XXXV
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.