It seemed to Paul Brent that peace and the spring came suddenly to
Beaucourt, and that even in this war-scarred country there was a beauty
that had a mystery and a strangeness of its own.
The fruit trees in Manon’s orchard were big with bud. Brent had joined
her in reclaiming the garden; the rubbish and broken boughs had been
cleared away, the wall mended, the fruit trees pruned and cleaned, the
soil dug over. Seeds were in with neat little labels showing the
rows—lettuces, beans, peas, early potatoes. Paul had rescued and nailed
up the hardy vine that grew on the south wall of the house.
He was happy. He liked to wander down to the stream, and see the willow
blazing gold, the young grass lushing up, the purple woods ready to
burst into leaf. The great chestnuts in the avenue at the château were
beginning to open their brown buds. Paul found violets in flower on a
sunny bank, and came back with a child’s handful of them to Manon. He
heard the wryneck in the woods, and soon the cuckoo would be calling,
and as for the blackbirds they sang to him night and morning. The war
had been merciful to Beaucourt in passing over it so lightly, and the
spring seemed to call for the brown faces and the strong hands of the
peasants.
It would seem that the world has to rediscover the great truth that it
is the simple things that matter in life. The sap in the stem of a young
oak is worth all the orchids that ever were pampered. Paul Brent was
fortunate in his happy drift into the simple and innocent life, with its
elemental needs and primitive triumphs. He was to escape so much of the
disillusionment of the years after the war, nor was he to become the
victim of that strange physical apathy that flamed now and again into
feverish erotism. Men had had the strong drink of an abnormal excitement
snatched away from them. They were pushed back to the bench and the desk
and the coal seam, and life seemed a damnable dulness. Money meant
escape. There were thousands who were mad for money.
Brent fell straight into the lap of nature, with a fresh handful of
simple ideals ready to be sown, and he sowed them in Beaucourt and
watered them with a happy, human sweat. He did not want to slack and
talk and theorize; the days were too short for him. He loved the work of
his hands, the simple sensations, the smell of the sawdust, the
crisply-curled shavings his plane ripped from a plank, the new nails he
hammered in, the paint, the clang of his hammer, the snoring of his saw,
the smell of the soil. Life was good. The whole house was re-roofed; he
had more leisure to enjoy the true craftsman’s love of accurate detail;
he could stand in the middle of the road with his hands in his pockets,
and Manon beside him. They were never tired of looking at the house, the
new roof which Paul thought of tiling or thatching some day over the
galvanized iron, the windows with their neat yellow panels of oiled
linen, the front door which Paul had painted a gay green.
They were as proud as a couple of children over a sand castle. And Brent
had fought for his castle and held it.
“Looks fine, doesn’t it?”
And Manon’s eyes were full of the spring.
In the matter of the more spiritual things these ideals count, and
Paul—that simple fellow—kept his panache. Perhaps there are no English
words capable of expressing the subtle personal pride of a Cyrano de
Bergerac, or the emotional exultation of the chivalrous soul that has
stooped to no foul compromise. Paul kept his panache. He had never heard
of the word, but he was the master of all that it expressed.
He was in love with Manon. He looked love at her, but he did not make
it, and Manon had the heart to understand. He was one of those natural
gentlemen, bricklayer, shepherd, fisherman, what you will. He had his
notion of chivalry, a chivalry that could give, wait, hold back. He did
not rush to pick the flower and flaunt it in his buttonhole. Such men
are laughed at by the shallow and the dirty-minded, but somehow they
keep the love of a woman. You may find them in cottages, villas, country
houses. They have escaped the curse of wanting to be self-consciously
clever.
Paul and Manon went to church each Sunday, and stood for a few minutes
under the shattered roof. They were not religious people as religion was
understood in the Victorian days. Their sacrament was a little silence,
a pause, a looking backwards and forwards, a holding of hands, a gentle
generous emotion. They thought of the dead, of the children, of
seed-sowing and harvest, of good comradeship and the peace thereof that
passeth understanding.
Paul had his ideal, his task.
“I’ll ask her to marry me when I have made the place good,” was his
thought.
And Manon accepted this, even though she might have to face little
humiliations in the acceptance. She kept her eyes on the man’s broad
ideal. It was a big tree that would grow; it was strong, slow, hardy. If
casual tongues dropped a few seeds of discord, of gossip, they were but
little bitter weeds which the tree would smother.
“I love him,” she said to herself.
And Paul loved her with each nail he drove, each joist he fitted, each
barrow-load he cleared from the place. He loved her in washing, in
eating, in cutting wood for her stove, in looking at the white clouds
sailing over the new roof, when it rained, when it blew, when the sun
shone. She was in every corner of his life, and he in hers.
Sometimes he was greatly curious to know what that other man of hers had
been, this Gaston Latour who had been killed early in the war. Manon had
been married less than a year. She had a photo of her first husband
somewhere, and one evening Paul asked to see the photo. Sometimes, he
had an uncomfortable feeling that he was wearing a dead man’s shoes; he
wondered, too, how he was filling them.
Manon took a candle down to the cellar, and brought back the photo.
“Gaston was a good fellow; we agreed quite well.”
Paul looked at the man’s picture. Gaston Latour had been one of those
sickly Frenchmen, cold, pale and prominent of eye, with a big forehead
and a weak beard. He stood with his hands resting on the back of a
chair, staring straight in front of him.
Manon had been watching Paul’s face, and with a sudden, quick but quiet
motion she took the photograph away from him. It is possible that a
woman does not like to see her lover repelled by the face of the man who
had first possessed her.
“That was nearly five years ago,” she said; “and, if you please, we will
forget it.”
“I’m sorry,” Brent told her; “weren’t you——?”
“It was a very excellent marriage; our parents arranged it, and my
father died six months later. No, this house always belonged to us, not
to the Latours.”
She took the photo back to the cellar, nor did she return for some
minutes, leaving Brent warming his hands at the stove. She had said so
little, but enough to make Paul understand that her first marriage had
not been happy, that it had left no delicate roots behind it. If Brent
was guilty of a secret gladness, he hid it, but the gladness was there.
He felt sorry in an impersonal way for that cold-eyed fellow who lay
dead somewhere in France, but the human part of him was with Manon. He
hoped that it would come all fresh to her, as fresh and as rich and as
generous as it seemed to him.
April came, and it rained hard for two days, driving Brent indoors. At
dinner they sat and looked at the roof, watching for drips, and exulting
when no drips appeared. Paul had been fixing the floor of the room above
the kitchen.
“It is a splendid roof,” said Manon; “it is you who rain sawdust.”
“I can’t taste it.”
“Look in your potage. I was away only half a minute, but you managed to
drop that wooden salt of yours into the saucepan.”
Brent gave her an oblique, laughing look.
“Supposing we put up the ceiling. It will be rather like laying a carpet
upside down.”
“That canvas?”
“Yes.”
“How delightful! But can you do it alone?”
“No. Two hands to stretch it, while the other nails.”
“Let’s begin at once,” said Manon.
And that is how Anatole Durand found them, perched up on the joists,
Manon stretching the canvas while Paul drove in the tacks. They were so
busy hammering, talking, laughing, and the rain made such a patter on
the iron roof that they had not heard his car. But Anatole Durand was an
event. He had not happened for three weeks.
“Hallo, mes enfants!”
Two faces looked down at him.
“Monsieur Durand! But what do you think of our ceiling?”
“Magnificent!” said Anatole, and, in a hurry to get out a dramatic cry
of his own, “And what do you think of my American dump?”
“Comment, monsieur?”
“I have bought it,” he said, shining like a little sun-god. “I have
bought my American dump!”
They had come down after that, for a canvas ceiling could not suppress
such a little excited, restless sun. Here was an event, a sensational
episode in the history of Beaucourt! Manon brought out her wine, and
they sat round the table, and talked—at least Anatole Durand talked. He
opened his fat note-book on the table and began to roll off figures with
the voice of a curé chanting the mass.
“Yes, I have bought it, but I had to race around like a comet. Just
listen, my friends.”
He chanted triumphantly of timber and iron sheets and rolls of felt by
the thousand, tins of preserved meat, fruit, milk, salmon by the tens of
thousand, coffee in hundreds of kilos, blankets, tools, barbed wire,
buckets, candles, soap. Wine and honey in Canaan! The oration was
Biblical, exultant.
“It must have cost you a fortune, monsieur,” said Manon.
Durand would not boast about the money he spent.
“Oh, I have plenty left. It is the best bargain I have ever made in my
life.”
“And where is the dump, monsieur?”
“A hundred miles south of Chalons, perhaps. But I have arranged for the
hire of a dozen lorries, and we will have it here in no time. Now see
what it is to be thorough. I have here the cubic space of the dump, and
the cubic space of the cellars at the château, you know what good
cellars they are, and all the food and the blankets can be stored in
them. The timber and the felt and the iron sheeting can be stacked in
the courtyard.”
“You are a wonderful man, Monsieur Anatole.”
“I’m just an old boy,” he laughed.
She poured him out another glass of wine, and he sipped it, looking
round the room with eyes of appreciation.
“You two children know how to work. You are quite chez-vous here,
already.”
Manon glanced questioningly at Paul. Brent nodded.
“And we are fiancés, monsieur.”
“Why, that’s splendid!” said old Durand holding up his glass; “your very
good health, and good luck to us all.”
They drank.
“And that fellow Louis Blanc seems to be out of the picture. The Coq
d’Or was full of the gossip.”
“Tiens, what has happened to Bibi?”
“He is in hospital at Amiens, and they have taken out one of his eyes.
It is said, too, that he may go blind in the other. When they asked him
to explain how it happened, he said he had had a quarrel with some
English soldiers, and that three of them set on him.”
Paul and Manon exchanged glances.
“Shall I tell him?” her eyes asked him.
Brent nodded.
“That is not quite the truth, monsieur. You are our friend, and you can
keep a secret. Bibi came by those wounds in this very room.”
“Tonnerre—here?”
Very simply she described to Anatole Durand all that happened, and so
vivid were her words that the old man found it difficult to sit still.
His eyes lit up; he had the eyes of a fighter.
“But it is incredible! What a wild beast! You did very well, Monsieur
Paul, to thrash that stallion.”
He jumped up and clapped Paul on the shoulder.
“So you wish me to say nothing of this?”
“It is not a pleasant tale for Manon to tell.”
“And the fellow has got his deserts. I am ready to wish he may lose that
other eye, and be harmless for the rest of his life. But let us talk of
something more pleasant.”
He lit a cigar, and, walking up and down for a moment on his brisk legs,
paused abruptly in front of Manon.
“I have some good news for you.”
“You are full of good news, Monsieur Anatole.”
“Well, listen. When I was in Amiens I fell in with a gentleman who is
planning excursions to the battlefields. He wanted to know of a place
where the richer sort of people might be able to spend the night, and
get the atmosphere of a devastated village. ‘My friend,’ said I, ‘I know
the very place in my own village, a little hôtel that will be ready to
receive such people in a month or two.’ He jumped. ‘It will be very
simple,’ said I. ‘The simpler the better, my dear fellow. We want the
proper atmosphere.’ So, my dear, if the idea pleases you, I will drive
you over to Amiens in a day or two, and you can make arrangements with
this gentleman. It should be quite a prosperous enterprise.”
Manon jumped up and kissed him, and Durand did not appear to object. He
was a democrat, and the new Beaucourt was going to be very democratic.
“What a good friend you are.”
“I’m just an old boy,” said Durand.