XLI
In the full blaze of an August afternoon Louis Blanc made Barbe take him up the hill to the Bois du Renard. They had locked up the buvette, and the red-haired girl led Bibi by the hand along the field-path to the wood. Her head shone like a piece of red metal close to the blackness of the man’s coat; she had to watch the ground so that Bibi should not stumble.
“My God, but it is hellish to be blind!” he said; “I cannot even see you, you know.”
She helped him over an old, fallen trench at the edge of the wood, and in crossing it he slipped and fell against her. They stood, clinging together on the edge of the rotten bank; but Barbe had a body like steel, and she held the man on his feet with his head resting against her bosom. They remained thus for a moment, Bibi’s face flat against her red blouse as though he were burying his face in an armful of flowers.
“Ah, but you smell good.”
He took great breaths of her, holding her close, and pressing her body to his till it was curved like a bow.
“Do you want to break me, you great rough?”
She was delighted, a sensuous cat, her eyes half closed, her chin resting on the crown of Bibi’s head.
“There is something left in life after all. Let us sit down in the shade.”
“Anywhere?”
“No. I want to be where I could see all Beaucourt like a meal laid out on a table.”
She chose a shady place for him at the foot of a beech tree, spreading out her skirt and making him sit on it. From the Bois du Renard it was possible to see the whole of Beaucourt and the fields and woods lying about it in the broad August sunshine. Bibi sat with his knees drawn up and his elbows resting on them. Barbe let her right arm lie across his shoulders.
“There it is,” she said; “I can even see little Crapaud putting new tiles on the factory roof.”
Bibi moistened his lips with the tip of his tongue.
“Tell me all about it, just as though you were painting a picture.”
She humoured him, describing Beaucourt and all that she could see happening in Beaucourt, using that brisk and satirical slang of hers, the language of the comptoir.
“There is the church with half its spire knocked off, and, I suppose, inside of it old Lefèbre is splashing whitewash about. The post-office in the Place—just like a flat grey louse crawling up to have a bite at the church! Someone is walking about in the ruins of your hotel.”
“Yes, my hotel! Who is it?”
“It’s too far off for me to see, but he has a basket, and seems to be picking up bricks.”
“My bricks! Well, it doesn’t matter. Go on.”
“Half-way down the Rue de Picardie a peasant is lying flat on the roof of a house. He has a white patch on the seat of his trousers, as though the curé had given him a smack with his whitewash brush. Then we come to the café. I can see the café quite plainly.”
“We will stay there a moment. What is happening at the café?”
“A woman is hanging out linen on a line in the orchard.”
“That’s a waste of time—when we are going to dirty it for them.”
“Oh—yes—and I can see the man. He is standing on a ladder doing something to the new sign-board.”
“More waste of time. We shall drop a bomb on them next Sunday.”
Bibi remained silent for a while, his blind face like a grotesque gargoyle spewing hatred over the house of his enemy. Barbe watched him out of the corners of her eyes, her arm resting upon his shoulders. She knew that some plan was forming in his mind, and, though he had thrown out nothing but hints to her, she was ready to help her man.
“What happens on Sunday?”
He turned his blind eyes to her.
“You are not going to cut my hair—like that woman in the Bible.”
She answered sharply.
“You can’t get on without me. Isn’t that so?”
He put an arm round her.
“That’s the truth. You know how to mix the drinks.”
“So that is to be my job?”
“I want all of them mad on Sunday. I shall want old Cordonnier well fuddled and in a state to swear anything. What’s the best stuff for it?”
She reflected, leaning her chin on the palm of her hand.
“There is that jar of cognac. It is fiery stuff. I could mix it with the wine. What are you going to do?”
“I keep that card up my sleeve.”
“You must tell me,” she said; “I shan’t give you away.”
He drew her head close to his face, and whispered in her ear.
“The man is a Boche. Now do you see light?”
Neither Manon nor Paul had any suspicion that danger was so near to them, nor guessed that they were to be made the victims of a drunken mob. Quiet people do not foresee such catastrophes, nor is happiness a window that opens upon tragedy. The very house they had rebuilt lulled them like a cradle. It was so very precious, so much a portion of their human selves that it shared that immortality that seems part of us when we love. The wholesomeness of the place was unassailable.
Moreover, Paul Brent’s mood of pessimism and self-distrust had passed. To share a secret with a friend is to halve the burden of it, and Lefèbre was more than a friend. He and Durand were at the café early on the morning after Paul and Manon’s visit to the sacristy. They sat in Manon’s kitchen, with the doors and windows closed, and talked the affair over from end to end.
Durand had pretended to be scandalized.
“My favourite Frenchman turning out English! A nice game you have played with us!”
“I am very sorry, monsieur.”
“Well, well, don’t look so miserable. The war has turned the world upside down, and after all—it is this that counts.”
He looked round Manon’s kitchen.
“We ought to judge a man by what he does. A simple rule of life and how rarely we follow it! Now, then—it is for us to provide this Englishman with a French character.”
He smiled at Lefèbre. There appeared to be some secret between them, some dramatic and very human dénouement that they guarded like a couple of sentimental old men.
“It should not be difficult,” said the priest.
Anatole turned to Manon.
“Monsieur Lefèbre and I are going to Amiens on Saturday. We have business there—a deputation, a meeting upon the devastated regions. I can interest a friend or two in his little romance; what is more, we will approach the English authorities. If we give this rogue here a passport it will make things so much simpler.”
Manon slipped across the room and kissed him.
“I do not think they can be very hard on us.”
“My dear, I had better take you with me to see some English colonel with a red band round his hat. Feminine influence, you know! If you put your arms round his neck——!”
“You can tease me as much as you like, both of you, for I love you both.”
“Lefèbre,” said the manufacturer, “this house is becoming dangerous.”
It was Anatole Durand who advised them to send for Marie Castener from Ste. Claire, and to arrange for her to stay with them in Beaucourt during the next few weeks. He pointed out that Brent would have to go to England, be released by the authorities, and return with the necessary legal proofs of his identity. Meanwhile Marie would be the very woman to help Manon in the house. She was so solid, so imperturbable, such a good friend, quite as capable as a man of dealing with men.
“If any of Goblet’s fellows stroll round here, Marie would only have to stand in the doorway.”
Durand lent her his car and drove Manon over to Ste. Claire. Marie was willing to come to Beaucourt, and she accepted Manon’s confession with her usual phlegmatic reasonableness.
“A good man is the same everywhere. You can trust me to keep your secret.”
“It will not be a secret long.”
“So much the better. For myself I always prefer to tell people before they find out. But that man of yours is clever; he took us all in.”
“Well, I helped him,” said Manon.
Marie Castener was to come to them on the Saturday. Etienne would drive her over in the gig, for Etienne wanted to see how things were going at Beaucourt. There were people who called it the “miraculous village,” and she smiled shrewdly at Anatole Durand.
“Monsieur is a wizard.”
Durand, looking happy, shrugged off the compliment.
“Everybody has worked hard. We are so proud of Beaucourt that we have asked a very great man to come and see it. But I am giving away secrets. I am very glad that you are coming to look after Manon, madame.”
“I have always found Manon very well able to look after herself, monsieur. But then—I am—solid.”
A man whose hands are well occupied is not, as a rule, a man of moods, and yet a quite unexplainable sadness took possession of Paul Brent on that Friday evening before the coming of Marie Castener. It was the last evening that he and Manon were to spend alone before the uncertain days that would follow his surrender to some English Provost-marshal. Paul had become resigned to the idea of surrender; it was his penance before his marriage, the only path by which he could come back to Manon with no lie in his heart. It was the thought of leaving her that troubled him, and gave an edge of pain to his tenderness. He was astonished to find how deeply this new life of his had rooted itself in Beaucourt; England mattered to him hardly at all.
“It is the woman,” he said to himself; “it is the woman who matters.”
As they sat at supper Manon became aware of his silence. She noticed that his eyes wandered about the room, this room that had seen the beginnings of the adventure, the defeat of Bibi, the exultation of their first embrace. She saw Paul look at the pictures on the walls, the new curtains, the bowl of asters on the table by the window, Philosophe asleep on the rug by the stove. This familiar room was pleasantly and wholesomely complete. It was home.
“Yes, without you it would never have happened,” she said.
He looked at her across the table with the tenderness of a grown man whose love is far deeper than the romantic devotion of a boy.
“It makes me miserable to think of leaving it.”
She stretched out a hand and let it rest on his.
“But you will come back very soon. I have a feeling that they will not do anything very terrible to you, and Marie and I can carry on.”
Dusk was falling. They did not light the lamp, but went out like lovers into the orchard and watched the moon coming up huge and solemn in a cloudless sky. It was one of those perfect summer nights, very gentle and still, when you can fancy that you can hear the dew falling out of the silent sky. Holding hands they wandered down to the stream and followed its flickering movements in the moonlight, walking close to the poplars and the old pollarded willows. The trees were silent as death. There were no fences here, and the meadows seemed to stretch into the illimitable moonlight.
“How peaceful it is.”
She slipped into the hollow of his arm, her head on his shoulder.
“It is so good to be able to trust a man. Do you not know what that means to me?”
“I know that nothing matters to me—but you.”
They stood close to the trunk of a white poplar, and kissed.
“You belong here now, mon chéri. You are sure that you will never be home-sick for England?”
Brent looked at the moon.
“It is like this,” he said; “a man learns what life can give him, and what he wants life to give him. The things that matter—the simple, happy, restful things! You may run all over the world looking for something you left in your own village. When you are young you are always wanting the apples on the other side of the wall. I’m not like that—now—thank God!”
She stretched out a hand and touched the trunk of the great poplar.
“Trees are so wise. They stay in the same place, it is true, but they grow; they see the great fields and the good, wise life of the fields. They feel the wind, and see the sky and the moon and the stars, and hear the water running through the meadows. Mon mari, I think we are going to be very happy here, you and I.”