XXXIV
There were two very happy men in Beaucourt during that miraculous spring, Anatole Durand and Marcel Lefèbre.
Things went well, amazingly well. There were no quarrels, very little jealousy, and no slacking. At the end of the first month more than half the people were out of the huts and back in their own houses, and though the roofs were of black felt and the windows of canvas, the critical period had passed. The Philipons had sent for their children; so had many others. Mère Vitry was back in her cottage, with the picture of the Sacré Cœur hanging on its nail, and in her garden were crops of lettuce, spring cabbage, peas, beetroot, potatoes. There were days when the whole village went out into the fields, with Monsieur Lefèbre heading the pilgrimage, and the seed-sowing was a public sacrament. Durand’s tractors had ploughed up hundreds of acres, and though the season was too late for wheat, these peasants, labouring from dawn to dusk, seeded those great brown fields with beans, potatoes, cabbage, beetroot, turnips, peas and swedes. The luck of the season was with them. It was sunny and dry, and the battle was with the weeds. A hundred hoes and a blazing sun fought and suppressed grass and charlock, dock, nettle, sorrel, buttercup and poppy.
The orchards had only missed one year’s pruning, and promised well. Even flower seeds had not been forgotten. Manon was to have beds of mignonette, marigold, Virginia stock, red linum, gaudy nasturtiums. There were buds on the old rose trees, and Paul had done some pruning. The Bois du Renard was in full leaf, and the château chestnuts had had a wonderful display of white wax candles. The white thorn, too, had looked like snow. Old Durand had had lilac in bloom, and he had sent Manon a mass of it for the big bowl in the window. Paul had found her burying her face in the blossom, and he had caught her in his arms and kissed her.
“You smell like the spring.”
She had ruffled his hair with her hands.
The village continued to take its principal meals at the canteen, for this public kitchen saved time, labour and fuel, and allowed the women to spend the whole day about their houses or in the gardens and fields. Other families were returning, and, to relieve the congestion in the huts, some of the people who were more forward in their houses arranged to do their own cooking and to eat their meals there. The école was turned into an additional rest-house for the new-comers; they took their share of the work, food and material; the Council of Beaucourt administered a patriarchal justice. There were no gendarmes in the village.
Civilization began to re-erect its old landmarks, and Beaucourt made quite a jest of the new post-office when Madame Bonpoint, who was very fat and very red and a little severe, made Beaucourt think of a broody hen sitting on a clutch of eggs in a coop.
Pierre Poirel, the village farceur, put his head inside her doorway and crowed like a cock.
“Comment?” said the lady.