XXXVII
Brent was up and about on that great day when the furniture arrived from Amiens. It made a triumphant entry into Beaucourt, piled in two waggons, and followed by half the youngsters in the village. All the morning was spent in unloading it and carrying it into the house, for Paul’s staircase was a staircase of moods and prejudices, and refused to be taken by storm. The two men who came with the waggons exercised much patient and laborious persuasion, inspired by the enthusiasms of Manon and some practical sympathy in the form of red wine. Young Beaucourt stood on the pathway and stared through the windows.
Brent was aware of Manon as a pair of happy eyes, and a blue and white check torchon. She was everywhere, polishing, supervising, issuing orders in that caressing voice of hers, a housewife in heaven. Paul followed her about like a Greek chorus. He had been forbidden to carry anything heavy, and very often he was made to sit down in a chair.
They hung up curtains, put down rugs, moved the beds to and fro until Manon’s critical taste was satisfied. She would run forward, give a touch to some piece of furniture, and then come back to Paul and stand holding his arm.
“How does that please you?”
“Everything pleases me,” he would reply with the broad appreciation of the male.
Neighbours arrived and had to be shown over the house, Mère Vitry, Mesdames Poupart and Philipon. They were enthusiastic and without envy, for Manon was popular with women, and it was not easy for them to be jealous of her. There was no guile behind her enthusiasm; she was so practical yet so human that these older women seemed to feel the unspoilt child in her.
“So you will be married soon,” said Madame Poupart with a glance at the new bed in Manon’s room.
Manon was laying out the new sheets with the naturalness of a woman whose whole heart was absorbed in the great affair.
“Yes, I expect so. Paul is such a man for thoroughness. He insisted on finishing all the repairs before we thought of marrying. What do you think of this linen?”
The women examined the sheets, holding them up to the light, stretching them between their hands, and even scratching the fabric with their finger-nails. They talked all the while, and, though Manon used her tongue, her eyes were the essentially eloquent part of her. “We are going to be happy,” she said; “I feel it in my blood and in my soul.”
Madame Philipon was rubbing the linen between a thumb and forefinger.
“It is not so good as before the war.”
“Nothing is,” said Madame Poupart; “one cannot expect it.”
Manon gave a lift of the head, and laughed.
“What are you laughing at, ma chérie?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“You are thinking that your marriage will not be like these sheets?”
Rosalie Philipon’s eyes were shy and affectionate.
“Perhaps!”
“I think you will always be happy. There are some women to whom a man cannot be unkind.”
Brent had disappeared downstairs with the amused tolerance of a man who recognizes his own occasional superfluity. He was sitting straddle-legged on a chair by the kitchen window watching the two men preparing to drive their two waggons back to Amiens, and listening to the voices of the women up above. The animation and the intimacy of their voices soothed him. He fell into a day-dream in which he felt happily conscious of all the elemental happenings of life, a woman’s kisses, the warmth of her bosom in those dear moments of surrender, the tranquil sound of her breathing, the practical and caressing presence of her by day and by night. These voices suggested other thoughts and emotions. They seemed to fill the house with the spirit of the great human mystery. These women were busy about a bed. It was almost as though they were waiting for the little cry of a child—that faint whimpering that fills the hushed house with a sense of tender exultation and relief.
Brent’s eyes were blue and vague, but suddenly the alertness came back to them as he glanced along the Rue de Picardie. Something unusual was happening in Beaucourt. He saw a crowd of children, an English officer wheeling a bicycle, and behind them a G. S. waggon with three khaki figures riding on it. The two waggoners were standing in the middle of the road staring at the procession.
Brent had a moment of panic, the panic of a man with a secret. These familiar uniforms were so unexpected and so reminiscent of much that he wished to forget. He stood up and felt his heart beating hard and fast.
The window was open and he heard one of the waggoners explain these English to his comrade:
“Les exhumeurs.”
The truth flashed upon Brent. They had come to open Beckett’s grave.
He was conscious of a profound discouragement, an inward protest! What an omen! Why had they chosen this day of all days? He had a feeling that he wanted to run away out of the house, and to remain away until the affair was over.
Cordonnier was knocking at the door.
“Madame Latour?”
Brent got a grip on himself. He felt that he could not leave this business to Manon, and that he did not want the taint of it in her heart on this most happy and innocent day. He went to the door, and found Cordonnier and the officer waiting on the path.
Cordonnier looked under his slow eyelids at Brent.
“Monsieur Paul, here is an English officer who has come to take away a body.”
Brent glanced at the officer. He was the most harmless thing imaginable, a Moth in Spectacles, one of those anomalous males without masculinity, in age about five-and-forty, mild, a little frightened, with a brown moustache that fell down over a precise mouth. Brent seemed to know that there was a patch of baldness under his cap. He was indifferently shaved. His tie was in a lump. He wore very new leggings that did not fit.
“Bonjour, monsieur.”
The officer began in text-book French.
“Bonjour, monsieur, est-ce que vous avez un soldat Anglais enterré ici?”
“There is a grave in the orchard, monsieur.”
The officer blinked.
“Have I your permission to remove the body?”
“Certainly, monsieur. I will show you.”
He got the Englishman away before Manon could appear, and taking him round by way of the yard, showed him the grassy mound and the wooden cross below the bank in the orchard. The soldiers took off their coats and set to work. Brent turned away to rout a dozen inquisitive youngsters who wanted to see the body dug up.
“Allez!”
He looked white and fierce, and the children fled.
Brent sat on the bank and made himself watch this opening of Beckett’s grave. There was something final about it, something symbolical, and yet—as performed by these English Tommies—it was utterly without reverence. They smoked cigarettes; they were immensely casual and indolent; it was evident that they considered their officer a negligible old woman. Brent watched them with an increasing dislike. He saw one man spit into the grave, the instinctively dirty act of a mere common man, and for a moment he was almost on his feet and ready to call them “swine.” His eyes met the brown, short-sighted eyes of the officer. Brent understood that he, too, despised and loathed these men, but that he was afraid of their brute animal obtuseness. This, too, was symbolical. It reminded Brent of a saying of Anatole Durand’s: “In these days the brain of civilization is afraid to tell the body of civilization what an ignorant brute it is.”
Manon came out into the orchard, saw Paul sitting there, and understood. She gave him a mother-look, a caress of the eyes, and slipped away without his realizing that she had been so near to him.
One of the soldiers stuck his pick into something.
“The old ——’s there, chum!”
The officer winced. Brent looked fierce. He made himself go and stand beside the officer.
“Your men have not much respect for the dead, monsieur.”
The Moth in Spectacles understood French better than he spoke it. He looked almost timidly at Brent.
“It is habit, monsieur. They are awkward brutes.”
He spoke to one of the men.
“Be careful, Saunders; that Englishman was alive once.”
“B——y nice job he left us, anyhow,” said the man, with sulky insolence.
The disinterment was soon completed. Brent saw his own identity disc taken out of the grave and handed to the officer, and a sudden curiosity moved him. He edged close and looked over the little officer’s shoulder at the red circle lying in his palm. The Tommy had cleaned the disc by spitting upon it and rubbing it on his breeches.
597641 Pte. Brent, P.
2—9——Fusiliers.
The officer brought out a note-book and entered the details, while the men put what was left of Beckett into the wooden shell that they had brought in the waggon. Brent stood and looked at the hole in the ground. He was thinking of that morning in March when Beckett had been killed. He remembered the frost on the grass, the sunlight, the stillness, the white splinters of the apple tree, the hob-nails in the soles of Beckett’s boots. The memory carried him to Manon, Manon who was alive, Manon who loved him. He turned away and walked back to the house, conscious of an immense gratitude to her, of a tenderness that had felt the taunt of some unclean act and rushed to purify itself in her presence. How clean and wholesome and human she was! Those dirty, soulless men in khaki spitting into Beckett’s grave; those conscript grave-diggers turning over the bones of a dead valour!
Manon heard him enter the house. She was upstairs. Something in her seemed to divine his mood. She called to him.
“Paul, I am here.”
He climbed the steep staircase that he had built, and found himself in her room—their room. And, suddenly, her arms went round him. She held him close with all her sturdy, human strength, and drew his face down to her shoulder.
“My man has such a soft heart.”
He turned his head, and with an emotion that was very near to tears, kissed her warm throat.
“It might have happened some other day.”
She smiled over him compassionately.
“Well, it is over. That mound there in the orchard always made me a little sad. Now, look, all this is yours and mine; it is ours.”
She made him look round the room at the new bed with its clean linen and red duvet, the rugs on the floor, the curtains that she had tacked up at the windows.
“It is alive,” she said, “our little home.”
He held her close, and they stood with heads bowed, as though praying.
In the street a blind man led by a small boy had stopped outside the Café de la Victoire, and was turning his sightless face to it with a hatred that had inward eyes.
“It is a fine house they have now,” said the boy; “the door looks as green as an apple.”
Bibi said nothing. The boy led him away down the Rue de Picardie, and neither Manon nor Paul knew that Bibi had passed their house.