“That is permitted. But after that, you will take a holiday.”
He thought that she was joking.
“A holiday—with ten hours’ work.”
“It is Sunday,” she said.
“That is news to me. I had forgotten the days of the week.”
“Yes—Sunday. And I am going to church.”
“All the way to Ste. Claire?”
“No! here in Beaucourt. The church is still there. And I suppose le bon Dieu was not driven away by shells.”
“I shall come with you,” said Paul; “it won’t do me any harm.”
It was no formal ceremony that church-going, no affair of greased forelocks, polished boots and conventional self-suppression. Manon chattered all the way up the deserted street—buoyant as the February sunshine, talking about this romance of reconstruction with a frank enthusiasm that accepted God as an interested listener. Even the battered church with its stump of a spire, and white wounds showing in its grey bulk, was a thing of life and of hope. God had shared with these peasants in the tragedy of their ruined homes. That was how Manon visualized it. The Great Mother stood there amid the rubbish, stretching out her beneficent and understanding hands. The glass had gone; there were holes in the roof, and patches of damp on the walls; the tracery of the windows had had the beauty of its Gothic curves snapped and broken. Yet this church of Beaucourt seemed to have won a deeper mystery—the ineffable smile of a martyr, the beautiful exultation that no clever devilry can kill.