“Etienne’s beasts are always tame. Yes, you have beautiful eyes, my dear.”
And though they did not confess it to each other the thought of Bibi blind and helpless haunted them all that night.
The working days slipped by, and in his white tent at the end of the avenue of chestnuts old Durand slept the sleep of a healthy tired child. He was irrepressible and he was happy, up soon after dawn each morning, and shaving in the doorway of his tent before rushing down into the village to begin another day of creation and adventure. Marcel Lefèbre was his partner in this early morning enthusiasm. Lefèbre slept on an old wire bed in the sacristy. Everybody knew that he spent the first two hours of the day working in the church, clearing out the rubbish, scraping the floor, and daubing whitewash over the banalities and blasphemies that casual hands had scribbled on the walls. The “flip-flop” of that brush and the priest’s splashed face were a rallying cry and an ensign to Beaucourt. The whole village gathered in the church for Sunday morning mass. The peasants came because they liked Lefèbre and because the service seemed to be a sort of social sacrament, a very human hour when they stood in silence side by side, and felt the humanity in each other. The dead were there, and the children. And there were those, Philipon among them, who had called the mass a mummery and a swindle, but who came to the church because Marcel Lefèbre’s religion grew in the soil. Even these children of reason felt that it was good to gather together and to drink of the cup of common humanity.
Beaucourt was happy, rather proud of itself and ready to echo old Durand’s cry of “Ça ira, ça ira.” There was a competitive spirit in the air, a spirit that was good for Beaucourt and for France. People asked each other, “What are they doing in Peronne, in Domart, in Caix, in Roye, up in the North? We can show them something here. It grows, it blossoms.” Beaucourt had some little reason to be proud of its work.
Yet there was a shadow. It arrived suddenly and unexpectedly, and it was cast by a man. Nobody save Durand and Lefèbre imagined that there was anything sinister about the shadow or felt that any new thing had arrived in Beaucourt. What did a little fat man signify, a manufacturer, a fellow who had been known as the “Elephant” because he had a nose like a trunk and trousers that made one think of an elephant’s legs? M. George Goblet was just a coarse little man whose life had been given to the making of money. In the old days the factory had seemed good for Beaucourt; some of the girls and women had worked there, and nothing terrible had happened. The peasant, not the ouvrier, had dominated the village.
Monsieur George arrived in a car. Durand met him walking down the Rue de Bonnière with Marcel Lefèbre, and Lefèbre had the look of a man whose dinner had not agreed with him.
“What, you back!” said Durand, with a quick glance at the priest.
Monsieur George had lunched in his car on chicken and a bottle of Château Citron. He smoked. He was cheerful; his face looked red and beneficent, but Marcel Lefèbre—the Christian—wished him in hell.
“Monsieur Goblet is restarting the factory.”
“Tiens,” said Durand; “he will have to bring his own workpeople; we are too busy here.”