Part 7

“Mon ami,” she exclaimed, “I shall not go to Ste. Claire to-morrow. I shall stay here several days. There is no time to be lost, and I can help you. We must take what we need before Bibi thieves everything.”

XIV

They entered the café and sat down on the two wooden chairs that Manon had salved from one of the houses. The coming of Bibi had introduced a sudden sinister complexity into the adventure, an element of discord, a threat of competition. Brent refilled his pipe. He looked worried.

“We had better begin on those huts,” he said; “I’ll get the tools together and go down at once.”

Manon restrained him.

“No, not yet. We must wait.”

“Till that fellow has gone?”

She nodded.

“Bibi is cunning. He has come here to see what he can find—and there is no generosity to be expected from Bibi. We must not betray what we are doing. When he has driven off in that cart of his, then we can work like slaves.”

“There will be a moon to-night,” said Brent; “I shall work all night. We must store the sheeting in one of those rooms, and I will get two doors and some shutters fitted at the first chance.”

Manon held up a hand.

“Listen!”

They heard a man’s boots clanking on the pavé.

“I knew he would come here.”

Monsieur Louis Blanc did not stop outside the Café de la Victoire. He strolled past it with the detached and casual air of a holiday-maker, nodding at Manon who stood at the window.

“Even if you have no wine, madame—they tell me there is plenty of good water in the well.”

“Yes, there is plenty of water.”

He paused for a second—his hands in his pockets, his eyes considering the house.

“You have been lucky.”

“Ah, monsieur, lucky! I have four walls and an abundance of ventilation.”

“I have two walls and half a wall. Just because my little hotel was too near the church! We always shelled churches, you know, just to give le bon Dieu a personal interest in the affair.”

He laughed and walked on.

Manon waited till he had disappeared down the Rue de Rosières, and then ran out into the garden. She knew that from one corner of the garden it was possible to see the field where those precious huts stood, but though she remained on the watch, the figure of Louis Blanc never appeared in the field. Brent, who was equally interested in the pilgrimage of Monsieur Bibi, went across to the stone house over the way, and saw the Frenchman turn back before he had reached the end of the Rue de Rosières. Bibi stopped to look at the well, gave a casual glance at the café, and diverging into the Rue Romaine, walked off towards the factory.

Brent followed him, keeping to the orchards and the gardens behind the houses. The ruins of the cottage nearest to the factory served him as an observation post, and Brent did not quit it till he saw Bibi driving off in his cart along the road to Bonnière.

Brent ran back to the café.

“He has gone,” he said, reaching under the wire bed for the box in which he kept his tools.

Manon was ready.

“He did not see those huts.”

“I think Bibi was looking at something else,” said Brent; “your café.”

It is probable that no salvage party ever worked as Paul and Manon did, stripping the corrugated iron from those army huts in the field on the road to Rosières. They dragged the yellow gig up the hill, and Manon loaded it, while Brent used hammer, cold chisel and tommy-bar, and slid the loosened sheets down to her from the roof. They made a fine and healthy clatter between them on that Sunday afternoon, but as there was no one in Beaucourt to hear it, no one was offended. Brent allowed twenty sheets to a load, remembering the weak wheel of the gig. Then they set off for the café, Brent between the shafts, Manon pushing behind, the load banging and clattering as the gig bumped over the pavé. They carted two such loads before breaking off for dinner, a meal that lasted less than twenty minutes.

“Forty sheets. That was pretty quick work. We want a hundred.”

He had lit his pipe, and was glancing humorously at the bloody finger and knuckles of his left hand.

“Nasty stuff to handle. And I was in a hurry.”

“You worked like a devil,” she said.

“I’m fresh to the tools. Show me your hands.”

Manon had a slight cut across her left palm.

“You ought to have gloves.”

“I’m not afraid of a cut or two.”

“Look here, I can manage alone this afternoon. Supposing you collect bricks for these two holes in the wall!”

She refused to do any such thing.

“Do you think that I am some soft little cat from a villa in Paris? I used to dig and hoe all my garden during the war, and I can carry a sack of potatoes if someone puts it on my back. I don’t cry off because of a scratched hand.”

Brent liked her pluck and determination.

“Put a sandbag over each hand. There are some in the cellar. I don’t want you with your arm in a sling.”

As he crawled about the roof, wrenching off the iron sheets and sending them skiddering down to Manon, Paul was troubled by the face of Louis Blanc. The adventure had ceased to be an exciting game played by two grown-up children; it had taken on more primitive colours, colours that had not the innocence of the brown eyes and red lips of Manon, of the purple of the woods and the grey green of the fields. The world and Monsieur Bibi had come swaggering together into Beaucourt, and Brent was conscious of the unpleasant significance of the event.

Straddling the ridge of the roof, and looking at the chequer of red and white walls, the shadowy interspaces and the patches of broad sunlight that were Beaucourt, Brent realized that he had become responsible for Manon. He felt that she belonged to him, which of course was absurd. Less than two days of close comradeship did not justify a sense of possession, and yet the instinctive fierceness of the feeling astonished Brent. Why this bristling of the hair, this clenching of the fist? He had no difficulty in finding an answer.

But a far more sensitive and unselfish mood forced itself in front of these primitive emotions. Brent sat and looked into the face of his own past, a past that conjured up the present and the future. The coming of Bibi had made all the difference in the world to Brent’s outlook upon life. A cloud had wiped the irresponsible and un-self-conscious sunlight from the landscape. This polite and clever blackguard had reintroduced the social compact into Beaucourt. The village had ceased to be a wilderness, even though Louis Blanc’s presence in it had been a mere matter of hours. His appearance was more than a suggestion. Society had returned in the spirit, even if it remained absent in the flesh, and Brent saw Beaucourt full of eyes, mouths, ears and heads.

His thoughts centred upon Manon. What would Bibi tell people, those refugees scattered through the villages beyond the region of devastation? Brent knew how a man of Bibi’s kidney would talk. “Oh, yes, Manon Latour is living at Beaucourt with some fellow.” Brent swore to himself—but swearing did not solve the problem. He had discovered that he was responsible for Manon, even though he knew in his heart of hearts that this adventure promised to be the cleanest and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him in life.

“Hallo!”

For the best part of a minute he had been straddling the ridge, staring at a hole in one of the iron sheets, and doing nothing. Manon was waiting. His inactivity was so sudden and so obvious that it touched her curiosity.

“Tired?”

He leant forward and knocked off the head of a screw with the chisel and hammer.

“No. Thinking.”

“You looked like murder.”

“I dare say I did.”

He loosened another sheet and slid it down to her, but she let it lie untouched, and stood looking gravely up at him.

“You were thinking about Bibi?”

He moved along the roof to attack the next sheet.

“Well, perhaps I was.”

“What does Bibi matter, when we are getting all that we want?”

Brent raised his hammer and let it fall again.

“It has made a difference.”

“What has?”

“His coming here.”

Her eyes had gone black and opaque, as was their way when she was seriously puzzled or troubled. It was plain to her that something was clogging Paul’s mind and hampering his work.

“What kind of difference?”

Brent was frowning.

“Don’t you see what has happened? I am not a fool who goes out to look for trouble, but we are not alone here any longer. A man has to think of these things.”

Her eyes gave a flash.

“Good heavens—you mean——?”

“Well, what sort of man is Bibi? Was he pleased to find me here?”

“You mean that you are afraid,—you want to go?”

Brent slogged the head off a nail.

“Damn!—I never thought you would think that! What the devil do I care what happens to me? But what I do care about——”

She caught her breath with a little breathless exclamation that was almost like a cry of pain.

“Oh, it’s like that? I understand—you will forgive me, mon ami?”

He looked down at her with eyes that had a queer shine in them.

“If you will forgive me for swearing!”

Brent went on with the work. It was the obvious thing to do, and it was a screen behind which he could hide, for Brent was one of those men who became absurdly shy in the presence of emotion. He hammered away with indefatigable ferocity, ignoring Manon who was stroking her chin with two fingers and looking at something that was a long way off.

Presently she resumed her loading of the gig, nor did she speak again till she had dealt with all the sheets that Brent had pushed down to her.

“Twenty,” she said, “we have a load.”

Brent slid down the roof, landed, and put himself between the shafts of the gig. Manon took her place behind it, and they started out of the field.

“Paul,” said her voice, just when they were on the edge of the pavé.

“Hallo.”

“I am not afraid of Bibi.”

The rattle of the wheels and the clanging of the iron sheets made it difficult for Brent to hear her.

“What did you say?”

“I am not afraid of Bibi.”

He threw his weight against the shafts and stopped the gig.

“Nor am I. Not for myself. But do you not see my point of view?”

“I have a pair of eyes in my head,” she retorted, “and in front of me I see my partner, Monsieur Paul Rance, whom I met when I was at Rennes.”

“Yes, all that sounds very pleasant, but——”

“Mon ami,” she broke in, “why are you in such a hurry to explain things to people, when no one has asked for explanations?”

She gave a push to the gig.

“Allons! You are afraid that Bibi will gossip, and that people will believe him. I am not going to be frightened by Bibi, simply because it amuses him to frighten people. Besides——”

Her brown eyes gave him a flash of buoyant audacity.

“You need not explain a thing that will appear obvious to decent people. And it is always possible for a man to change his mind.”

Brent was puzzled.

“I don’t understand you.”

She gave another and more vigorous push to the cart, looking at him with eyes that said, “What a simple fellow you are!” Brent turned about and put his weight on the shafts, and staring at the pavé in front of him, spent the whole of that journey in trying to disentangle her meaning.

During the unloading of the gig Brent watched Manon’s face as though he hoped to find it a mirror in which he could see the reflection of his own thoughts. But Manon’s face showed him nothing. She was the cheerfully determined little Frenchwoman wholly absorbed in helping him to unload those iron sheets. She refused to be sentimental or to let herself encourage Brent’s tendency towards too much self-consciousness. Men are such children, and Brent appeared to be an unusually sensitive child. He would go and get lost in the woods unless she held him shrewdly to the great work that mattered.

XV

After working at the huts till ten o’clock, Brent walked back to the Café de la Victoire by the light of the moon. He was tired, dead tired, but his weariness was full of a pleasant sense of physical satisfaction; he had done the best day’s work in his life, and if his hands were sore and his back one huge ache, what did it matter?

Manon had gone home earlier to light the stove. She heard Brent’s footsteps on the pavé, and ran out to meet him.

“Partner, I’m tired.”

He laughed over it, for he was a little exultant.

“I never thought that we could do it, rip off a hundred sheets and get them carted and stacked here. I have knocked half the weather boarding off that hut.”

Manon enveloped him in a soft atmosphere of sympathy, applause, gratitude.

“Go down and sit by the fire. The water is boiling. What shall it be, tea or coffee?”

“Coffee. Your coffee?”

The tired yet happy note in his voice touched her. She had been thinking a great deal about Paul while she was watching the stove grow red and waiting for the sound of his return. In all her experience of life—and a woman can see an abundance of life in a little French café—Manon had never met a personality quite like Paul’s. This little widow knew men through and through, yet Brent had puzzled her until that moment when he had sat astride the roof of the hut and betrayed the sensitive prudery of a sentimentalist. She liked him none the less for that, though it added to the complexity of the adventure. Manon was not a prude, and Paul was not a Frenchman. She realized the significance of the fact, nor did the possible unexpectedness of this man’s romantic boyishness bore her. She was piqued by it. Most men are so obvious.

She had a meal ready for this tired man of hers, a man whose body had performed a tour-de-force, and whose happy weariness was ready to eat, drink, light its pipe and relax before the fire. Manon was glad of Brent’s tiredness, even as she was glad of his strength. She wanted him in that mood of happy relaxation. She saw the white stones of the cellar’s vault bright with candle light and the glow from the stove. The water bubbled contentedly in the saucepan. The arm-chair from the école stood embracing the warmth from the fire. And Manon was sensitively alert to the impression that the homeliness of the place would make on Paul. She had been busy here, exerting a woman’s forethought, not for purely selfish ends, but because a woman’s shrewdness may become involved in the things that she does for a particular man.

“You have earned that chair.”

He took it, after protesting that it should be hers. She saw him lie back and melt into enjoyment of this atmosphere of simple comfort.

“I say—this is good.”

His eyes wandered—and then fell to watching Manon, Manon whose hands were busy in his service. He became aware of the pleasantness of Manon, and that it was good to look at her, good to feel her near. As she leant forward over the stove to fill the coffee-pot Paul noticed the brown depths of her eyes, the shadowy curves of her nostrils, the pretty line of her mouth, her frank forehead, and the white fulness of her throat and chin. He observed a little brown freckle rather quaintly placed in the centre of her left lower eyelid. Her hands were plump and strong, with straight, well-formed fingers; generous, capable hands. He was aware, too, of a perfume, a personal aroma that was subtle and wholly French.

“Voilà!”

She drew the table close to the stove.

“How is that?”

“I am being spoilt,” said Brent.

That was exactly what she wanted him to feel. The memory of this evening was to have a particular significance.

“You amazed me to-day.”

She was pouring out his coffee.

“I never saw a man work with such ferocity.”

“I enjoyed it.”

“Yes, but you must not work too hard. And I am not going to talk to you until after supper.”

“Talking is food,” said Brent, “if one happens to be interested.”

Now Manon’s attitude towards Brent had developed since she had realized how easily he could be affected by the swaggering cynicism of a man like Louis Blanc. Hitherto she had not been conscious of any particular attitude towards this comrade of two days. The adventure had opened with such verve and simplicity that she had not bothered her head about the social complexities, but the coming of Bibi and Paul’s instant reaction to the challenge in the big Frenchman’s sensual eyes had compelled her to look at Brent more closely. She guessed that he had a thin skin, and that he was the sort of good fellow who fell into a panic if anyone accused him of behaving like a blackguard. Like many sensitive men he was extraordinarily diffident. An audacious beast like Bibi would squeeze out all his self-confidence.

“What a comfort it is to have you here.”

Brent looked surprised, pleasantly disconcerted.

“In what way?”

“Because you are rather unusual. Most men—Oh!—well—you know what I mean.”

It was the beginning of her conscious effort to humour her man. Paul was a sentimentalist, but Manon had a philosophy. She knew that life is always a bit of a scramble and that in Beaucourt life was going to be rather primitive and savage. Paul’s skin was too thin. She had a feeling that she would have to guard his sensitiveness—prevent his impressionable good nature from being at the mercy of hard people. Brent lacked hardness. She had an idea that this lack of hardness had been the cause of his failure.

“But you can’t make a soft man hard,” she said to herself; “it must be done some other way.”

She felt that Brent had that queer passion for ethical self-expression that plain people call “self-sacrifice.” She sensed it vaguely at first, and she could not have translated the impression into words. It was a thread, an intuition, and she followed it.

“This fine weather cannot last,” she said with apparent vagueness.

She filled his cup a second time.

“And to-morrow? What will you do to-morrow?”

He knew at once what he meant to do, and she respected the quiet and orderly way in which he had mapped out the work.

“I shall bring the timber across. The rafters of that big hut will be the right size for us over here. Nothing like having all your material on the spot, and under your eyes,—especially as there seems some chance of competition.”

He frowned when he thought of Bibi, and Manon was prompted by that frown. She thought of altering her plans, and she was curious to see what effect such an alteration would have upon Brent, but she wanted her change of purpose to develop naturally and not to appear as a sudden decision forced on her from without.

“More coffee, mon ami?”

“Please. It’s so jolly good.”

“No more to eat?”

“Not another mouthful.”

She looked at the bully beef, the biscuits, the carton of jam—and the unappetizing dryness of this fodder gave her her first suggestion. She made a little grimace, and waved a hand over the table.

“You poor man. Now, if only we had a savoury omelette and some spinach! I must change all this. That is obvious.”

She appeared to reflect.

“Yes, you must have fresh food,—eggs and butter and vegetables. If I went three times a week to Ste. Claire——”

Brent had brought out his pipe, and then slipped it back again into his pocket. The gesture was full of significance.

“Smoke.”

“Not here.”

“But I like the smell of it.”

“As a matter of fact, I am at the end of my tobacco.”

“Quel dommage! But this is a tragedy. It is obvious that I must go to Amiens; I may be able to buy English tobacco there.”

He corrected her.

“What a conscience you have! But, mon ami, could you spare me to-morrow? Could you carry all that wood?”

“Easily.”

“And if I stayed away three days?”

She saw that he was not in the least dashed by the suggestion. In fact he approved of it.

“I shall want that saw.”

“Yes—and blankets. It must be so horribly cold up there, and you were quite snug before I came. Oh, mon ami, I have an idea.”

He looked up at her questioningly.

“Well——?”

“It will take many days to put a roof on the house, will it not?”

“A fortnight—perhaps more.”

“And then there are the doors and windows.”

“Yes.”

“The weather will change. Rain and wind—mon Dieu! And you, under those pieces of tin! Be quite honest with me, Paul; would it not be more sensible for me to stay at Ste. Claire and leave you the cellar—until the roof is on?”

She watched Brent’s face, and discovered nothing but a faint shadow of surprise, a surprise that was momentary and transient. He leaned forward and stirred up the wood in the stove with an old iron bar that they used for the purpose. The glow from the wood shone on a calm face, and Manon saw that it had cost him no effort to adjust life to the new atmosphere.

“A sound idea,” he said, feeding more wood into the stove.

Perceiving no resistance, Manon let the new plan develop itself.

“It is not that I am a coward, mon ami, or afraid of a rough life.”

“You are no coward,” he said with quiet conviction.

She showed a sudden animation that flowed with the full flood of the new idea.

“I can hire a horse and cart in Ste. Claire, and I must see what can be bought at Amiens. I could drive over here twice a week, and if I started very early in the morning I should be able to spend most of the day here, cook for you, and help you when you needed a second pair of hands. And then, there is the garden.”

“The garden’s important.”

“Yes, our living this summer. I could work in the garden and sow seeds, and I could use the horse and cart to collect things for you. I must think of my good partner’s comfort.”

Brent stared at the fire.

“Don’t worry about me,” he said; “I am not the one to be considered. I am thinking of you.”

They had been skimming the surface, but those words of Brent’s went down beneath the conventional crust.

“Mon ami, you are very unselfish.”

“It’s not that. A man has to think of things—other things than bricks and timber; and when there is a woman about, a man has to think of her.”

Manon was silent for a while, and in her heart of hearts she knew that Paul was right. She had used her intuition and her shrewdness to bring the adventure into sympathy with this man’s simple sense of honour, and now that the thing was done she felt that Paul was happier.

“What a good man you are!”

He smiled at her and said nothing.

“You think of others before yourself. And how exciting it will be when I drive over and see what you have done; each time there will be something fresh, a new piece of roof, a door, a window.”

“It will be just as exciting to me—the finest game I ever played in my life.”

She frowned a little over that word.

“Game—game! You English are always thinking of games.”

“The word does not fit; I should not have used it. It is more than a game.”

Manon looked at her knees, possessed by a feeling of gentleness and humility. She knew now that she had been right about Brent, utterly right in her reading of his simple and sensitive character. He was no ordinary man, nor was his inspiration the inspiration of the ordinary man. Brent gave. Most men take.

“It is very strange,” she said, “that you should be so good to me. I think—somehow—that doing good things is as pleasant to you as the tobacco you smoke in your pipe. Is it not so, monsieur?”

He nodded.

“Perhaps there’s reason in it.”

“I am very lucky.”

And then she added,

“How good to be able to trust you—with everything! It is like feeling that God is near.”

XVI

Brent was up with the dawn. He heard a bird singing somewhere as he went down to the well to fill the bucket, and he stood in the street and looked at the sky with the eyes of a child. In the east and reaching to the zenith great ridges of tawny white cloud broke the intense blue of the sky. A mysterious golden light enveloped everything, the broken walls, the spire of the church, the grey-green hills, the murk of the woods, the tangled, unpruned orchards. Even the cobble-stones had a bloom of gold upon them. The brown blackness of Manon’s house loomed up against the dawn.

Brent’s face was a thing of delight. His beard had a more tawny richness, his eyes a deeper blue.

“By God—life’s good!”