At seven 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.