Madame Castener had lit the lamp when someone knocked at the door of her cottage. The wind was roaring in the poplars and blowing the rain against the windows, and Marie Castener opened the door no more than an inch, for lamp glasses were terribly dear.
“Who is there?”
A man’s voice came out of the darkness, a brisk but quiet voice.
“Good evening, madame, I am sorry to trouble you on such a night, but they tell me that Madame Latour is here.”
Manon was sitting at the table with a sheet of red linen that was to be the cover of a duvet hanging over her knees. The lamp was turned low and the corners of the room were in comparative darkness. She saw a little man wearing a black-caped overcoat and a soft black hat step quickly into the room while Madame Castener closed the door behind him.
The visitor bowed to Manon, pulled off his hat, and, coming into the circle of light, began to unbutton his overcoat. He was a compact, square-shouldered little man, short in the neck and legs, with a shrewd, grey, close-cropped head, very bright eyes and an air of humorous benignity. He smiled at Manon as she put the red linen aside on the table, rose, and held out her hands for his coat.
“Monsieur Durand!”
“I have surprised you.”
She hung the wet coat over the back of a chair, turned up the lamp, and looked at Monsieur Anatole Durand with eyes that told him nothing. Monsieur Durand had owned the château at Beaucourt. He was neither an aristo nor a parvenu, but a solid little man whose father and grandfather had been solid men before him, millowners at Lille, men who had made money. Anatole had bought the château at Beaucourt about ten years before the war. A man of ideas and of energy, he had tried to teach Beaucourt certain things that it did not know, and Beaucourt—like most villages—had had no desire to be taught anything. Monsieur Durand had not been popular. He had lived up there in the château, and he had not belonged to the château. A peasant may abuse an aristo, but, even in abusing him, he recognizes the aristo’s indigenous right to be there. Durand was an importation, a city man, a big little fellow who appeared to think he had right to interfere with the other little fellows in Beaucourt. The soul of the peasant had shown its surliness. Durand was just a bumptious manufacturer who had come to amuse himself in the country. Beaucourt had held its nostrils at the smell of his autocar. What did Beaucourt want with an autocar? What did Beaucourt want with electric light, and a dynamo driven by water power? The man was a fussy, new-fangled fool.
“Be seated, monsieur.”