XXII
Anatole Durandwas away for two hours, and when he returned to the Café de la Victoire he found that Brent had extemporized a ladder out of some lengths of timber and was at work again on the roof of the house. The gale of the preceding night had been a warning to Manon’s partner, and he was in a hurry to get the whole roof covered in before the wind rose again. Manon was helping at the foot of the ladder, and making further use of Monsieur Durand’s rope. She had knotted a big loop at one end of it, a loop which would grip a couple of sheets of iron, so that Paul could draw them up.
Old Durand sat down on the running-board of his car and watched. He had seen his château, and he had seen Beaucourt, and perhaps he had been a little discouraged, though Manon had warned him against what he called “la maladie des ruines,” but as he watched the cheerful activities of these two, Brent hauling up the sheets and nailing them down with the speed and precision of a human machine, the adventure of it thrilled him.
“Hallo, that’s life,” he said, “the spirit of youth that strives and creates. Youth is not daunted. Look at that fellow’s strong brown arms, and the little Manon with her sleeves rolled up. Mon Dieu! but it is splendid! Ça ira, ça ira!”
He threw his big note-book on to the front seat of the car, took off his coat, and was ready for the dance. He could not resist the music of those two happy figures, and the fine clang of the hammer.
“Hallo, you two, here is a recruit. Set me to work, my dear.”
Manon exclaimed as only a Frenchwoman can exclaim.
“Monsieur has caught the fever! We shall all call you Papa Durand, Père de Beaucourt.”
Anatole winked at Paul.
“Now let us see what she will give me to do! She has made use of my rope——”
Manon stood considering, hands on hips.
“I have it. Monsieur was always a great gardener.”
“That’s it. Give me a spade. Turning up the good soil for the first crops!”
“It will be the first soil turned in Beaucourt. The honour is yours, monsieur.”
“Before God, it is an honour,” said old Durand with sudden solemnity.
So he set to work in Manon’s garden, clearing the rubbish, and starting his trench with all the careful deliberation of the professional gardener. He whistled, he perspired, he took off his waistcoat. Life was good, the simple life that grows out of the soil.
Manon went in to cook the meal. She had brought eggs and butter, and she made an omelette. There was a white cloth on the table, glasses, a bottle of wine, half a loaf of bread, some cheese. When all was ready, she went forth with a saucepan and a spoon and hammered her gong.
“Messieurs, le dîner est servi.”
Old Durand came in with a shining forehead and eyes that laughed.
“What, the hotel is open already!”
He shook hands with Paul.
“You are the very man we want, my friend. I congratulate madame on her partner. I hear you have lived in England?”
“Seven years,” said Brent, and swallowed the lie, not liking it. Durand was a man to whom it was no pleasure to tell a lie; there was something of the frank, brave child in him.
They sat down to the meal, and it was Anatole who talked, and he talked like his note-book. He expressed himself in energetic, jerky phrases, like a man pushing a big stone up a hill.
“Work, that’s it. The world has got to get back to work. There is nothing so good as work. Look at my appetite! I saw it all mapped out while I was digging. We must get at the soil, grow our food, grow more food till we have food to sell. Then we can buy clothes, and pots and pans, and curtains—the things that the towns have to sell. Quite simple, is it not? But to begin with we shall have no food and little shelter. That is where Papa Durand will come in. I shall buy food; we will open a public kitchen and a canteen. I shall buy stores, timber, felt, iron sheets, stoves. Perhaps you, Monsieur Paul, will be my director of works—who knows? Perhaps madame will manage the food. We must get the strong men and the women back, shelter them, feed them, give them tools. Not charity, no, but a new chance. It is not wise to make things too easy; if people do not work, they shall not come to our canteen. The old women and the children had better stay where they are until Beaucourt has its feet on the rock. Yes, I shall live here, and work here, when I am not scouring the country for stores, or shouting at officials. The officials always have wool in their ears. They say, ‘Your plan shall be considered,’ and then put it away in a drawer. But you, my friends, and the like of you, will be the saviours of devastated France. I drink your health, madame, and wish you ‘bonne chance.’ ”
When the meal was over, and Monsieur Durand had lit a cigar, Manon took him to see the huts in the field off the Rue de Rosières. Two of these huts were in perfect condition and had not been touched by Brent; and there were two others that could be put in repair. Each hut would hold about twenty people.
Anatole was delighted.
“Here we are! Shelter for forty men and the same number of women—barracks for the workers till we can find something better. Then there are the cellars in Beaucourt. I shall use the cellars of the château as my depôt for food.”
He scribbled in his note-book.
“I shall be in debt to Beaucourt,” said Manon, “but I shall pay the debt.”
“How so, my dear?”
“We have taken more than enough material to make another hut.”
“The example will pay for it. I suppose that fellow—Louis Blanc—knows of these buildings?”
“Yes.”
“Confound him!” said Durand.
She left him wandering among the ruined cottages, and returned to the café and to Paul. Manon’s ideas had been enlarged by the enthusiasms of old Durand, for he was a man who had remained young, whose brain was vital and alert. Age was horrible to Manon, even though she pitied it, age with its stupidly staring old face, its eternal questions, its eternal condemnation of anything new. She found herself picturing the Beaucourt of the future. What would it be like?—a little world of old men and old women, grumblers, backbiters, grudging folk who could never forgive youth for being young? The figures of Paul, Bibi and old Durand seemed to stand in the foreground of the new Beaucourt. She was more than a little afraid of Paul. How would Beaucourt accept him? Had the war made people broader-minded, more generous, more ready to say “This man has done good things; let us judge him by his works”?
Paul had shifted his ladder to the other side of the house, for he had completed the roofing of the half next the street. Already this house of hers was ceasing to look an empty shell; it had a solidity, an overspreading shadow. Something thrilled in her. She looked up at the man, her man with his brown arms and sturdy back, and a strange new tenderness awoke in her heart. She would stand by him; she would place herself resolutely between him and the past. What did the past matter? It was the future, the brave looking forward, and the light in the eyes, the hands strong for the labour that was to be. These were the things that mattered.
“Paul.”
She called him, and her voice had a new softness, a note that was for his ears alone. He turned and looked down at her, this dark-haired little woman in her black blouse and black and white check skirt. The woman in her and the indefinable perfume of her womanhood seemed to rise to him like the scent of the spring.
“Come down,” she said; “I wish to talk.”
Brent smiled, hesitating.
“I want this finished before the wind gets up.”
“Yes, I know,” she answered; “you work like a devil.”
He laughed and came down the ladder, and when he was standing at her side, he felt that they had passed some invisible landmark, and that Manon knew it and was holding out a hand.
“Where is Monsieur Anatole?”
“Dreaming,” she said, “dreaming, but I think his dreams will come true.”
“A great old man—that.”
“Because he is not old. He looks forward, not back. If he can only give his eyes to Beaucourt, it will be good for Beaucourt—and for us.”
She turned through the gateway into the garden where old Durand’s first ridge of freshly turned brown soil showed at the end of a green carpet of weeds. The path under the pollarded limes and between them and the stone wall was broad enough for two. It had many memories for Manon, many associations—this old garden; it was an intimate place, and Brent was no longer a stranger.
“I am worried about Bibi,” she said.
She looked up at Paul with a full, frank glance of the eyes, a glance that seemed to open the whole of her world to him.
“I can look after myself. I don’t want to quarrel with the fellow.”
“You are thinking that he could make trouble?”
“Yes, that’s the danger.”
They walked to the end of the path in silence, a silence that was like a lane that led towards a clearer view of the future.
“How great is the danger, Paul?”
She spoke very quietly, and in turning, looked calmly up into his face.
“Do you not think that I ought to know?”
Brent stood a moment, his eyes set in a stare of thought. He was wondering what had prompted her to ask him that question, nor had he any quarrel with her right to ask it, and in a measure, he was glad.
“You have every right to know—I will tell you.”
“Wait——”
She touched his sleeve.
“Do not misunderstand me. If I wish to defend my friend, I must know how the attack might come, I must have my eyes open. And then—of course, it all depends on whether you are happy here.”
Brent smiled.
“If you say that I may stay, I stay. Such a second chance does not often come to a man. And now—I’ll tell you.”
“Everything,” she said with a quick look at him.
“Everything.”
He found the making of that confession far easier than he had thought. On his first day in Beaucourt he had given her mere hints, sketched a vague outline, but now he drew in every detail, withholding nothing, painting his life’s picture with a simplicity and a sincerity begotten of the war. He had lived two years in an English prison, having been convicted of fraud—but the fraud had been of another man’s making. Brent had trusted people; he was good-natured; he had left all the legal details of the adventure to the other man.
“Of course I was to blame,” he said; “I was just as responsible as he was; I ought not to have gone about in blinkers. I abetted his swindling because I did not take the trouble to find it out. My wife knew it all the time; she was one of those women who are mad to make a show. I never forgave her that. When I came out of prison the war had started, and I had my chance. But after the war—there was nothing. Do you wonder that I had a horror of going back?”
“What a tragedy!” she said; “just your good nature.”
He glanced at Manon.
“One ought not to be too good-natured. But for that disgrace—and the truth of it—I’m free.”
“Quite free?”
Her dark eyes looked into his with a candour that was almost fierce. And Brent understood.
“Yes, free. My wife died during the first year of the war. I’m quit of the whole miserable business; only, over there, I should always be labelled an ex-convict. I didn’t mind so much during the war; you lost yourself in the bigness of it and in the heart of your pal. But when it was over——”
“The past came back.”
And then she smiled, and opening the old blue gate in the garden wall, looked out over Beaucourt.
“There’s the old world—everybody’s past. We are beginning all over again, old Durand—you—I—even Bibi. But Bibi will be just the same as ever, and after all there is so little for Bibi to find out. You are just an Englishman who chose to stay in France.”
“I’m a deserter,” he said. “I suppose they would call me that. Beckett—the man buried over there would not have grudged me the chance; he was the sort of fellow who never minded risking his head. I have seen him go to a farm that was being shelled and bring away the dog that was chained up in the yard.”
And then he added, “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing. You are just Paul Rance, a Breton who had lived in England, and who has not gone back to England.”
“Yes,” said Brent; “but there are occasions in life when a man has to produce papers, documents, and I have nothing but the pay-book and disc that belonged to my friend. I would rather like you to take charge of them.”
“You can give them to me; I will lock them up in the box I have at Marie Castener’s. And now that I know everything, it seems nothing.”
Brent was looking through the gateway at the ruins of the village.
“You are very generous,” he said. “We will see what Beaucourt makes of me. If it accepts me as a good sort of fellow, it may ask no questions. It is about time I got back to work on the roof.”
They walked back to the house, and before he climbed the ladder, Brent went down into the cellar and returned with the battered brown Army Book and the identity disc. He gave them to Manon.
“There is my pledge.”
“It shall always be honoured,” she answered him, slipping them into her blouse.
XXIII
Half an hourbefore dusk Anatole Durand started up the engine of his car, and glanced round for Manon, who had been putting on her cloak. Durand saw in this delay a loitering of lovers, nor had he any quarrel with a romance that seemed part of the soul of the new Beaucourt. “If I am loved by the young,” was one of his sayings, “the old can hate me as much as they please.” His protest was a mild bleat on the horn, and a jab at the accelerator that set the engine roaring for a couple of seconds. He had a side glimpse, as he turned the car, of Manon and Paul coming out of the doorway of the Café de la Victoire, Paul’s blue trousers very close to Manon’s black and white check skirt. There was an indescribable nearness about their figures, and yet just a little space between them, that magnetic space that separates the hearts of lovers who have not confessed.
Manon was saying something to Paul. She looked across at Durand.
“I am coming, monsieur.”
“I am thinking of those shell-holes in the road near Les Ormes.”
Manon climbed into the back seat, and Brent leant over and wrapped a blanket round her. She had a little canvas bag in her hand, a bag that contained something heavy, and she dropped the bag into one of the pockets of Paul’s coat.
“I managed to borrow it,” she said, “after much trouble.”
Old Durand refrained from looking over his shoulder.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
Manon gave Paul a nod and a brightening of the eyes.
“Be careful,” she said, “or I shall be worried.”
The red car squeezed its way round the well and disappeared into the Rue Romaine, leaving Paul Brent looking at the empty sunset and feeling the canvas bag that Manon had dropped into his pocket. He drew it out, unfastened the string at the mouth of the bag, and saw protruding the lacquered butt of a little revolver, a mere cheap toy of a pistol such as they made by the thousand in Belgium before the war. There were half a dozen cartridges at the bottom of the canvas bag, and Brent emptied them into the palm of his hand.
The forethought was Manon’s and therefore he had no quarrel with it, discovering in that little weapon associations of tenderness and pathos. The war had made him a fighting man, yet this pistol did not seem to be the tool of a fighting man, but rather a thing to be carried in a pocket like some hooligan’s knife. Brent smiled, but the memories of Manon were behind the smile. He had seen Bibi in action and the beastliness of it had sobered him, suggesting a wild dog among the ruins, a dog that might leap out and snap at your throat. The whole business was primitive and preposterous, rather unconvincing to an Englishman who had been trained to a disciplined and orderly way of killing Germans. The idea of being set upon and bludgeoned in a ruined French village suggested thePolice News.
The dusk approached, and this ghost village had an inhuman silence. Old Durand’s car seemed to have trailed the last thread of life out of it, and a sharp shadow fell across Brent’s face. His chin went up; he stood listening. Somewhere in the Rue de Picardie a loose tile clattered down, and the fall of it was like the sound of an avalanche.
Brent slipped six cartridges into the drum of the revolver, and put it back in his pocket. He stood a moment looking up at the new roof that covered the western half of the house, and if his pride swelled itself out a little, the feeling was justified. Under the level light of the sunset the old house had warmed to a soft, ruddy brown, and those blind eyes needed only window-frames and shutters painted a battered blue to make it melt again into its green nest among the orchards. In all his life Brent had never done a piece of work better or more quickly, and the man in him exulted.
He entered the house, and hesitated in the kitchen with a half-puzzled look upon his face. The sunlight had reached out over Beaucourt like a great hand, a hand that was suddenly withdrawn, and through the oblong of the window he saw the outlines of the ghost-houses, ribs showing, eye-sockets grey and empty. The room itself was filling with the dusk; objects in it were growing indistinct; the chair on which Manon had sat looked like a ghost of a chair. The silence was extraordinary. Brent had known the same silence over No-Man’s Land on quiet nights, but there had been men near—other men. Here there was desolation, that and nothing else.
His own face had a touch of grimness. He was listening all the time, without perhaps realizing that the drums of his ears were tense; and he was conscious of a sudden feeling of acute loneliness, an uncomfortable loneliness, chilly, fidgety, unpleasant. He pulled out his pipe, filled the bowl, lit the tobacco, and found himself biting hard at the stem and ceasing to suck at it, in order to listen.
“Wind up!”
He smiled. An old soldier getting the wind up in Beaucourt! Did anyone ever meet a ghost coming down Tottenham Court Road? He sat down in Manon’s chair, stared at the blank emptiness of the window space, and thought of lighting the stove and going to bed. Brent had got out of the habit of locking doors and fastening windows, but Beaucourt, this silent, twilight Beaucourt, brought him back to a primitive understanding of the habit. He was a civilized man again who still takes precautions against primordial savagery. He was the hermit-crab in its borrowed shell, but this particular shell had gaps in it. And somehow in the chill of that dusk Brent knew that he did not relish sleeping in that cellar, where a man could creep down the steps in his stockinged feet and stun him before he could move.
He decided that he was not going to sleep in the cellar, and he went below and carried up the wire bed on his back. Then he brought half a dozen sheets of galvanized iron and some lengths of timber into the kitchen so that he could barricade the window and the door. The cunning of the old soldier suggested an additional device, some sort of harmless booby-trap to guard the front and back doors, a few old tins scattered about, a loosely slung wire that would bring a saucepan clattering down if anybody touched it. The virtues of a good house-dog, and of stout doors and shutters, needed no emphasizing.
Brent barricaded the door and window of the kitchen and went to bed. Manon’s revolver lay ready on a box; also a candle and a box of matches. Beaucourt was still, extraordinarily still, so silent that it kept Paul awake, listening for the sound of anyone moving outside the house.
He was growing accustomed to the stillness, and beginning to feel drowsy and less on the alert when something brought him back to a state of acute attention. He could remember having been scared as a boy by the sound made by a snail crawling across a window-pane, and this sound that he heard was just as peculiar and unexplainable. It made him think of a hand rubbing softly across some roughish surface. It seemed quite near, and yet he was unable to localize it in the darkness. Brent lay absolutely still, knowing that the confounded wire bed would creak and complain if he made the lightest movement.
The sound changed abruptly, became sharper and more metallic. It suggested finger-nails picking at the edge of a sheet of metal, and in a flash Brent seemed to visualize the origin and the meaning of the sound. A man’s hand had been feeling its way across the sheets of corrugated iron that closed the window until it had come in contact with the edge of one of the sheets. The hand had been testing the solidity of the improvised shutter, and whether it was possible to slip one of the sheets aside.
The sound ceased, and Brent’s hand went out for the revolver. He fancied that he could hear a movement along the raised path towards the street door, and he waited for the clink of one of those tins, but his booby-traps gave him no warning. There was an interval of silence, quite a long interval, and Brent’s ears were beginning to play him tricks. He was lying on his left side, his face turned towards the kitchen doorway, its barricade of iron sheets and timber a black patch in the plastered wall opposite him, when he saw a little thread of light outline the lower edge of the barricade. It was very faint, a mere greyness, diffused from some light that was burning in one of the rooms on the other side of the passage.
Brent pushed back the blankets, drew up his feet, and lifting his legs slowly over the edge of the bed, sat up. The wire netting creaked, but the sound coincided with a very distinct and crisp rustling in one of those other rooms, a rustling that suggested the brushing up of shavings in a carpenter’s shop. It was one of those sounds that struck an old familiar memory on Brent’s brain. He had taken the precaution of carrying the ladder into the kitchen, and it stood slanting against the partition wall just below the gap in the uncompleted roof. Paul felt his way to the ladder, tested its steadiness with a pressure of the hands, and mounted it slowly, Manon’s revolver in his left hand.
A sudden broadening glow of light met him as he reached the top of the wall. There was the distinct crackle of burning wood, and then Brent understood. He caught one of the rafters, pulled himself on to the wall, and lying flat along it, was able to look down into the back room on the other side of the passage.
He saw a man down there, a man who was bending forward and feeding chips and bits of wood on to the fire he had lit on the floor. He had piled his shavings against Brent’s stack of timber salved from the dismantled huts, and the flames were beginning to lick at the pile of floor boards. Brent set his teeth, and changed his pistol from his left hand to his right. The man was Louis Blanc; Paul knew him by his cap and clothes, and those angular projecting shoulders.
Brent might have saved himself much future suffering and travail if he had obeyed that first impulse and shot Bibi as he bent forward over the fire. He did not do it. It was one of those deeds that became impossible directly the instinctive impulse has been gripped and held. Brent fired straight at the fire, and the bullet sent a spurt of burning chips over the feet of the man below.
Bibi gave a leap like a cat, all four limbs spread. Paul had a momentary glimpse of his face, lips drawn back tight over the teeth, eyes furious and surprised. Then he dodged sideways out into the passage, and Paul heard the saucepan clatter against the stones as Bibi’s ankles struck the wire. There was a pause, a scuffle, an oath.
Brent used Bibi’s favourite expletive.
“Voilà!” he shouted. “I missed you on purpose. Next time I shan’t miss.”
“Go to the devil,” said the other voice from somewhere in the street.
Paul scrambled down to save his timber. Manon had brought him a little electric torch, and after dismantling the barricade across the kitchen doorway, he stepped into the passage. Bibi might still be hanging about outside the house, and since it was possible that Bibi was armed, Paul went to the street doorway, and flashed his torch along the path and across the road. Seeing no sign of Louis Blanc he made a dash for the back door, and using a bit of board scooped the mass of burning shavings away from the timber pile. The floor was of tiles, and Brent was able to beat out the scattered fire.
He had no more sleep that night, but sat on a box in the corner of the kitchen, his blankets wrapped round him, torch and revolver ready. During that long watch he did some very practical thinking on the subject of doors and shutters, and the values of a good watch-dog. If there was to be a battle of wits among the ruins of Beaucourt many of the advantages would rest with Bibi; he could attack when he pleased; an eternal “standing to” to repel some chance raid was not a pleasant prospect.
“I might put the police on him,” Paul thought, and immediately saw himself in a legal tangle, and being handed over as a deserter to a corporal’s guard.
Before the first greyness of the dawn he lit the fire, made himself some tea, and then started the day’s work. It took him less than an hour to finish sheeting the roof covering the right half of the house, and he saw the sun come up through the beech trees of the Bois du Roi and flood the broken walls with yellow light. There was nothing to break the silence save the sound of his hammer, and in the calm of the dawn Brent found it difficult to believe that Louis Blanc existed.
He knocked off for breakfast, and then took a stroll up the Rue de Picardie. Not twenty yards from the café he came upon a rather amusing and significant proof of the impetuosity of Louis Blanc’s retreat, a pair of boots standing neatly, even demurely, in the middle of the street. Bibi had pulled off his boots here before making his attack, and Brent pictured him in his socks pedalling that bicycle of his back to Ste. Claire.
Paul was inclined to be elated over the finding of those boots, and to attach too triumphant a significance to this rather ridiculous detail. Louis Blanc had the soul of a “sneak-thief,” and the courage of a bully. Shot at, he evaporated, and Brent was tempted to believe that he had finished with Bibi.
But he kept to his plan, and began by closing the back door of the house with a barricade of iron sheets and timber backed by ammunition boxes filled with bricks. There were three ground-floor windows in the unroofed half of the house and Paul covered them with more sheets, driving the nails into the hard old mortar of the walls. He was nailing up the last sheet when he heard the sound of a car.
Old Durand had chosen a different road that morning, and had come by way of the Rue de Rosières. He pulled up outside the house, and Paul, standing there hammer in hand, saw Manon’s eyes fixed on the barricaded windows.
She gave a look of interrogation, frowning slightly.
“Just to keep out the wind,” Paul told her.
She did not believe him, and while Paul was talking to Durand she went in and discovered the blackened tiles in the back room, the charred shavings, and the scorched pile of floor boards.
Durand drove on to the château. He wished to make a survey of the place and to examine the cellars, and Paul found Manon standing in the doorway, a very serious Manon, with eyes that demanded the truth.
“What happened last night?”
“What do you mean?”
Brent’s eyes were tired and red about the lids, the eyes of a man who had had no sleep.
“Someone tried to light a fire in there.”
He nodded.
“So you have seen it! Yes, it was that pleasant neighbour of ours, Bibi. He sneaked in when it was dark, but I happened to be awake.”
She wanted to know everything, and Brent described all that had happened, and how he had frightened Louis Blanc with the revolver she had left him.
“I wish you had killed the beast,” she said with a passion that surprised Brent; “no one would have been any the wiser.”
“I couldn’t shoot the man in cold blood.”
“Cold blood! You have too nice a sense of honour. Bibi would have burnt you alive, or suffocated you in cold blood, as you call it.”
And then her eyes softened.
“Yes, it is like you to be generous; but this madness of Bibi’s puts me in a different temper. I am coming to live in Beaucourt.”
“But Manon!”
“You can argue for ever and ever, but I am coming. I have a sense of honour, mon ami. And as for worrying about what old women might say to me, nom d’un chien! but they can go to the devil. I stand by my man.”
XXIV
Atseven o’clock on a misty March morning Etienne Castener brought his horse out of the stable and harnessed him to the big blue cart. The two women were busy in Manon’s cottage, and a little yellow dog, bought by Manon the night before, and tied by a piece of string to a leg of the table, kept running round and round until he had wound himself so close to the table leg that any further circumlocutions did not seem worth while. A wooden packing-case, two yellow trunks, a table, an arm-chair, a cupboard, the frame of a wooden bed, a mattress, a hamper of vegetables, and a basket of food had been placed outside the cottage to be loaded to the cart. Manon had been able to save a little furniture before the Germans had entered Beaucourt, and it had been stored in Marie Castener’s grenier.
The blue cart crunched out of the muddy yard into the road, and drew up outside the cottage. A few neighbours had collected to watch the departure; one or two of them brought presents, a few apples, a bag of potatoes, a string of onions. Manon was popular.
Among them was Mère Vitry, a refugee, whose picture of the Sacré Cœur Manon had rescued from the cottage in the Rue Romaine. There were quite a number of refugees in the neighbouring villages; Anatole Durand had a list of the names, and he had visited them all and persuaded them to remain in the villages for another week. Within ten days he hoped to have a supply of food in Beaucourt. “Without food, my friends, we can do nothing.”
Etienne began to load the cart, his mother helping him with hands and tongue. She was very strong and she would not allow Manon to do any more work. “You keep your strength for the other end, my dear. There will be plenty to do in Beaucourt.” So Manon stood and watched, holding the yellow dog by the string, and Mère Vitry stood beside Manon and looked at her as though she were a new Jeanne d’Arc. Mère Vitry had a face like a wrinkled brown boot, with buttons for eyes. Her black skirt had a great plum-coloured patch where her bony old knees had worn the cloth thin.
“You will take care of the picture, my dear?”
“Yes, I will take great care of it,” said Manon.
Mère Vitry explained that the picture had belonged to her mother in the days when her father had come back from the Russian war, and that it had hung in the same place and on the same nail.
“My father drove that nail, and every two years I used to put a new piece of cord on the picture. And you say there is no roof left in the house?”
“Just a small piece. There are no whole roofs in Beaucourt.”
“Enough for an old woman to sleep under, perhaps. I shall be there when the spring comes.”
Etienne had loaded the cart, and had so arranged the arm-chair that it formed a seat for Manon. He was going to walk beside his horse.
“I shall walk,” said Manon.
Marie Castener scolded her.
“Get up and save your legs. Etienne can ride all the way home.”
Manon laughed, kissed Marie, climbed up into her seat and took the dog in her lap. Marie Castener stood by the wheel; she was feeling important with all these neighbours listening while she helped to launch Manon on this great adventure.
“Etienne’s boy shall come over twice a week with eggs, vegetables, butter and bread. He can ride a bicycle, you know. If you want anything write it down on paper, for Pierre forgets everything, save the time for his meals.”
Manon leant over towards this stolid, ugly woman who had the heart of a saint.
“How good you have been to me.”
“Don’t be sentimental,” said Marie Castener; “haven’t I enjoyed it?”
The blue cart moved off, and the neighbours made the departure quite a public occasion, waving to Manon and shouting “Bonne chance.” It was an emotional moment, a dramatic moment—Manon sailing out into the wilderness with all her belongings loaded on the cart, to begin the new life, the life that was to be so bitter and so heart-breaking to many.
At the end of the village, just before the road turned up the hill under the poplars, stood the farm-house where Louis Blanc had been lodging. A meadow planted with a few apple trees separated the house from the road. Bibi, an unshaved and slovenly Bibi, was leaning over the farmyard gate when Manon and the cart went by. She did not see him, but Louis Blanc watched the brown horse and the blue cart go slowly up the hill.
His jaw seemed to lengthen; his lower lip protruded; his eyes looked mere slits. He rubbed his chin between finger and thumb, and spat over the gate. It appeared that Manon had a way of getting things done; she had a cart at her service when he, Bibi, had been unable to hire a cart, and she had a man to work for her. Now she was going to Beaucourt with all her goods and chattels to take up life in the Café de la Victoire. Bibi’s nostrils looked pinched, he sneered.
“A nice fix she would be in,” he thought, “if someone kicked that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt.”
That was the centre point of Bibi’s vision. The bottom had fallen out of his own enterprise, and he had been listening to panegyrics on the philanthropy of Anatole Durand: “Ah, if all wealthy men were like that, if there were no profiteers.” The whole business made Bibi savage. Manon and her man were flaunting their success, while old Durand was preparing to spoil the place as a fertile field for speculation. And the fools applauded him!
“They think it is going to be a little heaven,” was Bibi’s reflection as he sludged back through the dirty yard to drink his morning coffee.
At Beaucourt Paul Brent had spent a very peaceful night, lying safely behind a good door and barricaded windows. He was up at dawn, and washing with confident publicity in the open street, his head full of the thoughts of the coming of Manon. He had become a little less self-conscious in his attitude towards Manon, less ready to consider the possible prudery of a repopulated Beaucourt, less afraid of the activities of Louis Blanc. And romance joined him in the misty street, and walked back with him over the grey cobbles and into the house of Manon Latour. Paul reintroduced sentiment into the house. It is said, perhaps with truth, that the French are a hard-headed and unromantic nation, killers of birds, teaching even the sex-bird to live in a very practical and ungilded cage, but Paul Brent opened the door of the cage. His love sang in the open, welcoming its mate.
He played at being housewife, turning everything out of the cellar where Manon was to sleep, brushing the brick floor, laying out the new blankets she had bought the previous day, and hanging up a little cracked old mirror he had found in one of the houses. The cellar had all the best of the furniture, a couple of chairs, an improvised wash-hand stand, a cupboard, a neat little wooden platform beside the bed for the reception of Manon’s feet when she emerged in the morning. There was a jug and basin, a tin bath, a table beside the bed to hold her candlestick.
Having sentimentalized and prepared the cellar, Paul set to work in the kitchen. He had borrowed a rather battered cupboard-dresser from the école, and on this he arranged all the crockery, plates neatly paraded on the shelves, coffee-pot, cups and glasses clean and polished. The commissariat occupied the cupboard. He arranged a shelf over the stove for the pots and pans. His own bed he pushed away into the far corner, with a couple of ammunition boxes underneath it to hold his few belongings and his clothes. The rest of the furniture included a table, the old arm-chair, a couple of plain chairs, with a second table under the window.
Paul stood and looked round the room. It pleased him; it had the air of a room that was lived in, and yet something was lacking. Everything was in order, even to the box of wood by the stove and a glazed crock full of water. A touch of colour was needed, that little live flame of sentiment, that unpractical something that appeals to the heart. A man does not live by bread alone, nor is love satisfied with pots and pans. Brent went out and searched, and down by the stream he found what he needed, a sallow with its soft yellow “palm” blossoms shining in the thin, March sunlight.
He gathered a bunch of palm, chose a blue and white jug he had found in someone’s back garden, filled it with water, and arranged his bit of “life.” The jug took up its vigil on the table by the window. The sunlight struck a note of colour on the yellow blossoms. Brent stood and smiled. He felt, somehow, that the room was complete.
About eleven o’clock the blue cart turned the corner of the Rue Romaine with Manon and her yellow dog perched in front of the load of baggage. Paul was fixing a window-frame in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms, and he came forward hammer in hand. The yellow dog stood up on Manon’s lap and barked at him.
“Be quiet, silly.”
Manon handed the yellow dog to Etienne and climbed down. She was in a very happy mood, a little excited and exultant.
“Paul, this is Monsieur Etienne Castener.”
The men shook hands, Etienne smiling one of his broad, slow smiles.
“Tiens, but you have a front door!”
Manon had not noticed it, for she had been looking at Paul.
“Mon Dieu, so we have! A real door! When did you finish it?”
“Last night.”
“Let me see how it opens and shuts.”
She ran up the steps of the raised path, and tried the door like a child playing with a new toy.
“And it has a lock and bolts!”
Etienne stood and stared at the house, still smiling that slow, country smile. He was easily astonished, and the Café de la Victoire astonished him.
“You must have worked like the devil,” he said.
Paul took a fancy to Etienne. He was one of those silent fellows with the smell of the soil about him, and he had no tricks.
“Some things are worth working for. Shall I help you unload the cart?”
Manon had walked into the kitchen and found herself entangled in a new atmosphere. It, too, had a door, only a matchboard door it is true, but the door gave the room a new homeliness. She saw the dresser with its crockery, the box of wood by the stove, the table by the window, the blue and white jug with its posy of sallow bloom. Her heart seemed to utter a little cry of pleasure and of tenderness. She went forward, picked up the jug, and buried her face in the yellow palm.
“A Frenchman would not have thought of it,” she said.
She heard the two men struggling with something heavy.
“Manon!”
She ran out.
“Where will you have this?”
It was the cupboard.
“It is for you, Paul.”
He looked at her with the eyes of a lover.
“In the kitchen, then? I have prepared the cellar for you.”
“The kitchen, then.”
She stood and directed the two men, happy as a little housewife arranging her home for the first time. Then she descended into the cellar, lit the candle, and experienced a moment of exquisite pleasure. Her eyes missed none of the details. This little white-arched cellar held more than a bed, a table, a cracked mirror; she felt in it the soul of the man who had been busy here.
Paul was waiting at the top of the steps. She turned and met him.
“I thought it would be warmer for you down there,” he said.
She stood leaning against the wall.
“Thank you, Paul. It is so good to come back, when a man has taken so much trouble.”
Brent was silent a moment.
“What will you have down there? The bed and the trunks?”
“Please. The wooden box can stay upstairs.”
When everything was settled, Etienne had unharnessed his horse, fastened him to the wheel of the cart, and given the beast water and an armful of hay, they sat down to a meal in the kitchen. Manon had unearthed a bottle of red wine. She and Paul kept looking at each other, and at the different pieces of furniture in the room. There was a conspiracy of pride, of congratulation between them, a half-shy tenderness that looked and looked again. Castener was all curiosity, all questions. His eyes kept wandering up to the roof.
“You have plenty of air,” he said, “plenty of air.”
And then:
“What will you do for a ceiling?”
“I shall put in a floor there when I have finished the rest of the roof.”
“And the stairs?”
“We shall have to be satisfied with a ladder, to begin with.”
“But you will be able to go to bed. What does it matter! And some day, I suppose, you will line all the inside of the roof?”
“Canvas to begin with; wood when we can get it.”
Etienne munched bread, and still stared at the ceiling.
“It is wonderful,” he said, “quite astonishing.”
After the meal he harnessed his horse and prepared to drive off.
“I must bring my plough over here one day,” he said; “an acre or two of ploughed ground would be useful.”
That was the way of the Casteners; they did not appear to see much, but they saw what mattered.
When Etienne had gone, Manon lit the stove and put on the coffee-pot. There was no more work to be done that day; it was a saint’s day; there was something sacramental about it. Manon pointed out the yellow dog, who had curled himself on the arm-chair in the sunlight.
“We will call him ‘Philosophe,’ ” she said; “he has set us a good example. But there is no reason why he should have that chair. It is yours.”
Brent smiled, picked up Philosophe, and sat down in the chair with the dog on his lap. He lit his pipe, and they drank coffee, and talked. Manon’s eyes kept glancing round the room, caressing everything in it, the soft eyes of a woman who is happy. The room was uncomfortably high, the walls showed patches of discoloured plaster and raw brickwork, and the window of the room above let in rather too much fresh air—but it had the atmosphere of home. You could light a lamp at night, and draw up intimate chairs close to the stove.
“What will you do next?”
Paul was pulling the yellow dog’s ears.
“Finish all the window-frames and doors on the ground floor, and put up shutters. I suppose there is no chance of getting any glass.”
“Linen will have to do, or canvas, to begin with. We must divide up the day’s work. I shall take all the household work and the garden.”
“What about seeds?”
“I have a whole boxful of seeds in that case. The Casteners have promised to give me potatoes to plant, also young lettuces and cabbages. If Etienne ploughs up part of the meadow we can put potatoes in there, and perhaps a little corn and some winter roots. I am going to keep a few chickens, and later on a cow and a pig.”
“You will be busy.”
Manon was looking at the unglazed window-frame.
“I wish we could get some of that oiled linen that the English have. The other day, when Monsieur Durand and I drove from Rosières, we passed what you call a dump.”
Brent’s eyes brightened.
“What sort of a dump?”
“Sheds, and great piles of stores, boxes under tarpaulins, and an English soldier lying on a bench asleep. It is close to the railway line. I wonder if the English are selling their stores?”
“I think I will go over some day and have a look at that dump,” said her partner.