“Comment, monsieur?”
“I have bought it,” he said, shining like a little sun-god. “I have bought my American dump!”
They had come down after that, for a canvas ceiling could not suppress such a little excited, restless sun. Here was an event, a sensational episode in the history of Beaucourt! Manon brought out her wine, and they sat round the table, and talked—at least Anatole Durand talked. He opened his fat note-book on the table and began to roll off figures with the voice of a curé chanting the mass.
“Yes, I have bought it, but I had to race around like a comet. Just listen, my friends.”
He chanted triumphantly of timber and iron sheets and rolls of felt by the thousand, tins of preserved meat, fruit, milk, salmon by the tens of thousand, coffee in hundreds of kilos, blankets, tools, barbed wire, buckets, candles, soap. Wine and honey in Canaan! The oration was Biblical, exultant.
“It must have cost you a fortune, monsieur,” said Manon.
Durand would not boast about the money he spent.
“Oh, I have plenty left. It is the best bargain I have ever made in my life.”
“And where is the dump, monsieur?”
“A hundred miles south of Chalons, perhaps. But I have arranged for the hire of a dozen lorries, and we will have it here in no time. Now see what it is to be thorough. I have here the cubic space of the dump, and the cubic space of the cellars at the château, you know what good cellars they are, and all the food and the blankets can be stored in them. The timber and the felt and the iron sheeting can be stacked in the courtyard.”