The logic of the thing was so convincing, and Madame Poupart so determined, that Jacques went out and laboured to earn his plateful of stew.
Anatole Durand and Brent spent the morning making a pilgrimage through the village. They visited each house to which the head of a family had returned, Paul examining each building and giving his opinion as to what could be done. Anatole stood by with his inevitable note-book, jotting down the details of this tour of inspection, while Brent and the owner looked at walls and gables, sagging roofs, shell-bitten chimney-stacks and questionable foundations. Each problem differed a little from the other; each house had its own particular sickness. Some were dead, so dead that there was nothing to be suggested save that a new house or hut should be built in the yard or garden. Anatole made a note, “Try and buy huts.” There were stud and plaster houses with the timber framing fairly sound; the walls of these could be replastered or covered temporarily with felt. There were brick houses that a little ingenious patching would put into passable repair. There were mere broken shells that needed building up squarely before they could carry the cap of a roof. In many cases a crumpled mass of tiles and rafters would have to be removed before the actual work of reconstruction could be begun. The old houses built of the chalky limestone of the district were the most hopeless of all. When such a house had been wounded, it had crumbled, cracked, dropped masses of masonry, dribbled loose stones out of the wounds, bled itself to death. The war had taught Brent to respect the extraordinary tenacity of good brickwork. You could square up the ragged walls, fit a patch into the holes, and the house was as good as ever.
Beaucourt saw Paul Brent as a brown man with a short, pointed beard and friendly blue eyes. He seemed a pleasant fellow, capable, rather quiet in his speech, and with an accent that was vaguely foreign. He was a stranger and Beaucourt kept a critical eye on strangers, but Brent went so wholeheartedly about his job and was so obviously a man of his hands that these peasants accepted him. They were too busy to be inquisitive. Brent had sat up late for many nights dragging out of the dictionary the French for such things as plaster, felt, rafters, joists, mortises, concrete. He had made a list of all the technical words that he could find, learnt the names by heart, and made Manon hear his lesson.
“You ought to shout more,” she told him; “you English just talk to yourselves.”
He looked at her with the eyes of a lover.
“Shall I shout those dear words?”
“You may keep that soft voice—for me.”
She had been a little anxious for her man, knowing that he had prepared himself to face a possible ordeal in this return of the natives. It was not only that he loved her and that he had come to look on Beaucourt as a home, but he had a man’s horror of betraying himself and of being damned as something worse than a fool. She knew that he would imagine that the humiliation would spread to her, and she could picture him packing his knapsack and marching off into the night.
He came back to her in the evening with the air of having spent a happy and a human day. There was laughter in his mood, not the laughter of ridicule, but laughter that had felt the pathos and beauty of the thing that had inspired it. He had been down to Mère Vitry’s cottage, and had discovered Monsieur Lefèbre on the roof, a sprawling, enthusiastic, happy figure with a distinct celestial shininess about the broad seat of its breeches. Monsieur Lefèbre was stripping the roof of its remaining tiles and lowering them carefully in an old bucket with a bit of wire fastened to the handle. Mère Vitry stood below, unloaded the bucket, and packed the tiles away in a corner. They were as absorbed as two children playing a game.
“It has been a great day,” said Paul; “I don’t seem to have puzzled anybody. And the way these people work——”