Part 6

“There are dozens of these scattered about in the buildings. We ought to take care of them. They may help to feed some of the others when they come.”

Brent’s heart blessed her.

“No wonder we are lucky,” he said.

They went to look at the ladder. Manon had discovered it lying behind one of the sheds; it was a thirty-rung ladder, and Brent saw that the right pole needed splinting about three feet from the top.

“Just long enough,” was the verdict, “I think I’ll take this home before anyone else borrows it.”

He shouldered the ladder and marched off, and on his way back met Manon trundling the barrow along the Rue Romaine. She had loaded the tools into it, and the iron wheel was making a fine clatter over the cobbles.

Brent took charge of the barrow.

“I’m getting hungry,” he observed.

“Poor Monsieur Paul.”

She ran on ahead, and when Brent reached the café with his precious plunder, he found that she had the table ready and had washed the plates. The two glasses were set out, and in the middle of the table stood a bottle of red wine.

“Thunder, what is this?”

“I brought this with me. We will drink the health of the adventure.”

She poured him out a glass of wine.

“And I have a secret.”

“Then—keep it.”

She laughed.

“No secrets between comrades. There are thirty bottles of red wine, twenty of white, and a flask of cognac buried in the garden.”

Brent pretended to be shocked.

“You buried them?”

“Yes.”

“I wonder if they are still there. The Boche had a wonderful sense of smell.”

“I put something to mark the place, and it has not been touched.”

“Heavens,” said Brent, “you will be able to stock your cellar. What a good thing it is that Paul is a sober fellow. But I should like to remind you, madame, that we have not found that lime.”

“Did I not tell you? I found a heap of it in the factory stable. I was so excited about the ladder.”

“Something very terrible is going to happen to us. We are being too lucky.”

XII

After dinner 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

Manon did 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.