Part 19

“It does not bore me, you know. I just stand and look at you.”

“Yes, and it upsets my ideas.”

“I’ll go shopping on my own; there are those tools and fencing wire that I want to take back to-morrow in Talmas’ cart.”

“That is a good idea. And, oh, Paul, don’t forget the spinach seed. And this evening we will go and sit in the cathedral, and afterwards we will drink coffee or a bock outside the café. You don’t wish to go to a cinéma, do you?”

“Is it likely?” said her man.

Brent had known Amiens during the war, but the Amiens of his wanderings while Manon shopped was not the city he had known of old. Amiens depressed him. Its narrow, crowded side-walks and penitential pavé made life uncomfortable for a stroller who soon grew tired of staring in shop-windows, and Amiens—like all cities—had the power of impressing itself with unpleasant vigour upon the casual countryman. The peasant is jostled out of his little, quiet complacencies. He has not the spaciousness of the fields to comfort him; the city cinéma-show tries his eyes. Too many people, too much noise, too much restlessness!

Amiens made Paul feel home-sick. He sat on a damp seat in one of the boulevards, a man with the soul of a peasant, a man to whom—after the first hour of window-gazing—this city could offer nothing. He felt tired, absurdly tired, and ready to be taken home like a child. Home? What was home? The place where he worked, where the crops grew, where he sat by the stove in a French village? Yes, it was that and more than that, and in those moments of loneliness Paul discovered the blood and the flesh behind the conventional picture. To man home was a woman, the woman, that and nothing else. The rest was mere furniture, baggage, call it what you will, inanimate things that become alive only when a woman moved among them and turned them into mute symbols of sentiment and tenderness. It was Manon who mattered, Manon the woman.

It began to rain again, and Paul jumped up. He walked fast down the wet streets and the people in the streets had ceased to be strangers. Even the few figures in khaki refused to accuse him of being an exile, a bastard Frenchman masquerading in French clothes. He looked up at the flèche of the cathedral, and his heart felt big in him, big with a sense of the common humanity of them all.

Paul went straight to the auberge, and opening the glass-panelled door, found Madame Berthier knitting. She looked up at him with a smile.

“Manon is not back?”

“Not yet.”

He went out with happy impatience, and waited on the bridge in the rain. He felt that she would come that way, and while he waited there a very wonderful thing happened. The battered-looking street, the grey quays, the green-black water of the river had seemed heavily grey and ugly. Suddenly the sun broke through, sending down a shower of yellow light, while the rain continued to fall. A coloured bow overarched the city. The chestnuts glittered, wet with a beautiful splendour of light. The cathedral seemed to tower into the sky, flashing its dripping stones and pinnacles and windows, its flèche ashine against a great black cloud.

Paul stood spellbound. His eyes were the eyes of an awed yet delighted child.

Manon surprised him in that moment of un-self-consciousness. She came across the bridge without his seeing her, and the look on his face made her think of a window opened in heaven. His face was wet with the rain; he was smiling.

She did not speak, but came and stood beside him as though to share the beauty that enchanted him; to gaze at the sun-splashed trees and the splendour of mystery that enveloped the cathedral. Paul’s smiling eyes came down out of the heaven to her, and the smile became human.

“I’ve been waiting here. I thought you would come by the bridge.”

“You have been feeling lonely,” she said.

“How do you know that?”

He caught her hand and held it firm and fast, and they leant over the rail of the bridge and looked at the still water whose surface was no longer blurred by the rain. There were wonderful reflections in the water, and there were strange lights in Manon’s eyes. She had felt the strong grip of Paul’s hand, and a quiver of deep passion that woke a cry of exultation and of understanding in her heart.

“I want to go home,” he said.

“Home?”

“To Beaucourt.”

He felt the pressure of her firm, warm fingers.

“Is Beaucourt home to you?”

He smiled down at the water.

“I felt like a lost child this afternoon. I had to come back to try and find you. I wanted you; I never knew I could want you so much.”

“Mon chéri,” she said; “so you waited out here in the rain? And then the sun shone?”

“And you came back. Home is where you are. That’s a great discovery for a man to make, is it not?”

“Had you never discovered it before?”

“No.”

“Then I am the first woman you have loved,” she said simply; “I am very happy.”

Paul kissed her softly on the cheek, and their reflections in the water below imitated that kiss.

Madame Berthier gave the lovers an early supper, and after the meal they wandered out into Amiens, walking arm in arm. To Paul Amiens was no longer a strange city full of cold, anonymous faces. They entered the cathedral and sat a while in the great nave, watching the pigeons flying to and fro in the sunset light of the clerestory, for the glass was gone from many of the windows, and the pigeons nested in this great dovecote. Paul held Manon’s hand. They spoke in whispers.

“Only good men could have built this place.”

“Good workmen, anyhow,” said her lover; “I think we have forgotten something.”

“Mon Dieu, something I should have bought?”

He gave a soft laugh.

“No, not that. This place reminds me of that house of yours.”

“Ours,” she corrected.

“Ours. You could put it here inside the cathedral. It’s part of the same stuff. I don’t want to live in a world of sky-scrapers.”

“What are sky-scrapers?”

“The buildings in New York, America. It’s a great age, but, good God, I’m satisfied with Beaucourt.”

“Always?”

“You are not going to die yet, are you?”

“Mon chéri, not before you marry me.”

“And there will always be work to do in Beaucourt, the sort of work that makes a man go to bed happily with the smell of good soil or sawdust in his nostrils. I say, that was a wonderful bed we bought this morning!”

“Yes. We should not have liked an iron bed. You will hold me very close, some day, my Paul.”

“And I shall never let you go.”

Next morning Brent tied up his belongings in the check handkerchief, kissed Manon, shook hands with Madame Berthier, and marched off to the Place Vogel. Monsieur Talmas’ cart started at nine on the return journey to Beaucourt, and Paul found two other travellers on the wooden seat, an old lady who was joining her married daughter, and Monsieur Poupart, who had been spending two days in Amiens buying goods for the shop. Poupart had a yellow face and a melancholy manner, and the old woman had been boring him with the irritating vivacity of second childhood. She asked interminable questions.

“Work the pump, will you?” said Poupart to his neighbour; “my arm is stiff. They had la grippe in the house where I have been staying; I expect I have caught it; I always do.”

“I have had la grippe thirteen times,” said the old lady triumphantly, leaning forward and looking across Paul at the pessimist.

“The thirteenth attack should have killed you, madame;” and, in a truculent aside, “you would never have had thirteen attacks if you had been my mother-in-law.”

The old lady chattered to Paul all the way to Beaucourt. She was very inquisitive, and Paul was hard put to keep her curiosity within the limits of a decent reticence, for her old hands were ready to pull everything to pieces, even to interfere with her neighbours’ clothes. She asked Paul if he was married, and cackled when he told her that he was only betrothed.

Poupart listened with a sardonic solemnity. He caught Paul’s eye, and nudged him with his elbow.

“Push her downstairs.”

Paul laughed.

“La Croix would have done that years ago if he had not been a fool.”

“I understand what you are saying, quite well, Monsieur Poupart. No one has been able to break my neck for me.”

“What a pity, madame!” said the man.

Monsieur Talmas’ cart entered Beaucourt by the Bonnière road, and just beyond the gates of the factory, where a number of workmen were lounging, they passed a waggon drawn in at the side of the road and laden with the sections of a hut. Brent, who had been looking at the factory, felt himself nudged by Monsieur Poupart’s sharp elbow.

“Look there!”

Ten yards beyond the waggon a man was sitting on the grass bank, the man whose closed eyelids seemed sunk in their eye-sockets. A girl with red hair was standing beside the man, a girl with narrow lips and a prominent bosom. She was speaking to the driver of the waggon who was unhooking his horses.

“It is Louis Blanc,” said the shopkeeper, staring inquisitively at the woman.

Paul was conscious of a shock of astonishment. It was Bibi himself, blind and bearded, sitting there and listening to what the girl was saying, his head slightly on one side like the head of a listening bird. A couple of sticks lay on the bank beside him! He was dressed in his best clothes.

“He’s blind, you know,” said Poupart; “poor devil!”

Brent’s eyes were grim. He realized that he had not prepared himself for the return of Bibi, for Bibi had passed out of the life of the village, and his reappearance filled Brent with a feeling akin to nausea. It was the return of something that was essentially evil, an element of discord, the spirit of malice.

Paul was staring hard at Louis Blanc and as the cart passed him Bibi raised his head with a jerk. His eye-sockets were fixed upon Brent. He seemed to feel the passing of an enemy and the challenge of an enemy’s eyes.

Paul drew back and looked away. He heard Bibi speaking to the girl with the red hair; he was asking her who was in the cart that had passed.

“It’s the carrier’s van,” she said.

“Who’s inside?”

“Two men and an old woman. Now, then, are you quite sure this is your piece of ground? It lies opposite the end of the factory wall.”

Bibi had owned half an acre of orchard here.

“Yes, that’s it. Count the trees. There used to be thirty-six, all apples. They were standing there months ago.”

Barbe, of the Coq d’Or, took a step up the bank and counted the trees.

“I make the number thirty-five.”

“Near enough. We will have the hut off the waggon here. Give me a hand; I can help the fellow to unload.”

Some of the workmen came across to help in the unloading. They thought that Bibi had lost his eyesight in the war; and Barbe was very attractive to men. They fraternized with Bibi.

“You are good fellows,” he said, “not like these damned peasants. There will be some good wine here when my buvette goes up.”

“What, you are going to sell drink, old man?”

“Plenty of it,” said Bibi.

XXXVI

The events that agitated Monsieur Anatole Durand were the arrival of the “Elephant’s” workmen and the birth of Bibi’s buvette.

Anatole had Marcel Lefèbre at his elbow, and Lefèbre had never hesitated to say that it was in the factory that the modern social diseases were hatched and bred. If you argued the point with him and quoted the example of Monsieur Menier and his Chocolate Town he would answer that there were very few enlightened men like Monsieur Menier, and that factories existed not for the good of the workpeople but to make money. To Marcel Lefèbre the making of money was the root of all evil. It debauched both the capitalist and the worker, begot the bastard lives that men live in great cities, made life hectic and unreal. He combated the assertion that the peasants were hard, greedy, less intelligent than the dwellers in cities, and he would ask you whether a man who could carry out all the varied and scientific work on a farm had not a more fully developed and intelligent life than a workman who spent each day cutting threads on a screw, who read nothing but the “red rags” and talked about things that he did not understand. In the villages you found no venereal disease, few prostitutes, none of the grosser sorts of crime. An occasional murder, perhaps; but Lefèbre was a man of passions—disciplined passions—and yet he could understand the violence that shed blood. There are occasions when the killing of a man is a wholesome and a cleanly act.

It must be confessed that Lefèbre’s prejudices were justified by the temper of the men whom Monsieur Goblet introduced into Beaucourt. The “Elephant” had picked up the dregs of the casual labour that had been set free from the munition works and the army, fellows who drifted, youngsters who had learnt too soon the vices of grown men. Very few of Goblet’s original “hands” had returned; some had been killed; others had settled elsewhere; for the few who were ready to return there could be no technical work until the buildings had been repaired and new machinery installed. Durand had spoken of “riff-raff,” and the words fitted the case exactly. Monsieur Goblet had picked up the riff-raff that is to be found in all cities. There were some good men among them, one or two of the older bricklayers, the engineer, and two of the mechanics. The rest were a bad lot, ready to run about the village and make trouble with the women.

As for Louis Blanc’s buvette, that, too, could not be helped, nor does any sensible Frenchman quarrel with a seller of good wine. Bibi’s buvette grew up like a gourd, for the workmen over the way saw that the plant was for their own pleasure, and spent the evenings in helping it to grow. They put up Bibi’s hut for him, built Mademoiselle Barbe a throne and a set of shelves, knocked tables and benches together, even helped with the furniture. Bibi had a small marquée as well as a hut. He meant to sleep in the marquée, but Mademoiselle Barbe demanded a door and a lock, and the room that was partitioned off at the end of the hut. For one day Bibi distributed free drinks in token of his gratitude to the good fellows who had their eyes fixed on the red-haired girl’s petticoat. Bibi became popular. He had a fine collection of lewd stories suited to the gentlemen whom the “Elephant” had imported into Beaucourt.

Durand professed to see virtues in Louis Blanc’s establishment.

“It will keep the roughs out of the village.”

Lefèbre insisted on seeing the truth.

“There is part of the village that may be glad to join the roughs.”

“Mon Dieu,” said Anatole, “are we not rather like a couple of fussy old hens?”

“My religion spreads its wings over the children. You know very well, my friend, that Goblet has opened the lid of the box. We shall have trouble here.”

Durand bit his finger-nails.

“There may be a way of persuading that fellow Blanc to disappear.”

Paul missed the events of those few days, for Amiens had made him a present, the present that Monsieur Poupart had expected to bring back with him. Brent went down with influenza, an influenza of a particularly virulent type. He was alone in the house, Luce Philipon having returned to her parents, and the disease struck Paul like a dose of poison. He was at work in the morning; that evening he was delirious, with a temperature that had soared.

About nine o’clock in the evening old Prosper Cordonnier, who slept at the château, and acted as Anatole’s “store-guard,” was sent down by Durand to the Café de la Victoire with a message to Brent. Anatole wished him to come up next day and make a rough survey of the château. Cordonnier found the café shut up, but hearing a voice, he knocked at the door. No one answered the knock, so Cordonnier tried the door, and finding it unlocked, walked in.

It was still sufficiently light for Cordonnier to see his way about the house, and he discovered Brent in bed in the little room whose window overlooked the garden. Paul was delirious, and talking all sorts of imaginable nonsense, and he was talking in English. Cordonnier stood and stared at him. This lingo was strange to Prosper, who had passed his refugee years working on a farm in the Gironde.

Cordonnier bent over the bed, and shook Brent by the shoulder.

“Hallo, old chap, what’s the matter?”

Brent pushed him away.

“Bosh,” he said, “bosh! Oh, go to the devil!”

Cordonnier left him, but he stood in the passage for a minute or two, rubbing his chin and listening. Prosper had been known in Beaucourt as “Mutton Head,” a man of slow movements, very stupid, yet touchily conscious of his stupidity. People had laughed at him, and this laughter had bred in Cordonnier a stubborn reticence. He used very few words, and those of the simplest. He talked only of obvious things, and if anyone asked him for an opinion he bolted back into his silence like a rabbit into a hole. He had one failing, a fondness for drink, and he had been heard to argue with a mild recklessness upon the contrasted virtues of farmyard dung and chemical manures.

Cordonnier went back to the château.

“That fellow Paul might have been talking German,” was the thought that entered his head, “but we won’t say anything about that. They always laugh, the fools! A man should keep things to himself.”

He told Durand that Paul was sick. “I found him in bed, monsieur. You had better see him yourself in the morning.”

“Nothing serious, Prosper?”

Cordonnier avoided expressing his opinion.

“He was in bed, monsieur, so I came away.”

Anatole was with Paul early the next day; the high fever had passed, and he found Brent flushed but sane. He remembered nothing of Cordonnier’s visit, nor had it occurred to him that he might have been babbling in English.

“This comes of taking a holiday in Amiens.”

Durand lit the stove in the kitchen, warmed up some milk, and made Paul drink it.

“When does Manon come back?”

“To-morrow.”

“I will fetch Mère Vitry. She is a good nurse, and she will be glad to look after you.”

And there the incident ended. Mère Vitry came in, a very willing angel of mercy, with her patched skirt, and her bright black eyes. She washed Paul’s hands and face, talking to him as she would have talked to a baby, and shuffling about the house in an old pair of felt slippers. In the toe of one of these slippers a mouse had gnawed a hole, and the little black circle fascinated Brent. It looked like a bird’s eye.

Manon returned next day in Monsieur Talmas’ cart. She found Mère Vitry sitting in the kitchen, darning Paul’s socks, her cat asleep on the table by the window, and the coffee-pot ready on the stove. Manon had been in a state of pleasant excitement from the moment that she had left Amiens. She was returning to her home and to her lover.

“You have been looking after my man. How good of you.”

“S-sh!” said Mère Vitry, “he is asleep.”

“Asleep!”

“He has been ill, my dear, but he is better. Monsieur Durand says it is la grippe. Perhaps you had better not go into the room.”

Manon put her bag on the table, took off her hat, and behaved as Mère Vitry would have behaved in impulsively flouting her own advice. She went to the door of Paul’s room, opened it without a sound, and stood looking at him as he lay in bed asleep.

It was that kiss on the forehead that woke Brent. He opened his eyes to find her bending over him, her warm red mouth still shaping a kiss. Her clothes and her bosom smelt faintly of some delicate perfume, and her hands were touching his shoulders.

“Mon pauvre,” she said.

Brent lay and looked at her. He was thinking that he had never had a more pleasant awakening than the lips of Manon had given him in their new home.

“So you are back.”

He was content to look at her, and she understood the happy indolence in his eyes.

“You should have sent me a message. How long have you been ill?”

She sat down on the edge of the bed, and held one of his hands.

“I am not complaining.”

“No?”

“To wake up like this, and suddenly see you, here. But, little woman, you ought not to be here.”

“Who says so?”

“I do. I don’t want you ill.”

“Indeed!”

Deliberately, wilfully, she bent forward till her face was close to his.

“I am afraid of nothing that you could give me. So there.”

Brent would not kiss her lips, but he kissed her hand.

“I shall be up in two days. Life is so exciting just now. When does the furniture arrive?”

“On Friday.”

And suddenly he remembered that Louis Blanc had returned to Beaucourt. He wondered if Manon knew.

She was leaning back and looking at him, aware of the sudden seriousness of his eyes.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“You are in pain?”

“No.”

“But there is something; I am not to be deceived.”

He smiled up at her.

“How you notice things.”

“Yes. I saw Bibi and his new hut near the factory. Is that what is worrying you? Monsieur Talmas told me. It does not worry me.”

Brent’s face cleared. In some ways women are more courageous and more imperturbable than men.

“Well, then, it does not matter,” he said, “but I wish that fellow had taken his blind face somewhere else.”

In their happiness they were ready to forget Louis Blanc and that brown hut of his among the apple trees on the bank above the Bonnière road. The buvette was complete. Mademoiselle Barbe had her comptoir and her shelves for bottles, and at night the factory workmen crowded in and sat round the improvised tables and drank Bibi’s execrable wine. Those who were unable to find room in the hut made themselves at home under the apple trees. They were noisy; they sang. Bibi had a chair beside Barbe’s comptoir. He talked a great deal, but he never laughed. His blind face was the face of a man who listened for some particular voice, the voice of an enemy.

This hut of his was like an outpost, or a rallying point in the inevitable antagonisms that were stirring in the village. Peasant Beaucourt looked at it with unfriendly eyes. It was not that these peasants were saints; far from it; and yet it was as though that arch-peasant, Monsieur Lefèbre, had placed Bibi and his buvette under an interdict. There were elemental discords between the tiller of the fields and these ouvriers. The peasant had his home, his wife, his daughters, his work, his crops; the factory hand was an Ishmaelite, noisy, contentious, cynical, full of crude theories about double pay and less work. He had no woman with him, and your barrack-housed man is a troublesome dog. He will spend half his night sniffing after petticoats, and in Beaucourt the petticoats belonged to the peasants.

This tacit antagonism existed long before it was actually provoked by the inevitable escapades of the “Elephant’s” roughs. To Beaucourt, the Beaucourt that followed Durand, Lefèbre, Philipon and their party, Bibi’s buvette was out of bounds. No one went there. If a man wanted a little red wine, he got it at Manon’s café, and so, almost insensibly, the Café de la Victoire became involved in the feud.

Prosper Cordonnier was the first of the peasant party to secede, and his secession was furtive and occasional. This bibulous and inarticulate old man had felt a dryness at the throat whenever he passed along the Rue de Bonnière. His timidity and his passion for strong drink struggled together for a long time before that scorching and dusty day provided both the temptation and the opportunity. It was three o’clock in the afternoon; everybody was at work, and Prosper, who had been on an errand for Anatole Durand, passed Bibi’s buvette at an hour when it was empty. Bibi himself was sitting in the shadow of the doorway; Mademoiselle Barbe had gone to Amiens in Talmas’ cart.

Prosper loitered, looking shyly at the board over the door. It occurred to him that it would be polite and neighbourly to speak to Bibi, this poor fellow who had lost his sight.

“Good evening, monsieur.”

Bibi sat up very straight in his chair.

“Hallo, who’s that?”

“Prosper Cordonnier.”

“Come up and drink.”

Golden words on a scorching July day! Prosper Cordonnier surrendered.

“Help yourself,” said Bibi.