XII
Afterdinner they held a council of war. It was Manon who opened it, Manon the woman, the housewife, the Queen of the Linen and the Store Cupboard.
“I shall go to Amiens,” she said; “will you please give me my note-book?”
Brent surrendered it to her, and smoked his pipe, while she sat biting the end of the pencil, a very serious and pre-occupied little woman whose eyes looked at the mottled and disfigured face of the stone house over the way, and whose right hand kept jotting down notes on the paper.
“I can hire a pony and cart at Ste. Claire. Yes, I will go to Ste. Claire the day after to-morrow, and I shall stay away three days. There are so many things that we shall need.”
Brent sunned himself in the pleasant seriousness of her enthusiasm. Now and again he was conscious of a moment of incredulity as he watched her intent face with its soft curves and wreath of coal-black hair. Her brown eyes seemed to be looking into the windows of the magasins of Amiens. When she was puzzled or in doubt she tapped her white teeth with the end of the pencil. He became aware of the fact that he himself appeared to be the centre in the field of her vision. She looked at his pipe—his boots, his clothes, with the critical eyes of a little mother fitting out a boy for school.
“Potatoes!”
She made a note on the page.
“I have to think of your health,” she said with wide-eyed candour; “it is necessary for a man to have good food, a little fresh meat and vegetables. It will be necessary for me to go marketing once a week.”
“Then you will let me share.”
He patted his pocket.
She looked at him gravely and shook her head.
“That is my affair. You work, I find the food. That is my part of the partnership. It is quite reasonable.”
Brent attempted to argue, but she was very determined, and she had her way.
“You must leave me some share, mon ami. It would be absurd if you were responsible for everything.”
“Now tell me. What do you require—most urgently?”
He reflected.
“A good saw.”
“Yes.”
“A dictionary.”
“But you speak almost like a Frenchman.”
“I haven’t all the words I want—the names of things.”
She made a note of the dictionary.
“Some paint and brushes. And nails—nails of all sizes. We shall eat nails.”
When she had completed her list she tore out the leaf and handed the note-book back to Brent.
“I am going to tidy the house,” she said.
Brent had schemes of his own. He went out and paced the length and breadth of the café, and then sat down on the steps of the stone house and did sums on paper. He reckoned that he would need some hundred sheets of corrugated iron if the sheets measured six feet by two feet, and allowing for overlap. The timber for the rafters worked out at 720 feet. Then there would be the tie-pieces and battens. He saw, too, that it would be necessary to fit bedding-plates for the rafters to bear upon along the tops of the walls. That was a problem that sent him wandering through Beaucourt on another voyage of discovery.
In an alley behind the Post Office Brent found a dump of pit-props and railway sleepers. The sleepers were seven feet in length, well squared, and in good condition, the very material he needed for his bedding-plates. He spent an hour shouldering a dozen of them across to the Café de la Victoire, and stacking them in one of the rooms on the right of the passage. Brent was shaping his plans with a forethought that contemplated a complete assembling of all the necessary material. He was not fool enough to begin building before he had made sure of his resources.
Seeing nothing of Manon, he went to explore the Rue de Bonnière between the Post Office and the factory. There were some biggish houses on the north of the street, and the remains of a few shops. Brent worked through the houses, making notes of anything that might be usefully borrowed. In what appeared to have been the yard of a local builder of Beaucourt, Brent found the head of a felling axe and a bricklayer’s rusty trowel. A carpenter’s saw was the one thing he coveted, but Beaucourt baulked him in the matter of a saw. He collected a coil of stout telephone wire, a French shovel, and the head of a hoe; but it was in the backyard of the last house that he made his great find.
In one corner of the yard, an old gig with black and yellow wheels was standing with its shafts uptilted, like a praying mantis. Dash-board and seat were gone, and three of the spokes were broken in one wheel, but Brent’s brain rushed to imagine the uses of such a vehicle. He got hold of the shafts, and found that the gig could be trundled quite successfully; it was light, and the injured wheel would function, provided that too much was not expected of it. Brent dragged the gig out of the yard and round into the Rue Romaine, and in the Rue Romaine he met Manon.
She was coming out of the ruins of Grandmère Vitry’s cottage, carrying the picture of the Sacré Cœur. She saw Brent between the shafts of the gig, lugging it along with an air of triumph. He pulled up—out of breath, for he had been trundling the gig up-hill.
“Transport,” he said; “here it is. The very thing for carting our iron and timber.”
Her delight was as great as his, and therein lay the secret of this little woman’s charm. She reacted with the freshness and buoyancy of a healthy child, and her temperamental and French expressiveness made her an exquisite playmate.
“But—it is a triumph! Yes, the doctor’s old gig, with the wheels that made you think the sun was shining.”
“I’m borrowing it,” said Brent with a wink; “I’m borrowing everything.”
She showed him her picture.
“I shall take care of this for Madame Vitry. It was so sad to see it hanging there. Now then, you between the shafts pull, and I’ll push.”
The gig went up the hill with great briskness between the laughing and chattering pair of them. They ran it into the yard, and examined it there with much pride, Brent explaining how he could load the timber and iron from the huts, and run his improvised truck down the slightly sloping Rue de Rosières.
Manon had had triumphs of her own. She took Paul into the house with a dramatic gesture.
“Voilà!”
He saw a couple of chairs, one of them the arm-chair from the école, a real table, and upon it a collection of glass and china. There were cups, plates, dishes, tumblers, wine-glasses, forks, spoons, even a couple of rusty knives. A china candlestick was included. On the floor stood a big earthenware bread-pan, a kettle, and an old tin bath.
“Magnificent,” said Brent.
“Borrowed—like your gig,” she added, with a look of mischief.
“There are times, madame, when it does not do to be too particular.”
“Ah, I have a piece of work for you—to-morrow. I have found my own kitchen stove. It is in the école.”
“No time like the present. I’ll collect it with the barrow.”
“It takes to bits, mon ami. You will find it in the ground-floor room on the left.”
“Map reference not required. I go—toute de suite.”
So Brent went out again into the ruins of Beaucourt and worked till the red sun set alight the beeches of the Bois du Renard and the sky was a steely blue above his head. Brent had been exploring the château on the hill, and he stood on the grass-grown drive, with the grass crisping with frost under his feet. He heard a partridge calling to its mate, a harsh but plaintive sound in the great silence.
A sudden solemnity fell upon Brent. He looked out over the wooded country purpling in the hollow of the up-rolling night. The redness began to die down beyond the Bois du Renard. Presently a star flickered out. The air was very cold, and Brent’s breath a patch of silver vapour.
The beauty and strangeness of it all seemed like the fall of a curtain at the end of that most wonderful day. Brent could hardly believe that so much had happened in ten short hours, those extraordinary hours full to the brim with inevitable adventure. He turned his head to look down at Beaucourt, a ghost village melting slowly into the dusk, a pattern of broken walls and gables, patches of whiteness, shadowy hollows like the eye-sockets of a skull. Brent saw a light shine out, a little yellow square in the darkness, solitary and strange. It was the light in the Café de la Victoire—Manon’s light.
Brent did an absurd thing. He took off his cap to it—uncovered his head.
“Home,” he said; “how queer!”
His footsteps seemed to make a great noise in the silent village as he walked back through the still, cold night—but Brent did not feel the cold, for his heart was warm in him. Manon was whistling, whistling like a blackbird; the sound came out of the cellar, a cellar that was full of the glow from the stove.
She heard his footsteps up above and ran to the steps.
“It is you?”
“Yes.”
“Come down. Supper is ready.”
He hesitated at the head of the stairs, a man grown suddenly shy.
“May I? It is your cellar.”
“Do not be foolish,” she said; “I have cooked you a hot supper.”
That wonderful day drew to a close. Manon and Paul were tired, wholesomely and happily tired, and they ended the day by arguing about the blankets.
“One each,” said Manon.
“You can have both.”
“Then I will have neither.”
“My greatcoat is enough for me.”
“Mon ami,” she said, “if you think that I am going to let you sleep up there under a bit of tin with nothing but your coat, you are a little touched in the head. Take your blanket, at once, and do not argue.”
Brent surrendered. He bade her good-night and went upstairs, taking his bag for a pillow. He made a sack of his blanket, crept into it, and settled himself on the creaking wire bed under the four pieces of corrugated iron. Through the window he could see the stars shining over Beaucourt, clear, frosty stars.
Brent pulled his greatcoat over his head, and slept in spite of the cold.
XIII
Manondid not wake very early, and rays of sunlight were thrusting like sword blades through the iron grating when she opened her eyes.
The cellar was warm, and the wire bed surprisingly comfortable, and Manon lay curled up, looking at the yellow light and feeling in no hurry to leave the bed.
“Another fine day,” she said; “I wonder if the man is still asleep.”
She became aware of a thudding sound coming from the back of the house, a sound that associated itself with ideas of work—strenuous work on a frosty morning. Manon felt guilty. She had a vision of Paul warming himself after a night spent with one blanket under a tin roof, and she jumped up and lit the stove. She had decided to give him hot coffee.
When the stove was well alight, she brought a comb and a little mirror out of her bag and put up her hair. She had slept in her clothes, and however much she disliked the feeling of it, she realized that such things as blankets bulk big in any scheme of civilization, and that without blankets a woman’s sense of daintiness might not be able to survive.
“I must go to Amiens,” she reflected, as she washed her hands and face in an old tin basin half full of cold water; “but what a pity that things are so dear.”
The stove needed more wood, and she went up in search of her partner, discovering him in the yard, breaking up boxes with a pick.
“You poor man,” she said, “are you frozen?”
“I had to thaw my feet and hands,” he laughed, “but life is devilish good.”
“We will change all that—not the devilish good part of it, Monsieur Paul. There will be hot coffee in ten minutes.”
“I am going to splice that ladder before breakfast.”
“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.
Manon paused in the Place de l’Eglise. She was silent now, wide-eyed, serious. She made the sign of the cross as she looked up at the broken spire.
“It is still very beautiful. Let us go in.”
The church of Beaucourt had served many purposes. It had been a hospital, a supply store, a stable, and it carried the stigmata of all these experiences upon its stones. Soldiers had scribbled on its walls, driven in nails, left lewd phrases strung upon the plaster. Whenever it rained there were puddles on the floor. Rubbish and smashed masonry choked the aisles. Someone had slept on the altar and left a dirty mattress there, but the Gothic mystery remained, the awe, that invisible something that is like the sigh of an invisible god.
Brent followed Manon into the church, uncovering his head as she dipped a finger into the imaginary water of the piscina, and made her little obeisance to the altar. She knelt down on the stone floor, and Brent knelt down beside her. She remained thus for some minutes, eyes closed, hands folded,—but Brent did not close his eyes—for his religion was centred in Manon. Brent was just the ordinary man, supremely indifferent to dogmatic religion, well able to live without it, rather mistrustful of the so-called religious people. But Manon’s kneeling figure touched his sense of the beauty of human emotion. Her simple devoutness had the charm of a pleasant picture. It added mystery to her, made her eyes more than mere mirrors of consciousness, her blood more than a red and vitalizing fluid. Brent had always been something of a mystic, a man who had disliked his mysticism reduced to printer’s ink and pews.
A light breeze had sprung up. It played through the broken tracery of the windows and through the rents in the roof, making a soft and plaintive murmur like the rush of invisible wings. Manon opened her eyes, raised her head and smiled. Her face made Brent think of white light. He felt that he could trust Manon as very few women can be trusted; she had not the hard little soul of the modern girl; she would understand a man’s finer impulses; she would not shock him with some sudden little blasphemous confession of crude and vulgar egotism. And yet he realized that she was no fool.
She crossed herself, stood up, and brushed the dirt from her black skirt. It was the practical, pleasantly dainty little Frenchwoman who reappeared.
“They need a broom here. And what a bill there will be for glass!”
They passed out again into the sunlight.
“It was good of you to come with me. In these days men are not devout; they have other things to think of. Are you a Catholic, mon ami?”
Brent hesitated.
“No, to be perfectly honest.”
And then she surprised him.
“Do not worry your conscience. When I go to church, it is not because I am this or that, but because I know there is a God, and that life is a mystery, and that one should kneel down and feel things and try to understand. I am not a religious woman, as the priests would have it, nor am I a Catholic. Religious women are often not good women—as I understand goodness.”
“You are full of surprises,” he said.
She gave him a shrewd little smile.
“I went to a good school, Paul. Do you think that because I live in a village I have been brought up in a convent? We French are very practical; we think a great deal. But I am not a little fool who imagines that she understands everything. One must have a religion, and it is none the worse if you make it yourself. Never to do mean things, and never to grow hard. And to remember—always—that one’s orchard and garden are miracles, and that life did not happen by chance.”
Brent had put on his cap. He took it off again.
“You get to the heart of things,” he said.
Directly ahead of them, and half closing the east end of the Place de l’Eglise, were the ruins of the Hôtel de Paris. The hotel stood at the corner where the Rue d’Eschelle ran steeply down to the river, a big white place, its angles and cornice of faced ashlar, its great central chimney-stack still standing up red and raw. On the other side of the street the Hospice towered up like a ragged grey cliff that looked ready to fall.
Manon walked towards the Hôtel de Paris. The ruins had a particular significance for her, for the hotel had belonged to Monsieur Louis Blanc, vulgarly known as Bibi. Manon had had cause to regard Monsieur Louis Blanc with peculiar distrust and aversion. He had been her rival, and he had desired also to be her lover; the intrigue would have suited both his body and his business.
“I must tell you about Bibi.”
Then they looked at each other, for someone was trampling over the piles of broken brick inside the shell of the Hôtel de Paris. The sound came towards them. A tall man appeared in the doorway, a man wearing a soft black hat, a black coat, and the blue breeches and puttees of a French soldier. He stood and smiled and took off his hat.
“Good morning, Madame Latour.”
Manon’s face became a thing of stone.
“Good morning, Monsieur Blanc. A fine day for the ruins, is it not?”
Bibi was looking at Brent with a peculiar and cynical curiosity.
“I have muddled the name, have I? Madame is no longer a widow.”
Manon snubbed him.
“I will leave you to guess, monsieur.”
Bibi laughed. He was a sallow-faced man with a pair of insolent, light blue eyes, a nose that broadened out towards the nostrils in the shape of a green fig, and a mouth that looked as though it had been hacked out in the rough and never finished. He had a way of staring people in the face with a faintly ironical smile, a smile that put them down in the mud. He looked very strong with the strength of a great, raw-boned, nasty-tempered horse. The backs of his hands were covered with black hair.
“Perhaps monsieur is less proud?”
He looked at Brent, cocking one shoulder up, and tilting his head. But Brent said nothing. He was trying to explain his own instant feeling of antipathy towards the man, and an instinctive desire to hit Monsieur Bibi hard and square between the eyes. It was not that the man was evil. Brent had lived with evil men, and they had not troubled his temper. And then he struck it. It was Bibi’s swagger, the arrogance of the male thing who had had many successes with women. Bibi was one great swagger. He swaggered when he smiled, when he talked, even when he stood still. His very silence swaggered. And Brent had a suspicion that it was not a thing of wind and brass—but a huge self-confidence, an audacity that took life in its hands and laid it next the wall.
And then Brent remembered that he had not chosen a French name. He pulled out his pipe, filled it, and looked at Bibi across the top of the bowl as he struck a match.
“Here is my fiancée, monsieur. An English girl, too!”
Bibi’s eyes snapped. He saw the joke, and he had learnt something that he wished to know. He matched Brent’s pipe with a cigarette, and stood there, ugly, polite and conversational. Manon’s face remained a thing of stone. She knew how clever Bibi was—abominably clever, and she wanted to warn Brent.
“So you have returned, monsieur?”
Bibi had a suspicion that she was trying to put herself between him and the other man.
“Just to view the scenery, madame. I drove over alone; the cart and horse are in the factory stable. Is it possible that I may have the pleasure of driving you home?”
“I remain here,” she said.
“Tiens!—Monsieur, perhaps?”
“He is staying here too,” said Manon with stubborn composure.
Bibi shrugged. He had learnt something more.
“You are more lucky than I am, madame; you have a partner.”
“Yes; it is an excellent arrangement. We have come to see what can be done—but all this is rather hopeless, is it not?”
She nodded at the ruined hotel. Bibi inflated himself, spat, smiled at her.
“I shall have that up in no time. Pst!—just like that! The bigger the job, the bigger I feel.”
And Manon smiled on him.
“You always were a man of resources, monsieur. I shall have to be content with a shanty, a couple of rooms,—what we can knock together. And now I have the fire to attend to; the blankets are damp; Monsieur Paul discovered them in a cottage. Au revoir, monsieur.”
Bibi’s hat swaggered to her.
“Be very careful of those blankets,” he said.
Manon did not speak to Paul until they were half-way up the Rue de Picardie.
“Well!—that is Monsieur Bibi,” she said; “what do you think of him?”
“A beast.”
His frankness brought back her animation.
“Yes, you are right—a beast—and a clever beast. Did you see how he was trying to find out——?”
“I ought to have a French name,” said Brent; “how would Paul Rance do? It is a river—somewhere. And if inquisitive people ask questions, and worry about my accent you can tell them—or I will—that I lived for seven years in England.”
Manon nodded.
“It is possible that we shall have trouble with Bibi. He has a grudge against me.”
“What sort of a grudge?” Brent asked.
“He wanted to buy my café—because too many people came to it.”
“Yes.”
Manon remained silent for a moment. She was thinking.
“Mon ami,” she exclaimed, “I shall not go to Ste. Claire to-morrow. I shall stay here several days. There is no time to be lost, and I can help you. We must take what we need before Bibi thieves everything.”
XIV
Theyentered the café and sat down on the two wooden chairs that Manon had salved from one of the houses. The coming of Bibi had introduced a sudden sinister complexity into the adventure, an element of discord, a threat of competition. Brent refilled his pipe. He looked worried.
“We had better begin on those huts,” he said; “I’ll get the tools together and go down at once.”
Manon restrained him.
“No, not yet. We must wait.”
“Till that fellow has gone?”
She nodded.
“Bibi is cunning. He has come here to see what he can find—and there is no generosity to be expected from Bibi. We must not betray what we are doing. When he has driven off in that cart of his, then we can work like slaves.”
“There will be a moon to-night,” said Brent; “I shall work all night. We must store the sheeting in one of those rooms, and I will get two doors and some shutters fitted at the first chance.”
Manon held up a hand.
“Listen!”
They heard a man’s boots clanking on the pavé.
“I knew he would come here.”
Monsieur Louis Blanc did not stop outside the Café de la Victoire. He strolled past it with the detached and casual air of a holiday-maker, nodding at Manon who stood at the window.
“Even if you have no wine, madame—they tell me there is plenty of good water in the well.”
“Yes, there is plenty of water.”
He paused for a second—his hands in his pockets, his eyes considering the house.
“You have been lucky.”
“Ah, monsieur, lucky! I have four walls and an abundance of ventilation.”
“I have two walls and half a wall. Just because my little hotel was too near the church! We always shelled churches, you know, just to give le bon Dieu a personal interest in the affair.”
He laughed and walked on.
Manon waited till he had disappeared down the Rue de Rosières, and then ran out into the garden. She knew that from one corner of the garden it was possible to see the field where those precious huts stood, but though she remained on the watch, the figure of Louis Blanc never appeared in the field. Brent, who was equally interested in the pilgrimage of Monsieur Bibi, went across to the stone house over the way, and saw the Frenchman turn back before he had reached the end of the Rue de Rosières. Bibi stopped to look at the well, gave a casual glance at the café, and diverging into the Rue Romaine, walked off towards the factory.
Brent followed him, keeping to the orchards and the gardens behind the houses. The ruins of the cottage nearest to the factory served him as an observation post, and Brent did not quit it till he saw Bibi driving off in his cart along the road to Bonnière.
Brent ran back to the café.
“He has gone,” he said, reaching under the wire bed for the box in which he kept his tools.
Manon was ready.
“He did not see those huts.”
“I think Bibi was looking at something else,” said Brent; “your café.”
It is probable that no salvage party ever worked as Paul and Manon did, stripping the corrugated iron from those army huts in the field on the road to Rosières. They dragged the yellow gig up the hill, and Manon loaded it, while Brent used hammer, cold chisel and tommy-bar, and slid the loosened sheets down to her from the roof. They made a fine and healthy clatter between them on that Sunday afternoon, but as there was no one in Beaucourt to hear it, no one was offended. Brent allowed twenty sheets to a load, remembering the weak wheel of the gig. Then they set off for the café, Brent between the shafts, Manon pushing behind, the load banging and clattering as the gig bumped over the pavé. They carted two such loads before breaking off for dinner, a meal that lasted less than twenty minutes.
“Forty sheets. That was pretty quick work. We want a hundred.”
He had lit his pipe, and was glancing humorously at the bloody finger and knuckles of his left hand.
“Nasty stuff to handle. And I was in a hurry.”
“You worked like a devil,” she said.
“I’m fresh to the tools. Show me your hands.”
Manon had a slight cut across her left palm.
“You ought to have gloves.”
“I’m not afraid of a cut or two.”
“Look here, I can manage alone this afternoon. Supposing you collect bricks for these two holes in the wall!”
She refused to do any such thing.
“Do you think that I am some soft little cat from a villa in Paris? I used to dig and hoe all my garden during the war, and I can carry a sack of potatoes if someone puts it on my back. I don’t cry off because of a scratched hand.”
Brent liked her pluck and determination.
“Put a sandbag over each hand. There are some in the cellar. I don’t want you with your arm in a sling.”
As he crawled about the roof, wrenching off the iron sheets and sending them skiddering down to Manon, Paul was troubled by the face of Louis Blanc. The adventure had ceased to be an exciting game played by two grown-up children; it had taken on more primitive colours, colours that had not the innocence of the brown eyes and red lips of Manon, of the purple of the woods and the grey green of the fields. The world and Monsieur Bibi had come swaggering together into Beaucourt, and Brent was conscious of the unpleasant significance of the event.
Straddling the ridge of the roof, and looking at the chequer of red and white walls, the shadowy interspaces and the patches of broad sunlight that were Beaucourt, Brent realized that he had become responsible for Manon. He felt that she belonged to him, which of course was absurd. Less than two days of close comradeship did not justify a sense of possession, and yet the instinctive fierceness of the feeling astonished Brent. Why this bristling of the hair, this clenching of the fist? He had no difficulty in finding an answer.
But a far more sensitive and unselfish mood forced itself in front of these primitive emotions. Brent sat and looked into the face of his own past, a past that conjured up the present and the future. The coming of Bibi had made all the difference in the world to Brent’s outlook upon life. A cloud had wiped the irresponsible and un-self-conscious sunlight from the landscape. This polite and clever blackguard had reintroduced the social compact into Beaucourt. The village had ceased to be a wilderness, even though Louis Blanc’s presence in it had been a mere matter of hours. His appearance was more than a suggestion. Society had returned in the spirit, even if it remained absent in the flesh, and Brent saw Beaucourt full of eyes, mouths, ears and heads.
His thoughts centred upon Manon. What would Bibi tell people, those refugees scattered through the villages beyond the region of devastation? Brent knew how a man of Bibi’s kidney would talk. “Oh, yes, Manon Latour is living at Beaucourt with some fellow.” Brent swore to himself—but swearing did not solve the problem. He had discovered that he was responsible for Manon, even though he knew in his heart of hearts that this adventure promised to be the cleanest and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him in life.
“Hallo!”
For the best part of a minute he had been straddling the ridge, staring at a hole in one of the iron sheets, and doing nothing. Manon was waiting. His inactivity was so sudden and so obvious that it touched her curiosity.
“Tired?”
He leant forward and knocked off the head of a screw with the chisel and hammer.
“No. Thinking.”
“You looked like murder.”
“I dare say I did.”
He loosened another sheet and slid it down to her, but she let it lie untouched, and stood looking gravely up at him.
“You were thinking about Bibi?”
He moved along the roof to attack the next sheet.
“Well, perhaps I was.”
“What does Bibi matter, when we are getting all that we want?”
Brent raised his hammer and let it fall again.
“It has made a difference.”
“What has?”
“His coming here.”
Her eyes had gone black and opaque, as was their way when she was seriously puzzled or troubled. It was plain to her that something was clogging Paul’s mind and hampering his work.
“What kind of difference?”
Brent was frowning.
“Don’t you see what has happened? I am not a fool who goes out to look for trouble, but we are not alone here any longer. A man has to think of these things.”
Her eyes gave a flash.
“Good heavens—you mean——?”
“Well, what sort of man is Bibi? Was he pleased to find me here?”
“You mean that you are afraid,—you want to go?”
Brent slogged the head off a nail.
“Damn!—I never thought you would think that! What the devil do I care what happens to me? But what I do care about——”
She caught her breath with a little breathless exclamation that was almost like a cry of pain.
“Oh, it’s like that? I understand—you will forgive me, mon ami?”
He looked down at her with eyes that had a queer shine in them.
“If you will forgive me for swearing!”
Brent went on with the work. It was the obvious thing to do, and it was a screen behind which he could hide, for Brent was one of those men who became absurdly shy in the presence of emotion. He hammered away with indefatigable ferocity, ignoring Manon who was stroking her chin with two fingers and looking at something that was a long way off.
Presently she resumed her loading of the gig, nor did she speak again till she had dealt with all the sheets that Brent had pushed down to her.
“Twenty,” she said, “we have a load.”
Brent slid down the roof, landed, and put himself between the shafts of the gig. Manon took her place behind it, and they started out of the field.
“Paul,” said her voice, just when they were on the edge of the pavé.
“Hallo.”
“I am not afraid of Bibi.”
The rattle of the wheels and the clanging of the iron sheets made it difficult for Brent to hear her.
“What did you say?”
“I am not afraid of Bibi.”
He threw his weight against the shafts and stopped the gig.
“Nor am I. Not for myself. But do you not see my point of view?”
“I have a pair of eyes in my head,” she retorted, “and in front of me I see my partner, Monsieur Paul Rance, whom I met when I was at Rennes.”
“Yes, all that sounds very pleasant, but——”
“Mon ami,” she broke in, “why are you in such a hurry to explain things to people, when no one has asked for explanations?”
She gave a push to the gig.
“Allons! You are afraid that Bibi will gossip, and that people will believe him. I am not going to be frightened by Bibi, simply because it amuses him to frighten people. Besides——”
Her brown eyes gave him a flash of buoyant audacity.
“You need not explain a thing that will appear obvious to decent people. And it is always possible for a man to change his mind.”
Brent was puzzled.
“I don’t understand you.”
She gave another and more vigorous push to the cart, looking at him with eyes that said, “What a simple fellow you are!” Brent turned about and put his weight on the shafts, and staring at the pavé in front of him, spent the whole of that journey in trying to disentangle her meaning.
During the unloading of the gig Brent watched Manon’s face as though he hoped to find it a mirror in which he could see the reflection of his own thoughts. But Manon’s face showed him nothing. She was the cheerfully determined little Frenchwoman wholly absorbed in helping him to unload those iron sheets. She refused to be sentimental or to let herself encourage Brent’s tendency towards too much self-consciousness. Men are such children, and Brent appeared to be an unusually sensitive child. He would go and get lost in the woods unless she held him shrewdly to the great work that mattered.
XV
Afterworking at the huts till ten o’clock, Brent walked back to the Café de la Victoire by the light of the moon. He was tired, dead tired, but his weariness was full of a pleasant sense of physical satisfaction; he had done the best day’s work in his life, and if his hands were sore and his back one huge ache, what did it matter?
Manon had gone home earlier to light the stove. She heard Brent’s footsteps on the pavé, and ran out to meet him.
“Partner, I’m tired.”
He laughed over it, for he was a little exultant.
“I never thought that we could do it, rip off a hundred sheets and get them carted and stacked here. I have knocked half the weather boarding off that hut.”
Manon enveloped him in a soft atmosphere of sympathy, applause, gratitude.
“Go down and sit by the fire. The water is boiling. What shall it be, tea or coffee?”
“Coffee. Your coffee?”
The tired yet happy note in his voice touched her. She had been thinking a great deal about Paul while she was watching the stove grow red and waiting for the sound of his return. In all her experience of life—and a woman can see an abundance of life in a little French café—Manon had never met a personality quite like Paul’s. This little widow knew men through and through, yet Brent had puzzled her until that moment when he had sat astride the roof of the hut and betrayed the sensitive prudery of a sentimentalist. She liked him none the less for that, though it added to the complexity of the adventure. Manon was not a prude, and Paul was not a Frenchman. She realized the significance of the fact, nor did the possible unexpectedness of this man’s romantic boyishness bore her. She was piqued by it. Most men are so obvious.
She had a meal ready for this tired man of hers, a man whose body had performed a tour-de-force, and whose happy weariness was ready to eat, drink, light its pipe and relax before the fire. Manon was glad of Brent’s tiredness, even as she was glad of his strength. She wanted him in that mood of happy relaxation. She saw the white stones of the cellar’s vault bright with candle light and the glow from the stove. The water bubbled contentedly in the saucepan. The arm-chair from the école stood embracing the warmth from the fire. And Manon was sensitively alert to the impression that the homeliness of the place would make on Paul. She had been busy here, exerting a woman’s forethought, not for purely selfish ends, but because a woman’s shrewdness may become involved in the things that she does for a particular man.
“You have earned that chair.”
He took it, after protesting that it should be hers. She saw him lie back and melt into enjoyment of this atmosphere of simple comfort.
“I say—this is good.”
His eyes wandered—and then fell to watching Manon, Manon whose hands were busy in his service. He became aware of the pleasantness of Manon, and that it was good to look at her, good to feel her near. As she leant forward over the stove to fill the coffee-pot Paul noticed the brown depths of her eyes, the shadowy curves of her nostrils, the pretty line of her mouth, her frank forehead, and the white fulness of her throat and chin. He observed a little brown freckle rather quaintly placed in the centre of her left lower eyelid. Her hands were plump and strong, with straight, well-formed fingers; generous, capable hands. He was aware, too, of a perfume, a personal aroma that was subtle and wholly French.
“Voilà!”
She drew the table close to the stove.
“How is that?”
“I am being spoilt,” said Brent.
That was exactly what she wanted him to feel. The memory of this evening was to have a particular significance.
“You amazed me to-day.”
She was pouring out his coffee.
“I never saw a man work with such ferocity.”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Yes, but you must not work too hard. And I am not going to talk to you until after supper.”
“Talking is food,” said Brent, “if one happens to be interested.”
Now Manon’s attitude towards Brent had developed since she had realized how easily he could be affected by the swaggering cynicism of a man like Louis Blanc. Hitherto she had not been conscious of any particular attitude towards this comrade of two days. The adventure had opened with such verve and simplicity that she had not bothered her head about the social complexities, but the coming of Bibi and Paul’s instant reaction to the challenge in the big Frenchman’s sensual eyes had compelled her to look at Brent more closely. She guessed that he had a thin skin, and that he was the sort of good fellow who fell into a panic if anyone accused him of behaving like a blackguard. Like many sensitive men he was extraordinarily diffident. An audacious beast like Bibi would squeeze out all his self-confidence.
“What a comfort it is to have you here.”
Brent looked surprised, pleasantly disconcerted.
“In what way?”
“Because you are rather unusual. Most men—Oh!—well—you know what I mean.”
It was the beginning of her conscious effort to humour her man. Paul was a sentimentalist, but Manon had a philosophy. She knew that life is always a bit of a scramble and that in Beaucourt life was going to be rather primitive and savage. Paul’s skin was too thin. She had a feeling that she would have to guard his sensitiveness—prevent his impressionable good nature from being at the mercy of hard people. Brent lacked hardness. She had an idea that this lack of hardness had been the cause of his failure.
“But you can’t make a soft man hard,” she said to herself; “it must be done some other way.”
She felt that Brent had that queer passion for ethical self-expression that plain people call “self-sacrifice.” She sensed it vaguely at first, and she could not have translated the impression into words. It was a thread, an intuition, and she followed it.
“This fine weather cannot last,” she said with apparent vagueness.
She filled his cup a second time.
“And to-morrow? What will you do to-morrow?”
He knew at once what he meant to do, and she respected the quiet and orderly way in which he had mapped out the work.
“I shall bring the timber across. The rafters of that big hut will be the right size for us over here. Nothing like having all your material on the spot, and under your eyes,—especially as there seems some chance of competition.”
He frowned when he thought of Bibi, and Manon was prompted by that frown. She thought of altering her plans, and she was curious to see what effect such an alteration would have upon Brent, but she wanted her change of purpose to develop naturally and not to appear as a sudden decision forced on her from without.
“More coffee, mon ami?”
“Please. It’s so jolly good.”
“No more to eat?”
“Not another mouthful.”
She looked at the bully beef, the biscuits, the carton of jam—and the unappetizing dryness of this fodder gave her her first suggestion. She made a little grimace, and waved a hand over the table.
“You poor man. Now, if only we had a savoury omelette and some spinach! I must change all this. That is obvious.”
She appeared to reflect.
“Yes, you must have fresh food,—eggs and butter and vegetables. If I went three times a week to Ste. Claire——”
Brent had brought out his pipe, and then slipped it back again into his pocket. The gesture was full of significance.
“Smoke.”
“Not here.”
“But I like the smell of it.”
“As a matter of fact, I am at the end of my tobacco.”
“Quel dommage! But this is a tragedy. It is obvious that I must go to Amiens; I may be able to buy English tobacco there.”
He corrected her.
“What a conscience you have! But, mon ami, could you spare me to-morrow? Could you carry all that wood?”
“Easily.”
“And if I stayed away three days?”
She saw that he was not in the least dashed by the suggestion. In fact he approved of it.
“I shall want that saw.”
“Yes—and blankets. It must be so horribly cold up there, and you were quite snug before I came. Oh, mon ami, I have an idea.”
He looked up at her questioningly.
“Well——?”
“It will take many days to put a roof on the house, will it not?”
“A fortnight—perhaps more.”
“And then there are the doors and windows.”
“Yes.”
“The weather will change. Rain and wind—mon Dieu! And you, under those pieces of tin! Be quite honest with me, Paul; would it not be more sensible for me to stay at Ste. Claire and leave you the cellar—until the roof is on?”
She watched Brent’s face, and discovered nothing but a faint shadow of surprise, a surprise that was momentary and transient. He leaned forward and stirred up the wood in the stove with an old iron bar that they used for the purpose. The glow from the wood shone on a calm face, and Manon saw that it had cost him no effort to adjust life to the new atmosphere.
“A sound idea,” he said, feeding more wood into the stove.
Perceiving no resistance, Manon let the new plan develop itself.
“It is not that I am a coward, mon ami, or afraid of a rough life.”
“You are no coward,” he said with quiet conviction.
She showed a sudden animation that flowed with the full flood of the new idea.
“I can hire a horse and cart in Ste. Claire, and I must see what can be bought at Amiens. I could drive over here twice a week, and if I started very early in the morning I should be able to spend most of the day here, cook for you, and help you when you needed a second pair of hands. And then, there is the garden.”
“The garden’s important.”
“Yes, our living this summer. I could work in the garden and sow seeds, and I could use the horse and cart to collect things for you. I must think of my good partner’s comfort.”
Brent stared at the fire.
“Don’t worry about me,” he said; “I am not the one to be considered. I am thinking of you.”
They had been skimming the surface, but those words of Brent’s went down beneath the conventional crust.
“Mon ami, you are very unselfish.”
“It’s not that. A man has to think of things—other things than bricks and timber; and when there is a woman about, a man has to think of her.”
Manon was silent for a while, and in her heart of hearts she knew that Paul was right. She had used her intuition and her shrewdness to bring the adventure into sympathy with this man’s simple sense of honour, and now that the thing was done she felt that Paul was happier.
“What a good man you are!”
He smiled at her and said nothing.
“You think of others before yourself. And how exciting it will be when I drive over and see what you have done; each time there will be something fresh, a new piece of roof, a door, a window.”
“It will be just as exciting to me—the finest game I ever played in my life.”
She frowned a little over that word.
“Game—game! You English are always thinking of games.”
“The word does not fit; I should not have used it. It is more than a game.”
Manon looked at her knees, possessed by a feeling of gentleness and humility. She knew now that she had been right about Brent, utterly right in her reading of his simple and sensitive character. He was no ordinary man, nor was his inspiration the inspiration of the ordinary man. Brent gave. Most men take.
“It is very strange,” she said, “that you should be so good to me. I think—somehow—that doing good things is as pleasant to you as the tobacco you smoke in your pipe. Is it not so, monsieur?”
He nodded.
“Perhaps there’s reason in it.”
“I am very lucky.”
And then she added,
“How good to be able to trust you—with everything! It is like feeling that God is near.”