XXXI
That evening, when the sky had cleared, Manon and Brent opened up a hole under the wall where Manon’s treasure lay buried, and carried the silver into the cellar. Anatole was to drive over again next day and take Manon to Amiens where she was to meet the gentleman who was promoting these pilgrimages in Picardy, and also deposit her valuables with the “Société Générale.” Paul was shovelling the earth back into the hole when Manon came back along the path, walking slowly, and stroking a black eyebrow with a meditative forefinger.
“Dear soul, look!”
Her face flushed a sudden excitement. There was a vivacious buoyancy in her pointing finger. Paul was head up on the instant, ready for some dramatic event.
“What is it?”
She was pointing at the brown soil behind him, and there was a child’s delight in her eyes.
“The little green dears!”
Paul turned and looked, one hand on the handle of his spade, and he smiled. Strung between two of the white seed pegs stretched a thread of green thrown into vivid contrast by the rain-darkened soil, nothing more nor less than a row of lettuce seedlings just opening their twin leaves. A string of emeralds would never have seemed so innocent or so precious.
“The first of our children,” said Brent, “the little fellows!”
He looked shy, but Manon snuggled up and in some silent way made him understand that her hand wanted to be held.
“Is it not wonderful?”
“Everything’s wonderful,” said Brent, with a glimmer of blue between half-closed eyelids.
“Here’s where we began, over that hole in the ground. Just because you happened to catch me playing with a spade. And now—a year afterwards—these!”
“Like a live bit of ribbon, isn’t it!”
“And a few weeks later we shall be eating lettuces!”
“Méchant!” she said. “Be serious. How do you like Anatole’s idea?”
“It’s an inspiration.”
“Very well, we will have supper early, and then we will sit down and make plans. Oh, I didn’t tell you, Marie is giving me six pullets.”
“So we shall sit down and make plans for the pullets.”
“Be serious! No, we must arrange the rooms and the furniture, and see how much money we can afford.”
“Oh, that’s it? Well, look here, I put my money into the business or I go on strike.”
“But, Paul——”
His hand closed firmly on hers.
“It’s got to be. I’m a man. Don’t you understand?”
She looked up at him with soft, consenting eyes.
“Oh, yes, I understand perfectly. But who is to handle the firm’s money?”
“You, of course,” said Brent. “I always was an idiot with money. I’ll take my share, keep a little pocket money, and put the rest back into the business.”
“Do you understand pigs?” she asked him with quiet irrelevancy.
“I did keep one once.”
“And cows?”
“I dare say I could learn to milk a cow. I’ve studied more difficult things than that.”
With supper over, Manon cleared the table, lit two candles, produced a writing pad and pencil from the cupboard. They drew two chairs up on the side of the stove, and sat with their heads close together, Manon sketching out a plan of the house. There would be seven rooms in all, four on the ground floor, and three above, but the rooms on the other side of the passage were rather small, and one of them could only be reached by passing through an outer room.
“The visitors would have to take their meals here in the kitchen, unless we arranged to let them use the public room on the other side of the passage.”
“English people might not like that. Let them sit and see their own food cooked; it would amuse them.”
“I should have to engage a strong girl to help.”
“That wouldn’t be difficult, would it?”
“I am thinking of the bedrooms,” Manon said. “We shall have only four, even if we use the little ground-floor room that looks out on the garden.”
She scribbled lines and crosses on the paper, frowning on the problem.
“Supposing we were to give the girl that little room.”
“Yes.”
“Keep the public room where it is, and turn the back room into a little salon for the visitors or ourselves. But that would only leave us one spare bedroom.”
She continued to scribble on the paper.
“When we get married,” she began, “it will save a bedroom.”
“Yes, that’s so,” and he also looked at the scribbles on the paper, scribbles that meant nothing; “meanwhile I might rig myself up something outside, or sleep in the cellar. But I suppose we shall need the cellar.”
“We might put a partition across that room,” and she pointed upwards with the pencil; “but it would be so much simpler——”
“All right,” said Paul; “we’ll think about it. Now, what about furniture?”
They made a list of the furniture that would be needed, Manon writing the name of each article under such headings as “Salon,” “Girl’s room,” “Visitors’ room,” “Our room.” The list began to frighten them not a little.
“Hold on,” said Brent; “I can make tables, cupboards, wash-stands, if we can get some decent wood. Bedsteads and bedding seem to be the main problem. I expect the prices are up in Amiens.”
“I have about seventy thousand francs. Sixty thousand are invested in Rentes. That leaves ten thousand for furniture, and stock and current expenses.”
“I can put a thousand to that. Not much, is it?”
“You are putting in more than money, Paul. It will be yours as well as mine. All this could never have happened without you.”
Paul went to bed with his head full of the new enterprise, and the hundred and one inventions and ingenuities it suggested. He remembered having seen somewhere a room decorated with arched trellis-work painted a soft green, the arches hung with mauve wistaria made out of paper. Then his thoughts jostled against the problem of “baths.” Would English tourists of the richer sort expect and demand baths? Brent’s enthusiasm could not see itself rising above hip-baths and one can of water heated up in the corner of an outhouse. Fuel—like bedrooms—was going to be precious, and Paul went to sleep thinking of that particular bedroom and Manon’s simple solution of the difficulty.
“A good solution, too,” said Brent; “but I’ll stick out till I have finished the house.”
Durand’s De Dion was with them early, but not so early that Manon had not been able to help Paul finish the canvas ceiling of the kitchen. She was below in the cellar, dressing, while Brent loaded the valuables into the car.
“Any news of Louis Blanc?”
“Nothing,” said Durand. “By the way, do you know all the wells in Beaucourt?”
“No.”
“Then I will send old Prosper Cordonnier over with my sanitary expert; he knows them all.”
“You are having all the water tested?”
“We should look fools if it turned out bad, hey? Hallo—now, voilà le printemps!”
Paul turned and beheld the miracle of a French working woman in her Sunday clothes. It was not that he had never seen Manon before in that little black chapeau, black velour costume, and those neat suède high-heeled shoes. He could remember her going to church in those same clothes when he was billeted in Beaucourt during the war, but now they seemed different. They had a more personal and a more intimate meaning for him. He was aware of her small feet, of the quiet, sleek chicness of her clothes, of the roguish sedateness of that little hat. His thoughts went back fifteen years. He was thinking of a certain fair-haired girl with a razor-edged nose and mouth, coming out of the back gate of a big house, and wearing a blue plush hat covered with red cherries, an electric blue dress and the yellowest of yellow boots.
“How you stare!” she said.
Paul’s thoughts came back from that other life.
“Monsieur Durand used the exact word.”
“And what was that?”
“Printemps;” and he added, “this April seems to belong to me—somehow.”
They drove off, and Brent went to work, but the sun was shining, and his thoughts got in the way of his hands. He was so happy that he seemed to pause and to look suddenly at this happiness of his with the eyes of a man who was afraid of losing it. He had been nailing down the floor boards on the joists of the upper room that was to be their bedroom, and this sudden inward questioning of his own dreams sent him idling into the sunlight. He crossed the street, sat down on the doorstep of the stone house over the way, and looked with serious blue eyes at the café.
It occurred to him again that it would need a sign and that he would paint it. But might not the painting of that sign be about the last piece of work he would accomplish in the reconstruction of the “home”?
He lingered over the word “home.” It was very sweet to him now, but would it always be so sweet? Certain panic thoughts gathered round him like officious and penny-wise old women. He was an Englishman; would he be happy living as a Frenchman? When the house was finished, every stick painted, and the little farm without a weed, might not a sudden restlessness seize him? Would he be content to live all his life in a French village? That other home of his in England had never been a home in any spiritual sense; he could remember going out one night in a miserable and lonely rage and throwing bricks through a little greenhouse that had been his particular pride. But surely this would be different? Manon was different; he was different. And yet, at the bottom of this panic mood was a horror of hurting Manon, of falling short of her some day in the measure of his happiness.
“Fudge!” he said, and got up suddenly; “it’s just cowardice, that’s all. Haven’t I seen it in the war, chaps who were always looking for things to go wrong? It’s the same with the fellows who write books, books in which everybody gets into the gutter and all the world’s wrong. Just funk—Hallo!”
A certain aggressively smart figure had swung round the corner, buttons and cap badge polished, chin shaved, puttees neatly rolled, boots black and glossy as the back of a rook.
“Cheer-oh, cove.”
It was Corporal Sweeney with the grey grouse out of his eyes, a proper man, well groomed.
“Bon jour, monsieur, comme vous êtes gai aujourd-hui.”
“Demobbed, demain, compris?”
The two men smiled at each other, and Sweeney cast an eye over the house.
“Your dug-out, what?”
Brent nodded, wondering if he might allow himself a little more English.
“A bit of all right. Blimy! You’ve got a roof and winders.”
“Entrez,” said Paul, and took him in and gave him red wine.
The corporal had cigarettes; he offered Brent one, and lay in the arm-chair and drank in the goodness of life.
“Wonder if you get me, bloke?”
He had begun to philosophize.
“Me for a bit of garden. Be home in time to get my pertaters in. Ever kep’ pigeons?”
“One time, monsieur.”
“Lot o’ sound gum in pigeons, and chickens. Make you feel sort of homy on Sunday mornings. Hear ’em cooin’ and cacklin’ and cluckin’. Got any kids?”
“Des enfants, monsieur?”
“Got it.”
“I get married this year.”
Corporal Sweeney gave a wise grin.
“Funny stunt—gettin’ married—but it’s all rite; yes—it’s all rite. Used t’ think it was kind of bloomin’ monot’nous. Well, I dunno. If you start goin’ round the corner with strange gals, well, it’s good-bye to the chickens and the pertaters. Besides it’s a mug’s game. Who’s your real pal? She as you have ’eard tryin’ not to scream out when she’s bearin’ the kid you’ve given ’er; she ’oo cooks yer Sunday dinner. T’aint slosh, it’s the truth.”
Paul smiled. He pretended to have picked some of the pith out of the man’s harangue.
“You talk good, monsieur. I tink I be ver’ happee here.”
“Course you’ll be happy,” said the soldier almost fiercely; “it’s inside a chap, ain’t it? ’Course there’s other things that count. So long as a chap don’t keep spittin’ down his own well! Bein’ happy is like keepin’ yer buttons polished. It’s a ’abit.”
Brent could have quoted an occasion when the corporal’s buttons were distinctly dingy, but he refrained. Mark Tapley might have turned into an average, decent, grumbling Englishman had he been stuck down at Harlech Dump.
“ ’Ere, bloke,” said the corporal before leaving; “what’s wrong with you having a little more paint and canvas for the ’appy ’ome. I shall be gone to-morrer. And you could do with it.”
Paul fell. He had a passion for paint, and he reckoned that the British Public still owed him money.
“Vous êtes très agréable, monsieur.”
“You come along back with me. I ain’t ’ad an eighteen pounder shell in my chicken-’ouse. You ’ave.”