Part 23

She went blundering across the yard, and out by the gate leading into the orchard. Crapaud and half a dozen other men just missed the flick of her petticoat round the angle of the wall as they ran into the yard to guard the back door. Brent had closed and bolted it, and Marie got away.

Ledoux and several others had swarmed in through the kitchen window. They came into the passage as Paul sprang for the stairs. He had no weapon, but he turned on them there with the ferocity of an animal driven into a corner.

“What do you want, you devils? I’m an Englishman. Keep clear.”

“You are a Boche,” shouted Ledoux; “no more tricks. Drag him down, lads, out with him into the street.”

XLIII

As Marie Castener turned into the Rue Romaine she heard Bibi shouting like a madman.

“Put me at the door, put me at the door.”

They humoured him, and he began to lash at it with his big feet till the flimsy thing broke away from its fastenings and showed the struggling group upon the stairs. Ledoux was leaning against the wall holding his head in his hands; three other men were dragging Brent down the stairs.

Marie Castener panted down the Rue Romaine, waving her hands in the air.

“Mon Dieu—ces hommes!”

For once in her life her phlegm deserted her, and her emotion overflowed her bulk. She was to stop Manon—prevent her returning to the Café de la Victoire—but beyond that her ideas were hazy and uncertain.

Fifty yards down the Rue Romaine she met Manon coming towards her, a Manon who had seen Bibi’s mob rush past Mère Vitry’s window. With the rush of those fatal figures an equal fear had leapt into her heart. She had hurried out, and here was Marie, stertorous and quaking, and trying to look calm. From that moment Manon knew what was happening at the Café de la Victoire, and that it was her love against the mob.

“They are there?”

Marie spread out her arms.

“Don’t go. Paul told me to stop you.”

“He told you that!”

She slipped past big Marie as easily as a dog dodges a bull, and began to run towards the corner where the three roads met. Marie Castener turned and lumbered after her, and now that the secret was out she began to use that deep, low voice of hers. Doors were opening, and people pushing their heads out into the street. Marie shouted to them, waving an arm like an Amazon heading a charge.

“Come on, all of you—come on. Help me to save Manon.”

When Manon came to the meeting of the roads she saw a sight that she was never likely to forget. A thing that looked like a bundle of torn clothes was lying in the middle of the street, and Bibi was kicking at it with his heavy boots. There was something grotesquely disgusting in this great blind beast feeling for Paul Brent’s body with his feet, trampling and hacking like a blind stallion. The crowd stood round with an animal stupidity that is fascinated by violent physical action.

Manon’s face lit up with a white and inward blaze. She picked up a loose cobble-stone and ran forward; a little figure of silence, purposeful and intense. No one in the crowd noticed her until she had opened the circle, that little arena held by certain elemental passions, and had flung her stone full in Bibi’s face. It took him between the eyes and laid him on the cobbles.

That physical act of hers dominated the crowd. She stood over Paul’s body and looked round at these men, these creatures of a brutal impulse whom strong drink and their passions had inflamed. It was a moment of physical balance, of hesitation, of poignant self-consciousness, when some little act or word turns men back from the smell of the shambles.

“Why did you do it?”

She spoke in a quiet and accusing voice, like a grown child who is unable to understand the ways of rough men.

“He had done nothing to you. He was a good man.”

They stood grouped around her, furtively awkward, suddenly self-conscious, and therefore very near to shame. She had turned and was bending over Paul Brent, when Lazare Ledoux, rocking on his heels, shot out a malignant and accusing hand.

“The fellow is a Boche.”

She straightened up and faced Ledoux.

“It is a lie.”

He grimaced at her.

“I say he is a Boche. And you—a Frenchwoman—have given yourself to a Boche.”

Manon did not move. Her eyes looked straight at Ledoux.

“It is a lie. This man is English, and I will prove it. But what have I to do with any of you? Oh, Marie, help me!”

Marie Castener appeared, pushing the men aside as though they were bits of furniture. There were other women with her, a dozen of them, and a few men. Manon was down on her knees with Paul’s head in her lap, bending over his grey, dirt-smeared face. He was bleeding from the mouth, and from a bruised wound on the forehead.

“He breathes!”

Marie was down beside her when Ledoux tried to interfere. She turned, and swinging a huge arm, caught him across the face with the back of her hand.

“Get out.”

Two other women pushed him back, and the crowd laughed. Ledoux, looking evil, went round to where Bibi was sitting up, still dazed but potentially dangerous. Ledoux helped him to his feet.

“It was the woman who hit you with a stone. Come on.”

Ledoux was too late, for Beaucourt intervened. It came in force down the Rue de Picardie, led by Philipon, who carried a blacksmith’s hammer. Someone sprang on the side-walk and collared Pompom Crapaud, who was caught at the café doorway with a tin of petroleum and a bunch of straw. The two crowds jostled each other, waiting for some inflammatory word or act that should set them alight, but that faction fight never developed. Philipon’s hammer may have had something to do with it; also, these peasants were quiet fellows; they had the strong bodies and the obstinate blue eyes of the men of the open country. Almost imperceptibly they pushed Goblet’s factory roughs back towards the Rue Romaine, took possession of the central scene, and held it.

Manon was kneeling, body erect, watching Bibi and Ledoux, who had been cut off from their friends. Her eyes met Philipon’s. She pointed.

“Those two.”

Ledoux had been trying to make away, but Bibi held him by the arm.

“Hold on, what’s happening? Is the house alight?”

Ledoux was frightened.

“Look out! The whole village is here, and the women are spiteful.”

“He’s dead, that chap, isn’t he? Whose hand is that? Hallo!”

“Mine!” said Philipon. “You stand where you are, Louis Blanc. And you, too, you dog with the red eyes. Here, look after these two beauties, some of you.”

And suddenly, yet with deliberation, he took Bibi by the beard and held him as a man might hold a goat.

“Yes, you, Louis Blanc, it is not for me to spit in the face of a blind man. Stand still, will you? If there is law in Beaucourt to-day it is the law of my hammer.”

Louis Blanc stood still. He had always been afraid of Philipon, the one man in Beaucourt who was stronger than himself.

Meanwhile, the unconscious figure of Paul Brent and the two kneeling women bending over it held the crowd silent and attentive. Here was a little human scene that had all the helplessness and the inevitableness of tragedy, a man lying dead in a village street, and a woman holding his poor head in her lap. That is how the crowd saw it. They looked at Manon with a shrinking curiosity, a sympathy that was kindly inarticulate. With her hands she was wiping away the dust from Paul’s hair, her eyes quite tearless, eyes that seemed to look at a sudden emptiness, a vacancy in life. Paul was not dead, but she believed that he was dying.

Philipon joined them, sombre and gentle.

“How is it with him? How did it happen?”

Manon raised her eyes to his.

“They have kicked him to death. It was Bibi’s doing.”

She bent over Paul.

“He still breathes. If only we had a doctor! Marie, what shall we do?”

Marie Castener had been passing her big, slow, capable hands over Brent’s body. She had felt his heart beating under his torn shirt. Marie kept her head.

“He is not dead—a doctor—that’s it! They always say, ‘Never pull an unconscious man about.’ Josephine, and you, Claire—run into the house for some blankets; pull them off the bed. Has anyone a bicycle?”

“If Anatole were here, he would drive to Amiens for a doctor. He is at Amiens, if he could be met and told.”

She raised her head to listen. Philipon, too, was listening with an attentive look on his face, and in that most dramatic moment in the history of Beaucourt the whole crowd seemed to turn instinctively to the opening of the Rue Romaine. They heard the musical bleating of a horn. Someone on the outskirts of the crowd held up a warning arm as the nose of a long grey car slid slowly out of the Rue Romaine. Old Durand’s De Dion was following at the tail of the grey car. The crowd edged back. They saw Monsieur Lefèbre standing up in Durand’s car, his hand on Anatole’s shoulder, his jocund face very stern and troubled. The grey car pushed on until it reached the space about those central figures; it stopped there like some intelligent beast wholly sensible of its own dramatic significance. There were four men in the grey car, and one of them had the white head and the indomitable and unforgettable face of the man who had refused to see France defeated. It was the “Tiger,” the Father of Victory, Georges Clemenceau.

XLIV

Anatole Durand jumped out of the car and ran towards the group in the middle of the street. His bright eyes saw everything, Bibi and Ledoux held by four men, the figure lying on the cobbles, and the women bending over it, but the most vivid and arrestive thing of all was the white face of Manon.

“Monsieur Anatole, a doctor?”

Durand gave a dramatic jerk of the hands.

“We have one here in the car—Monsieur Lafond!”

A man with a black beard was already leaving the grey car. He was short, compact, square, with alert brown eyes shining behind pince-nez, a figure of good-humour, and of energy, direct yet easy in all its movements. He came forward pulling off his gloves. One of the women threw a folded blanket on the ground beside Paul Brent, and the doctor knelt upon the blanket.

Durand and Lefèbre were talking to Philipon and Marie Castener, and Durand’s anger was explosive. He looked across at Bibi and Ledoux, his nostrils inflated, his bright eyes agleam.

“Those dogs! Presently—presently!”

He faced about, and, walking to the grey car with an air of sturdy courage, stood close beside the Father of Victory. And these two old Frenchmen looked each other in the eyes.

“This village of yours, Monsieur Durand, seems a little quarrelsome.”

“I am not humiliated, monsieur, but my heart is sore. You will tell me that life is ironical?”

Clemenceau laid a hand on Durand’s shoulder.

“My friend, I have always set my teeth. What hurts you hurts me. What has happened?”

In a few jerky sentences Durand gave Georges Clemenceau the pith and soul of this village romance.

“The man who raised the flag here, and was the first to attack the ruins, but then, he had the soul of a peasant, of a worker, a creator; the city eats and destroys; the countryman grows and harvests. Once again it is the peasant spirit that will save France.”

He leant his arms on the door of the car.

“Yet is it not strange, monsieur, that I—a foolish old man—should have chosen this very day to show you the pride of my heart? Perhaps we had grown a little vain here, and Providence sent a few drunken blackguards to chasten us.”

Clemenceau was frowning, and his bushy white eyebrows bristled.

“No. The work stands. The quiet men will always thrash the talkers. Is that the house—there?”

He looked intently at the Café de la Victoire.

“Yes—one man’s work.”

Georges Clemenceau smiled.

“He was very much in love. God forbid that this should end unhappily.”

A little human murmur rose from the crowd, a pleasant sound such as animals make when their young run to them for milk. The doctor was smiling behind his glasses, for Brent had opened his eyes. He raised a hand and touched Manon, a Manon whose face had suddenly lost the calm of tragedy and was like broken light, quivering, tenderly shaken. She began to weep—tears of quiet emotion.

“Oh, mon chérie!”

Paul looked up at her and nothing else.

“They have not hurt you?”

“No, no.”

The doctor patted her shoulder and continued to watch Brent.

“I do not think he is going to die, madame.”

“No, monsieur.”

“He has a rib or two broken. We will get him into the house, and I can dress that wound on his head. It is probable that Monsieur Clemenceau will let us send the car back to Amiens for the necessary drugs and dressings. Is there a bed ready?”

“Yes, monsieur.”

The doctor got up, and seeing Philipon, instinctively chose him for the work that was to be done.

“It is essential that he should be moved very carefully. I shall want a door, something flat, and four helpers. One has to be cautious when a man has been kicked about the body.”

Anatole Durand rejoined them with a face that beamed.

“There is nothing very serious? No? Monsieur le docteur, I am overjoyed. Well, Paul, my boy, we are going to mend you in five minutes.”

He was down on his knees beside Manon.

“My dear, it is your happiness that weeps.”

She raised her face to his.

“Monsieur Anatole, almost I am afraid yet to be happy, but I am not afraid of all that must follow.”

“The aftermath?”

“Yes, I must speak. Is it true that Monsieur Clemenceau is in that car?”

“Quite true.”

“It is an act of God. Will you ask Monsieur Lefèbre to speak to the crowd and tell them to stay here? I shall leave Paul and Marie and the doctor when we have put him to bed. First of all I wish to speak to Monsieur Clemenceau.”

“He will listen to you, my dear. We told him your tale to-day, and he understands.”

Philipon had found a length of “duck-board” in one of the yards; blankets and coats were spread on it, and Brent lifted gently on to this improvised stretcher. Philipon and three other men carried him into the house, past the smashed green door that showed scars left by Bibi’s boots, and into the little room whose window overlooked the garden. He was put to bed there, Monsieur Lafond helping Manon and Philipon, while Marie stood in the doorway and watched.

Paul was aware of a voice speaking to the crowd—the deep and pleasant voice of Monsieur Lefèbre. The curé was standing on the raised path in front of the café, and his massive and impressive head looked the colour of bronze.

“My friends, Madame Latour asks you to remain here. She has something to say to us all, and I—who know the truth—ask you to stay and listen.”

The crowd acquiesced. It had no thought of dispersing when the stage was still set, and Monsieur Clemenceau himself descending upon Beaucourt like a god in a car. They had cheered him, and someone had begun to sing the “Marseillaise,” all the men standing bare-headed in the August sunshine. Then the crowd resigned itself to interlude, grouping itself in doorways, and along the raised path, and even sitting on the cobbles. Most of Goblet’s men had slipped away, but a few loafed defiantly at the corner of the Rue Romaine. And from that moment it was Anatole Durand who acted as the master of the ceremonies, going briskly to and fro between the Tiger’s car and the café. At last he appeared with Manon on his arm. The crowd stirred with a sound like the rustling of leaves when a wind ruffles the hanging boughs of a wood.

They saw Manon and Durand descend the steps at the end of the raised path, and walk towards the grey car. Manon stood close to the running-board of the car, a sturdy little woman with a dignity of her own, her tears gone, her eyes steady and determined. Durand introduced her.

“This is Madame Latour.”

Georges Clemenceau removed his hat.

“Madame, Monsieur Durand made you known to me in Amiens. I have been admiring your house of adventure. What can I do for you?”

They understood each other at once, these two.

“Monsieur, I wish you to judge us like a father, myself, my betrothed, and those two men there. I shall speak, and they can answer me. I wish this to be done before all the village, before all those who honour us. I shall tell the truth—the whole truth.”

Clemenceau’s eyes glimmered under their white eyebrows. He considered Manon, and the heart and the head of him found her good.

“Work heals all wounds,” he said, and then, with a smile at this little Frenchwoman, “I am to give you patriarchal justice? What could be better! And the doctor needs my car.”

He turned to Durand.

“Let us have some chairs placed on that path in front of the house. Now, madame.”

He left the car, followed by his two officials, and mounted the raised path, keeping Manon beside him.

“To begin with,” he said, “I must look at this house of yours while Monsieur Durand is arranging the stage for us. It interests me vastly, this house.”

He entered the café, pausing to look at the broken door. “A Prussian trick, that!” His round, white head seemed to sink more grimly between his shoulders. Manon had to show him the whole house from cellar to roof, and to give him an account of how they had lived through that adventurous spring. His eyes twinkled, he noticed everything; his interest in all the human details of the house was simple and intense. Stubbornness and courage appealed to him, and there was courage in every corner of this little provincial home. He saw in it life, inevitable yet miraculous, pushing its way through the ruins. It was a poem in timber and iron, an emotion, a part of the heart of France.

At the foot of the stairs he turned and looked up at Manon.

“He has done well—this man of yours. I will see him presently.”

Then he went out into the sunlight and faced the crowd. Five chairs had been set in a row along the raised path, and Georges Clemenceau took the centre chair. On his right sat Lefèbre; on his left Anatole Durand. Manon had the chair next to Durand, Philipon the one on the extreme right. Clemenceau nodded to Durand. Bibi and Ledoux were pushed forward into the open space below the path, and the crowd closed round them. There was silence.

XLV

Every man and woman in the crowd watched Georges Clemenceau, for his presence dominated them all. Even the naturalness with which he sat in his chair and looked at them from under his bushy eyebrows seemed part of his greatness, part of his magnificent yet subtle simplicity. They saw in him the man who had held up the sword-arm of France, a man who could be stubborn with the stubbornness of a peasant. That round head of his and that almost feline face had a shrewd and humorous benignity. The Tiger could smile, he could hate, and he could love.

He began to speak to them, leaning back in his chair; his hands resting on his thighs.

“Let me tell you that in the country men do not make speeches; they put their hands to the plough and hoe; that is the eloquence we understand. To-day I came to this village of yours to see if Monsieur Durand had been telling me fairy tales, and I find a little family quarrel going on, and someone has asked me to sit here as the head of the family to decide who is right and who is wrong. At my age—and in these days—the things that are right and good for our country seem so plain and so simple that it is easy for us to judge whether a man is a good citizen or not. The ruins and the very stumps of the dead trees call to us for help. He who builds, he who plants, he who gives his sweat to France, that man is the man whom we honour.”

He paused, smiling round at the listening and attentive faces. He was speaking like a peasant to peasants, and he had his hand on their hearts.

“Let me tell you that I have visited many villages. What happens? The people crowd round me; they say: ‘Monsieur, when will the Government help us? We have no material. What are we to do? It is sad, it is tragic.’ And I say to them, ‘Work, children, work. Do not wait for the bureaucrats and for indemnities. The world is a selfish world, and officials do not hurry, but I will hurry them with all the strength that is left to me. Our sufferings are not yet over, but let us suffer a little longer for France. Work; look about you, do not sit still and wait. Clear the ground—gather together what you can; we will see to it that you have food and fuel. During the war we gave blood; now—we must give our sweat.’ And they are good people; they see that I cannot promise miracles and they forgive me.”

Paul Brent was lying in the little room listening to Monsieur Clemenceau’s voice. His face was turned to the window that opened on the garden, and he could see the line of the stone wall and the branches of the lime trees making a broken pattern against the blue of the sky. Beaucourt seemed very silent, extraordinarily silent, and yet Brent knew that nothing but a brick wall separated him from all those people. The street below the Café de la Victoire was as quiet as a court of justice, and the voice of Clemenceau was the voice of a judge.

Marie Castener sat on the chair beside the bed, a big, blond, patient woman, who listened intently to all that the great man said. Now and again she nodded her head and made some comment. “Yes, that’s sound sense.” “This man gets to the heart of things.” “We make our own miracles.” “Listen, Manon is speaking.”

They heard Manon’s voice coming out of that same silence, the profound silence of men and women whose sympathies are challenged by some drama of life that stirs their emotions, their loves, and their hates. They had listened to Clemenceau with stolidity and interest, but when Manon Latour began to speak to them their eyes lit up with living passion. Into the open space where Bibi and Ledoux were standing someone had pushed Pompom Crapaud, and at the sight of this sinister little devil still carrying his tin of petroleum, the crowd uttered its first cry of anger. These peasants looked meaningly at each other. Mouths and eyes hardened. A house had become a sacred object in Beaucourt, and Crapaud had been caught in an act of sacrilege.

Manon was standing beside her chair. The sight of Crapaud angered her as it angered the crowd.

“What had we done to you that you should wish to burn our home?”

Crapaud giggled. He found himself between Bibi and Ledoux and facing Clemenceau, that grim old badger with the white moustache. Fear made him impudent and vicious. He leered up at the blind and sullen face of Louis Blanc, and at the uncertain and flickering eyes of Lazare Ledoux.

“You look cheerful—you two!”

He nudged Bibi with his elbow and was shrugged aside by an angry jerk of Blanc’s big body. Bibi was sulky and furious; these “roughs” were of no more use to him.

“Get out!”

Crapaud was jostled against Ledoux, who looked like a great melancholy bird disturbed on its perch. Ledoux was afraid. His red eyes could find nothing pleasant upon which they could come to rest.

“The capitalists have got us, old man!”

“Shut up, you fool.”

Manon had begun to speak, and in that little, quiet room Paul Brent had held out a hand to Marie Castener. Instinctively she drew a motherly chair nearer to the bed.

“Can you hear?”

“Yes; she is telling them everything.”

Paul lay and looked at the blue sky. His body ached; it hurt him to breathe, but he was conscious of a great tranquillity, the contentment of a sick man who surrenders himself and his fate to the care of others.

“I am glad,” he said.