She was away at five o’clock, after a simple breakfast by lamplight in the red-tiled cottage. The morning was very dark and still, one of those mysterious and secret mornings when the heart thrills not a little to the eternal adventure of life. There had been a frost, and the air struck keen and clear, with the smell of fresh earth that some peasant had turned up with his plough. A few stars pricked the black sky. The great poplars guarding the road were still wrapped up in their coats of darkness and of sleep, and as Manon passed along the road and up the hill she felt rather than saw the branches of those trees meeting like a high vault above her head.
She trudged along with her bundle slung over one shoulder, and the saw swathed in paper under the other arm, not hurrying because of her knowledge of the twenty kilomètres that were to be marched that day, and of the work she wished to do at Beaucourt. She was a little woman with a great heart; also—she was happy. The blackness of the morning seemed to shut her up with her own thoughts, and Manon’s thoughts were many and varied as she pushed steadily along the road. The elements of life were mixed up with her thinking, and if, as the clever people tell us, ordinary thinking is but the glow thrown up by the emotions, then Manon’s thoughts were made of human stuff. She felt—and in feeling she knew, and in knowing grasped the quaint and seemingly irrational altruism of this English Paul, the essential badness of Bibi—the great truth that some people give while others take. If you do not give you will never know what life can give you in return. Manon’s view of life was quite simple yet shrewd. Men had to be managed. It was very necessary for a woman to have someone to love; she withered into a stick without it. Happiness can be planned, if you love someone very much, and go about the managing of your happiness like a cheerful little housewife. Simple things matter. Men like to be praised, women to be kissed. Always back your man with your tongue, finger-nails and heart. A comfortable bed, a well-cooked meal, and a glass of wine at the right moment are worth oceans of wise verbiage. A woman should never marry a man who was not a little shy before he kissed her for the first time. Greedy eaters are soon satisfied.
She trudged on, shifting her bundle from shoulder to shoulder, and presently the dawn came, a greyness that grew red like a fire. The bare trees of a wood showed up against it, the branches like some exquisitely carved rood-screen in a church. She heard a bird pipe up somewhere in the wood, and then another and yet another till a good score were singing, for the birds had multiplied during the war. Beyond the wood a great sweep of black and desolate country cut like a broad knife at the red throat of the dawn. A solitary house with half its roof gone, the broken stump of a tree, a rifle, butt end upwards, marking a grave, a pair of wagon-wheels in a shell-hole, all these were like black symbols against that red sky. Yet there was a silence over this wilderness, a beauty, a strangeness that called; and over yonder lay Beaucourt, waiting, waiting for those who would return.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Manon to herself; “nôtre pays est malade; it calls for help. The strong ought to help the weak. I must not forget that; my little house is not going to stuff itself with food and do nothing for the others. What a pity all the Bibis in the world weren’t killed in the war!—it would have made things so much easier, and I have an idea that Bibi is going to be a nuisance. I wonder what Paul is doing? Lighting the stove?”
Her thoughts centred on Paul, and somehow this wild landscape with the red sky turning to a tawny gold swept away any little feeling of surprise that had lingered in Manon’s mind. The wind blew as it pleased over these leagues of desolate country. Life was a going back to the wilderness—a fight, face to face, with the elements in Nature and in man. The little stuffy conventions had no roof under which to create a moral fog. You went out into the open with your man and laboured till the sweat ran from you, swinging axe and hammer, or plying hoe and spade. Courage and a clear faith in your comrade, that was how Manon sensed it. Adam and Eve, with God looking on, and the Serpent out of a job.
Some three hours later Manon came to Beaucourt in the blue of a March morning. A great white wall stood up at the west end of the village like a gigantic notice board waiting for a message; the wall had been part of the factory owner’s house.
“Yes, there ought to be something on that,” said Manon, smiling in the eyes of the morning.
“Beware of Bibi!” she laughed.
“Or, Tommy’s word, ‘Cheero,’ or just ‘Courage.’ ”
She left the road and made her way over the higher ground, through the orchards above the Rue Romaine, and from this hill she had a view of the Café de la Victoire and a little human glimpse of Paul Brent. He had fixed up a length of telephone wire in the garden, and Manon saw him in the act of hanging out his washing—a shirt, two pairs of socks, and the things that he wore under his trousers.