Manon had 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.”