XXXII
Overthe great wilderness the cuckoo was calling, and the blackbirds sang deep-throated in the orchards. Cowslip time had come and gone; a richer season followed after, with all that wild world rushing into leaf, covering all ugliness with a film of beauty. The old orchards were white in the narrow valley where the stream ran through deep green ways; the trees were snow-trees—rose-edged—floating between the mystery of the woods and upon the blue distance of the horizon. Grass and weeds were springing up everywhere in the streets, in the ruins themselves, threading even the rubbish through with emerald wire. There were blue-bells in the Bois du Renard above the château, and masses of yellow broom waving on the uplands.
Beaucourt came to life with the spring. Wonderful things had happened when that droll, that little wizard of an Anatole Durand had flicked his wand hither and thither. Dust had risen on the roads. A string of lorries had lumbered up the street, and a gang of men had unloaded stores in the green-grey courtyard of the château. The cellars were full of food; the yard itself stacked with timber and iron. On the circle of turf at the end of the avenue of chestnuts stood a white tent with a camp-bed, a chest of drawers, a table, a washing basin, a chair, Anatole Durand’s home. He took his meals at the Café de la Victoire, where Brent’s hands were keeping pace with the buoyant rush of the year.
Men were repairing and cleaning the huts in the field on the road to Rosières, and a temporary camp-kitchen was being improvised. New winches and buckets had been fitted to the wells. A couple of tractors and light waggons had panted over the desert roads, and the tractors were at work, ploughing from dawn till dusk. Great strips of brown soil waited for a catch-crop. Old Anatole went about with his note-book, like a field-marshal or a parish priest, organizing, organizing.
Then came the day when the first batch of refugees returned. They arrived in waggons from Ste. Claire and many other villages, with their few possessions piled up, like a convoy of settlers in the old days travelling west. The carts and waggons collected in the field where the huts stood, and with them came Monsieur Lefèbre, the parish priest. Anatole Durand met them in the field. He and Monsieur Lefèbre kissed each other, the agnostic and the Christian.
There was a hot meal ready, iron coppers full of good stew; Manon was in charge of the hut where meals were to be served. But these peasants sat down on the grass in the open air like pilgrims on a feast day. They laughed and talked. One or two of the women wept a little. They had left the children behind.
Durand and Monsieur Lefèbre sat side by side on the tail of a cart. They talked; they looked straight into each other’s eyes.
“Do you remember, my friend, how we used to disagree?”
The priest smiled. He had jocund black eyes in a red face, and he was a good man, if fat.
“Our text is the same to-day. Go forth and recover the wilderness, and comfort my children.”
“I have a bed in my tent,” said Anatole; “you can use it.”
“That is brotherly of you, but I shall sleep with the men.”
Durand looked round at the peasants sitting on the grass, and his eyes blessed them.
“Monsieur, I wish to speak to these people presently. I wish to explain what I have done, what I have planned to do, what we all must do. You will speak to them also. What better place than the church?”
“In the old days, monsieur.”
Durand shrugged.
“Life is so big,” he said, “that we shall forget to knock our feet against the stones.”
When the meal was over, Monsieur Lefèbre got up on the cart and told the people to gather in the church. His jocund black eyes had always been more persuasive than his preaching, and nobody grumbled at being asked to go to the church. Monsieur Lefèbre was a good fellow; he deserved his place on the stage, and to these peasants the day had a religious meaning; they were attending the sacrament of the soil. Paul and Manon walked with the crowd, and stood under the broken roof of the church, with the blue sky showing through it, and grass sprouting through the stones on the floor. Manon was looking at many familiar faces. There were the Graviers who had kept the tiny boucherie in the Rue de Bonnière; the Crampons—Claude Crampon pulling his long nose in the same odd way as though to make sure he had not lost the end of it; the Guiveaux, Pierre with his huge flat butter-coloured moustache, and Josephine, whose red hair was always untidy; the Pouparts, who had kept a grocery shop, yellow as ever. Old Lebecq carried his cock’s head high in the air, and behind him his two big daughters giggled together. Philipon, who had been a blacksmith as well as a farmer, held his pretty little wife by the arm; his swarthy face was very solemn, and he frowned as though he wanted to get to work. Lacroix and his wife and boy looked thin as figures cut out of brown cardboard. Big Jean Roger was smiling at everybody and picking his teeth with a red match. His daughter Lucille seemed rather sad; her eyes were vacant; she had lost her lover in the war. There were one or two younger men who had recently been demobilized, and a few strong boys who were half inclined to make a joke of the whole affair. Philipon looked round at them with his fiery eyes and a gleam of teeth in his black beard.
“Shut up! The dead don’t make fools of themselves like that.”
There was no more horseplay.
Monsieur Lefèbre stood on the steps of the choir. His deep voice rolled out a prayer, and after the prayer he spoke a few simple words to the people. He was much moved; his chin shook a little; and the people were moved with him. They had come back to their homes and their fields; the blessed spring was with them, the green joy of the year. They would go out together, without jealousy, helping each other, planting in this ruined village the imperishable patience of a victorious France.
Lefèbre gave way to old Durand. Anatole’s grey hair seemed to bristle; he looked straight at them all with shrewd, smiling eyes; his enthusiasm had a flash of humour.
“My friends, we used to quarrel a little. Perhaps it was my fault. To-day I am happy; I feel that we have something better to do than to quarrel—work.”
Philipon gave a growl of applause.
“That’s it—work!”
He glared at the group of youths. Anatole went on.
“Bien. It is not my ground or your ground, it is our ground. It is our Beaucourt. What do you say? The women to the gardens and the rubbish heaps, the men to the saw and the hammer and the fields. But you know what to do. I am an old man, I am enjoying myself; I am spending what I cannot take with me. I do not stand here and crow; I want to be just a little old man in Beaucourt.”
There were cries of emotion from the little crowd.
“We understand, monsieur.”
“Without you it could not have happened.”
Durand made a face as though he were not far from tears.
“That’s it; we are all Frenchmen together. Now, then, let me explain.”
He went on to speak of the stores, material and tools that he had collected. They were to be divided equally and as the need arose. The tools and the seeds would belong to the village. He wanted a committee, a village council composed of both men and women to consider what was fair, and to decide all that should be done. He spoke of Manon and of Paul, and Paul blushed. Durand called him an expert, a practical builder. Let them go and look at the Café de la Victoire and see what Monsieur Paul Rance had accomplished single-handed, and the sight would cheer up any pessimist. Monsieur Rance had offered to give three hours a day to the community; and to put himself at the service of anyone who wanted advice. As for the canteen, well, Madame Latour had that in hand, but she would need women to help her.
“Now, let us finish with words. Let us choose our council before we break up. I suggest a council of four men and two women.”
“And a president,” said Philipon.
“I propose Monsieur Durand as president”—this was from old Lebecq.
Anatole was elected. They chose Philipon, Lebecq, Jean Roger and Monsieur Lefèbre as the men, Manon Latour and Madame Poupart as the women. The council agreed to meet three times a week at eight in the evening, and Monsieur Lefèbre suggested the sacristy of the church as their council-chamber. A board would be set up in the Place de l’Eglise on which the notices and the decisions of the council would be posted.
“Allons!—to work,” said old Durand.
Philipon echoed him.
“To work. That’s our motto.”
In the passing of half a day the whole atmosphere of Beaucourt had changed, and the familiar silence of the ruins was broken by the new life. Brent was planting potatoes in the field below the orchard, for Etienne Castener had brought his plough over in a cart and ploughed up half the field for them, and as he dibbled in the seed Brent could hear voices everywhere. The hollow shell of the village echoed with them; the place was like a comb full of working bees. Each family had gone to what had been its house, that brick ruin or shelter of timber, and for a while there had been silence. What problems, what discouragement! Where and how to begin? They had been told that Beaucourt had been more fortunate than the majority of villages—villages that had melted into mere piles of rubbish. The little groups stood about, staring, bewildered, lamenting, wandering through the wreckage and the gardens, standing on the tiled floors of what had been rooms. And in nearly all cases it was the woman whose instinct escaped first from that apathy of staring. The housewifely habit stirred in her. Perhaps she began to clean her kitchen floor, throwing old tins, broken bricks and tiles, rags, anything, out into the street. That was what Durand had advised them to do; he had planned to have the rubbish carted away and dumped in some field. Very soon the men were at work with the women, each cleaning his particular shell, uncovering his kitchen hearth. Their blood warmed. Beaucourt was full of the sound of voices, the clatter of tins and broken tiles. Figures appeared on the walls, or in the spider web of the sagging timber frames, scattering useless patches of tiling, or knocking down loose beams and joists. Beaucourt was at work. Anatole Durand found Philipon sweating like a swarthy Hercules in his little house in the Rue du Château, knocking down useless bits of wall with a big hammer, while his pretty wife carried off the sound bricks and stacked them in the yard.
“Thunder, but this is life!” said the sweating peasant; “I’m happy.”
Manon was walking back from the canteen when she caught sight of a little old figure approaching along the Rue Romaine. It was none other than Mère Vitry dressed in her rusty black Sunday clothes, and carrying a shabby bag. She had been left behind at Ste. Claire as too old to face the first struggle with the wilderness; but Mère Vitry had had no intention of remaining in Ste. Claire, and her indomitable legs had carried her to Beaucourt.
Manon went to meet her, greatly touched by this old thing’s courage.
“Mother, what are you doing here?”
But Mère Vitry was in no need of pity. She seemed to be overflowing with the sap of a renewed youth; her little black eyes twinkled; her weather-beaten face was all smiles.
“Here I am. Do you think I was going to be left behind?”
Manon kissed her.
“Come to my house. You must want something to eat.”
“I had my meal on the road, my dear. I would not quarrel with a cup of coffee.”
Manon took Mère Vitry home with her, and the old lady removed her cloak and bonnet, and sat down with an air of complete contentment. Her eyes observed everything; she was the most cheerful soul in Beaucourt. Her philosophy was touched with the irrepressible optimism of the spring.
Manon offered her her bed.
“No, I shall sleep with the others. They thought I should be a nuisance, no use; you shall see. I shall put on my old clothes here, my dear, and then go and begin tidying the house. It needs it.”
It did. There was but a third of the roof left, and no windows and no doors, and in the garden weeds and rubbish competed with each other. Mère Vitry put on her old plum-coloured skirt, and black and white check blouse, borrowed a broom and an old spade, and marched off to battle like the true Frenchwoman that she was.
Monsieur Lefèbre, taking a parochial stroll, found Madame Vitry sweeping out the rubbish from the tiled floors of her kitchen and bedroom. He stood and watched her a moment, a most human smile on his generous face, and then that plump right hand of his made the sign of the cross.
“So you are busy already, madame?”
She leant on the broom-handle, thin hands clenched, black eyes bright with renewed youth.
“One cannot be idle, monsieur, when there is so much to be done.”
“You have walked from Ste. Claire?”
“I feel very well, monsieur, very well indeed. To-morrow I am going to work in my garden.”
“Splendid,” said the priest.
Her face lit up.
“Come inside, Monsieur Lefèbre; I have something to show you in my garden.”
She led him through the house and into the garden where the new growth of the year was pushing up through broken bricks and coils of wire, old tins, the rusty frame of a bedstead, battered petrol cans, barbed wire, the wheel of a cart. The wooden frame and rusting springs of an old box-mattress lay across the path. But Mère Vitry was looking at none of this rubbish. She was pointing upwards and smiling at a gigantic apple tree whose limbs had been shot away. The tree was nothing but a torso, a huge, mutilated stump, but from one limb a young branch had grown out and brandished against the blue sky two little sprays of white blossom.
“That is fine, is it not, monsieur? He is holding up his flag; he is not beaten.”
She laughed.
“Here we are together, the old woman and the old tree. I flourish a broom, he waves a bit of blossom. What do you think of it, monsieur?”
The priest’s face was lit up like the face of a saint.
“It is France,” he said, “the very soul of my country.”
XXXIII
Manonhad described to Paul Mère Vitry’s return to Beaucourt, and Brent had been so touched by it that he went down very early next morning to the house in the Rue Romaine. The old fruit tree welcomed him, throwing its white banner against the flush of the dawn, and he set to work at disentangling the miscellaneous rubbish from the dew-wet weeds. He had cleared away all the heavy débris and made a dump of it on the cobbled path between the cottage and the roadway when he was surprised by another enthusiast, Monsieur Marcel Lefèbre.
“Good morning,” said the priest; “it seems that I am a little late.”
His black eyes had a glitter of fun in them. He carried his cassock over his arm, appearing to the world like any good bourgeois ready for an hour’s work in the garden.
“That’s the worst of it.”
Brent touched the pile of rubbish with the toe of a casual boot.
“So you have left me nothing to do?”
“There is plenty left, monsieur. I thought I would come down and move the heavy stuff for the old lady.”
“We are beginning very well in Beaucourt,” said Lefèbre, “very well indeed.”
These two good men stood for a few minutes and talked. They were friends from the first smile, equally simple and courageous in their outlook upon life, answering at once to a generous touch of the hand. Lefèbre had the soul of a peasant, with all its shrewdness, its grasp of the elemental facts that keep men strong and wholesome. This return of the people to their homes and to their soil was to him a veritable sacrament. He knew that it is good for man to suck the milk from the bosom of Mother Earth. In the towns souls are hand-fed, dissociated from the great miracle of nature. Lefèbre hated the great towns. They gave babes strong drink, false appetites, parched mouths, the lust after lust. Men walked restlessly in the streets, men who are envious and unhappy after the long dulness of the factory or the shop. They had turned no soil, nor gone to bed happily tired.
“What can one make of this little house?”
He was looking at the patch of brown tiles and the bare rafters. His face was eager, inquisitive. Brent felt the thrill of his humanity.
“It could be made quite strong again.”
“You think so.”
“The roof can be covered with felt, and later it can be retiled. A door and some windows—and there you are.”
Lefèbre hung his cassock over the sill of one of the empty window spaces.
“I will go up to the château and get a roll of felt. Would you take down those tiles?”
“It would be better.”
“If you could spare five minutes later in the day for a little criticism?”
“I may be able to give you a hand,” Brent said.
Monsieur Lefèbre went for some tools, nails and a roll of felt, and when he returned to the Rue Romaine he found Mère Vitry standing in the garden under the old fruit tree. She was smiling, a child’s wonder in her eyes.
“Look, monsieur, a miracle! Someone has been here.”
“A friend, perhaps.”
“It was you, monsieur, who carried away all that rubbish?”
“No. But miracles happen, madame, even in these days. There is always the miracle of the good man.”
Mère Vitry crossed herself, and looked at the roll of felt under Monsieur Lefèbre’s arm.
“And you—you are going to work, too, monsieur?”
Lefèbre’s jocund face broke into creases.
“I am going to try and put a roof on your cottage. That will be another miracle!”
Manon had gone to the canteen which she and Madame Poupart were to manage with the help of two of the older women. They had had a boy assigned to them, a strong young rascal whose duty was to trundle the day’s provisions down from the château in a hand-truck, chop wood for the stoves, and to make himself useful in any way that God or Manon chose to order. He sulked the first morning, having promised himself the excitement of helping to pull down some of the ruins.
“People who are lazy get no dinner.”
He argued the point with Manon, and it required the dinner hour to convince him that these women were in earnest. When the file of men had passed to the tables with full plates, Master Jacques stood by the iron boiler, holding a tin plate that was empty, and inviting Madame Poupart to use her ladle.
“We had to cut the wood,” said the lady, “to cook your dinner. You refused to cut wood; we give you no dinner.”
The logic of the thing was so convincing, and Madame Poupart so determined, that Jacques went out and laboured to earn his plateful of stew.
Anatole Durand and Brent spent the morning making a pilgrimage through the village. They visited each house to which the head of a family had returned, Paul examining each building and giving his opinion as to what could be done. Anatole stood by with his inevitable note-book, jotting down the details of this tour of inspection, while Brent and the owner looked at walls and gables, sagging roofs, shell-bitten chimney-stacks and questionable foundations. Each problem differed a little from the other; each house had its own particular sickness. Some were dead, so dead that there was nothing to be suggested save that a new house or hut should be built in the yard or garden. Anatole made a note, “Try and buy huts.” There were stud and plaster houses with the timber framing fairly sound; the walls of these could be replastered or covered temporarily with felt. There were brick houses that a little ingenious patching would put into passable repair. There were mere broken shells that needed building up squarely before they could carry the cap of a roof. In many cases a crumpled mass of tiles and rafters would have to be removed before the actual work of reconstruction could be begun. The old houses built of the chalky limestone of the district were the most hopeless of all. When such a house had been wounded, it had crumbled, cracked, dropped masses of masonry, dribbled loose stones out of the wounds, bled itself to death. The war had taught Brent to respect the extraordinary tenacity of good brickwork. You could square up the ragged walls, fit a patch into the holes, and the house was as good as ever.
Beaucourt saw Paul Brent as a brown man with a short, pointed beard and friendly blue eyes. He seemed a pleasant fellow, capable, rather quiet in his speech, and with an accent that was vaguely foreign. He was a stranger and Beaucourt kept a critical eye on strangers, but Brent went so wholeheartedly about his job and was so obviously a man of his hands that these peasants accepted him. They were too busy to be inquisitive. Brent had sat up late for many nights dragging out of the dictionary the French for such things as plaster, felt, rafters, joists, mortises, concrete. He had made a list of all the technical words that he could find, learnt the names by heart, and made Manon hear his lesson.
“You ought to shout more,” she told him; “you English just talk to yourselves.”
He looked at her with the eyes of a lover.
“Shall I shout those dear words?”
“You may keep that soft voice—for me.”
She had been a little anxious for her man, knowing that he had prepared himself to face a possible ordeal in this return of the natives. It was not only that he loved her and that he had come to look on Beaucourt as a home, but he had a man’s horror of betraying himself and of being damned as something worse than a fool. She knew that he would imagine that the humiliation would spread to her, and she could picture him packing his knapsack and marching off into the night.
He came back to her in the evening with the air of having spent a happy and a human day. There was laughter in his mood, not the laughter of ridicule, but laughter that had felt the pathos and beauty of the thing that had inspired it. He had been down to Mère Vitry’s cottage, and had discovered Monsieur Lefèbre on the roof, a sprawling, enthusiastic, happy figure with a distinct celestial shininess about the broad seat of its breeches. Monsieur Lefèbre was stripping the roof of its remaining tiles and lowering them carefully in an old bucket with a bit of wire fastened to the handle. Mère Vitry stood below, unloaded the bucket, and packed the tiles away in a corner. They were as absorbed as two children playing a game.
“It has been a great day,” said Paul; “I don’t seem to have puzzled anybody. And the way these people work——”
He sat down in the arm-chair and watched Manon laying the table. She was very good to watch, and every now and again her eyes gave him the glimmer of light that a woman gives to her lover.
“Let him pass—Paul Rance, a good Frenchman.”
“I believe I shall pass,” he said. “I like your people. They smell of the soil.”
She balanced a fork, pointing it at him.
“And remember, they will like you. You see, you are such a good fellow, and——”
He sprang up suddenly and caught her, and holding her face between his hands, looked long and steadily into her eyes.
“Yes, you are just my life. I had to fight for you, didn’t I? But I have been afraid, ma chérie, that these people might not want me here. I might be found out.”
“Do not run to meet troubles,” she said; “you will have very good friends in Beaucourt. Besides——”
She clasped his wrists for a moment with her two hands, and then moved gently away to lift a boiling kettle from the stove.
“Let us look at the house—afterwards, at everything.”
He stood watching her devoutly.
“It’s so good that sometimes I am afraid.”
“What is there to fear in Beaucourt?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
When the meal was over they walked out into the garden and looked at the green crops, those rows of beans and peas and lettuces paraded so exactly on the clean brown soil. The holes in the wall had been filled in; the fruit bushes were covered with a film of green, and the pollarded limes showed a thousand emerald tips. From the garden they passed to the orchard, and Brent stood a moment by Beckett’s grave. He had put a white wooden cross there, but he had never been able to persuade himself to paint up the lie of his own name.
Manon drew him away.
“Now we will look at the house.”
They went over it as though they had not seen the Café de la Victoire for three months. It still remained a perennial wonder to them, something of a miracle, a thing that grew and fed upon the labour of their hands. Already it had an atmosphere, the human friendliness of a place that is lived in. It was ready to be the secret home of their love and their memories.
Brent had put up a simple staircase to the upper rooms. They were still open to the bare rafters of the roof, but Harlech Dump had provided canvas for the ceilings, and all the floors were complete, save the floor of the back room on the right. Brent had used up all the wood that he had salved from the army huts.
Manon was dreaming the dreams of a housewife. She stood in the middle of the room that was to be hers and Brent’s, her back to the window, her thoughts busy with furniture, curtains, linen. In a week or two she would be able to go to Amiens and buy furniture for the new home. She looked at Paul.
“Come and hold my hand.”
“What is the problem?”
“I’m thinking. We will have the bed there, and a big cupboard against the north wall, and another cupboard with shelves in that corner. I should like one or two bright-coloured mats.”
“A little colour is good,” said Brent.
His left arm went across her shoulders, and they stood silent, thinking.
“There is only the floor of that room, and the ceilings——”
“And then?”
She looked up at him, and her dark eyes were intense.
“Promise me, you will never run away.”
“Run away?”
“Yes, don’t you understand? This is going to be ours, whatever happens. Besides, what is there that could happen?”
Paul kissed her.
“I almost wish——” he said.
“What do you wish?”
“That the village knew everything—that it could judge me as an Englishman who had made a mess of life in his own country.”
She held his arms.
“Mon chéri, perhaps, some day, we will tell them, but of what have you to be ashamed? Let us win them first. How I wish we had wood for that floor.”
Brent held her close.
“Yes, that was my promise. Do you think it is easy for me to hold out?—and yet, I’m going to hold out for six months. I’ll win Beaucourt before I ask you to marry me.”
She stroked his cheek.
“What spurs you wear on your conscience! Am I to agree? Well, what can a woman do? Who’s that?”
Someone had entered the house. It was Anatole Durand, an Anatole who wanted to gossip, and he stood at the foot of the staircase, looking up.
“Hallo!”
“Won’t you come and look, monsieur?”
He climbed up on his brisk legs, amused, smiling.
“Talking over the furniture, hey?”
“There is one room that needs a floor, and we have no more wood.”
“Wood—wood? Why, I’ll give it you.”
“But we have had more than our share in taking the wood from those huts.”
“Tiens,” said old Durand, “isn’t an old man allowed to be silly now and again? One can’t help having favourites, you know.”
XXXIV
Therewere two very happy men in Beaucourt during that miraculous spring, Anatole Durand and Marcel Lefèbre.
Things went well, amazingly well. There were no quarrels, very little jealousy, and no slacking. At the end of the first month more than half the people were out of the huts and back in their own houses, and though the roofs were of black felt and the windows of canvas, the critical period had passed. The Philipons had sent for their children; so had many others. Mère Vitry was back in her cottage, with the picture of the Sacré Cœur hanging on its nail, and in her garden were crops of lettuce, spring cabbage, peas, beetroot, potatoes. There were days when the whole village went out into the fields, with Monsieur Lefèbre heading the pilgrimage, and the seed-sowing was a public sacrament. Durand’s tractors had ploughed up hundreds of acres, and though the season was too late for wheat, these peasants, labouring from dawn to dusk, seeded those great brown fields with beans, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot, turnips, peas and swedes. The luck of the season was with them. It was sunny and dry, and the battle was with the weeds. A hundred hoes and a blazing sun fought and suppressed grass and charlock, dock, nettle, sorrel, buttercup and poppy.
The orchards had only missed one year’s pruning, and promised well. Even flower seeds had not been forgotten. Manon was to have beds of mignonette, marigold, Virginia stock, red linum, gaudy nasturtiums. There were buds on the old rose trees, and Paul had done some pruning. The Bois du Renard was in full leaf, and the château chestnuts had had a wonderful display of white wax candles. The white thorn, too, had looked like snow. Old Durand had had lilac in bloom, and he had sent Manon a mass of it for the big bowl in the window. Paul had found her burying her face in the blossom, and he had caught her in his arms and kissed her.
“You smell like the spring.”
She had ruffled his hair with her hands.
The village continued to take its principal meals at the canteen, for this public kitchen saved time, labour and fuel, and allowed the women to spend the whole day about their houses or in the gardens and fields. Other families were returning, and, to relieve the congestion in the huts, some of the people who were more forward in their houses arranged to do their own cooking and to eat their meals there. The école was turned into an additional rest-house for the new-comers; they took their share of the work, food and material; the Council of Beaucourt administered a patriarchal justice. There were no gendarmes in the village.
Civilization began to re-erect its old landmarks, and Beaucourt made quite a jest of the new post-office when Madame Bonpoint, who was very fat and very red and a little severe, made Beaucourt think of a broody hen sitting on a clutch of eggs in a coop.
Pierre Poirel, the village farceur, put his head inside her doorway and crowed like a cock.
“Comment?” said the lady.
“Are the letters hatched yet, madame?”
It was Pierre Poirel, too, who scrawled on the doorway of his eccentric-looking cottage, “Villa des Nouveaux Riches.” And all Beaucourt laughed at the joke. The village had recovered its sense of humour, which was an excellent symptom, for a community that can work hard and laugh has no social sickness to fear.
Durand restarted a carrier’s service between Amiens and Beaucourt, and three times a week a carrier’s cart left the Place Vogel, carrying passengers and parcels. Beaucourt used to take its relaxation in an evening gossip on the Place de l’Eglise, about the time the carrier’s cart rolled in. Anatole would be there, Monsieur Lefèbre, the patriarchs, the women. You could buyLe Petit Journalor theEcho de Paris. For a few sous, too, you could get a good cup of coffee at the house of Manon Latour, and ask the advice of that fine fellow, Paul Rance.
Paul was growing popular. His day was full from dawn to dusk, and when he was not working at the café or in the garden, he was helping some villager with his house. Paul tackled all sorts of problems. He rescued derelict roofs, underpinned dangerous walls, patched broken chimneys. Manon’s man was a good fellow, a much better fellow than the rather querulous and thin bearded Gaston who had been Manon’s first husband, and Beaucourt approved of the betrothal. It accepted Paul. He could use his hands.
Brent had a share in preparing one of the great sensations, Beaucourt’s first shop. The enterprise was Madame Poupart’s. Paul built the shelves, the counter, the window stage, and, since the venture was a private one, he was paid good money for the work. He took the notes home and handed them to Manon.
“Put them in the partnership bank.”
He was very happy over that money, and Manon was happy with him.
Few people could get near Madame Poupart’s shop when first it was opened. The window was only six feet square, and you had to push hard to obtain a glimpse of it. Not that Beaucourt was in mad haste to spend its money, or to buy the cheap pipes, sweets, picture postcards, reels of cotton, brown crockery, matches or lead pencils that were arranged in the shop-window. It was the fact that Beaucourt had a shop. People crowded like children to stare at it.
Animals began to arrive and they could not have created more interest if they had walked out of the Ark. The Philipons had a brown cow; Monsieur Talmas, the messenger, kept two horses; the Lebecques had a pig, but the idea of keeping a pig was soon plagiarized by other people. Hens clucked and scratched, and cocks crowed. Someone gave Mère Vitry a cat.
Nor was the Café de la Victoire without its live-stock, and Philosophe—a very useful beast—soon had to acknowledge rivals. Etienne’s blue cart arrived from Ste. Claire, carrying a calf secured under a net, a coopful of young chickens, and Marie Castener in her Sunday clothes. Etienne and Paul were left to man-handle the calf, while Marie stumped all over the house, making Paul’s new floors shake, and talking as she had not talked for years. She kissed Manon in nearly every room as though she were sealing a blessing, quite forgetting that she never could abide people who were impulsive and sentimental.
“And when are you going to be married?”
“Very soon, my dear; in three or four months, perhaps.”
“Three or four months! What are you waiting for? If I were that fellow Paul I should not be able to keep my hands off you.”
“He is a very good fellow,” said Manon, “and very patient.”
“Patient! A man ought not to be patient. Talking of bad men, have you heard the news about Bibi?”
Manon’s face hardened.
“No. What is it?”
“He’s blind—stone blind. They had to cut out one eye, and the other got affected. A man like that quarrels once too often; those English soldiers cut him to pieces.”
Manon paused on the stairs.
“Be careful; they are rather steep. Did they ever catch those Tommies?”
“No.”
“And what is Bibi doing?”
“Living at the Coq d’Or. They say there is something between him and that girl Barbe. She’ll keep him in order, if any woman can do it. I suppose he has some money.”
When the Casteners had gone Manon told Paul the news about Louis Blanc. They were leaning over the stable door, and the calf was sucking Manon’s fingers, a protest against its weaning.
“Poor devil!” said Brent, “I would rather be dead. I never thought——”
“I can’t pity him,” she answered; “I suppose I ought to, but I can’t. I wonder if he will come back to Beaucourt?”
“What could a blind man do here?”
“Make mischief. I hope he will stay where he is; there would be something horrible about a blind man crawling about the village. Be careful, ma petite, do you want to eat my hand?”
Brent leant over and rubbed the calf’s head, and the little beast’s sapphire blue eyes looked up at them without fear.
“This thing is tame enough.”
“Etienne’s beasts are always tame. Yes, you have beautiful eyes, my dear.”
And though they did not confess it to each other the thought of Bibi blind and helpless haunted them all that night.
The working days slipped by, and in his white tent at the end of the avenue of chestnuts old Durand slept the sleep of a healthy tired child. He was irrepressible and he was happy, up soon after dawn each morning, and shaving in the doorway of his tent before rushing down into the village to begin another day of creation and adventure. Marcel Lefèbre was his partner in this early morning enthusiasm. Lefèbre slept on an old wire bed in the sacristy. Everybody knew that he spent the first two hours of the day working in the church, clearing out the rubbish, scraping the floor, and daubing whitewash over the banalities and blasphemies that casual hands had scribbled on the walls. The “flip-flop” of that brush and the priest’s splashed face were a rallying cry and an ensign to Beaucourt. The whole village gathered in the church for Sunday morning mass. The peasants came because they liked Lefèbre and because the service seemed to be a sort of social sacrament, a very human hour when they stood in silence side by side, and felt the humanity in each other. The dead were there, and the children. And there were those, Philipon among them, who had called the mass a mummery and a swindle, but who came to the church because Marcel Lefèbre’s religion grew in the soil. Even these children of reason felt that it was good to gather together and to drink of the cup of common humanity.
Beaucourt was happy, rather proud of itself and ready to echo old Durand’s cry of “Ça ira, ça ira.” There was a competitive spirit in the air, a spirit that was good for Beaucourt and for France. People asked each other, “What are they doing in Peronne, in Domart, in Caix, in Roye, up in the North? We can show them something here. It grows, it blossoms.” Beaucourt had some little reason to be proud of its work.
Yet there was a shadow. It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly, and it was cast by a man. Nobody save Durand and Lefèbre imagined that there was anything sinister about the shadow or felt that any new thing had arrived in Beaucourt. What did a little fat man signify, a manufacturer, a fellow who had been known as the “Elephant” because he had a nose like a trunk and trousers that made one think of an elephant’s legs? M. George Goblet was just a coarse little man whose life had been given to the making of money. In the old days the factory had seemed good for Beaucourt; some of the girls and women had worked there, and nothing terrible had happened. The peasant, not the ouvrier, had dominated the village.
Monsieur George arrived in a car. Durand met him walking down the Rue de Bonnière with Marcel Lefèbre, and Lefèbre had the look of a man whose dinner had not agreed with him.
“What, you back!” said Durand, with a quick glance at the priest.
Monsieur George had lunched in his car on chicken and a bottle of Château Citron. He smoked. He was cheerful; his face looked red and beneficent, but Marcel Lefèbre—the Christian—wished him in hell.
“Monsieur Goblet is restarting the factory.”
“Tiens,” said Durand; “he will have to bring his own workpeople; we are too busy here.”
Monsieur George smiled.
“Enterprise, my dear sirs. I am going to get the place tidy. Men do not grow on currant bushes these days, but I have been in Paris and elsewhere.”
“Riff-raff,” said Anatole aggressively.
The “Elephant” looked at him suspiciously with his little eye. He had never been able to understand Durand; he thought him a fool. And, of course, they disliked each other. It would never have occurred to Goblet that these two men had an affection for Beaucourt, an affection that resembled the love of an old man for a daughter, and that they suspected him of being ready to debauch her innocence.
Goblet was a man of platitudes.
“France has to get to work. There is going to be a race for trade.”
“Trade? Of course. One is apt to forget these things. We have got to fill the shop-windows so that silly women may spend money.”
“I make cloth, Monsieur Lefèbre. That is one of life’s necessities, is it not, or would you rather have the women running about naked in the fields?”
“You are unanswerable, monsieur.”
Anatole edged Lefèbre gently out of the conversation, for M. Marcel had a hot temper and a way of losing it with righteous sincerity.
“Monsieur George has been reading ‘Penguin Island,’ ha, ha! He is right; we cannot have our villages full of naked angels. But where are you going to put your workmen?”
“Tents or huts.”
“And feed them? We have our own organization, but we can’t feed your fellows.”
“I have not asked you to, have I? I did not start business yesterday; I have my scheme just as you have yours.”
“And you have managed to buy machinery?”
“Should I go out without my trousers?”
Anatole and the priest left the “Elephant” standing coarsely on his dignity outside the gate of the factory. They walked back arm in arm to the Place de l’Eglise.
“My dear friend,” said Durand, “M. George is behaving like a reasonable and enterprising citizen. What good will it do to us or Beaucourt to quarrel with him? I think we are in danger of becoming a couple of sentimentalists.”
“God forgive the reasonable people,” said Monsieur Lefèbre. “It was the devilry of common-sense that killed the child in man.”