“That is a good idea. And, oh, Paul, don’t forget the spinach seed. And this evening we will go and sit in the cathedral, and afterwards we will drink coffee or a bock outside the café. You don’t wish to go to a cinéma, do you?”
“Is it likely?” said her man.
Brent had known Amiens during the war, but the Amiens of his wanderings while Manon shopped was not the city he had known of old. Amiens depressed him. Its narrow, crowded side-walks and penitential pavé made life uncomfortable for a stroller who soon grew tired of staring in shop-windows, and Amiens—like all cities—had the power of impressing itself with unpleasant vigour upon the casual countryman. The peasant is jostled out of his little, quiet complacencies. He has not the spaciousness of the fields to comfort him; the city cinéma-show tries his eyes. Too many people, too much noise, too much restlessness!
Amiens made Paul feel home-sick. He sat on a damp seat in one of the boulevards, a man with the soul of a peasant, a man to whom—after the first hour of window-gazing—this city could offer nothing. He felt tired, absurdly tired, and ready to be taken home like a child. Home? What was home? The place where he worked, where the crops grew, where he sat by the stove in a French village? Yes, it was that and more than that, and in those moments of loneliness Paul discovered the blood and the flesh behind the conventional picture. To man home was a woman, the woman, that and nothing else. The rest was mere furniture, baggage, call it what you will, inanimate things that become alive only when a woman moved among them and turned them into mute symbols of sentiment and tenderness. It was Manon who mattered, Manon the woman.
It began to rain again, and Paul jumped up. He walked fast down the wet streets and the people in the streets had ceased to be strangers. Even the few figures in khaki refused to accuse him of being an exile, a bastard Frenchman masquerading in French clothes. He looked up at the flèche of the cathedral, and his heart felt big in him, big with a sense of the common humanity of them all.
Paul went straight to the auberge, and opening the glass-panelled door, found Madame Berthier knitting. She looked up at him with a smile.
“Manon is not back?”
“Not yet.”
He went out with happy impatience, and waited on the bridge in the rain. He felt that she would come that way, and while he waited there a very wonderful thing happened. The battered-looking street, the grey quays, the green-black water of the river had seemed heavily grey and ugly. Suddenly the sun broke through, sending down a shower of yellow light, while the rain continued to fall. A coloured bow overarched the city. The chestnuts glittered, wet with a beautiful splendour of light. The cathedral seemed to tower into the sky, flashing its dripping stones and pinnacles and windows, its flèche ashine against a great black cloud.
Paul stood spellbound. His eyes were the eyes of an awed yet delighted child.