a very good fellow,” said Manon, “and very patient.”

“Patient! A man ought not to be patient. Talking of bad men, have you heard the news about Bibi?”

Manon’s face hardened.

“No. What is it?”

“He’s blind—stone blind. They had to cut out one eye, and the other got affected. A man like that quarrels once too often; those English soldiers cut him to pieces.”

Manon paused on the stairs.

“Be careful; they are rather steep. Did they ever catch those Tommies?”

“No.”

“And what is Bibi doing?”

“Living at the Coq d’Or. They say there is something between him and that girl Barbe. She’ll keep him in order, if any woman can do it. I suppose he has some money.”

When the Casteners had gone Manon told Paul the news about Louis Blanc. They were leaning over the stable door, and the calf was sucking Manon’s fingers, a protest against its weaning.

“Poor devil!” said Brent, “I would rather be dead. I never thought——”

“I can’t pity him,” she answered; “I suppose I ought to, but I can’t. I wonder if he will come back to Beaucourt?”

“What could a blind man do here?”

“Make mischief. I hope he will stay where he is; there would be something horrible about a blind man crawling about the village. Be careful, ma petite, do you want to eat my hand?”

Brent leant over and rubbed the calf’s head, and the little beast’s sapphire blue eyes looked up at them without fear.

“This thing is tame enough.”

“Etienne’s beasts are always tame. Yes, you have beautiful eyes, my dear.”

And though they did not confess it to each other the thought of Bibi blind and helpless haunted them all that night.

The working days slipped by, and in his white tent at the end of the avenue of chestnuts old Durand slept the sleep of a healthy tired child. He was irrepressible and he was happy, up soon after dawn each morning, and shaving in the doorway of his tent before rushing down into the village to begin another day of creation and adventure. Marcel Lefèbre was his partner in this early morning enthusiasm. Lefèbre slept on an old wire bed in the sacristy. Everybody knew that he spent the first two hours of the day working in the church, clearing out the rubbish, scraping the floor, and daubing whitewash over the banalities and blasphemies that casual hands had scribbled on the walls. The “flip-flop” of that brush and the priest’s splashed face were a rallying cry and an ensign to Beaucourt. The whole village gathered in the church for Sunday morning mass. The peasants came because they liked Lefèbre and because the service seemed to be a sort of social sacrament, a very human hour when they stood in silence side by side, and felt the humanity in each other. The dead were there, and the children. And there were those, Philipon among them, who had called the mass a mummery and a swindle, but who came to the church because Marcel Lefèbre’s religion grew in the soil. Even these children of reason felt that it was good to gather together and to drink of the cup of common humanity.

Beaucourt was happy, rather proud of itself and ready to echo old Durand’s cry of “Ça ira, ça ira.” There was a competitive spirit in the air, a spirit that was good for Beaucourt and for France. People asked each other, “What are they doing in Peronne, in Domart, in Caix, in Roye, up in the North? We can show them something here. It grows, it blossoms.” Beaucourt had some little reason to be proud of its work.

Yet there was a shadow. It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly, and it was cast by a man. Nobody save Durand and Lefèbre imagined that there was anything sinister about the shadow or felt that any new thing had arrived in Beaucourt. What did a little fat man signify, a manufacturer, a fellow who had been known as the “Elephant” because he had a nose like a trunk and trousers that made one think of an elephant’s legs? M. George Goblet was just a coarse little man whose life had been given to the making of money. In the old days the factory had seemed good for Beaucourt; some of the girls and women had worked there, and nothing terrible had happened. The peasant, not the ouvrier, had dominated the village.

Monsieur George arrived in a car. Durand met him walking down the Rue de Bonnière with Marcel Lefèbre, and Lefèbre had the look of a man whose dinner had not agreed with him.

“What, you back!” said Durand, with a quick glance at the priest.

Monsieur George had lunched in his car on chicken and a bottle of Château Citron. He smoked. He was cheerful; his face looked red and beneficent, but Marcel Lefèbre—the Christian—wished him in hell.

“Monsieur Goblet is restarting the factory.”

“Tiens,” said Durand; “he will have to bring his own workpeople; we are too busy here.”

Monsieur George smiled.

“Enterprise, my dear sirs. I am going to get the place tidy. Men do not grow on currant bushes these days, but I have been in Paris and elsewhere.”

“Riff-raff,” said Anatole aggressively.

The “Elephant” looked at him suspiciously with his little eye. He had never been able to understand Durand; he thought him a fool. And, of course, they disliked each other. It would never have occurred to Goblet that these two men had an affection for Beaucourt, an affection that resembled the love of an old man for a daughter, and that they suspected him of being ready to debauch her innocence.

Goblet was a man of platitudes.

“France has to get to work. There is going to be a race for trade.”

“Trade? Of course. One is apt to forget these things. We have got to fill the shop-windows so that silly women may spend money.”

“I make cloth, Monsieur Lefèbre. That is one of life’s necessities, is it not, or would you rather have the women running about naked in the fields?”

“You are unanswerable, monsieur.”

Anatole edged Lefèbre gently out of the conversation, for M. Marcel had a hot temper and a way of losing it with righteous sincerity.

“Monsieur George has been reading ‘Penguin Island,’ ha, ha! He is right; we cannot have our villages full of naked angels. But where are you going to put your workmen?”

“Tents or huts.”

“And feed them? We have our own organization, but we can’t feed your fellows.”

“I have not asked you to, have I? I did not start business yesterday; I have my scheme just as you have yours.”

“And you have managed to buy machinery?”

“Should I go out without my trousers?”

Anatole and the priest left the “Elephant” standing coarsely on his dignity outside the gate of the factory. They walked back arm in arm to the Place de l’Eglise.

“My dear friend,” said Durand, “M. George is behaving like a reasonable and enterprising citizen. What good will it do to us or Beaucourt to quarrel with him? I think we are in danger of becoming a couple of sentimentalists.”

“God forgive the reasonable people,” said Monsieur Lefèbre. “It was the devilry of common-sense that killed the child in man.”

XXXV

Early in June, the Café de la Victoire being ready for its furniture, Manon made her great expedition to Amiens. The canvas ceilings were up, all the timber-work stained or painted, and Paul had papered the walls of the kitchen, the two best bedrooms, and the coffee room. Manon had chosen a pattern of pink roses for her room; the windows were to have rose-coloured curtains, and the bed a rose-coloured duvet; Paul had stained the floor the colour of old oak.

They left Philipon’s girl, Luce, in charge of the house, and travelled to Amiens in the carrier’s cart, sitting on the wooden bench behind M. Talmas, and under the black canvas cover that had a little window on either side. Manon had a carpet-bag at her feet; she was to stay three or four days. Paul carried his travelling gear wrapped up in a black and white check handkerchief; he wore his velvet trousers and black coat. There was no one else in the carrier’s cart, and as its grey-blue wheels rolled slowly along the straight roads under the poplars, beeches, limes and acacias, Paul felt himself back in some ancient bit of England. M. Talmas’ van would have found country cousins in the Weald of Sussex or among the Somersetshire orchards. Cæsar Talmas, too, was a bit of old France, with the head of a grenadier, a tuft of grey hair on his chin, and his eyes as blue as his breeches.

This cart dropped them at the Place Vogel, and they walked to the Rue Belu, Paul carrying Manon’s bag. Across the green-black water of the river, and with its windows looking at the chestnut trees and in the inspired grey glory of the cathedral, stood the Auberge de l’Evêque, a tall, old, white house with yellow shutters, a rust-red gate and door. Manon knew the place. It was clean and quiet, and she had written to retain two bedrooms.

They stood on the bridge for a moment, and looked at the cathedral.

“When we have left our luggage,” said Manon, “we will go in and say our prayers.”

Madame Berthier of the Auberge de l’Evêque, one of those crisp, firm-fleshed Frenchwomen, with a ruddy face and fair hair, met them like an old friend. Manon had a bedroom on the first floor; Paul a little room under the roof. Madame Berthier gave them coffee, and chattered to Manon about prices.

“The cheap shops are not always the cheapest,” was her dictum.

Manon agreed.

“If you mean to live with the same furniture all your life, why not have it good to look at?”

“Like your wife,” said madame with a roguish look at Paul.

“Yes, that’s so, madame. I find that she is very pleasant to look at.”

“Thank you, mon ami. Are you coming out with me to the shops?”

“Of course.”

“Then put on your hat.”

It was a showery day, but that did not trouble them, for whenever the rain began to fall Manon found a shop in which she wished to enquire the prices. She was in no hurry, and they had explored all the streets in the neighbourhood of the Hôtel de Ville before Manon made her choice. She bought her furniture at a shop in the Rue des Chaudronnières, cupboards, chairs, wash-hand stands fitted with drawers, a big French bed.

They had hesitated over that bed, and the shopkeeper and his wife joined in a debate that became a sort of family discussion. Manon could buy an iron bedstead of the English pattern, with a mattress and pillows for four hundred and ninety-five francs, but the French wooden bed looked handsome and more homely. It would cost them six hundred francs.

“What do you think?”

She looked at Paul.

“I like the wooden one.”

“It is a beautiful bed, madame, and the box-mattress is our very best.”

“Why copy the English?” said the proprietor. “Think of the price they are charging us for coal.”

“An iron bedstead looks rather cold in a room.”

“Yes. More suitable for old maids.”

“Be quiet, Jules. I assure you, madame, that if you are going to have a pretty room for yourself and Monsieur——”

They bought the wooden bed, and walked on to the Rue Dumeril, where Manon had discovered two shops that had pleased her, one of them a bazaar that supplied anything from a table-knife to an enamelled soap-dish. At another shop over the way Manon bought material for curtains, some cheaper bedding, and two rugs. She had her lists made out in a note-book, a hypothetical price placed against each article, and she worked methodically through each list, refusing to be hurried. It was a very serious affair this restocking of a kitchen and a linen cupboard, with every sheet, towel and blanket to be examined and handled, and Paul saw that it would take days.

“I shall leave you at home this afternoon,” she told him, as they walked back to dine at the auberge; “a man in a draper’s shop is like a dog on a string.”

He laughed.