The House of Adventure

by Warwick Deeping

The fruit trees in Manon’s orchard were big with bud. Brent had joined her in reclaiming the garden; the rubbish and broken boughs had been cleared away, the wall mended, the fruit trees pruned and cleaned, the soil dug over. Seeds were in with neat little labels showing the rows—lettuces, beans, peas, early potatoes. Paul had rescued and nailed up the hardy vine that grew on the south wall of the house.

He was happy. He liked to wander down to the stream, and see the willow blazing gold, the young grass lushing up, the purple woods ready to burst into leaf. The great chestnuts in the avenue at the château were beginning to open their brown buds. Paul found violets in flower on a sunny bank, and came back with a child’s handful of them to Manon. He heard the wryneck in the woods, and soon the cuckoo would be calling, and as for the blackbirds they sang to him night and morning. The war had been merciful to Beaucourt in passing over it so lightly, and the spring seemed to call for the brown faces and the strong hands of the peasants.

It would seem that the world has to rediscover the great truth that it is the simple things that matter in life. The sap in the stem of a young oak is worth all the orchids that ever were pampered. Paul Brent was fortunate in his happy drift into the simple and innocent life, with its elemental needs and primitive triumphs. He was to escape so much of the disillusionment of the years after the war, nor was he to become the victim of that strange physical apathy that flamed now and again into feverish erotism. Men had had the strong drink of an abnormal excitement snatched away from them. They were pushed back to the bench and the desk and the coal seam, and life seemed a damnable dulness. Money meant escape. There were thousands who were mad for money.

Brent fell straight into the lap of nature, with a fresh handful of simple ideals ready to be sown, and he sowed them in Beaucourt and watered them with a happy, human sweat. He did not want to slack and talk and theorize; the days were too short for him. He loved the work of his hands, the simple sensations, the smell of the sawdust, the crisply-curled shavings his plane ripped from a plank, the new nails he hammered in, the paint, the clang of his hammer, the snoring of his saw, the smell of the soil. Life was good. The whole house was re-roofed; he had more leisure to enjoy the true craftsman’s love of accurate detail; he could stand in the middle of the road with his hands in his pockets, and Manon beside him. They were never tired of looking at the house, the new roof which Paul thought of tiling or thatching some day over the galvanized iron, the windows with their neat yellow panels of oiled linen, the front door which Paul had painted a gay green.

They were as proud as a couple of children over a sand castle. And Brent had fought for his castle and held it.

“Looks fine, doesn’t it?”

And Manon’s eyes were full of the spring.

In the matter of the more spiritual things these ideals count, and Paul—that simple fellow—kept his panache. Perhaps there are no English words capable of expressing the subtle personal pride of a Cyrano de Bergerac, or the emotional exultation of the chivalrous soul that has stooped to no foul compromise. Paul kept his panache. He had never heard of the word, but he was the master of all that it expressed.

He was in love with Manon. He looked love at her, but he did not make it, and Manon had the heart to understand. He was one of those natural gentlemen, bricklayer, shepherd, fisherman, what you will. He had his notion of chivalry, a chivalry that could give, wait, hold back. He did not rush to pick the flower and flaunt it in his buttonhole. Such men are laughed at by the shallow and the dirty-minded, but somehow they keep the love of a woman. You may find them in cottages, villas, country houses. They have escaped the curse of wanting to be self-consciously clever.

Paul and Manon went to church each Sunday, and stood for a few minutes under the shattered roof. They were not religious people as religion was understood in the Victorian days. Their sacrament was a little silence, a pause, a looking backwards and forwards, a holding of hands, a gentle generous emotion. They thought of the dead, of the children, of seed-sowing and harvest, of good comradeship and the peace thereof that passeth understanding.