XXXVI
The events that agitated Monsieur Anatole Durand were the arrival of the “Elephant’s” workmen and the birth of Bibi’s buvette.
Anatole had Marcel Lefèbre at his elbow, and Lefèbre had never hesitated to say that it was in the factory that the modern social diseases were hatched and bred. If you argued the point with him and quoted the example of Monsieur Menier and his Chocolate Town he would answer that there were very few enlightened men like Monsieur Menier, and that factories existed not for the good of the workpeople but to make money. To Marcel Lefèbre the making of money was the root of all evil. It debauched both the capitalist and the worker, begot the bastard lives that men live in great cities, made life hectic and unreal. He combated the assertion that the peasants were hard, greedy, less intelligent than the dwellers in cities, and he would ask you whether a man who could carry out all the varied and scientific work on a farm had not a more fully developed and intelligent life than a workman who spent each day cutting threads on a screw, who read nothing but the “red rags” and talked about things that he did not understand. In the villages you found no venereal disease, few prostitutes, none of the grosser sorts of crime. An occasional murder, perhaps; but Lefèbre was a man of passions—disciplined passions—and yet he could understand the violence that shed blood. There are occasions when the killing of a man is a wholesome and a cleanly act.
It must be confessed that Lefèbre’s prejudices were justified by the temper of the men whom Monsieur Goblet introduced into Beaucourt. The “Elephant” had picked up the dregs of the casual labour that had been set free from the munition works and the army, fellows who drifted, youngsters who had learnt too soon the vices of grown men. Very few of Goblet’s original “hands” had returned; some had been killed; others had settled elsewhere; for the few who were ready to return there could be no technical work until the buildings had been repaired and new machinery installed. Durand had spoken of “riff-raff,” and the words fitted the case exactly. Monsieur Goblet had picked up the riff-raff that is to be found in all cities. There were some good men among them, one or two of the older bricklayers, the engineer, and two of the mechanics. The rest were a bad lot, ready to run about the village and make trouble with the women.
As for Louis Blanc’s buvette, that, too, could not be helped, nor does any sensible Frenchman quarrel with a seller of good wine. Bibi’s buvette grew up like a gourd, for the workmen over the way saw that the plant was for their own pleasure, and spent the evenings in helping it to grow. They put up Bibi’s hut for him, built Mademoiselle Barbe a throne and a set of shelves, knocked tables and benches together, even helped with the furniture. Bibi had a small marquée as well as a hut. He meant to sleep in the marquée, but Mademoiselle Barbe demanded a door and a lock, and the room that was partitioned off at the end of the hut. For one day Bibi distributed free drinks in token of his gratitude to the good fellows who had their eyes fixed on the red-haired girl’s petticoat. Bibi became popular. He had a fine collection of lewd stories suited to the gentlemen whom the “Elephant” had imported into Beaucourt.
Durand professed to see virtues in Louis Blanc’s establishment.
“It will keep the roughs out of the village.”
Lefèbre insisted on seeing the truth.
“There is part of the village that may be glad to join the roughs.”
“Mon Dieu,” said Anatole, “are we not rather like a couple of fussy old hens?”
“My religion spreads its wings over the children. You know very well, my friend, that Goblet has opened the lid of the box. We shall have trouble here.”
Durand bit his finger-nails.
“There may be a way of persuading that fellow Blanc to disappear.”
Paul missed the events of those few days, for Amiens had made him a present, the present that Monsieur Poupart had expected to bring back with him. Brent went down with influenza, an influenza of a particularly virulent type. He was alone in the house, Luce Philipon having returned to her parents, and the disease struck Paul like a dose of poison. He was at work in the morning; that evening he was delirious, with a temperature that had soared.
About nine o’clock in the evening old Prosper Cordonnier, who slept at the château, and acted as Anatole’s “store-guard,” was sent down by Durand to the Café de la Victoire with a message to Brent. Anatole wished him to come up next day and make a rough survey of the château. Cordonnier found the café shut up, but hearing a voice, he knocked at the door. No one answered the knock, so Cordonnier tried the door, and finding it unlocked, walked in.
It was still sufficiently light for Cordonnier to see his way about the house, and he discovered Brent in bed in the little room whose window overlooked the garden. Paul was delirious, and talking all sorts of imaginable nonsense, and he was talking in English. Cordonnier stood and stared at him. This lingo was strange to Prosper, who had passed his refugee years working on a farm in the Gironde.
Cordonnier bent over the bed, and shook Brent by the shoulder.
“Hallo, old chap, what’s the matter?”
Brent pushed him away.
“Bosh,” he said, “bosh! Oh, go to the devil!”
Cordonnier left him, but he stood in the passage for a minute or two, rubbing his chin and listening. Prosper had been known in Beaucourt as “Mutton Head,” a man of slow movements, very stupid, yet touchily conscious of his stupidity. People had laughed at him, and this laughter had bred in Cordonnier a stubborn reticence. He used very few words, and those of the simplest. He talked only of obvious things, and if anyone asked him for an opinion he bolted back into his silence like a rabbit into a hole. He had one failing, a fondness for drink, and he had been heard to argue with a mild recklessness upon the contrasted virtues of farmyard dung and chemical manures.
Cordonnier went back to the château.
“That fellow Paul might have been talking German,” was the thought that entered his head, “but we won’t say anything about that. They always laugh, the fools! A man should keep things to himself.”
He told Durand that Paul was sick. “I found him in bed, monsieur. You had better see him yourself in the morning.”
“Nothing serious, Prosper?”
Cordonnier avoided expressing his opinion.
“He was in bed, monsieur, so I came away.”
Anatole was with Paul early the next day; the high fever had passed, and he found Brent flushed but sane. He remembered nothing of Cordonnier’s visit, nor had it occurred to him that he might have been babbling in English.
“This comes of taking a holiday in Amiens.”
Durand lit the stove in the kitchen, warmed up some milk, and made Paul drink it.
“When does Manon come back?”
“To-morrow.”
“I will fetch Mère Vitry. She is a good nurse, and she will be glad to look after you.”
And there the incident ended. Mère Vitry came in, a very willing angel of mercy, with her patched skirt, and her bright black eyes. She washed Paul’s hands and face, talking to him as she would have talked to a baby, and shuffling about the house in an old pair of felt slippers. In the toe of one of these slippers a mouse had gnawed a hole, and the little black circle fascinated Brent. It looked like a bird’s eye.
Manon returned next day in Monsieur Talmas’ cart. She found Mère Vitry sitting in the kitchen, darning Paul’s socks, her cat asleep on the table by the window, and the coffee-pot ready on the stove. Manon had been in a state of pleasant excitement from the moment that she had left Amiens. She was returning to her home and to her lover.
“You have been looking after my man. How good of you.”
“S-sh!” said Mère Vitry, “he is asleep.”
“Asleep!”
“He has been ill, my dear, but he is better. Monsieur Durand says it is la grippe. Perhaps you had better not go into the room.”
Manon put her bag on the table, took off her hat, and behaved as Mère Vitry would have behaved in impulsively flouting her own advice. She went to the door of Paul’s room, opened it without a sound, and stood looking at him as he lay in bed asleep.
It was that kiss on the forehead that woke Brent. He opened his eyes to find her bending over him, her warm red mouth still shaping a kiss. Her clothes and her bosom smelt faintly of some delicate perfume, and her hands were touching his shoulders.
“Mon pauvre,” she said.
Brent lay and looked at her. He was thinking that he had never had a more pleasant awakening than the lips of Manon had given him in their new home.
“So you are back.”
He was content to look at her, and she understood the happy indolence in his eyes.
“You should have sent me a message. How long have you been ill?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and held one of his hands.
“I am not complaining.”
“No?”
“To wake up like this, and suddenly see you, here. But, little woman, you ought not to be here.”
“Who says so?”
“I do. I don’t want you ill.”
“Indeed!”
Deliberately, wilfully, she bent forward till her face was close to his.
“I am afraid of nothing that you could give me. So there.”
Brent would not kiss her lips, but he kissed her hand.
“I shall be up in two days. Life is so exciting just now. When does the furniture arrive?”
“On Friday.”
And suddenly he remembered that Louis Blanc had returned to Beaucourt. He wondered if Manon knew.
She was leaning back and looking at him, aware of the sudden seriousness of his eyes.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“You are in pain?”
“No.”
“But there is something; I am not to be deceived.”
He smiled up at her.
“How you notice things.”
“Yes. I saw Bibi and his new hut near the factory. Is that what is worrying you? Monsieur Talmas told me. It does not worry me.”
Brent’s face cleared. In some ways women are more courageous and more imperturbable than men.
“Well, then, it does not matter,” he said, “but I wish that fellow had taken his blind face somewhere else.”
In their happiness they were ready to forget Louis Blanc and that brown hut of his among the apple trees on the bank above the Bonnière road. The buvette was complete. Mademoiselle Barbe had her comptoir and her shelves for bottles, and at night the factory workmen crowded in and sat round the improvised tables and drank Bibi’s execrable wine. Those who were unable to find room in the hut made themselves at home under the apple trees. They were noisy; they sang. Bibi had a chair beside Barbe’s comptoir. He talked a great deal, but he never laughed. His blind face was the face of a man who listened for some particular voice, the voice of an enemy.
This hut of his was like an outpost, or a rallying point in the inevitable antagonisms that were stirring in the village. Peasant Beaucourt looked at it with unfriendly eyes. It was not that these peasants were saints; far from it; and yet it was as though that arch-peasant, Monsieur Lefèbre, had placed Bibi and his buvette under an interdict. There were elemental discords between the tiller of the fields and these ouvriers. The peasant had his home, his wife, his daughters, his work, his crops; the factory hand was an Ishmaelite, noisy, contentious, cynical, full of crude theories about double pay and less work. He had no woman with him, and your barrack-housed man is a troublesome dog. He will spend half his night sniffing after petticoats, and in Beaucourt the petticoats belonged to the peasants.
This tacit antagonism existed long before it was actually provoked by the inevitable escapades of the “Elephant’s” roughs. To Beaucourt, the Beaucourt that followed Durand, Lefèbre, Philipon and their party, Bibi’s buvette was out of bounds. No one went there. If a man wanted a little red wine, he got it at Manon’s café, and so, almost insensibly, the Café de la Victoire became involved in the feud.
Prosper Cordonnier was the first of the peasant party to secede, and his secession was furtive and occasional. This bibulous and inarticulate old man had felt a dryness at the throat whenever he passed along the Rue de Bonnière. His timidity and his passion for strong drink struggled together for a long time before that scorching and dusty day provided both the temptation and the opportunity. It was three o’clock in the afternoon; everybody was at work, and Prosper, who had been on an errand for Anatole Durand, passed Bibi’s buvette at an hour when it was empty. Bibi himself was sitting in the shadow of the doorway; Mademoiselle Barbe had gone to Amiens in Talmas’ cart.
Prosper loitered, looking shyly at the board over the door. It occurred to him that it would be polite and neighbourly to speak to Bibi, this poor fellow who had lost his sight.
“Good evening, monsieur.”
Bibi sat up very straight in his chair.
“Hallo, who’s that?”
“Prosper Cordonnier.”
“Come up and drink.”
Golden words on a scorching July day! Prosper Cordonnier surrendered.
“Help yourself,” said Bibi.
It was pleasantly cool and shady in the hut, and Prosper, after selecting a bottle and a glass from Mademoiselle Barbe’s shelves, sat down on a box by the doorway.
“It is very warm, monsieur. What shall I pay you for the wine?”
“Nothing,” said Bibi.
“But, monsieur——”
“You did me a good turn once, I don’t forget. Pour me out a glass, old chap.”
Cordonnier had laid a hand upon one of the most potent of Mademoiselle Barbe’s bottles, and in a little while the cords of his tongue were loosened. He became affectionate, talkative, foolishly confidential, dragging his box close to Louis Blanc’s chair, and tapping him on the knee with an intimate finger. He began to gossip about Beaucourt, the peasant part of Beaucourt. He had his grievances. His dignity in Beaucourt had never been sufficiently considered.
“Tiens, but what do I do at my age but run messages for Anatole Durand! And believe me, monsieur, I get two francs a day for it, my food, and a couple of blankets. Because a man has learnt to hold his tongue some people think he is worth nothing at all.”
Bibi sympathized with him. Old Cordonnier was a prodigious bore, but a blind man has to be patient.
“He is a dull dog, old Durand.”
“What I complain of, monsieur, is that he has favourites. Look at Manon Latour and that fellow, Paul Rance.”
Bibi yawned.
“Are they favourites of his? Fill up your glass, Prosper.”
Cordonnier babbled on.
“That fellow Paul Rance has a tin of milk a day; I have to carry it down each morning.”
“What, is he ill?”
“La grippe. And that reminds me of a funny thing, monsieur. I happened to go down to the café when he was taken ill, and he was all alone there in bed, and talking to himself in German.”
Bibi sat very still in his chair.
“But that sounds absurd. How did you know it was German?”
“Well, it was not French, monsieur; but of course, nobody ever pays any attention to me, so I never mention such a thing to anybody.”
He raised his glass and drank to his own neglected dignity.
“It is a great mistake to gossip, monsieur. I always hold my tongue. I’m not an old woman.”
Bibi did not answer him. His blind face seemed to have sunk back into the shadow of the hut. He was breathing deeply, nostrils dilated and twitching. This old fool of a Cordonnier had dropped a casual spark and set an idea alight.
For Bibi’s hatred of Paul Brent had become an obsession. His blindness intensified it, shutting him up in the darkness with his hatred of the man who had taken away his sight. He would sit for hours thinking of a possible revenge, but he spoke of it to no one, not even Barbe.