Barbe, of the Coq d’Or, took a step up the bank and counted the trees.
“I make the number thirty-five.”
“Near enough. We will have the hut off the waggon here. Give me a hand; I can help the fellow to unload.”
Some of the workmen came across to help in the unloading. They thought that Bibi had lost his eyesight in the war; and Barbe was very attractive to men. They fraternized with Bibi.
“You are good fellows,” he said, “not like these damned peasants. There will be some good wine here when my buvette goes up.”
“What, you are going to sell drink, old man?”
“Plenty of it,” said Bibi.
XXXVI
The events that agitated Monsieur Anatole Durand were the arrival of the “Elephant’s” workmen and the birth of Bibi’s buvette.
Anatole had Marcel Lefèbre at his elbow, and Lefèbre had never hesitated to say that it was in the factory that the modern social diseases were hatched and bred. If you argued the point with him and quoted the example of Monsieur Menier and his Chocolate Town he would answer that there were very few enlightened men like Monsieur Menier, and that factories existed not for the good of the workpeople but to make money. To Marcel Lefèbre the making of money was the root of all evil. It debauched both the capitalist and the worker, begot the bastard lives that men live in great cities, made life hectic and unreal. He combated the assertion that the peasants were hard, greedy, less intelligent than the dwellers in cities, and he would ask you whether a man who could carry out all the varied and scientific work on a farm had not a more fully developed and intelligent life than a workman who spent each day cutting threads on a screw, who read nothing but the “red rags” and talked about things that he did not understand. In the villages you found no venereal disease, few prostitutes, none of the grosser sorts of crime. An occasional murder, perhaps; but Lefèbre was a man of passions—disciplined passions—and yet he could understand the violence that shed blood. There are occasions when the killing of a man is a wholesome and a cleanly act.