Early in June, the Café de la Victoire being ready for its furniture,
Manon made her great expedition to Amiens. The canvas ceilings were up,
all the timber-work stained or painted, and Paul had papered the walls
of the kitchen, the two best bedrooms, and the coffee room. Manon had
chosen a pattern of pink roses for her room; the windows were to have
rose-coloured curtains, and the bed a rose-coloured duvet; Paul had
stained the floor the colour of old oak.
They left Philipon’s girl, Luce, in charge of the house, and travelled
to Amiens in the carrier’s cart, sitting on the wooden bench behind M.
Talmas, and under the black canvas cover that had a little window on
either side. Manon had a carpet-bag at her feet; she was to stay three
or four days. Paul carried his travelling gear wrapped up in a black and
white check handkerchief; he wore his velvet trousers and black coat.
There was no one else in the carrier’s cart, and as its grey-blue wheels
rolled slowly along the straight roads under the poplars, beeches, limes
and acacias, Paul felt himself back in some ancient bit of England. M.
Talmas’ van would have found country cousins in the Weald of Sussex or
among the Somersetshire orchards. Cæsar Talmas, too, was a bit of old
France, with the head of a grenadier, a tuft of grey hair on his chin,
and his eyes as blue as his breeches.
This cart dropped them at the Place Vogel, and they walked to the Rue
Belu, Paul carrying Manon’s bag. Across the green-black water of the
river, and with its windows looking at the chestnut trees and in the
inspired grey glory of the cathedral, stood the Auberge de l’Evêque, a
tall, old, white house with yellow shutters, a rust-red gate and door.
Manon knew the place. It was clean and quiet, and she had written to
retain two bedrooms.
They stood on the bridge for a moment, and looked at the cathedral.
“When we have left our luggage,” said Manon, “we will go in and say our
prayers.”
Madame Berthier of the Auberge de l’Evêque, one of those crisp,
firm-fleshed Frenchwomen, with a ruddy face and fair hair, met them like
an old friend. Manon had a bedroom on the first floor; Paul a little
room under the roof. Madame Berthier gave them coffee, and chattered to
Manon about prices.
“The cheap shops are not always the cheapest,” was her dictum.
Manon agreed.
“If you mean to live with the same furniture all your life, why not have
it good to look at?”
“Like your wife,” said madame with a roguish look at Paul.
“Yes, that’s so, madame. I find that she is very pleasant to look at.”
“Thank you, mon ami. Are you coming out with me to the shops?”
“Of course.”
“Then put on your hat.”
It was a showery day, but that did not trouble them, for whenever the
rain began to fall Manon found a shop in which she wished to enquire the
prices. She was in no hurry, and they had explored all the streets in
the neighbourhood of the Hôtel de Ville before Manon made her choice.
She bought her furniture at a shop in the Rue des Chaudronnières,
cupboards, chairs, wash-hand stands fitted with drawers, a big French
bed.
They had hesitated over that bed, and the shopkeeper and his wife joined
in a debate that became a sort of family discussion. Manon could buy an
iron bedstead of the English pattern, with a mattress and pillows for
four hundred and ninety-five francs, but the French wooden bed looked
handsome and more homely. It would cost them six hundred francs.
“What do you think?”
She looked at Paul.
“I like the wooden one.”
“It is a beautiful bed, madame, and the box-mattress is our very best.”
“Why copy the English?” said the proprietor. “Think of the price they
are charging us for coal.”
“An iron bedstead looks rather cold in a room.”
“Yes. More suitable for old maids.”
“Be quiet, Jules. I assure you, madame, that if you are going to have a
pretty room for yourself and Monsieur——”
They bought the wooden bed, and walked on to the Rue Dumeril, where
Manon had discovered two shops that had pleased her, one of them a
bazaar that supplied anything from a table-knife to an enamelled
soap-dish. At another shop over the way Manon bought material for
curtains, some cheaper bedding, and two rugs. She had her lists made out
in a note-book, a hypothetical price placed against each article, and
she worked methodically through each list, refusing to be hurried. It
was a very serious affair this restocking of a kitchen and a linen
cupboard, with every sheet, towel and blanket to be examined and
handled, and Paul saw that it would take days.
“I shall leave you at home this afternoon,” she told him, as they walked
back to dine at the auberge; “a man in a draper’s shop is like a dog on
a string.”
He laughed.
“It does not bore me, you know. I just stand and look at you.”
“Yes, and it upsets my ideas.”
“I’ll go shopping on my own; there are those tools and fencing wire that
I want to take back to-morrow in Talmas’ cart.”
“That is a good idea. And, oh, Paul, don’t forget the spinach seed. And
this evening we will go and sit in the cathedral, and afterwards we will
drink coffee or a bock outside the café. You don’t wish to go to a
cinéma, do you?”
“Is it likely?” said her man.
Brent had known Amiens during the war, but the Amiens of his wanderings
while Manon shopped was not the city he had known of old. Amiens
depressed him. Its narrow, crowded side-walks and penitential pavé made
life uncomfortable for a stroller who soon grew tired of staring in
shop-windows, and Amiens—like all cities—had the power of impressing
itself with unpleasant vigour upon the casual countryman. The peasant is
jostled out of his little, quiet complacencies. He has not the
spaciousness of the fields to comfort him; the city cinéma-show tries
his eyes. Too many people, too much noise, too much restlessness!
Amiens made Paul feel home-sick. He sat on a damp seat in one of the
boulevards, a man with the soul of a peasant, a man to whom—after the
first hour of window-gazing—this city could offer nothing. He felt
tired, absurdly tired, and ready to be taken home like a child. Home?
What was home? The place where he worked, where the crops grew, where he
sat by the stove in a French village? Yes, it was that and more than
that, and in those moments of loneliness Paul discovered the blood and
the flesh behind the conventional picture. To man home was a woman, the
woman, that and nothing else. The rest was mere furniture, baggage, call
it what you will, inanimate things that become alive only when a woman
moved among them and turned them into mute symbols of sentiment and
tenderness. It was Manon who mattered, Manon the woman.
It began to rain again, and Paul jumped up. He walked fast down the wet
streets and the people in the streets had ceased to be strangers. Even
the few figures in khaki refused to accuse him of being an exile, a
bastard Frenchman masquerading in French clothes. He looked up at the
flèche of the cathedral, and his heart felt big in him, big with a sense
of the common humanity of them all.
Paul went straight to the auberge, and opening the glass-panelled door,
found Madame Berthier knitting. She looked up at him with a smile.
“Manon is not back?”
“Not yet.”
He went out with happy impatience, and waited on the bridge in the rain.
He felt that she would come that way, and while he waited there a very
wonderful thing happened. The battered-looking street, the grey quays,
the green-black water of the river had seemed heavily grey and ugly.
Suddenly the sun broke through, sending down a shower of yellow light,
while the rain continued to fall. A coloured bow overarched the city.
The chestnuts glittered, wet with a beautiful splendour of light. The
cathedral seemed to tower into the sky, flashing its dripping stones and
pinnacles and windows, its flèche ashine against a great black cloud.
Paul stood spellbound. His eyes were the eyes of an awed yet delighted
child.
Manon surprised him in that moment of un-self-consciousness. She came
across the bridge without his seeing her, and the look on his face made
her think of a window opened in heaven. His face was wet with the rain;
he was smiling.
She did not speak, but came and stood beside him as though to share the
beauty that enchanted him; to gaze at the sun-splashed trees and the
splendour of mystery that enveloped the cathedral. Paul’s smiling eyes
came down out of the heaven to her, and the smile became human.
“I’ve been waiting here. I thought you would come by the bridge.”
“You have been feeling lonely,” she said.
“How do you know that?”
He caught her hand and held it firm and fast, and they leant over the
rail of the bridge and looked at the still water whose surface was no
longer blurred by the rain. There were wonderful reflections in the
water, and there were strange lights in Manon’s eyes. She had felt the
strong grip of Paul’s hand, and a quiver of deep passion that woke a cry
of exultation and of understanding in her heart.
“I want to go home,” he said.
“Home?”
“To Beaucourt.”
He felt the pressure of her firm, warm fingers.
“Is Beaucourt home to you?”
He smiled down at the water.
“I felt like a lost child this afternoon. I had to come back to try and
find you. I wanted you; I never knew I could want you so much.”
“Mon chéri,” she said; “so you waited out here in the rain? And then the
sun shone?”
“And you came back. Home is where you are. That’s a great discovery for
a man to make, is it not?”
“Had you never discovered it before?”
“No.”
“Then I am the first woman you have loved,” she said simply; “I am very
happy.”
Paul kissed her softly on the cheek, and their reflections in the water
below imitated that kiss.
Madame Berthier gave the lovers an early supper, and after the meal they
wandered out into Amiens, walking arm in arm. To Paul Amiens was no
longer a strange city full of cold, anonymous faces. They entered the
cathedral and sat a while in the great nave, watching the pigeons flying
to and fro in the sunset light of the clerestory, for the glass was gone
from many of the windows, and the pigeons nested in this great dovecote.
Paul held Manon’s hand. They spoke in whispers.
“Only good men could have built this place.”
“Good workmen, anyhow,” said her lover; “I think we have forgotten
something.”
“Mon Dieu, something I should have bought?”
He gave a soft laugh.
“No, not that. This place reminds me of that house of yours.”
“Ours,” she corrected.
“Ours. You could put it here inside the cathedral. It’s part of the same
stuff. I don’t want to live in a world of sky-scrapers.”
“What are sky-scrapers?”
“The buildings in New York, America. It’s a great age, but, good God,
I’m satisfied with Beaucourt.”
“Always?”
“You are not going to die yet, are you?”
“Mon chéri, not before you marry me.”
“And there will always be work to do in Beaucourt, the sort of work that
makes a man go to bed happily with the smell of good soil or sawdust in
his nostrils. I say, that was a wonderful bed we bought this morning!”
“Yes. We should not have liked an iron bed. You will hold me very close,
some day, my Paul.”
“And I shall never let you go.”
Next morning Brent tied up his belongings in the check handkerchief,
kissed Manon, shook hands with Madame Berthier, and marched off to the
Place Vogel. Monsieur Talmas’ cart started at nine on the return journey
to Beaucourt, and Paul found two other travellers on the wooden seat, an
old lady who was joining her married daughter, and Monsieur Poupart, who
had been spending two days in Amiens buying goods for the shop. Poupart
had a yellow face and a melancholy manner, and the old woman had been
boring him with the irritating vivacity of second childhood. She asked
interminable questions.
“Work the pump, will you?” said Poupart to his neighbour; “my arm is
stiff. They had la grippe in the house where I have been staying; I
expect I have caught it; I always do.”
“I have had la grippe thirteen times,” said the old lady triumphantly,
leaning forward and looking across Paul at the pessimist.
“The thirteenth attack should have killed you, madame;” and, in a
truculent aside, “you would never have had thirteen attacks if you had
been my mother-in-law.”
The old lady chattered to Paul all the way to Beaucourt. She was very
inquisitive, and Paul was hard put to keep her curiosity within the
limits of a decent reticence, for her old hands were ready to pull
everything to pieces, even to interfere with her neighbours’ clothes.
She asked Paul if he was married, and cackled when he told her that he
was only betrothed.
Poupart listened with a sardonic solemnity. He caught Paul’s eye, and
nudged him with his elbow.
“Push her downstairs.”
Paul laughed.
“La Croix would have done that years ago if he had not been a fool.”
“I understand what you are saying, quite well, Monsieur Poupart. No one
has been able to break my neck for me.”
“What a pity, madame!” said the man.
Monsieur Talmas’ cart entered Beaucourt by the Bonnière road, and just
beyond the gates of the factory, where a number of workmen were
lounging, they passed a waggon drawn in at the side of the road and
laden with the sections of a hut. Brent, who had been looking at the
factory, felt himself nudged by Monsieur Poupart’s sharp elbow.
“Look there!”
Ten yards beyond the waggon a man was sitting on the grass bank, the man
whose closed eyelids seemed sunk in their eye-sockets. A girl with red
hair was standing beside the man, a girl with narrow lips and a
prominent bosom. She was speaking to the driver of the waggon who was
unhooking his horses.
“It is Louis Blanc,” said the shopkeeper, staring inquisitively at the
woman.
Paul was conscious of a shock of astonishment. It was Bibi himself,
blind and bearded, sitting there and listening to what the girl was
saying, his head slightly on one side like the head of a listening bird.
A couple of sticks lay on the bank beside him! He was dressed in his
best clothes.
“He’s blind, you know,” said Poupart; “poor devil!”
Brent’s eyes were grim. He realized that he had not prepared himself for
the return of Bibi, for Bibi had passed out of the life of the village,
and his reappearance filled Brent with a feeling akin to nausea. It was
the return of something that was essentially evil, an element of
discord, the spirit of malice.
Paul was staring hard at Louis Blanc and as the cart passed him Bibi
raised his head with a jerk. His eye-sockets were fixed upon Brent. He
seemed to feel the passing of an enemy and the challenge of an enemy’s
eyes.
Paul drew back and looked away. He heard Bibi speaking to the girl with
the red hair; he was asking her who was in the cart that had passed.
“It’s the carrier’s van,” she said.
“Who’s inside?”
“Two men and an old woman. Now, then, are you quite sure this is your
piece of ground? It lies opposite the end of the factory wall.”
Bibi had owned half an acre of orchard here.
“Yes, that’s it. Count the trees. There used to be thirty-six, all
apples. They were standing there months ago.”
Barbe, of the Coq d’Or, took a step up the bank and counted the trees.
“I make the number thirty-five.”
“Near enough. We will have the hut off the waggon here. Give me a hand;
I can help the fellow to unload.”
Some of the workmen came across to help in the unloading. They thought
that Bibi had lost his eyesight in the war; and Barbe was very
attractive to men. They fraternized with Bibi.
“You are good fellows,” he said, “not like these damned peasants. There
will be some good wine here when my buvette goes up.”
“What, you are going to sell drink, old man?”
“Plenty of it,” said Bibi.