XIX
Paulwatched Manon arrange all this merchandise of hers upon the table, the yellow oranges, the blue linen trousers, and the white and blue striped shirt, the tobacco, matches, and candles, the old brown-covered dictionary, the fresh greens from Veuve Castener’s garden, the slices of cooked meat wrapped up in a page ofLe Petit Journal. It was a wonderful bundle that she had carried from Ste. Claire, and Brent was touched by all the little things that she had troubled to remember. After those three days of separation this visit of hers to Beaucourt with this weight of good human stuff on her sturdy shoulders seemed to give to their partnership an essential French and intimate solidity. Brent felt that he mattered to Manon. She had shopped for him, and shouldered the merchandise ten miles. A shallow man would have felt flattered, but to Brent it brought a sense of warmth to the heart.
“Manon?”
She looked up, smiling.
“We are going to argue again as we argued over the tobacco.”
“Oh, very well,” she said with a little gleam of her brown eyes.
She felt in the pocket of her skirt for her purse, opened it with serious deliberation, and picked out a few francs and some paper money. She unfolded the notes, one of fifty francs, two of ten, and three of five, and spread them on the table, putting an orange on each to keep them from blowing away.
“We are going to be very business-like. Let us see; I suppose you are working here at least ten hours a day, and I can afford to pay you a franc an hour. Five days of ten hours makes fifty francs. So I begin by paying you fifty francs.”
She held out the fifty-franc note to him, but Paul made no effort to take it.
She pretended to be surprised.
“Isn’t it enough?”
Brent looked at her quickly.
“I don’t take your money.”
She flourished the note.
“There you are! How logical! And I don’t take your money, Paul, so there is the end of it.”
Paul answered her with a slow, uneasy smile.
“That is all very well, but a man can’t live on a woman.”
And then she scolded him with a sudden fierceness that made Brent think that she was angry.
“Do not be so foolish; you are not living on me. What should I do if I had no one to help me here? Think. Men who can use their hands and their heads are going to be little gods in a place like Beaucourt. Men are scarce in France; we have lost so many of them and there is so much to do. Are we partners, or are we not? If we are partners I pay you good money, and you pay me for what I buy for you; and if you quarrel about the money, mon Dieu, I will give you the sack!”
They burst out laughing—both of them—at the idea of Paul being sacked.
“There, you see how ridiculous you were making things, wanting to be so proud.”
“Yes, but wait a minute. Supposing I decided that I should like you to buy me a piano.”
“Then I should begin to think that Paul had been at the red wine. You are not made that way. You give; you would always be wanting to give. Now, be a good man and go and try on that shirt and those trousers.”
Paul went like an obedient boy, and reappeared some five minutes later, looking quaintly self-conscious.
“They feel just right.”
She turned him round with a dominant forefinger.
“You must take care of your good clothes. I have bought you a fine pair of velour-à-cotes trousers for Sundays, and a little black jacket. Those linen trousers will wash. And now—I am quite rested; let us work.”
That swinging ridge-beam overhead was the first thing to be tackled. Paul went up the ladder and straddled his way up the gable end to the chimney-stack, and gave his directions to Manon. She had grasped what he wanted her to do, and had run out into the yard and got hold of the telephone wire whose lower end was fastened to a bit of an iron bar that Brent had driven into the ground.
“I pull?”
“That’s it.”
There was a slot in the throat of the chimney-stack where the original beam had taken its bearing, and Manon pulled on the stout wire until Paul held up his hand. He lay along a sloping bit of wall, and guided the end of his beam into the slot.
“All right. Fasten the wire again.”
He scrambled down, shifted the ladder, and climbed the partition wall. Manon had run round into the room below and had hold of the other wire.
“Ready.”
She raised the beam, waiting for Paul’s signal.
“Enough.”
He worked the end into the slot at the top of the partition wall, and the thing was done.
Manon clapped her hands.
“How exciting! Now, what next!”
Paul came down to the top of the front wall of the house.
“I want to try one of the rafters from the hut. One of those long things there. If you could give me the end of it——”
She did so, and Paul tried a balancing feat, like Blondin with a pole. He had braced the wooden sleepers together so that they lay solidly along the top of the wall, and resting the butt of the rafter against one of them, he prepared to lower it towards the ridge-beam.
“Hallo! Just a minute.”
He had paused.
“If the thing falls, our crockery may suffer. Pull that table into the corner.”
Manon pushed the table into a safe place, and watched Brent handle that length of timber. It was a ticklish job; an attack of nerves or some lack of balance might have landed him down below with a broken neck. Moreover, it was a test of strength; and when the rafter came to rest with some three inches of its end projecting over the ridge-beam, Manon sent up a little cry of applause and triumph.
“Oh, mon ami, splendid! And how strong you are.”
It was the man who dominated for the moment their little world of adventure, the man with the strong hand and the contriving head. Brent stood looking down at her and smiling.
“Now, then, the hammer and gimlet, a packetful of long nails, and the saw. I shall have half those rafters up to-day.”
She collected the tools and nails, made two journeys up the ladder and handed them to Brent. One end of the rafter was all ready cut to fit on the bedding-plate and Brent secured it with a nail driven half home, and then went up the slope of the partition wall, sawed off the upper end at an angle so that it dropped flush against the ridge-beam, and drove nails home.
“Now—it is going to be easy.”
He told Manon to fasten another rafter to the end of the wire that they had used for raising the end of the ridge-beam, he pulled it up, unfastened the wire, ran the rafter down the opposite slope of the partition wall, rolled it over till it was on a line with the rafter on the other side, shaped the upper end with the saw, and nailed it to the beam; with the two lower ends fastened to the sleepers on the wall Brent had completed his first span.
The rest was repetition, with Manon acting as ladder boy, and Paul working along a framework that grew stronger and more rigid with each pair of rafters that were fixed.
Half-way through the morning Brent told Manon to rest.
“You have another thirteen kilomètres to walk, and I can get along on my own.”
“Very well, I am going to cook your dinner.”
“Is that resting?”
“Of course. I sit on a chair between the stove and the table. But take care, you must not drop sawdust into my frying-pan.”
“I have too much respect for my dinner.”
So Manon collected wood and her pots and pans, and did her cooking in the roofless kitchen, while Brent scrambled up above, hammering, sawing, and whistling “Roses in Picardie,” his blue trousers more vivid than the blue of the sky. He was happy and strenuous, and kept up such a merry piping that he made Manon think of a jolly bird in a cage. She sat and watched him with soft eyes.
“Quel oiseau y at-il?”
Brent looked down from his rafters and laughed.
“A blue bird, Madame Taquine. Blue birds are lucky.”
“The bird shall have a glass of wine for dinner. And what is that pretty song you whistle?”
He told her, and she began to imitate him, picking up the melody and whistling it while she fed the fire.
“Now, there are two birds in a cage,” she called up at him, “and what am I? A black bird with brown eyes?”
Perched up against the blue sky and climbing about the increasing intricacies of his roof timbers, Paul developed a healthy hunger, and the savoury smell of Manon’s cooking drifted up to him from below. All his old “tool sense” was coming back, and he was working with a speed and a precision that would have damned him in the world of Go Slow. But then Paul had an object, a spark of the sacred fire, and the little capitalist down below there—even Manon—who employed him, would have opened her eyes very wide if he had preached by his acts the Religion of Slackness. Paul had seen her slip away into the garden and begin digging in the corner where the iron summer house stood. She returned, holding up a bottle of wine to encourage her man.
“Now you know where it is.”
She felt that the wine was as safe as the silver.
The dinner was all that a dinner should be, and they drank the health of the new roof. To Manon’s eyes the house began to look quite “dressed,” and already she saw herself voyaging over from Ste. Claire in Etienne Castener’s big blue cart with the bits of furniture she had collected, and turning the Café de la Victoire into a home. This house of hers would lead the way in Beaucourt, and stand as a live thing to encourage the others.
“I want to look again at Bibi’s house.”
Her watch told her that she would have to be on the march in half an hour, and there was the washing up to be done. She was not going to leave Paul with a lot of dirty crockery.
“You can heat up the meat and the vegetables for another meal,” she told him, “and perhaps you know how to fry eggs.”
“I can boil them and judge the time,” laughed Paul.
When Manon was ready for the road, Brent walked with her by way of the Rue de Picardie to look at the Hôtel de Paris. The place, standing as it did at the cross-roads, had suffered badly from shell-fire, and the ragged walls rose out of a deplorable chaos of rubbish—old iron and broken brick. It had been a biggish building, and Brent saw that the house had gathered itself round the great central mass of brickwork in which were the chimney flues, a mass of brickwork that stood like a lonely tower in the middle of the ruin. The main beams of the roof and floors had taken their bearings from this central tower. The staircase had curled round it, and in any reconstructive scheme this mass of brickwork would serve as a point d’appui.
Brent climbed over the rubbish and examined the chimney-stack with the eyes of an expert. There was a great crack running up one side of it, a crack that spread upwards from a raw chasm at the base of the mass where a shell had exploded. A good third of the foundations had been blown away, and the whole pile seemed to balance itself precariously on the edge of the shell crater.
Manon had followed Brent over the heaps of brick.
“Look at that,” and he pointed at Louis Blanc’s chimney-stack.
“It seems ready to fall.”
Brent was frowning.
“Half-an-hour’s work with a pick, or a Mill’s hand-grenade, and a bit of wind, and the thing would come down like an old factory chimney. Take that gable end of the house with it too, probably,—and put our dear friend back for weeks.”
Manon’s eyes met his.
“It would be a blow to Bibi?”
“Well—that brick stack is going to be very useful when they begin reconstructing the house. And if it fell it would be pretty sure to bring that wall down.”
“But we could not do it, Paul.”
Her face had a touch of fierceness.
“It would be such a dirty trick, the sort of trick that Bibi would play on other people.”
“I thought you would say that,” he told her, with a significant little smile.
“Then you wanted to find out——?”
“Yes.”
“O my Paul,” she said.
Brent looked sheepish.
“I should have known that you had some strong reason—that the fellow is such a beast.”
“He may be that, but we could not fight him in that way. I don’t believe you would have done it, Paul, even if I had asked you.”
“I was pretty sure you would not ask me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Brent walked with her as far as the factory, and turned homewards along the Rue Romaine. She had given him a soft look of the eyes, and a little smile, and Brent was happy.
“She’s great,” he kept saying to himself; “by God, I’m glad she trusts me!”
XX
Theday dawned very red, with the whole horizon flushed like the inside of a shell. The sky overhead was as grey as a pearl; there was no wind moving and the air lay soft and still.
Brent stood on the doorstep and scented a change in the weather. Rain was coming, and there might be wind with it, and he looked up at the new rafters overhead and was glad that he had fixed none of the iron sheeting. A gale could blow through the timber-work like a north-easter through the snoring rigging of a ship that has struck her sails, and do no damage, but Brent took the hint that that red sky gave him. He would have to block up those doorways and windows before sheeting the roof, or some malicious devil of a March wind might come crowding in, heave up the whole structure and deposit it in the backyard.
He had lit the stove and he had coffee, a boiled egg, and real bread and butter for breakfast. His pipe tasted good after that meal when he went up aloft to complete the fixing of the rafters on the half of the house over the kitchen. The sky looked like a great flat sheet of grey rubber, with a dirty patch of darker clouds sticking to it here and there.
“Yes, you are going to rain all right, damn you,” said Brent; “pity you couldn’t have put it off for three days.”
Paul had finished the fixing of the rafters and had been nailing on the battens that were to take the galvanized iron when Louis Blanc cycled into Beaucourt. He came by the road past the château, and from the high ground there he could not help seeing the fresh white timber-work of the Café de la Victoire’s roof showing up against the lead-coloured sky. Bibi dismounted and stood holding the machine by the handle-bars. Paul Brent was visible as a blue and white figure moving against the white timber, and Bibi could hear the faint tap-tap of his hammer.
The “propriétaire” of the Hôtel de Paris had the mentality of the superficially civilized man who has retained the worst blood of the savage. Louis Blanc was a Parisian, a Parisian of the cabaret type who happened to have been born in the provinces. He had a long head, immense appetites, and an exaggeration of the Latin temperament that the word “flamboyant” describes so well. A crowd made him brave, especially a crowd of women, and one woman would do the trick if she happened to be pretty. Bibi swaggered; but there was a streak of cowardice in the man when you cut the hair of his vanity. He was just the precocious, unlicked, boastful, dirty-minded boy of sixteen who had never been socialized, and who remained a boy at the age of forty.
But Bibi had a head. He was ingenious. He had avoided hard work, and he had prospered. “Always get somebody else to shift your muck for you,” was one of his sayings.
He had been very successful with women, though he had had his head bitten off on occasions. He did not understand that some women are fastidious. Bibi was not fastidious.
Beaucourt was in ruins, but the proprietor of the Hôtel de Paris had glimpsed the possibilities of a ruined village. For the plain person the problem of Beaucourt was shelter, work, food; the peasant, like Father Adam, would have to live on his own sweat, reclaiming those fields and gardens, gulping his potage, and swallowing his own potatoes and haricots. That was not Louis Blanc’s idea of life. He despised the peasant. He was modern, no agriculturist, but a manipulator of other men’s activities. He meant to create an artificial value in Beaucourt. He had money, and a man who was ready to back him with more money, a rich Parisian bourgeois whom he had met in the army who had been piqued by Bibi’s idea. Beaucourt was to be an “exhibition village,” a centre for the sentimental fools who would visit the battlefields, and might think it quaint and charming to stay in a village that was rising like the dead from its ruins.
A week ago Bibi and his man of money had visited the Tourist Agencies in Paris. Bibi had declaimed.
“In three months there will be an hotel in Beaucourt. Some experience, hey!—for Americans and English to stay in a devastated village! Table d’hôte inside, and people putting up rabbit hutches, or camping in the church or the cellars! The tourists will be able to see it all from my windows, and they will have their comforts too, good beds and full bellies. People like to be comfortable, messieurs, even after strolling down a devastated street. Wine—yes—plenty of wine. And relics—cartloads of relics. You can visit the graves, drive to Albert, Peronne, Villers Bretonneux, Chaulnes, Roye, Moreuil. Bus services to St. Quentin and the Hindenburg Line! Do you not see it all, messieurs?”
One of the principal Tourist Agencies saw it very vividly. Louis Blanc had an idea. They were ready to put him on their list and to advertise Beaucourt: “Spend three days in a devastated village. Comfort among the ruins. Unique provincial hotel just rebuilt after being demolished by shell-fire.” They rose to Bibi’s idea, but they were a little sceptical about his scheme for rebuilding the Hôtel de Paris.
“Thunder, but I am getting the stuff,” said Bibi, “and I am getting the men.”
Which was an exaggeration, for neither building material nor labour was to be had at a wave of the hand. Bibi was agitating his case with the Préfet and the Mayor of the Commune; he was trying to buy timber, tiles, army stores, army huts, anything and everything.
And there he stood on the château hill and saw that damned fellow of Manon Latour’s putting up a roof before he—Bibi—had bought a foot of timber!
“The devil scorch his blue trousers, but where did he get that wood?”
Louis Blanc walked his bicycle down the château hill, and left it leaning against the wall by the doorway of the Hôtel de Paris. He went in and had another critical look at this place of his, crunching over the broken bricks, examining the walls, the foundations. The precarious state of the great central chimney-stack was as obvious to him as it had been to Paul; the raw and ragged concavity at the base of it looked bigger than ever, so much so that Bibi’s eyes narrowed and little ugly wrinkles showed about his mouth and nostrils. He was a suspicious beast. A man who is ready to play dirty tricks on others is always imagining them being played upon himself. Bibi climbed down into the hole and examined the brickwork. There were no pick marks upon it, no signs of freshly broken surface, but Bibi was not satisfied.
He went and stood in the Place de l’Eglise and surveyed the stage upon which he was to mount this financial tableau of his. He looked at the church with its broken spire and worm-eaten walls. Yes, the church was just as it should be; the scenic effect of it was excellent; sensible people would leave the church just as it stood, a sensational and picturesque relic. Here was one of the outrages of the great war slap up against his windows; the tourists could stare at the church while they sat at dinner in the salle-à-manger. Bibi suspected that no funds would be available for the restoration of churches. That was excellent. Who wanted churches, unless they were of sufficient interest to be written up in guide-books? The shell-scarred lime trees, ranged round the Place like the pillars of a piazza, had a decorative and realistic effect, and Bibi decided that the lime trees must not be touched. He turned his attention to the Hospice. The Hospice was a very interesting ruin, and Bibi thought of trying to buy the building, visualizing it as an admirable annexe in the event of the scheme proving a success.
The tap-tap of Brent’s hammer echoed faintly through the ruins. The sound was insistent, challenging, busily competitive. It annoyed Louis Blanc, kept up a noise like the yapping of a dog, and disturbed his material visions.
“Confound that fellow!”
He called Brent a foul name, and then walked into the Rue de Picardie. Bibi was jealous of Manon, and jealous of the enterprise she had shown in gathering up the threads of life in broken Beaucourt. A woman had got ahead of him, and Bibi’s vanity felt the insult; women were created to be spectators and to supply the applause. Louis Blanc wanted Manon, and he wanted her house. She was so plump and pretty and provocative, and she would have made such an excellent little manageress, for even tourists like a pretty French madame busy about a house. But Manon had declared war upon Bibi; he had his grudge against her, and since she was only a woman, Bibi transferred the grudge to Brent.
Reaching the end of the Rue de Picardie, Louis Blanc had a view of the work that Paul had completed, and it was the work of a craftsman, no bodging job perpetrated in a back garden by an enthusiastic amateur. Bibi stood in the street and gazed, and the longer he looked, the more fiercely he disliked Paul. Brent was on the roof, nailing down battens at great speed, a couple of nails in his mouth, and his back to Louis Blanc. It was evident to Bibi that Manon had made a catch, and that the fellow up there on the roof was worth many smiles.
He shouted at Brent:
“Good morning, monsieur.”
And a moment later:
“Where the devil did you get that wood?”
Brent turned sharply, and sitting on one of the lower battens, looked down at Bibi. He saw him as a tall man, feet planted well apart, stomach thrown forward, his fists bulging out of his trouser pockets, a man who looked all angles, lean shoulders jutting out, jaw cocked, cap over one eye, elbows truculent. Bibi reminded Brent of a big and blackguardly variation of “Captain Kettle.”
He removed the nails from his mouth, and wished Bibi good morning. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall.
Louis Blanc repeated the question that Brent had failed to answer:
“Where the devil did you get that wood?”
Brent smiled down at him.
“Found it,” was all he said, and turning round, resumed his hammering.
Bibi looked hard at the middle of Paul’s back. It would have been a great pleasure to him to have climbed up and thrown that fellow off the roof, but there were things that Bibi wanted to find out. The rain drops fell on his face, and suggested shelter. Bibi mounted the path and entered the doorway of the Café de la Victoire. He poked his head into the room on the right of the passage and saw stacked in the farther room all that timber and galvanized iron that Paul and Manon had salved from the huts.
It was pure chance, but Brent’s hammer took it into its head to slide off one of the rafters and land on the stone floor of the passage within two feet of where Louis Blanc was standing. Brent looked down and saw Bibi, and Bibi was looking up at him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It was an accident,” said Brent.
“Nicely arranged.”
“Well, you have no business there, anyway, monsieur.”
Bibi stooped, picked up the hammer, and sent it whirling into the ruins across the road.
“Voilà!”
He stamped into the other rooms and looked at everything at his leisure, while Paul came down the ladder to find his hammer. He knew the sort of man that Bibi was, and he had no intention of letting himself be tricked into a rough and tumble with him. Such men are best held at arm’s length by a show of good temper.
Brent had the luck to find his hammer almost at once, and he was up the ladder again and hammering hard before Louis Blanc had satisfied his curiosity. Bibi looked up at him, puzzled.
“Oh, there you are!”
“I shan’t drop it again, monsieur. There is no need for a tin helmet.”
He saw Bibi’s teeth.
“A nice little hoard you have here. Did you buy it?”
“We bought it by working for it, monsieur.”
“You stole it,” said Bibi.
Brent paused, smiling.
“Look here, monsieur, you tempt me to drop the hammer on you.”
“Try it, my boy, try it.”
Paul let fall a subtle hint instead of the hammer. He wanted to be left alone.
“Why don’t you go and look for some yourself, monsieur. The good God helps those——”
“Oh, go to hell!” said Bibi.
He slouched out of the house, turning up the collar of his coat because of the rain, and Brent saw him walk down the Rue de Rosières. It appeared that Louis Blanc did not know of those huts, which was amusing and rather suggestive; Bibi had despised Beaucourt, and had not bothered to discover what Beaucourt could give him. When a man has big ideas, he does not trouble to grub among rubbish heaps.
Brent descended, looped the ground sheet over his shoulders, and went back to his work. Louis Blanc had disappeared, but presently he came swinging back along the Rue de Rosières, and Brent had a feeling that he had seen those huts.
Bibi went past the café with a cocked chin and a gleaming eye.
“You had better not take any more of that,” he shouted at Brent; “it belongs to the State.”
Paul nodded at him.
“All right. It’s no use to you, I suppose? Good morning.”
Bibi called him a certain foul thing, and stalked on. He had made up his mind to hire a wagon and horses and salve some of that stuff for himself.
But he was feeling very evil towards Brent, and when Bibi hated a man he piled every imaginable infamy upon the enemy’s shoulders.
“That fellow would play me a dirty trick—if he dared, but I frightened him a bit about the hammer. Wonder what a woman can see in a tow-headed sheep like that?”
It was raining hard and beginning to blow when Bibi got on his bicycle and rode for Ste. Claire.
Early in the afternoon the rain came with such a pelt, driven by a rising wind, that Paul had to leave work on the roof. He began rigging up a shelter in the big front room on the other side of the passage—a shelter that would enable him to push on with his doors and window-frames and defy the weather. He had stacked a reserve supply of dry firewood in the cellar, and when dusk fell and shut out the wet and melancholy blur of the Beaucourt ruins, Brent was not sorry to retreat to the cellar, light the stove and feel snug and dry. He lit the candle, put the kettle on the stove, and spent the time cutting the mortices for the window-frames, using a couple of boxes as a bench.
By nine o’clock the wind had worked to a gale, and its bluster became so menacing that Brent climbed the cellar steps and stood in the passage under the shelter of the wall. The wind was snoring through the timber-work overhead, and now and again a gust would smite the house a full smack with the open hand, but the walls of the café took the blow without flinching. Brent thanked his luck that he had not been caught with the roof half covered, for the gale would have made a mess of the whole structure.
As he stood there in the darkness, he became aware of Beaucourt as a place of weird noises. The broken walls and hollow spaces made so many Pan’s pipes for the wind to play upon. There was the noise, too, of things falling. Blocks of brickwork and strips of wall that had braved it out in quieter times subsided under the push of this furious north-easter. Remnants of roof slithered down with a clattering of tiles. Plaster that had clung to the stud-work crumbled to join the rubbish below. A rusty piece of corrugated iron went clanking and clashing up the Rue de Picardie, till a gust tossed it into a doorway and left it at rest.
Suddenly, like a big gun loosing off in the thick of all the tumult of the wind’s attack, some mass of masonry or brickwork came down with a crash. Brent felt a distinct vibration of the earth, a thrill of the foundations under his feet.
“Hallo, there goes Bibi’s chimney!”
He was right.
XXI
Madame Castenerhad lit the lamp when someone knocked at the door of her cottage. The wind was roaring in the poplars and blowing the rain against the windows, and Marie Castener opened the door no more than an inch, for lamp glasses were terribly dear.
“Who is there?”
A man’s voice came out of the darkness, a brisk but quiet voice.
“Good evening, madame, I am sorry to trouble you on such a night, but they tell me that Madame Latour is here.”
Manon was sitting at the table with a sheet of red linen that was to be the cover of a duvet hanging over her knees. The lamp was turned low and the corners of the room were in comparative darkness. She saw a little man wearing a black-caped overcoat and a soft black hat step quickly into the room while Madame Castener closed the door behind him.
The visitor bowed to Manon, pulled off his hat, and, coming into the circle of light, began to unbutton his overcoat. He was a compact, square-shouldered little man, short in the neck and legs, with a shrewd, grey, close-cropped head, very bright eyes and an air of humorous benignity. He smiled at Manon as she put the red linen aside on the table, rose, and held out her hands for his coat.
“Monsieur Durand!”
“I have surprised you.”
She hung the wet coat over the back of a chair, turned up the lamp, and looked at Monsieur Anatole Durand with eyes that told him nothing. Monsieur Durand had owned the château at Beaucourt. He was neither an aristo nor a parvenu, but a solid little man whose father and grandfather had been solid men before him, millowners at Lille, men who had made money. Anatole had bought the château at Beaucourt about ten years before the war. A man of ideas and of energy, he had tried to teach Beaucourt certain things that it did not know, and Beaucourt—like most villages—had had no desire to be taught anything. Monsieur Durand had not been popular. He had lived up there in the château, and he had not belonged to the château. A peasant may abuse an aristo, but, even in abusing him, he recognizes the aristo’s indigenous right to be there. Durand was an importation, a city man, a big little fellow who appeared to think he had right to interfere with the other little fellows in Beaucourt. The soul of the peasant had shown its surliness. Durand was just a bumptious manufacturer who had come to amuse himself in the country. Beaucourt had held its nostrils at the smell of his autocar. What did Beaucourt want with an autocar? What did Beaucourt want with electric light, and a dynamo driven by water power? The man was a fussy, new-fangled fool.
“Be seated, monsieur.”
Anatole Durand sat down, knees well apart, his hands resting on them. Marie Castener had drawn up a chair on the other side of the table; she began to darn stockings with an air of phlegmatic detachment that left these other two free to talk.
“So you are like the rest of them, Manon,” said Durand, looking her straight in the face.
“How is that, monsieur?”
She glanced at him and went on with her work.
“Of course—I was unpopular. That busybody, Durand! Always wanting something new!”
“You know Beaucourt as well as I do, monsieur,” said Manon.
Anatole Durand sat squarely on his chair. He was a square man all over, square in the boots, the head, the jaw, rather like a little copy of Thiers, that irrepressible, compact bit of energy.
“Well, they can hate me as much as they please, but I always was a man who must push a stone out of the way or cut down a rotten tree. I’m an old fellow, Manon, but my work is over there. I have another ten years left.”
There was a little quiver of emotion in his voice.
“I have no children, you know, and plenty of money. I am not one of the ruined ones. You can’t take your money away with you when you die. Did ever an old fellow have such an opportunity?”
Manon raised her head, and her eyes seemed to see something.
“Why do you come to me, monsieur?”
“You have gone back to Beaucourt.”
“In a sense, yes.”
“You are rebuilding—you are one of those with courage.”
“I have hope, monsieur, and I have had good luck.”
Anatole Durand’s eyes glistened.
“Life is like this, madame; there are those who work and create; there are those who wait and grumble. Some people sit still and say, ‘What a tragedy! What can we do? When is the Government going to help us?’ Those people will not rebuild Beaucourt; they will not bring back the smile and the good sweat to all that poor desert.”
“You think as I think, Monsieur Durand.”
He gave an audacious and triumphant little wave of the hands.
“Do not call me an egotist, my dear, if I wish to consecrate the rest of my life to the healing of these wounds. What better work for a Frenchman! And that is one of the reasons why I have come to you, because you have the courage, because I felt that you must think as I have thought.”
Manon put down her work, and looked at Anatole Durand with eyes of immense seriousness.
“Monsieur, listen a moment. When I first went to Beaucourt I thought only of my own bit of property, myself, but when I had seen Beaucourt and felt the pity of it, I began to think of my neighbours. Yet I say to myself, to help others you must first be strong yourself. So I did not hesitate to look round and get what I could, timber and iron from some army huts, tins of beef, tools, bits of furniture—which I shall return.”
Durand smiled at her.
“It is the spirit of France; do not apologize for it, madame, for it is the spirit that will rebuild Beaucourt. But now, I ask you, what will have to be done for the others?”
“Food,” said Manon promptly.
“Yes.”
“Tools, material, wood to build with.”
Old Durand clapped his hands.
“Exactly. Well, it will be my business to try and arrange all that. The Americans and English will sell us their camps and their stores, and I shall be one of the first to buy. We shall have to open a canteen at Beaucourt. Now, madame, I shall drive over in my autocar to-morrow. Will you go with me?”
“With pleasure, monsieur,” said Manon; “and if I may take a little bundle——”
“Anything but a piano or a cupboard,” said Anatole, with a laugh.
The storm blew itself out during the night, leaving wet roads and a blue sky and a smell of spring in the air. Durand and his car, an old-fashioned four-seater De Dion, called for Manon at nine, with Anatole at the wheel and a luncheon basket on the back seat. Manon’s bundle was no terrible affair, stores for Paul tied up in a blanket.
But someone was before them on the Beaucourt road, Louis Blanc on his bicycle, a Louis Blanc who was not in the best of tempers. He had visited nearly every farm in Ste. Claire, offering good money for the hire of a wagon and a couple of horses, but no one had been able to oblige him. He came into Beaucourt by the Bonnière road. In the Place de l’Eglise he dismounted and stood staring. Something was missing from the broken outlines of the ruins of the Hôtel de Paris; the great central chimney had fallen.
Bibi dashed his bicycle down upon the cobbles. He was in a rage—the dramatic, white-faced rage of the French “rough,” a rage that must gesticulate, stamp up and down, let itself loose on something. He stormed in and looked at the ruin, and a pretty mess the chimney had made of it. Falling on the gable end next the Rue des Echelles, it had sent it crashing, and this mass of brickwork, striking the tottering wall of the Hospice across the way, had brought down the whole façade of the Hospice into the road. The mouth of the Rue des Echelles was full of broken bricks and stones.
Bibi looked at it all, and swore. The centre-piece of his house had gone; there were only three walls instead of four—nothing left that could carry a roof. The end fronting on the Rue des Echelles would have to be rebuilt before anything could be done in the way of putting up timber.
Bibi stamped about, kicking the bricks, and flapping his arms like some furious bird. He was not a man who could satisfy himself by cursing the elements or black-guarding a purely impersonal wind. He wanted a tangible, human enemy, a personal quarrel, a feud that could be prosecuted with boot and fist. He wanted to take somebody by the throat, smash his fists against real flesh, smell real blood. Bibi was a savage. His rage was the anthropomorphic rage of a savage that spits in the face of its idol-god and hammers it with a club.
That chimney had not fallen itself. Therefore someone had helped it to fall. Therefore someone had played him a dirty trick. These deductions following each other easily through Bibi’s mind, proved that someone could be none other than that fellow of Manon Latour’s.
“Voilà!”
The motive was obvious, so obvious that Bibi had not to search for an enemy. He had found his quarrel and he fastened on it like a snarling dog.
He walked up the Rue de Picardie with those cold eyes of his full of a hard glare. His fists were stuffed into his trouser pockets; he swung his shoulders as he walked, and jerked his head from side to side. The fighting mood flared in him.
Paul was at work on the roof. He had carried up about twenty sheets of corrugated iron, and his hammer began to ring on them as Louis Blanc came up the street. To Bibi the noise was like the clashing of sword and buckler, a barbaric sound echoing out of his savage Gaulish past.
“Hallo, there!”
Brent turned, and leaning against the roof, looked down at the man in the street. Bibi’s figure was foreshortened. His long chin seemed to stick out; he looked all shoulders and feet.
“Good morning,” said Paul, “it has turned fine after the storm.”
Bibi grinned and looked at the ladder that rested against the front of the house.
“So you thought that dirty trick of yours rather clever.”
“What trick, Monsieur Blanc?”
Bibi raised a big hand, its fingers hooked, as though he were reaching for the man up above. He looked ugly, devilish ugly.
“Come down,” he said.
Brent sat and considered him.
“What’s the matter? What are you talking about?”
“Come down,” said Bibi again; “you know what I mean.”
Brent’s eyes went hard. He knew what had happened to Louis Blanc’s house, having strolled up there soon after dawn, and he sensed some connexion between the fallen chimney and that ugly figure in the road. The fellow wanted a row; he had found an excuse for it; but Brent had made up his mind not to give Bibi his chance. A row might prove most damnably awkward, and Paul meant to smile the man off.
“Look here,” he said. “I’m busy. What’s all this about?”
“Come down,” barked Bibi, with the persistence of a furious dog.
Brent laughed, turned, and pretended to go on with his work, but he kept an eye on the top of the ladder that projected above the wall.
“You pig of a coward,” said the voice.
Brent began hammering.
“You knocked away the foundations of my chimney.”
Brent went on hammering.
Then he saw the top of the ladder give a jerk, and he was round in a flash. Bibi had one foot on the third rung, and the two men stared at each other.
“Look here,” said Brent, still smiling, “you keep off that ladder. I have had nothing to do with that chimney of yours.”
“Liar!” shouted the Frenchman.
Brent gave a French shrug.
“It’s the truth; take it or leave it. But get off that ladder.”
Bibi began to climb up, and Brent bent down, gripped the top rung, and held the ladder out from the wall.
“Look here, if you try to come up, I’ll pitch you over.”
Bibi did try, and Brent kept his promise. Man and ladder went over into the road, Bibi lying like a big beetle with the thing on top of him. He slipped from under it, got up, and began to behave like a madman. He picked up the ladder, dashed it against the raised path so that it broke in the middle, and then went on to kick it to pieces with his heavy boots. He was like a wild animal that had lost all control and all sense of pain, and Brent sat and watched him with something of the feeling of a man who is safe in the branches of a tree. He understood now why Manon had looked so serious when she had spoken of Louis Blanc. The fellow could behave like a beast, and he had the strength of a beast. Brent had ceased to smile.
“I shall want a long spoon,” he reflected, “a devilish long spoon. Life in Beaucourt is going to be hot stuff.”
Into the middle of this display of animal energy came Anatole Durand’s car, poking its red nose round the corner of the Rue Romaine, and stopping by the well, for Bibi still occupied the road. He had not finished kicking the ladder to pieces, and his heavy boots made such a noise that he had not heard the car.
There was a very droll look on old Durand’s face. Manon had glanced at Paul on the roof, and Paul had smiled at her, but Manon did not smile. Here was this evil spirit loose in Beaucourt, this man who had always behaved like a spoilt child when baulked of some desire.
“So that fellow hasn’t been killed,” said Monsieur Durand. “What a pity! Let us ring for the concierge.”
He sat there and blew blasts on his motor horn as though Louis Blanc were the walls of Jericho.
Bibi left the remains of the ladder and walked across to the car. The imperiousness of old Durand’s horn annoyed him, nor was it any pleasure to him to look into the quizzical and bright eyes of the manufacturer from Lille. Anatole was not afraid of anything or anybody, and he had always spoken of Bibi as a dog that wanted thrashing. The presence of Manon modified the situation, and brought the sex swagger back into Bibi’s attitude.
“You seem to have no respect for your boots, monsieur,” said old Durand.
Louis Blanc stood in front of the nose of the car, hands in pockets, feet well apart, his body swung back from the loins.
“If a fellow plays you a dirty trick, monsieur, you go round to give him a thrashing, hey. But that fellow up there was afraid to come down, so I have smashed his ladder for him. You see!”
“Tiens!” said old Durand, “but what is it all about?”
“If you ask that fellow up there,” and Bibi shook a fist at Paul, “whether he did not knock down the chimney and wall of my hotel, he will tell you a lie.”
The voice of Manon interposed itself.
“Monsieur Blanc imagines that other people behave as he would behave. That is the whole trouble.”
She looked up at Paul.
“Have you touched Monsieur Blanc’s house?”
“Is it likely? The storm blew the thing down. I heard it fall about nine o’clock last night.”
Bibi shrugged his shoulders. The violence was dying out of him; it had exhausted itself for the moment; and he had a certain astuteness; the grapes were sour on this particular morning.
“You are a man of the world, monsieur,” he said to Anatole Durand; “you know that things do not happen of themselves, especially when certain people wish them to happen. But the truth remains; that fellow is a coward and a liar, and it was to madame’s interest.”
Anatole gave a little bleat on the horn.
“I think you have got a bee in your head, Monsieur Blanc. We French do not play such tricks on each other.”
“So it is three to one,” said Bibi; “and against a man who was three times wounded. Voilà! Into the ditch with you all! I’m off.”
He went swinging up the Rue de Picardie, and Durand and Manon sat and looked at each other.
“What is the matter with that fellow?”
“What was always the matter with Bibi, monsieur? He has an idea that Beaucourt is an opportunity, that he is going to show off and make money. He always had the biggest voice in the place, you know.”
“Yes, a fog-horn of a man,” said Durand, “a big drum. But what about our St. Simon up there?”
They climbed out of the car, and joined in council with Paul. But old Durand’s attention was divided. He was in Beaucourt, the place of his Frenchman’s dreams, in the thick of these dear ruins that were to bloom again under his hand. He looked at Manon’s house, and was delighted, and his delight almost forgot the worker and the work. Here was his symbol, his example, his banner of hope. He wanted to run through all the village on those sturdy little legs of his, and dream hard-headed dreams of reconstruction.
Manon understood.
“Go and look at Beaucourt, monsieur. I will see to my partner.”
Anatole dashed off, opening a big note-book. He had carried a big note-book all his life; it was his Bible.
“Expect me in half an hour.”
Manon stood in the road and spoke to Paul.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He came round here like a mad bull, and when he tried to climb the ladder I pitched him over, ladder and all. It’s a nuisance; I shall have to make a new ladder.”
Manon laughed. She liked Paul’s shrewdness, his smile of restraint.
“And now I must get you down.”
She happened to know that old Durand carried a length of stout rope in the locker under the back seat of the car. He had told her it was there. “If we break down, well, I have a tow-rope.” He liked thoroughness, to be prepared for all eventualities.
The rope served its purpose. Manon threw up the coil, and at the third attempt Brent caught it. He fastened the end to one of the rafters and slid down.
“That’s that,” he said tersely.
Manon looked at him with eyes that were brighter than the eyes of a man.