IX
Sothese two went back to the battered old red house with the patches of white plaster still hanging to the walls of its rooms, and the blue February sky showing where its roof should have been. The window of the kitchen looked along the Rue de Picardie and all the broken and jagged outlines of the village, etched with black rafters and the rawness of fractured brick. The snapped spire of the church was the colour of amethyst. White clouds floated above the beeches of the Bois du Renard.
Manon lingered for a moment at this window, her hands clenched, something between pity and anger in her eyes. Beaucourt mattered to the little Frenchwoman in a way that no restless dweller in cities could understand. It had formed the background of her memories, a quiet place where she had made a little song of the day’s work, a place where life had been rich in the emotions that are her religion to a woman. She had been proud of her café, proud of her linen, of her garden. Her happiness had made Beaucourt what no other place in the world could be to her. As the old Frenchman had put it, “The roots of life were deep down under the ruins.”
There were other memories, perhaps, thoughts that left a sour taste in her mouth, but Manon was thinking of the happier days. She had forgotten Brent, forgotten her hunger, as she stood looking out upon the ruins; and Brent waited like a man in the doorway of a church, some sanctuary that he had not the right to enter, feeling her at her prayers, wise enough not to disturb her. Her sadness was like a sweet smell of incense and the soft obscurity of some shrine. She was no mere material woman,—just a pretty, white-skinned, dark-eyed creature, with a beautiful bosom and a soft throat. Manon Latour had a soul, a little white fire burning in her heart. That was what Brent felt about her, the Brent who asked for those dear moments of mystery in a woman, for the flash of that spiritual fineness that can fill the eyes with a mist of tears. He did not want money; he craved for self-expression,—the simple human things, nearness to someone who was a little better than himself.
Manon’s lingering at the gap in the wall that had been a window lasted but a few seconds. She turned to Brent with a soft animation that played like sunlight across the deeps of her seriousness.
“Forgive me, Monsieur Paul.”
He smiled and handed her a box of matches.
“You will find a candle down there, and all that you need. I’m afraid I have not lit the stove.”
Her eyes seemed to question him. “Is it that you are wiser and a little more sensitive than other men? You can hold back.”
She went out into the passage, and Brent took her place at the window, lounging in the sunlight with his hands in his pockets, and recasting the metal of his vision. For a few short hours life had seemed solid and real, centred in that cellar in ruined Beaucourt, a life of quaint adventure, a boyish game played with the elements of existence as the counters. All this had changed with the return of Manon Latour. Brent felt himself adrift—on the edge again of a casual vagabondage. He was surrendering that cellar and all that it contained, food, shelter, even the vague inspiration that had been born in it. He saw himself packing his bag and marching.
“Monsieur.”
He had been so absorbed in these thoughts that he had not heard her re-enter the kitchen. He was struck by her seriousness. She, too, had been thinking.
“How long have you been in Beaucourt?”
“Since yesterday,” said Brent.
She sat down on the box.
“Since yesterday. And in my cellar I find food for many days, a bed, plates, blankets, all that a man would think of—if——”
She paused, looking up at him.
“What I did yesterday will be useful to you to-day.”
He smiled as he spoke.
“There is the beginning of a little home for you, madame. I washed the blankets; they have not been used since I washed them, and they will be dry by to-night. The food was collected by me—in Beaucourt.”
She interrupted him.
“Then—you meant to stay in Beaucourt?”
His face remained turned to the window, and she saw it in profile.
“I had thought of it. Just a whim, you know, the whim of a man who was starting life over again. By the way, the matches and the candles belonged to me. I can leave you two boxes—and if I may take one candle?”
Her eyes were dark with some emotion that Brent did not fathom.
“And where will you go?”
He refused to look at her.
“Oh, anywhere. It does not matter.”
“There is nothing that does not matter. And—you want your breakfast. Shall we have it up here in the sunlight?”
Brent’s chin swung round. He stared.
“Just as you please.”
She got up.
“I must light the stove. Or perhaps you are more clever at it than I am. Supposing I wash those plates. I can find some more boxes and make a table and seats here. And I have a packet of coffee in my bag.”
“Mon Dieu!” said Brent. “Life is good. I’ll go and light that stove.”
He went about the work like a thoroughly practical man, trying to limit the day’s outlook to that one word “breakfast,” and refusing to see anything sentimental in lighting a stove and boiling a saucepan of water.
“Anyhow, I shall start the day with a meal,” he said to himself; “I wonder what she will make of this place when I have gone?”
But Manon—the woman—kept intruding herself upon Brent’s prosaic philosophy.
“Mon ami—I want more water, and there is no bucket.”
Brent went upstairs with the bucket and filled it at the well.
“We ought to have a cistern,” she said when he returned; “it would save so much trouble.”
Brent was conscious of a shock of surprise. She seemed to be thinking in twos, while he was carefully limiting the future to one. But then—Brent knew very little about women. He had not learnt to divide the sex into its two groups, the woman who can be bought, and the woman who cannot. The woman who can be bought had always thought Brent a fool, because he had made a mystery where no mystery existed. Brent was an incorrigible romanticist, and your material woman detests romance. She suffers it in novels, but finds the thing a damnable nuisance when it comes gesturing and dreaming and getting itself mixed up with the very obvious furniture of her very obvious little life. The woman who could not be bought understood Brent at once. She was ready to trust him—but that did not help Brent to understand Manon Latour.
Manon had contrived a table and two seats in the kitchen, and had spread a clean handkerchief with a pink border to give a touch of feminine refinement to the deal box that formed the table. That handkerchief fascinated Brent. He stood staring at it while she was down below making the coffee. He supposed that she had taken that bit of pink and white stuff out of her bag. It was one of those little touches of colour, of imagination, that are like the opening of a flower, or the voice of a bird when the leaves are still in bud upon the trees.
Then he heard her calling him. She had one of those pleasant, animated French voices, soft and expressive, a voice that was made to chatter happily about a house.
“Mon ami—will you help?”
He met her on the stairs.
“The candle is burning out, and I do not know where to find another. Besides—they are so expensive; we must use more daylight. Be careful—it is very hot.”
She gave him the pewter coffee-pot, and was ready to follow with the rest of the meal. And she had a surprise for Brent—a little pat of fresh butter laid out on a rice-paper serviette.
“Allons!”
They sat down at the table, with the blue sky for a roof. The day was warm, a day that heartened the world with a breath of the spring, and the coffee was fragrant, exquisite. Brent spread some of the fresh butter on a biscuit, and looked vaguely sad.
“It is very pleasant here,” he said.
Manon was cutting herself a slice of bully beef.
“What children we are! And a child is the most inquisitive thing in the world.”
He gave her a sudden, yet shy look.
“Are you inquisitive?”
“Well, of course. But I do not catechize a friend.”
Brent gulped a mouthful of hot coffee, put the cup down, and stared at the pink and white handkerchief in the middle of the table.
“I would like to think I was that.”
She understood his hesitation and kept silent. Brent was still staring, the fingers of his right hand holding the cup.
“I am supposed to be dead,” he said with a kind of unwilling abruptness.
Manon put a slice of corned beef upon his plate.
“A good man has reasons.”
He raised his eyes to hers.
“A good man?—Well—perhaps! You see—I made a mess of life over there in England. I do not mean to go back.”
Manon’s eyes held his.
“You wish to become a Frenchman?”
Brent smiled one of those human and half-whimsical smiles.
“Perhaps—I want to make a fresh start. I’m not the sort of man who makes money; I’m too easy-going. I have always liked the things that you can’t buy.”
“I know what you mean,” said Manon. “One can’t buy happiness, can one?”
Brent’s eyes lit up.
“Now—how did you find that out?”
“I don’t think I ever found it out, mon ami. It’s the sort of thing I always knew. I suppose my mother gave it me. And yet, half the world never finds it out, and dies grumbling.”
Brent looked at her as though he had discovered a miracle.
“Extraordinary!—I always knew it—somehow, but the people I happened to live with did not believe in that sort of foolishness. I suppose my wife was an unhappy woman; she was always wanting something she had not got and she was always wanting the wrong thing—something that meant money. Well, of course, it fell on me.”
She gave him a look that was like a sympathetic caress.
“What a fool! And so——?”
“I smashed. Then, of course, she hated me. I was a failure—according to her ideas. If I had had a little pity, I might have got up again; but I did not get any pity. A man does like to have his head stroked, you know. Then the war came, and I got away.”
He drank his coffee and Manon refilled his cup.
“How did you manage it?” she asked.
“Manage what?”
“To be dead.”
He looked a little embarrassed, and then he told her.
“When my friend was killed down there in the orchard, I had an idea, an inspiration. He had no wife or children, no one who cared. So I buried myself in his grave, and took his name. It was so simple. I wanted to disappear, and to begin life over again.”
She was silent for a while, and her eyes seemed to be looking at a picture—a picture of this Englishman’s life. Her silence troubled Brent. He began to fidget.
“Perhaps it was a coward’s trick,” he suggested; “what do you think?”
“It is not easy to judge.”
Manon sat very still—realizing that he was in earnest.
“So you have turned Frenchman?”
He gave her a shy look.
“I managed to buy these clothes in Belgium, and then I disappeared. Paul Brent died a year ago, and if they look for Tom Beckett, my friend, well—they will never find him. If necessary, I am a Frenchman who is a little touched in the head. I have forgotten things. All my people are lost or dead; that happened in some village—early in the war. I’m just Paul—a vagabond. If people ask too many questions I just smile and shrug my shoulders.”
“But—all that—will lead to nothing,” she said gravely; “a dog’s life. I think you had some other purpose in your mind—and you are hiding it from me.”
“I have shown you the vagabond, madame, and a vagabond has no rights, no claims upon anybody.”
“Mon ami,” she said, “many men would say that you were a fool to trust a woman. You shall not regret it. When I look at these ruins I feel that the lives of all of us will have to begin over again.”
X
Brent’sday had begun with Manon’s tears, and those tears of hers and the incident of the untouched treasure had produced in both of them an atmosphere of emotional candour. Brent’s confession had grown out of the emotion that the misfortunes of Manon Latour had roused in him, and the tale that he had told her made her glimpse him as a sort of lost child, a man who was better than his past. She believed that he had told her the truth. His plan to begin life over again was so naïve, so whimsical, and so sad, that it moved her pity and made her wonder whether something more significant than chance had not brought Brent to Beaucourt.
She saw that he was making ready to go. He had the restless air of a man who was girding his loins for the road and preparing to shoulder his bag. She felt that he was sad over it, and that he was not so greatly in love with the vagabond life of which he spoke so lightly. She thought that Brent had neither the eyes nor the mouth of a wanderer. She could fancy him loving a corner by the fire, a bit of garden to dig in, the smell of a stable, a glass of wine on a summer evening, someone to whom he could talk, someone who did not listen to him because he was a stranger. She did not forget the corner he had made for himself in the cellar. A man who collects cups and plates and lays a store of food has not the heart of an Ishmaelite.
The meal was over and they were sitting there in silence, very conscious of each other and of the elemental and simple needs that had made comrades of them for an hour. Brent was filling his pipe. He looked vaguely dejected, and she noticed this all the more because he was making a business of trading in cheerfulness. Brent was a bad salesman.
Manon pulled out a gold watch, a watch that she wore under her blouse like a locket.
“Eleven o’clock!”
Brent straightened with uneasy self-consciousness; he felt that he ought to be on the road. Manon had put her watch back, and she appeared to have forgotten Brent—though she was thinking of him all the while with a shrewdness that considered everything. If Manon had a heart, she also had a head.
“Mon ami,” she said suddenly, “I shall stay here to-night.”
“The cellar is quite dry.”
“That long walk frightens me. It is seventeen kilomètres to Ste. Claire.”
“Too far,” said Brent with grim cheerfulness; “you will be quite comfortable here. Those blankets should be dry—and I’ll cut you some more wood before I go.”
She ignored those last words of his, and stood up, pushing back the box on which she had been sitting.
“I want to look again at all my little property. Will you come with me?”
Brent glanced at her in surprise.
“Of course.”
He rose and stood waiting while she took her cloak from the nail and flung it over her shoulders. And suddenly he saw her as a lonely little figure, a woman left sitting alone in this ruined house, and the man in him rebelled. He pictured her helplessness, the impossible struggle she would be carrying on against Nature, and perhaps against men. He understood that life in Beaucourt would be very primitive, and it was possible that it might be cruel. There were all the elements of a savage struggle for existence among these rubbish heaps that had been houses.
“I am ready.”
She gave him a flicker of her brown eyes, eyes that were on the verge of tears. He saw her bite her lower lip, and stiffen her shoulders as they went out into the street and stood there together looking up at the red shell of the house. A little furrow of pain, pain that was being fought and suppressed, showed on Manon’s forehead.
“Ma pauvre petite maison!”
Brent knew now that he wanted to stay in Beaucourt, that there was work here, work fit for a man’s hands.
“The walls are good,” he said; “they will stand.”
“But what can I do with bare walls, mon ami?”
She turned and walked into the yard, passing between the stone pillars that had lost their gates. The yard was full of the cosmopolitan rubbish that war creates, the elements of a civilized home reduced to one common scrap-heap. The stable had lost its roof. The little barn and the cow-house were mere timber frames from which the tiles and the plaster had fallen. Manon stood and looked at it all, and her mouth quivered.
“You see,” she said with a helpless gesture of the hands; “what is a woman to do?”
They passed on into the garden, and the garden did not despair. It had one great wound, a huge shell-hole in its centre, a pit into which the Germans had pitched their refuse, but an hour or two’s work with a spade would heal all that. The two holes in the stone wall needed stopping, and the espaliers cried out for the pruning knife, but as for the weeds, well they would make green manure. Manon and Paul wandered down into the orchard, climbing through the shell-hole in the wall, and here too Nature had a smile of promise, a promise of green growth that nothing could hinder or dismay.
Manon saw Beckett’s grave and glanced at Brent.
“Yes,—I lie there,” he said; “queer, isn’t it?”
“Was he a good man—your comrade?”
“He was a better man as a soldier than I was. That’s all I care to remember.”
She turned back into the garden, and her heart failed her as she looked at the roofless house. There had been an arbour in the garden at the end of the little avenue of pollarded limes, and Manon’s memories led her there. The iron frame was unbroken, rambled over by a hardy vine and some climbing roses,—a round iron table standing in the centre, with a semi-circular green bench at the back of it. People had forgotten to break up the wooden bench for firewood.
Manon sat down, and looked up at Brent, who was knocking the bowl of his pipe against the edge of the iron table. His face was serious—overshadowed.
“Mon ami,” she said suddenly, “I think that I am ruined.”
Brent glanced at her, and her eyes hurt him. He sat down on an end of the bench.
“I can understand,” he said; “it’s—it’s damnable.”
She began to talk with an air of pathetic candour.
“You see—my life lies here; the place is part of my heart. I have the blood of peasants in me, and all the time I think of the past. This morning I did not know what I should find here; I had such hopes, such an excitement of tenderness. And look at the poor place!”
She seemed to be touching something with gentle and caressing hands.
“What can a woman do? I have a little money, but all the others will be too busy to help. I shall not be able to hire labour. And even if my hands were the hands of a man I should not know where or how to begin.”
Brent had the stem of his empty pipe gripped between his teeth. He was staring at the house; and suddenly he turned to Manon.
“I am going to speak out. I shall not hurt you.”
“I am not afraid,” she said simply.
“Do you remember my telling you that I had had a dream? It happened at Peronne, only a few days ago. My dead friend who is over there came and spoke to me—we were here in this garden—but I could not understand what he said. When I woke up I had a feeling that I should come to Beaucourt, that it was my business to come to Beaucourt. And last night as I sat in that cellar of yours, I began to wonder whether some wise spirit had not sent me here. I want work, a new chance, something to make me feel a man. That’s how it happened; just like that.”
“I can believe it,” she said.
He went on, not looking at her, but staring at the ground:
“I told you I wanted to make a fresh start. Why should I go any farther? I have a little money, and one will want but little in Beaucourt to begin with—just food and boots and a little tobacco. Why shouldn’t I stay and rebuild your house?”
She was looking at him with her brown eyes wide open, softly, and with a kind of gentle incredulity.
“Mon ami, it is a beautiful thought; but it is not possible.”
She saw the muscles of his jaw tighten.
“You mean that it is impossible for me to stay here?”
“No, no! But how can you put a roof on my house? Where are the wood and the tiles to come from? Besides——”
He began to smile.
“It could be done.”
“But—you are dreaming?”
“I’m very wide awake,” he said, “and I say that it could be done. You have not seen as much of Beaucourt as I have. There are army huts over there—a little knocked about—but I could get enough timber and corrugated iron out of them to do the job. You see—ten years ago I was building houses with my own hands.”
“Are you serious?”
“I was never more serious in my life.”
Manon leant forward over the table, one hand shading her eyes and a faint flush showing upon her face. The forefinger of her right hand traced crosses and circles on the top of the iron table. She began to speak, hesitated, and fell back into silence. The colour died away from her face; she became very pale, so pale that even her red lips looked blanched. The very intensity of her emotion broke in a storm of fierce sincerity. She turned on Brent and attacked him.
“What is it that you want?”
And Brent did not flinch.
“I have told you. Work—a new chance—a man’s chance.”
She gave a flick of the head.
“Oh, I know men! They do not do things for nothing. Let us have no misunderstanding. I have nothing to give but a little money.”
Brent faced it out as he had faced many a bloody ten minutes. He was a little grim, but very gentle; and all his sympathies were with Manon.
“Now we are down to the foundations,” he said; “you have cleared all the rubbish away. You can hit out at me; it doesn’t hurt—because you are being honest, and I’m not a cad. I don’t want your money. I don’t expect anything. I don’t say that I shouldn’t fall in love with you if I stayed here—but even if I did, it wouldn’t be the sort of love that makes a man behave like a beast. That’s all I have to say.”
She smiled; her colour returned; her lips and her eyes softened.
“Somehow I believe you,” she said, “though I could not tell you why. And yet—what would you get out of such a life, what would it lead to—for you?”
Brent leant over towards her.
“Manon,” he said, “can you understand a man who has been a failure wanting to do something that is good and unselfish? Can’t you understand him craving for a clean taste of life in his mouth?”
“I can understand it,” she answered.
“Good God—do we always sit down and work out a sum on paper? Aren’t there bits of fine madness in life—glorious things that seem mad to the careful people?”
She held out a hand.
“My friend, forgive me; but I have been a woman to whom many men have made love. The fools do it so easily and they expect a woman to be flattered and to surrender just as one opens a door.”
Brent grasped her hand.
“Then—I may stay?”
“Yes.”
He threw up his head with an air of pride, and a flash of half-boyish exultation.
“That’s great of you—great. You are giving me my chance. Let’s go and look at the house; let’s get at it—at once. I want to take my coat off.”
XI
Fromthat moment they were like children carried away by the excitement of the adventure. The droop had gone from Manon’s eyelids. She glowed, she laughed, she chattered, her brown eyes alight, her heart full of the spirit of romance.
“What an adventure!”
“A very devil of an adventure,” said Brent. “I feel man enough to tackle the pyramids.”
She laughed and laid hold of his hand.
“I shall call you Paul,” she said, “and you can call me Manon. Now, we must not be in a hurry; we must consider everything—like wise people.”
“Heads first, hands afterwards. Let us go and look at the house, and get our plans on paper.”
He carried the two boxes down into the street, while Manon searched in her handbag for something. She joined him on the strip of grey pavé between the wrecked houses, a note-book in one hand, a pencil in the other.
“You see I have a head.”
Brent smiled like a boy.
“Trust a Frenchwoman to be practical! Just what I wanted. Now then.”
They sat down side by side in the open street, with the February sunlight shining on them, and the silence of Beaucourt unbroken save by their two voices. Brent had the note-book open on his knee, and he was looking critically at the house.
“Now then, let’s be obvious. What do you see?”
Her intense and glowing seriousness delighted him. It was like playing a game with a charming child.
“I see no roof,” she said.
“Exactly. That’s the most obvious thing. Let’s start with that. A roof means timber, corrugated iron, nails, a saw, a hammer, a jemmy or iron bar for getting the stuff. That’s bedrock. I’ll make notes of all these—under the word ‘Roof.’ ”
She looked over his shoulder while he wrote.
“How pleasant it looks on paper. We must find all that we can in Beaucourt. Can we not go now, at once?”
He turned and looked at her with eyes that laughed.
“Who was it said that we must not be in a hurry?”
“But I’m so excited.”
“Keep cool. Now, what next?”
“I see two holes in the wall, one just under where the roof was, the other on the right of the window of the public room.”
“We have to fill up those holes before we start the roof. That means lime, sand, bricks, and a bricklayer’s trowel. I write them down.”
“But can you lay bricks?”
“Yes.”
“What a wonderful man!”
“Now then—where the devil are we to get lime and sand?”
“Ah, where?”
She sat with her head slightly on one side, exquisitely solemn, frowning.
“The factory! There used to be sand at the factory. And bricks—they are everywhere. But lime? O mon Dieu!”
“We’ll manage somehow,” said Brent, “even if I have to use mud and straw. Plenty of straw in the old palliasses lying about. What next?”
“No doors.”
“A carpenter’s job.”
“No windows.”
“H’m,” said Brent reflectively, “I wonder if there is a dump anywhere about here. Oiled linen? Yes. I don’t mind what I thieve.”
She laughed.
“What morals! But—I like it. Oh, what an adventure—what life!”
Brent was making notes, and Manon pulled out her watch; its hands stood at five minutes past twelve. There was dinner to be remembered; she would be responsible for these household necessities, while her man worked, but Manon was too excited to think of eating. She wanted to explore Beaucourt, to discover all the wonderful things they needed, stacks of timber, mountains of corrugated iron. The iron would look horrible after the old red-brown tiles, but Manon reminded herself that it could be painted and that it would be the first whole roof in Beaucourt.
“Are you hungry, mon ami?”
“Not a bit.”
“I want to explore.”
He put the note-book away, and they started out on their first voyage of discovery. Brent turned down into the Rosières road and through a stone gateway into a grass field. He remembered having noticed half a dozen army huts standing in this field, and he rediscovered them with Manon on that February morning. There were six of these huts, and three of them were in very fair condition; one had been wrecked by a shell, and the other two damaged by splinters. There were doors to be had for the unscrewing of the hinges, window-frames also, though the oiled linen had been blown to ribbons.
Brent went through the huts, examining the rafters and the condition of the timber framing. He paced the floor of one of them to find its width, and then stood looking at Manon.
“Here is our roof.”
“Is there enough?”
“Enough in these six huts to roof half a dozen houses. And I think I can use these rafters.”
“I shall help,” she said; “I shall work like a man.”
Brent found a single wire bed in one of the huts. He put it on his back, and dropped it outside the café as they repassed it on their way into the village.
“I can rig that up somewhere. There is the shelter in the kitchen.”
She looked horrified.
“But you cannot sleep there.”
“Why not?”
“You will be frozen.”
Brent laughed.
“I was a soldier for four years. It will be better than the fire-step of a freezing trench. Now—what about this factory?”
As they walked along the little Rue Romaine, Brent discovered another Manon, a Manon who kept stopping to look at some wreck of a house, a Manon whose brown eyes were full of pity. She forgot the Café de la Victoire for a moment and lost herself in the tragedy of these obscure little cottages, and in looking through their broken nakedness at the weedy gardens that showed behind them. Rain had pulped the fallen plaster. There was a darkness, a slime about these ruins, a sense of pollution. Manon’s face seemed to have aged. The irresponsible buoyancy had disappeared from the adventure and she left the childhood of the day behind her in passing through the Rue Romaine.
“O mon ami, my heart bleeds.”
She passed in front of a cottage in which a picture of the Sacré Cœur still hung from a wall that had not fallen. “Grandmère Vitry lived here. Do you see the picture—and the tiled floor all covered with rubbish? She was so proud of her cottage—and whenever I looked in, Grandmère seemed to be polishing that floor.”
She walked on a few steps and then paused again. Her face was serious, compassionate, troubled.
“I seem to have been thinking of myself and of no one else. Do you think me very selfish, Paul?”
Her eyes appealed to him.
“I am troubled. I begin to ask myself, ‘Ought we to pull down those buildings—where people might shelter? Is it fair to snatch things for ourselves, when others will need them?’ ”
Her sudden sensitive hesitation touched Brent. He was being shown another Manon who thought of others as well as of herself. Brent’s heart had gone hungry for many years, craving that spiritual food without which no true man can be happy, and in the hands of this little Frenchwoman he seemed to see the bread and wine of the great human sacrament.
“Let us think it over,” he said.
He lit his pipe, and stood silent for a moment as though he was trying to visualize Beaucourt and all that Beaucourt suggested. The war had taught Brent to reduce life to its elemental facts. He had seen men do incredibly selfish things, and incredibly generous things. In attacking it had been necessary to keep your eyes and your mind on the objective, on some shell-smashed bit of trench that had to be taken—and held. You did not stop to look at the red poppies growing among the weeds.
“How many people were there in Beaucourt before the war?”
“How many? Perhaps two thousand.”
“And how many houses?”
“I can’t say—three hundred?”
“And all—without whole roofs. If we shared out the iron on these huts, each house might claim three or four pieces. There would be no sense in it. Besides—I will try to get all that we want from the huts that have been damaged.”
They stood there for a while, arguing the ethics of the adventure—nor did Brent find Manon easy to convince. He liked her none the less for that. She stood out against herself with a sturdiness and a courage that searched relentlessly for some sure inspiration that could satisfy the religious heart of a woman.
It was Brent who found it.
“Listen,” he said; “I will tell you something that happened to my comrade who lies in your orchard. It was in an attack on the ruins of a village. We were being smashed to bits as we went up the hill; the men faltered and began to lie down. My comrade went on. We saw him climb up on a bit of wall and sit there. He lit his pipe, and waved his steel hat at us. We got up and went on.”
His face lit up over that grim bit of courage.
“I can see it all,” she said.
“Well—we have got to be like that. We shall be the first up the hill. Perhaps the others will be dismayed, ready to despair. We shall be on our bit of wall, and we shall wave them on, and shout—‘Courage!’ ”
“That is true.”
And then he saw the light of vision in her eyes.
“And we can help, mon ami, we can help. I see it—now—and my heart is happy. Allons! There is courage in what we do.”
The factory was a red brick building on the south of the Rue de Bonnière, where the Rue Romaine joined it. Standing in the valley, its chimney and ziz-zag of walls were not part of Beaucourt as the Café de la Victoire saw it, the Arcadian Beaucourt with none of the grimy sweat of industrialism upon it. Yet the factory was to prove a treasure mine to Paul and Manon. Its glass roofs were shattered, and the machinery a chaos of rusty iron, but lying as it did, well away from the Beaucourt cross-roads, it had suffered less than any other building.
The very first thing that Brent saw in the factory yard was an iron hand-barrow tilted against a wall.
“Hallo! Here’s luck.”
He got hold of the barrow and found that it was sound and strong. A piece of shrapnel had torn a hole in the bottom—just for “drainage” as Brent put it. He was quite exulted over this stroke of luck.
Manon was watching him with a glimmer of light in her eyes. She had begun to like this man with his boy’s moods of seriousness and fun, his moments of shyness and enthusiasm.
“It is a little present from le bon Dieu.”
“For two good children. Now, supposing you take all those buildings over there, while I go through the workshops. It will save time. You know what to look for?”
She repeated the list.
“Lime, sand, a trowel—tools, anything that looks useful.”
“By George—I had forgotten something. What is ladder in French? Something you climb up, see?”
He made a show of climbing a ladder, and Manon understood.
“Echelle! Of course!”
Brent left her to go on her own voyage of discovery and made his way into the factory. The tiled floor was littered with broken glass that crisped and crackled under Brent’s feet. Here and there a girder had fallen and the place looked as though a Zeppelin had plunged through the roof and was rusting in a tangled mass of complex metal work. Brent saw nothing here but scrap-iron. He walked through a doorway, and found himself in what had been an engineer’s shop.
The opportune and heaven-blessed discoveries of the Swiss Family Robinson were not more singular than Brent’s adventure in that engineer’s shop. The indefatigable Boche appeared to have used the place as a workshop and then left in a hurry, and the British troops who had followed had passed through with equal speed. Luckily no Chinese had been sent to clear up the village, and Brent was the first salvage man on the spot. He collected a couple of hammers, a wrench, a tommy-bar, two cold chisels, a brace and a set of bits, a rusty hack-saw—a whole bag of nails, and an assortment of bolts and nuts. He was like an excited miser grabbing gold. In a box under one of the benches he found a jack-plane, a pair of pincers, some files, and a gimlet. The whole affair was so enormously successful that it seemed absurd.
He filled a box with the precious treasure, and staggered out to meet Manon. She, too, had rushed to meet him, a little flushed with excitement, a blue lacquered tin of corned beef in her hand.
“I have found a ladder. Its top is broken—but you might mend it.”
“Great! Look here!”
He showed her his boxful of tools.
“O, mon Dieu!”
“Everything I want! It’s absurd!”
Her eyes filled with sudden seriousness.
“Someone watches over us. It is a benediction. Let us not forget.”
And then she showed him her blue tin.
“There are dozens of these scattered about in the buildings. We ought to take care of them. They may help to feed some of the others when they come.”
Brent’s heart blessed her.
“No wonder we are lucky,” he said.
They went to look at the ladder. Manon had discovered it lying behind one of the sheds; it was a thirty-rung ladder, and Brent saw that the right pole needed splinting about three feet from the top.
“Just long enough,” was the verdict, “I think I’ll take this home before anyone else borrows it.”
He shouldered the ladder and marched off, and on his way back met Manon trundling the barrow along the Rue Romaine. She had loaded the tools into it, and the iron wheel was making a fine clatter over the cobbles.
Brent took charge of the barrow.
“I’m getting hungry,” he observed.
“Poor Monsieur Paul.”
She ran on ahead, and when Brent reached the café with his precious plunder, he found that she had the table ready and had washed the plates. The two glasses were set out, and in the middle of the table stood a bottle of red wine.
“Thunder, what is this?”
“I brought this with me. We will drink the health of the adventure.”
She poured him out a glass of wine.
“And I have a secret.”
“Then—keep it.”
She laughed.
“No secrets between comrades. There are thirty bottles of red wine, twenty of white, and a flask of cognac buried in the garden.”
Brent pretended to be shocked.
“You buried them?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if they are still there. The Boche had a wonderful sense of smell.”
“I put something to mark the place, and it has not been touched.”
“Heavens,” said Brent, “you will be able to stock your cellar. What a good thing it is that Paul is a sober fellow. But I should like to remind you, madame, that we have not found that lime.”
“Did I not tell you? I found a heap of it in the factory stable. I was so excited about the ladder.”
“Something very terrible is going to happen to us. We are being too lucky.”