Anatole Durand was 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.