“How you stare!” she said.
Paul’s thoughts came back from that other life.
“Monsieur Durand used the exact word.”
“And what was that?”
“Printemps;” and he added, “this April seems to belong to me—somehow.”
They drove off, and Brent went to work, but the sun was shining, and his thoughts got in the way of his hands. He was so happy that he seemed to pause and to look suddenly at this happiness of his with the eyes of a man who was afraid of losing it. He had been nailing down the floor boards on the joists of the upper room that was to be their bedroom, and this sudden inward questioning of his own dreams sent him idling into the sunlight. He crossed the street, sat down on the doorstep of the stone house over the way, and looked with serious blue eyes at the café.
It occurred to him again that it would need a sign and that he would paint it. But might not the painting of that sign be about the last piece of work he would accomplish in the reconstruction of the “home”?
He lingered over the word “home.” It was very sweet to him now, but would it always be so sweet? Certain panic thoughts gathered round him like officious and penny-wise old women. He was an Englishman; would he be happy living as a Frenchman? When the house was finished, every stick painted, and the little farm without a weed, might not a sudden restlessness seize him? Would he be content to live all his life in a French village? That other home of his in England had never been a home in any spiritual sense; he could remember going out one night in a miserable and lonely rage and throwing bricks through a little greenhouse that had been his particular pride. But surely this would be different? Manon was different; he was different. And yet, at the bottom of this panic mood was a horror of hurting Manon, of falling short of her some day in the measure of his happiness.
“Fudge!” he said, and got up suddenly; “it’s just cowardice, that’s all. Haven’t I seen it in the war, chaps who were always looking for things to go wrong? It’s the same with the fellows who write books, books in which everybody gets into the gutter and all the world’s wrong. Just funk—Hallo!”
A certain aggressively smart figure had swung round the corner, buttons and cap badge polished, chin shaved, puttees neatly rolled, boots black and glossy as the back of a rook.