XLI
Inthe 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
Sundaycame 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 ofLe 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.”
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
AsMarie 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 Durandjumped 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.