Part 13

The blue cart crunched out of the muddy yard into the road, and drew up outside the cottage. A few neighbours had collected to watch the departure; one or two of them brought presents, a few apples, a bag of potatoes, a string of onions. Manon was popular.

Among them was Mère Vitry, a refugee, whose picture of the Sacré Cœur Manon had rescued from the cottage in the Rue Romaine. There were quite a number of refugees in the neighbouring villages; Anatole Durand had a list of the names, and he had visited them all and persuaded them to remain in the villages for another week. Within ten days he hoped to have a supply of food in Beaucourt. “Without food, my friends, we can do nothing.”

Etienne began to load the cart, his mother helping him with hands and tongue. She was very strong and she would not allow Manon to do any more work. “You keep your strength for the other end, my dear. There will be plenty to do in Beaucourt.” So Manon stood and watched, holding the yellow dog by the string, and Mère Vitry stood beside Manon and looked at her as though she were a new Jeanne d’Arc. Mère Vitry had a face like a wrinkled brown boot, with buttons for eyes. Her black skirt had a great plum-coloured patch where her bony old knees had worn the cloth thin.

“You will take care of the picture, my dear?”

“Yes, I will take great care of it,” said Manon.

Mère Vitry explained that the picture had belonged to her mother in the days when her father had come back from the Russian war, and that it had hung in the same place and on the same nail.

“My father drove that nail, and every two years I used to put a new piece of cord on the picture. And you say there is no roof left in the house?”

“Just a small piece. There are no whole roofs in Beaucourt.”

“Enough for an old woman to sleep under, perhaps. I shall be there when the spring comes.”

Etienne had loaded the cart, and had so arranged the arm-chair that it formed a seat for Manon. He was going to walk beside his horse.

“I shall walk,” said Manon.

Marie Castener scolded her.

“Get up and save your legs. Etienne can ride all the way home.”

Manon laughed, kissed Marie, climbed up into her seat and took the dog in her lap. Marie Castener stood by the wheel; she was feeling important with all these neighbours listening while she helped to launch Manon on this great adventure.

“Etienne’s boy shall come over twice a week with eggs, vegetables, butter and bread. He can ride a bicycle, you know. If you want anything write it down on paper, for Pierre forgets everything, save the time for his meals.”

Manon leant over towards this stolid, ugly woman who had the heart of a saint.

“How good you have been to me.”

“Don’t be sentimental,” said Marie Castener; “haven’t I enjoyed it?”

The blue cart moved off, and the neighbours made the departure quite a public occasion, waving to Manon and shouting “Bonne chance.” It was an emotional moment, a dramatic moment—Manon sailing out into the wilderness with all her belongings loaded on the cart, to begin the new life, the life that was to be so bitter and so heart-breaking to many.

At the end of the village, just before the road turned up the hill under the poplars, stood the farm-house where Louis Blanc had been lodging. A meadow planted with a few apple trees separated the house from the road. Bibi, an unshaved and slovenly Bibi, was leaning over the farmyard gate when Manon and the cart went by. She did not see him, but Louis Blanc watched the brown horse and the blue cart go slowly up the hill.

His jaw seemed to lengthen; his lower lip protruded; his eyes looked mere slits. He rubbed his chin between finger and thumb, and spat over the gate. It appeared that Manon had a way of getting things done; she had a cart at her service when he, Bibi, had been unable to hire a cart, and she had a man to work for her. Now she was going to Beaucourt with all her goods and chattels to take up life in the Café de la Victoire. Bibi’s nostrils looked pinched, he sneered.

“A nice fix she would be in,” he thought, “if someone kicked that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt.”

That was the centre point of Bibi’s vision. The bottom had fallen out of his own enterprise, and he had been listening to panegyrics on the philanthropy of Anatole Durand: “Ah, if all wealthy men were like that, if there were no profiteers.” The whole business made Bibi savage. Manon and her man were flaunting their success, while old Durand was preparing to spoil the place as a fertile field for speculation. And the fools applauded him!

“They think it is going to be a little heaven,” was Bibi’s reflection as he sludged back through the dirty yard to drink his morning coffee.

At Beaucourt Paul Brent had spent a very peaceful night, lying safely behind a good door and barricaded windows. He was up at dawn, and washing with confident publicity in the open street, his head full of the thoughts of the coming of Manon. He had become a little less self-conscious in his attitude towards Manon, less ready to consider the possible prudery of a repopulated Beaucourt, less afraid of the activities of Louis Blanc. And romance joined him in the misty street, and walked back with him over the grey cobbles and into the house of Manon Latour. Paul reintroduced sentiment into the house. It is said, perhaps with truth, that the French are a hard-headed and unromantic nation, killers of birds, teaching even the sex-bird to live in a very practical and ungilded cage, but Paul Brent opened the door of the cage. His love sang in the open, welcoming its mate.

He played at being housewife, turning everything out of the cellar where Manon was to sleep, brushing the brick floor, laying out the new blankets she had bought the previous day, and hanging up a little cracked old mirror he had found in one of the houses. The cellar had all the best of the furniture, a couple of chairs, an improvised wash-hand stand, a cupboard, a neat little wooden platform beside the bed for the reception of Manon’s feet when she emerged in the morning. There was a jug and basin, a tin bath, a table beside the bed to hold her candlestick.

Having sentimentalized and prepared the cellar, Paul set to work in the kitchen. He had borrowed a rather battered cupboard-dresser from the école, and on this he arranged all the crockery, plates neatly paraded on the shelves, coffee-pot, cups and glasses clean and polished. The commissariat occupied the cupboard. He arranged a shelf over the stove for the pots and pans. His own bed he pushed away into the far corner, with a couple of ammunition boxes underneath it to hold his few belongings and his clothes. The rest of the furniture included a table, the old arm-chair, a couple of plain chairs, with a second table under the window.

Paul stood and looked round the room. It pleased him; it had the air of a room that was lived in, and yet something was lacking. Everything was in order, even to the box of wood by the stove and a glazed crock full of water. A touch of colour was needed, that little live flame of sentiment, that unpractical something that appeals to the heart. A man does not live by bread alone, nor is love satisfied with pots and pans. Brent went out and searched, and down by the stream he found what he needed, a sallow with its soft yellow “palm” blossoms shining in the thin, March sunlight.

He gathered a bunch of palm, chose a blue and white jug he had found in someone’s back garden, filled it with water, and arranged his bit of “life.” The jug took up its vigil on the table by the window. The sunlight struck a note of colour on the yellow blossoms. Brent stood and smiled. He felt, somehow, that the room was complete.

About eleven o’clock the blue cart turned the corner of the Rue Romaine with Manon and her yellow dog perched in front of the load of baggage. Paul was fixing a window-frame in the window of one of the ground-floor rooms, and he came forward hammer in hand. The yellow dog stood up on Manon’s lap and barked at him.

“Be quiet, silly.”

Manon handed the yellow dog to Etienne and climbed down. She was in a very happy mood, a little excited and exultant.

“Paul, this is Monsieur Etienne Castener.”

The men shook hands, Etienne smiling one of his broad, slow smiles.

“Tiens, but you have a front door!”

Manon had not noticed it, for she had been looking at Paul.

“Mon Dieu, so we have! A real door! When did you finish it?”

“Last night.”

“Let me see how it opens and shuts.”

She ran up the steps of the raised path, and tried the door like a child playing with a new toy.

“And it has a lock and bolts!”

Etienne stood and stared at the house, still smiling that slow, country smile. He was easily astonished, and the Café de la Victoire astonished him.

“You must have worked like the devil,” he said.

Paul took a fancy to Etienne. He was one of those silent fellows with the smell of the soil about him, and he had no tricks.

“Some things are worth working for. Shall I help you unload the cart?”

Manon had walked into the kitchen and found herself entangled in a new atmosphere. It, too, had a door, only a matchboard door it is true, but the door gave the room a new homeliness. She saw the dresser with its crockery, the box of wood by the stove, the table by the window, the blue and white jug with its posy of sallow bloom. Her heart seemed to utter a little cry of pleasure and of tenderness. She went forward, picked up the jug, and buried her face in the yellow palm.

“A Frenchman would not have thought of it,” she said.

She heard the two men struggling with something heavy.

“Manon!”

She ran out.

“Where will you have this?”

It was the cupboard.

“It is for you, Paul.”

He looked at her with the eyes of a lover.

“In the kitchen, then? I have prepared the cellar for you.”

“The kitchen, then.”

She stood and directed the two men, happy as a little housewife arranging her home for the first time. Then she descended into the cellar, lit the candle, and experienced a moment of exquisite pleasure. Her eyes missed none of the details. This little white-arched cellar held more than a bed, a table, a cracked mirror; she felt in it the soul of the man who had been busy here.

Paul was waiting at the top of the steps. She turned and met him.

“I thought it would be warmer for you down there,” he said.

She stood leaning against the wall.

“Thank you, Paul. It is so good to come back, when a man has taken so much trouble.”

Brent was silent a moment.

“What will you have down there? The bed and the trunks?”

“Please. The wooden box can stay upstairs.”

When everything was settled, Etienne had unharnessed his horse, fastened him to the wheel of the cart, and given the beast water and an armful of hay, they sat down to a meal in the kitchen. Manon had unearthed a bottle of red wine. She and Paul kept looking at each other, and at the different pieces of furniture in the room. There was a conspiracy of pride, of congratulation between them, a half-shy tenderness that looked and looked again. Castener was all curiosity, all questions. His eyes kept wandering up to the roof.

“You have plenty of air,” he said, “plenty of air.”

And then:

“What will you do for a ceiling?”

“I shall put in a floor there when I have finished the rest of the roof.”

“And the stairs?”

“We shall have to be satisfied with a ladder, to begin with.”

“But you will be able to go to bed. What does it matter! And some day, I suppose, you will line all the inside of the roof?”

“Canvas to begin with; wood when we can get it.”

Etienne munched bread, and still stared at the ceiling.

“It is wonderful,” he said, “quite astonishing.”

After the meal he harnessed his horse and prepared to drive off.

“I must bring my plough over here one day,” he said; “an acre or two of ploughed ground would be useful.”

That was the way of the Casteners; they did not appear to see much, but they saw what mattered.

When Etienne had gone, Manon lit the stove and put on the coffee-pot. There was no more work to be done that day; it was a saint’s day; there was something sacramental about it. Manon pointed out the yellow dog, who had curled himself on the arm-chair in the sunlight.

“We will call him ‘Philosophe,’” she said; “he has set us a good example. But there is no reason why he should have that chair. It is yours.”

Brent smiled, picked up Philosophe, and sat down in the chair with the dog on his lap. He lit his pipe, and they drank coffee, and talked. Manon’s eyes kept glancing round the room, caressing everything in it, the soft eyes of a woman who is happy. The room was uncomfortably high, the walls showed patches of discoloured plaster and raw brickwork, and the window of the room above let in rather too much fresh air—but it had the atmosphere of home. You could light a lamp at night, and draw up intimate chairs close to the stove.

“What will you do next?”

Paul was pulling the yellow dog’s ears.

“Finish all the window-frames and doors on the ground floor, and put up shutters. I suppose there is no chance of getting any glass.”

“Linen will have to do, or canvas, to begin with. We must divide up the day’s work. I shall take all the household work and the garden.”

“What about seeds?”

“I have a whole boxful of seeds in that case. The Casteners have promised to give me potatoes to plant, also young lettuces and cabbages. If Etienne ploughs up part of the meadow we can put potatoes in there, and perhaps a little corn and some winter roots. I am going to keep a few chickens, and later on a cow and a pig.”

“You will be busy.”

Manon was looking at the unglazed window-frame.

“I wish we could get some of that oiled linen that the English have. The other day, when Monsieur Durand and I drove from Rosières, we passed what you call a dump.”

Brent’s eyes brightened.

“What sort of a dump?”

“Sheds, and great piles of stores, boxes under tarpaulins, and an English soldier lying on a bench asleep. It is close to the railway line. I wonder if the English are selling their stores?”

“I think I will go over some day and have a look at that dump,” said her partner.

XXV

When Louis Blanc walked into the Coq d’Or, the old men seated at the white deal tables became as mute as birds when a hawk sails overhead. Mademoiselle Barbe was perched on a high chair behind the little comptoir, surveying the room with a pair of green-blue eyes, eyes that showed the white of the eyeballs between the lower lid and the edge of the iris. Mademoiselle Barbe had red hair, a big mouth, and a complexion like china clay. She was a thin young woman, an enigmatic young woman, with long limbs, narrow hips, and a rather prominent bosom.

“Good evening, Monsieur Blanc.”

Bibi sat down at the table in a corner, his hands in his trouser pockets, his feet thrust out. He looked in a bad temper. One by one the old men got up and went out, for there was no pleasure in gossiping with an uncomfortable fellow like Bibi in the room. He made himself felt like a thunderstorm concentrated within four walls, an oppressive person, explosive, threatening to make a noise and blow out the windows.

Mademoiselle Barbe watched Bibi. She had the arched and voracious nostrils of the woman who is a natural bird of prey. Her quick temper made men think her capable of a great passion, a creature who could bite in the excitement of a love affair, but Mademoiselle Barbe was as cold as a cat.

“You are in a bad temper to-night.”

She took a glass from the shelf, mixed Bibi a drink, and coming round from behind the comptoir, put the glass on Bibi’s table. She did not go back to the comptoir, but half leant, half sat on the table next to Bibi’s, her hands gripping the edge of the table, thin, loose-jointed hands, rather red about the knuckles.

Bibi drank.

“You mix a drink very well.”

“I always do things well,” said Barbe, with an insolent lift of the chin. “I have ideas, you know, like a man.”

Bibi looked up at her with eyes half closed. He had talked a good deal to Barbe of the Coq d’Or. She stimulated him. She was a clever girl, provocative, the sort of woman who was Bibi’s natural partner, a woman who could seize things with her claws. And Louis Blanc’s mentality was such that when the gas was out of an enterprise and his conceit somewhat deflated, he needed a woman like Barbe, a glass of absinthe, and a mouthful of rolling words.

He had boasted to Barbe of all that he meant to do in Beaucourt, how he was going to call his hotel the “Champ de Bataille,” and make a fortune out of American tourists, nor in Bibi’s vision were the people of Beaucourt forgotten. Army food bought cheaply and retailed at an immense profit seemed a mere question of shrewd foresight. Barbe had encouraged Bibi to talk, perhaps because he piqued the tigress in her, and she was bored with tame men. Mademoiselle was greedy and ambitious, and the Coq d’Or afforded a girl no scope.

“That old busybody of a Durand is going to be a nuisance to you,” she said.

Bibi jerked his shoulders. He had always posed before the red-haired girl as a devil of a fellow, a man who always got his own way.

“Durand! A talker, that’s all. Give me a little of this stuff in Beaucourt,” and he tapped the glass with a finger-nail, “and we will explode Anatole like a paper bag. Meanwhile, I have somebody else to settle with. When people get in my way, I push.”

Barbe nodded her head.

“That was a dirty trick, knocking down that chimney of yours.”

“I haven’t squared the account yet.”

“I thought you were rather fond of Manon Latour,” said the red-haired girl.

“She had a house that could easily be repaired.”

“How cunning you are!”

Bibi laughed.

“But she would not do business with me, you see. Not that I cared two sous about her; I don’t get excited over black-haired women. I shouldn’t have meddled with her and her man if they had left me alone; but when a fellow plays you a trick like that——!”

“He wants the boot,” said Barbe.

“He will get it, my dear. The fellow has a pistol and is rather free with it, but I shall manage. Meanwhile I have my plans.”

Barbe was interested in Bibi’s plans. She had begun to think that she would like to share in them, and she believed that she was the very woman for Louis Blanc. It appeared that Bibi had postponed the scheme for rebuilding the Hôtel de Paris; his new idea was to buy a couple of big Adrienne huts and erect them in an orchard at the back of the hotel. The red ruin would serve as a sort of placard, a dramatic advertisement for the wooden hotel among the apple trees. “You make your money quickly,” he explained, “and then clear out. In ten years the sentimental people will be tired of the battlefields.”

“But if Manon Latour has the same idea?” Barbe asked.

Bibi finished his drink.

“That’s it,” he said; “that place of hers is being repaired too quickly. But if I frighten that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt, she will be in a bit of a fix. I shall hire a gang to rush my huts up.”

“And when are you going to get the huts?” said Barbe, looking straight into Bibi’s eyes.

That was what she wanted to know—how much solidity there was behind this man’s march-music.

“I am going to Amiens to-morrow to see a contractor, and I expect to meet my friend who handles the money.”

“How exciting! And you will come back and tell me all about it?”

“You can bet on that,” said Bibi.

He was building hotels in the clouds to impress the red-haired girl and to encourage his own conceit. Boasting was Bibi’s food of the gods; and, when he had rolled a procession of fine words off his tongue, he began to believe that everything would be as he said it was. And yet there was a streak of cunning in all his vanity. He advertised his visit to Amiens, let all Ste. Claire know about it, because it was possible that he might wish people to think him in Amiens when he might be somewhere else. The contractor who had army huts to sell was a creature of the imagination, and even Bibi’s financial friend had begun to show an inconvenient cautiousness.

But he went to Amiens, walking to Boves with a little black bag in his hand, and taking the train from Boves to Amiens. He put up at a cheap hotel in the quarter north of the cathedral, and spent a day visiting certain agencies, a firm of builders, and an official at the hôtel de ville. Nobody seemed to know anything; there was a shrugging of shoulders, a suggestion that everything was waiting for the people at Paris. Monsieur Clemenceau, it was said, had made some sort of promise, and the Tiger was a man of his word. The builder whom Bibi visited hinted that he might be able to obtain one big hut, but it would cost Bibi forty thousand francs, and the price did not include charges for transport and re-erection.

“It is necessary to pay through the nose,” said the gentleman with brutal candour.

Bibi spat and went out denouncing profiteers. What was a soldier of the Republic to do with such wolves ready to tear the wool off a sheep’s back?

He fell into a rage, and could think of nothing but of Manon Latour and the way Brent had managed to baulk him. Bibi was always a man of one idea, one passion. Since his scheme for capturing and exploiting Beaucourt seemed in the air, its place was taken by an animal hatred of Paul and a desire to humiliate Manon. Louis Blanc had something of the mentality of a madman whose whole strength can be concentrated upon one definite and violent act. His power of self-expression was purely physical. He had the cunning of a savage, but very little self-control. It is difficult for decent people to understand how certain crimes are committed. Appetite will explain many of them, appetites that flush with hot blood those baser centres of a brain that have not received the living impress of social self-consciousness.

Louis Blanc settled his bill at the hotel, walked to the station and left his black bag at the consigne. He went out into the town again, bought some bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and had supper at an estaminet. About nine o’clock he started out of Amiens on foot, not hurrying, for he had plenty of time to reach Beaucourt before daylight.

About an hour before sunrise he pushed through a gap in a hedge south of the Rue Romaine and worked his way through the orchards to the back of the stone house opposite Manon’s café. Bibi had explored the stone house on one of his previous visits. Its staircase had not been destroyed, and it was possible to reach the upper rooms, one of which still retained its joists and a few floor boards. This particular room faced the street and had had a ragged hole drilled in its front wall by the shell of an English sixteen-pounder. Bibi entered the stone house from the yard at the back, treading very carefully lest he should set a tin rolling or crack a piece of fallen tile under his boot. He sat down in one of the ground-floor rooms until there was sufficient light to prevent him bungling the climb up the rickety stairs. The ruin was full of the greyness of the dawn when he took his boots off, crawled up the stairs, and, scrambling across the joists, lay flat on the platform of floor boards, and close to the hole in the wall.

He had a good view of the house across the street, and by moving his head he found that he could see the whole of it, and also a large part of the garden. The shell-hole in the wall was less than a foot in diameter, and by keeping well back in the shadow Bibi felt pretty sure that his face would be almost invisible to any one across the way. He had been lying there about twenty minutes when he heard the café door unlocked, and saw Brent come out with a bucket in his hand. Paul dropped out of Bibi’s view when he jumped down from the raised path and went to the well to draw water. Bibi heard him washing in the street, and sousing his head in the bucket.