Part 22

He sent them away much happier than they had come to him, which is the best thing that can be said of a man’s religion, and when they had gone he blew out his candle and went up to the château to see Anatole Durand.

The Place de l’Eglise lay in darkness, but there was a light in the post-mistress’s hut, and in passing it Paul and Manon nearly ran against big Philipon, who had come to see if Monsieur Talmas had brought him any letters. Philipon recognized them and stopped.

“Hallo, you two! Good evening, madame.”

Then he tapped Brent on the chest with a friendly forefinger.

“Have you left anybody in charge over there?”

“No.”

“I should get back home. Do you hear?”

They listened, and heard in the distance the sound of men singing a rowdy song.

Philipon nodded.

“A little zig-zag and parading the village! It is time we did something with that buvette of Louis Blanc’s. Hold on; I’ll walk back with you.”

He poked his black head into the post-office.

“Any letters, madame?”

“No, monsieur.”

“What is that boy of mine doing in Germany?”

He took Paul’s arm and the three of them entered the Rue de Picardie. Philipon was an affectionate animal in spite of his frown and his rumbling voice, and Brent had helped him in the rebuilding of his house. His fatherliness stretched out a protective arm over these two. It is the big men who are most warm-hearted and sentimental, and Philipon was always saying to his wife, “Look at those two at the café! What a romance! It does one’s heart good.”

They walked along between the queer shapes and little twinkling lights of Beaucourt, with the stars shining overhead, and Philipon’s big feet falling emphatically on the cobbles. Here and there men and women were sitting in the open doorways. They exchanged remarks with Philipon, whose familiar bulk and swing of the legs were known to all.

“Bibi’s nightingales are singing.”

“It is time we did something with that drinking shop.”

“I hear they are sending us two gendarmes.”

“Gendarmes! We can manage our own affairs. You wait. We are ready to give those fellows a lesson.”

The singing grew louder as they neared the end of the Rue de Picardie, and it appeared that Monsieur Goblet’s young men were coming down the Rue Romaine. Manon was holding to Paul’s arm. She was not frightened, but she was serious.

“We could do so well without them,” she said.

Philipon grunted.

“Don’t worry, madame. People who make the most noise are always the biggest cowards.”

When they reached the end of the garden wall Paul lifted Manon up on the raised path, but he and Philipon kept to the road. About a dozen “roughs,” with arms linked together, had swung round the corner out of the Rue Romaine and were dancing the can-can in the roadway below the café. They were rowdy and derisive, shouting and kicking up their heels in front of the house.

“Hallo—hallo!”

“Profiteers! Stuck-up pigs!”

“Let’s spoil the paint for them.”

“Shut up. They’re in bed. You are interfering with the embrace.”

“You there, is she nice to cuddle?”

“When is the baby expected?”

They roared with laughter, and then Philipon loomed up like a big ship in the starlight.

“Allez! Keep your snouts out of our village. We have sticks ready.”

The choir oscillated, swayed, and seemed inclined to wind itself in a spiral about the smith, but when Philipon rapped the stone wall of the path with the iron bar that he had been carrying these rowdies thought it wiser to laugh.

“Hallo, there goes the dinner-gong.”

“All right, sergeant-major.”

“And there is madame, too!”

“Bon soir, madame; we thought you were in bed. We came to serenade you!”

The human chain gave a wriggle towards the Rue de Picardie, but Philipon put himself in the way.

“You can go back by the other road. Beaucourt is bored with you.”

They chaffed him, but they took his advice. Manon had unlocked the door. She turned and thanked Philipon.

“Come in and drink a glass of wine.”

“Pardon, but I go to bed early in order to get up early. I think those lads are all wind. Good-night.”

“Good-night, monsieur, and thank you.”

“It’s nothing,” said the smith.

Manon was lighting the lamp in the kitchen when Brent came and put his arm round her.

“I wish we could blow Bibi and that crowd off the face of the earth. I don’t like the idea of leaving you here with those fellows about.”

XLI

In the full blaze of an August afternoon Louis Blanc made Barbe take him up the hill to the Bois du Renard. They had locked up the buvette, and the red-haired girl led Bibi by the hand along the field-path to the wood. Her head shone like a piece of red metal close to the blackness of the man’s coat; she had to watch the ground so that Bibi should not stumble.

“My God, but it is hellish to be blind!” he said; “I cannot even see you, you know.”

She helped him over an old, fallen trench at the edge of the wood, and in crossing it he slipped and fell against her. They stood, clinging together on the edge of the rotten bank; but Barbe had a body like steel, and she held the man on his feet with his head resting against her bosom. They remained thus for a moment, Bibi’s face flat against her red blouse as though he were burying his face in an armful of flowers.

“Ah, but you smell good.”

He took great breaths of her, holding her close, and pressing her body to his till it was curved like a bow.

“Do you want to break me, you great rough?”

She was delighted, a sensuous cat, her eyes half closed, her chin resting on the crown of Bibi’s head.

“There is something left in life after all. Let us sit down in the shade.”

“Anywhere?”

“No. I want to be where I could see all Beaucourt like a meal laid out on a table.”

She chose a shady place for him at the foot of a beech tree, spreading out her skirt and making him sit on it. From the Bois du Renard it was possible to see the whole of Beaucourt and the fields and woods lying about it in the broad August sunshine. Bibi sat with his knees drawn up and his elbows resting on them. Barbe let her right arm lie across his shoulders.

“There it is,” she said; “I can even see little Crapaud putting new tiles on the factory roof.”

Bibi moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue.

“Tell me all about it, just as though you were painting a picture.”

She humoured him, describing Beaucourt and all that she could see happening in Beaucourt, using that brisk and satirical slang of hers, the language of the comptoir.

“There is the church with half its spire knocked off, and, I suppose, inside of it old Lefèbre is splashing whitewash about. The post-office in the Place—just like a flat grey louse crawling up to have a bite at the church! Someone is walking about in the ruins of your hotel.”

“Yes, my hotel! Who is it?”

“It’s too far off for me to see, but he has a basket, and seems to be picking up bricks.”

“My bricks! Well, it doesn’t matter. Go on.”

“Half-way down the Rue de Picardie a peasant is lying flat on the roof of a house. He has a white patch on the seat of his trousers, as though the curé had given him a smack with his whitewash brush. Then we come to the café. I can see the café quite plainly.”

“We will stay there a moment. What is happening at the café?”

“A woman is hanging out linen on a line in the orchard.”

“That’s a waste of time—when we are going to dirty it for them.”

“Oh—yes—and I can see the man. He is standing on a ladder doing something to the new sign-board.”

“More waste of time. We shall drop a bomb on them next Sunday.”

Bibi remained silent for a while, his blind face like a grotesque gargoyle spewing hatred over the house of his enemy. Barbe watched him out of the corners of her eyes, her arm resting upon his shoulders. She knew that some plan was forming in his mind, and, though he had thrown out nothing but hints to her, she was ready to help her man.

“What happens on Sunday?”

He turned his blind eyes to her.

“You are not going to cut my hair—like that woman in the Bible.”

She answered sharply.

“You can’t get on without me. Isn’t that so?”

He put an arm round her.

“That’s the truth. You know how to mix the drinks.”

“So that is to be my job?”

“I want all of them mad on Sunday. I shall want old Cordonnier well fuddled and in a state to swear anything. What’s the best stuff for it?”

She reflected, leaning her chin on the palm of her hand.

“There is that jar of cognac. It is fiery stuff. I could mix it with the wine. What are you going to do?”

“I keep that card up my sleeve.”

“You must tell me,” she said; “I shan’t give you away.”

He drew her head close to his face, and whispered in her ear.

“The man is a Boche. Now do you see light?”

Neither Manon nor Paul had any suspicion that danger was so near to them, nor guessed that they were to be made the victims of a drunken mob. Quiet people do not foresee such catastrophes, nor is happiness a window that opens upon tragedy. The very house they had rebuilt lulled them like a cradle. It was so very precious, so much a portion of their human selves that it shared that immortality that seems part of us when we love. The wholesomeness of the place was unassailable.

Moreover, Paul Brent’s mood of pessimism and self-distrust had passed. To share a secret with a friend is to halve the burden of it, and Lefèbre was more than a friend. He and Durand were at the café early on the morning after Paul and Manon’s visit to the sacristy. They sat in Manon’s kitchen, with the doors and windows closed, and talked the affair over from end to end.

Durand had pretended to be scandalized.

“My favourite Frenchman turning out English! A nice game you have played with us!”

“I am very sorry, monsieur.”

“Well, well, don’t look so miserable. The war has turned the world upside down, and after all—it is this that counts.”

He looked round Manon’s kitchen.

“We ought to judge a man by what he does. A simple rule of life and how rarely we follow it! Now, then—it is for us to provide this Englishman with a French character.”

He smiled at Lefèbre. There appeared to be some secret between them, some dramatic and very human dénouement that they guarded like a couple of sentimental old men.

“It should not be difficult,” said the priest.

Anatole turned to Manon.

“Monsieur Lefèbre and I are going to Amiens on Saturday. We have business there—a deputation, a meeting upon the devastated regions. I can interest a friend or two in his little romance; what is more, we will approach the English authorities. If we give this rogue here a passport it will make things so much simpler.”

Manon slipped across the room and kissed him.

“I do not think they can be very hard on us.”

“My dear, I had better take you with me to see some English colonel with a red band round his hat. Feminine influence, you know! If you put your arms round his neck——!”

“You can tease me as much as you like, both of you, for I love you both.”

“Lefèbre,” said the manufacturer, “this house is becoming dangerous.”

It was Anatole Durand who advised them to send for Marie Castener from Ste. Claire, and to arrange for her to stay with them in Beaucourt during the next few weeks. He pointed out that Brent would have to go to England, be released by the authorities, and return with the necessary legal proofs of his identity. Meanwhile Marie would be the very woman to help Manon in the house. She was so solid, so imperturbable, such a good friend, quite as capable as a man of dealing with men.

“If any of Goblet’s fellows stroll round here, Marie would only have to stand in the doorway.”

Durand lent her his car and drove Manon over to Ste. Claire. Marie was willing to come to Beaucourt, and she accepted Manon’s confession with her usual phlegmatic reasonableness.

“A good man is the same everywhere. You can trust me to keep your secret.”

“It will not be a secret long.”

“So much the better. For myself I always prefer to tell people before they find out. But that man of yours is clever; he took us all in.”

“Well, I helped him,” said Manon.

Marie Castener was to come to them on the Saturday. Etienne would drive her over in the gig, for Etienne wanted to see how things were going at Beaucourt. There were people who called it the “miraculous village,” and she smiled shrewdly at Anatole Durand.

“Monsieur is a wizard.”

Durand, looking happy, shrugged off the compliment.

“Everybody has worked hard. We are so proud of Beaucourt that we have asked a very great man to come and see it. But I am giving away secrets. I am very glad that you are coming to look after Manon, madame.”

“I have always found Manon very well able to look after herself, monsieur. But then—I am—solid.”

A man whose hands are well occupied is not, as a rule, a man of moods, and yet a quite unexplainable sadness took possession of Paul Brent on that Friday evening before the coming of Marie Castener. It was the last evening that he and Manon were to spend alone before the uncertain days that would follow his surrender to some English Provost-marshal. Paul had become resigned to the idea of surrender; it was his penance before his marriage, the only path by which he could come back to Manon with no lie in his heart. It was the thought of leaving her that troubled him, and gave an edge of pain to his tenderness. He was astonished to find how deeply this new life of his had rooted itself in Beaucourt; England mattered to him hardly at all.

“It is the woman,” he said to himself; “it is the woman who matters.”

As they sat at supper Manon became aware of his silence. She noticed that his eyes wandered about the room, this room that had seen the beginnings of the adventure, the defeat of Bibi, the exultation of their first embrace. She saw Paul look at the pictures on the walls, the new curtains, the bowl of asters on the table by the window, Philosophe asleep on the rug by the stove. This familiar room was pleasantly and wholesomely complete. It was home.

“Yes, without you it would never have happened,” she said.

He looked at her across the table with the tenderness of a grown man whose love is far deeper than the romantic devotion of a boy.

“It makes me miserable to think of leaving it.”

She stretched out a hand and let it rest on his.

“But you will come back very soon. I have a feeling that they will not do anything very terrible to you, and Marie and I can carry on.”

Dusk was falling. They did not light the lamp, but went out like lovers into the orchard and watched the moon coming up huge and solemn in a cloudless sky. It was one of those perfect summer nights, very gentle and still, when you can fancy that you can hear the dew falling out of the silent sky. Holding hands they wandered down to the stream and followed its flickering movements in the moonlight, walking close to the poplars and the old pollarded willows. The trees were silent as death. There were no fences here, and the meadows seemed to stretch into the illimitable moonlight.

“How peaceful it is.”

She slipped into the hollow of his arm, her head on his shoulder.

“It is so good to be able to trust a man. Do you not know what that means to me?”

“I know that nothing matters to me—but you.”

They stood close to the trunk of a white poplar, and kissed.

“You belong here now, mon chéri. You are sure that you will never be home-sick for England?”

Brent looked at the moon.

“It is like this,” he said; “a man learns what life can give him, and what he wants life to give him. The things that matter—the simple, happy, restful things! You may run all over the world looking for something you left in your own village. When you are young you are always wanting the apples on the other side of the wall. I’m not like that—now—thank God!”

She stretched out a hand and touched the trunk of the great poplar.

“Trees are so wise. They stay in the same place, it is true, but they grow; they see the great fields and the good, wise life of the fields. They feel the wind, and see the sky and the moon and the stars, and hear the water running through the meadows. Mon mari, I think we are going to be very happy here, you and I.”

XLII

Sunday came as a day of great heat, sultry and oppressive. There was thunder in the air, and Beaucourt did not go out to work in the fields, but remained at home sitting in the shade, or lazily busy in its gardens. At noon there was hardly a soul to be seen in the streets, and for an hour no one passed down the Rue de Bonnière save old Prosper Cordonnier, loping long-legged and guiltily to Bibi’s buvette. The hut among the apple trees above the factory was the one live, noisy spot in Beaucourt. The hut itself was like a baker’s oven, and the men lay about on the grass under the orchard trees and under an awning that Bibi had put up. Barbe was kept busy serving them with drink, for it was a thirsty and quarrelsome day, a day when men’s tempers feel the great heat.

As Anatole Durand said, after the event had happened, “What a confession—that so much trouble should be caused by a bottle of cognac, a drunken ‘sheep’s head’—and a few lies!” Yet Bibi’s plan was so simple and so dangerously human because it appealed to the baser passions. Given sufficient cognac, a fuddled and persuadable fool like old Cordonnier, and one stark audacious lie, and the machine would move. It happened that there was ample cognac; Cordonnier became valiant and obstinate in his silliness; and Bibi’s lie had all the assurance and the completeness of the truth. The Café de la Victoire was a bonfire to which these rowdies were to put a match.

Bibi handled the affair very cleverly. He sat on a stool, under the awning, and twitted Pompom Crapaud and Ledoux with the repulse that they had suffered at the hands of Paul and Manon. He was playful and sardonic, and as potent for evil as the cognac with which Barbe had drugged the wine.

“Those capitalist swine,” snarled Ledoux, with eyes that looked inflamed.

“Well, you funked it, old man,” said Crapaud; “the fellow put me out all right, and you stood by and watched.”

Ledoux was lying close to Bibi’s stool, and Louis Blanc bent over him with ironical playfulness.

“Did you ever bayonet a Boche, Lazare?”

“Plenty of them.”

“So did I. I was rather good with the toasting-fork. But I never ran away from a Boche.”

Ledoux looked at him fiercely.

“Is that a cut at me?”

“Well, you let a Boche throw your pal into the street. Ask old Cordonnier over there.”

That is how it began. Bibi had the whole crowd round him, and old Cordonnier was swearing to all sorts of things with nods and winks that were meant to be cunning. He was too fuddled to realize the seriousness of the affair or to understand whither these men’s passions were tending. It seemed no more than a riotous and irresponsible jest invented to make the day merry.

It was so easy to inflame these roughs whose blood and brains had been heated by the stuff Barbe had given them to drink. A mob never reflects. It spills itself like wine out of a split cask and makes straight for the gutter.

Bibi told his tale—the tale that his hatred had thought out in the darkness of those summer days. Cordonnier had given him the idea, and he had elaborated with an ingenuity that made it convincing. He asserted that Manon had remained in Beaucourt after the Germans had occupied it; that she had had an affair with a Boche, that this Boche had “deserted,” and taken her away with him through the lines.

“You see how it worked,” he said. “Women are queer fish, and this woman was infatuated. The fellow may have found out where she had buried her money. Everything was upside down just then; the ‘front’ was a sieve, and this Boche was fed up. He gets Manon through the lines, and is taken prisoner. After the armistice he escapes, and where does he make for? Beaucourt, of course. He knows that he will find the money and the woman there. A useful fellow, too, who can use his hands and speak French like a Frenchman! And there they are in Beaucourt with the best house in the place. A nice pair, what!”

There was a confusion of angry and excited voices.

“A Boche!”

“But I say, old man, it doesn’t sound possible!”

Bibi held up a fist.

“Listen. Cordonnier there heard the man talking German. When he told me that, I thought I would try it myself, and one night I got Mademoiselle Barbe to put me under their window. When a man is shut up in a house with a woman, does he talk German just for the fun of it?”

“You heard him?”

“I did. And I can tell you my blood felt hot; it made me think of those nights when one heard the swine talking in the trenches.”

It was Lazare Ledoux who jumped up and called for a crusade. He was the torch-bearer, the inflamer of mobs.

“Come on! We’ll cut the woman’s hair off, and kick the fellow into the street. Come on!”

At the Café de la Victoire the peaceful details of an idle summer day were proofs of how little this storm-burst was expected. Manon had run down to Mère Vitry’s with a few lettuces and a basket of beans, and had stayed chatting with the old lady. Marie Castener was washing up the dishes. Brent, in his shirt-sleeves, had pulled the arm-chair to the open window, and was lighting a pipe before sitting down to read a day-old copy of _Le Petit Journal_. Someone was splitting firewood in a barn across the way, and the steady chunk-chunk of the hatchet was almost as rhythmic as the ticking of a big clock.

Brent had begun to read an article on the coal problem in France, an article that contained some very bitter criticism of the British miner, when an unusual and yet familiar sound drew his attention from the paper. Back in his brain were many memories, sense impressions left by the war, and this particular sound reminded him of a company of infantry marching into its village billets. There was the unforgettable pounding of heavy boots on the pavé, and yet this noise was different. Troops marched in step. This footwork belonged to the undisciplined and scrambling rush of a crowd.

Paul turned in his chair and, leaning sideways, looked along the street. He remained quite motionless for some seconds, staring at this little mob of men debouching from the Rue Romaine. The two leading figures gave Brent the first hint of how the coming of this crowd might be a threat to the Café de la Victoire. Lazare Ledoux had blind Bibi by the hand, a Bibi whose face looked white and fatal beside the inflamed faces of the other men.

Brent stood up. His jaw and mouth seemed to set into hard, bleak lines as he saw the wild eyes of these men turned towards the house. Lazare Ledoux caught sight of him standing at the open window, and Ledoux’s mouth became a red-edged splodge of howling blackness.

“Voilà le Boche!”

The crowd howled in chorus, and Brent felt the cold hand of fear run its fingers down his spine. He had heard that human and bestial sound before when a company of drunken Bavarians had rushed over to raid a front-line trench. The courage in him had felt brittle as glass, and yet as hard. But now he was conscious of a swift and desperate coolness, an instant’s lucidity of thought between spasms of pain.

He went quickly to the door, opened it, and stood facing the crowd, and from the moment that he looked into the wild faces of these men who hung at Bibi’s flanks Brent knew that the mob-horror was upon him. There was no reason in those eyes—nothing in these furious men to which he could appeal. He had a glimpse of Bibi’s teeth flashing white in his black beard, and then he shut the door on them and shot the bolts.

“Fetch him out!”

“We want the woman.”

Marie was standing in the passage, her face like a great round wondering moon.

“Quick! Get out by the back door, and through the garden. Stop Manon; she mustn’t come here.”

Marie stared at him, and Paul went to her and pushed her bodily towards the back door.

“They think I’m a Boche. For God’s sake go and stop her. I’ll keep them interested here.”