Part 9

It was after supper that night, and Marie Castener was emptying the last of the coffee into Manon’s cup, when they heard a man’s footsteps outside the door. He knocked and tried the handle, but the door was bolted. Veuve Castener thought it was Etienne, for Etienne never used his voice when some more primitive sort of sound would serve. Marie went to the door and opened it, and discovered Louis Blanc.

Veuve Castener’s big body filled the doorway. She said nothing. Her bulk and her silence kept Bibi on the doorstep.

“Good evening, madame.”

He had looked over Marie’s shoulder and seen Manon sitting at the table in the yellow circle of light thrown by the lamp.

“Good evening, Madame Latour.”

Bibi pushed the words past Veuve Castener, since her big body kept him out of the room.

Manon looked up.

“Good evening, Monsieur Blanc.”

She replied to him with an air of complete unconcern, betraying neither interest nor antagonism.

Bibi scraped his boots on the doorstep and removed his hat. You might take liberties when you were alone with one woman, but you were polite when there happened to be two of them.

“Is it permitted for a poor man to come in and sit down for ten minutes?”

He smiled, and made eyes at Marie.

“I have a few words to say to Madame Latour. A business matter, you know; we are full of business these days.”

Veuve Castener spoke to Manon in a loud voice, as though Bibi were on the other side of a field.

“Here is Monsieur Louis Blanc who wishes to speak to you, Manon.”

“What does he want?”

“To talk about business.”

“Oh, let him in,” said Manon, yawning a little.

Bibi was angry at being kept on the doorstep, and at the way Mother Castener had snubbed him by talking to Manon as though he were not there. He had seen Manon’s yawn, and appreciated the flat indifference of her voice; the diplomat in Bibi was ruffled. His swagger had lost its fine edge and became a more brutal weapon.

Veuve Castener let him enter. She glanced at Manon, who had reached for her work-basket and had taken out a stocking that needed darning, also wool and a pair of scissors. She dropped the scissors into her lap.

“I am going to wash up.”

Manon understood what was in Marie’s mind. The wash-house was at the back of the cottage, and was reached by crossing a brick-paved yard. Manon nodded.

“Sit down, monsieur.”

But Bibi remained standing, watching Veuve Castener clearing away the plates, his hands in his trouser pockets. Manon glanced up at him once or twice. She noticed that Louis Blanc was wearing new clothes, a well-cut black suit, new boots, a light waistcoat. These clothes were part of Bibi’s “business atmosphere”; he was a fellow who had money.

Veuve Castener disappeared with a tray full of dirty crockery. Bibi stood quite still for a moment, and then went and closed the door that opened on the yard. He came back and stared at Manon across the table.

“That is rather unnecessary, monsieur.”

“Indeed!”

“You and I have nothing to say to each other that my friend may not hear.”

He laughed, one of those soundless laughs, and fidgeted his hands in his pockets.

“You are still devilish pretty, ma petite.”

“And you are still a fool.”

He gave her a vicious yet humorous glance, and began to walk slowly up and down, his boots making a leisurely clatter on the red-tiled floor.

“That should reassure Madame Gossip,—what! So you won’t have sentiment, not even from me! Let us try business, my dear.”

Manon had begun darning the stocking. She looked steadily at Bibi for a moment.

“Very well, keep to business. What is it that you want?”

He swung round and faced her, legs straddling, head thrown back, loins hollowed, pockets and belly thrust forward.

“A partner.”

“What for?”

“You want me to give the whole game away, do you? Yes, you little devil, you always were the best business woman in Beaucourt. And such a leg, too.”

“Be quick,” said Manon; “I am going to help Marie at the end of five minutes.”

Bibi smiled, and began to walk up and down again, and Manon noticed that his track tended to become an orbit, with herself as the centre. Sometimes he was behind her, and she did not like having Bibi behind her, but she remained quite still in her chair, though tense as a steel spring.

“I am going to make money in Beaucourt. A little hotel—what! well advertised for the people with handkerchiefs and the fools of Americans! Kept by one of the veterans of Verdun, with the Médaille Militaire! Allons! That’s all right. What do you say?”

Manon went on with her work, conscious of Bibi standing there close beside her.

“I think many things, monsieur.”

“Let’s have them.”

“You want my house. It is in better condition than yours, is it not?”

“Tiens! What cleverness!”

“You would like to have your own way in Beaucourt, not an hotel or a café within twenty kilomètres.”

“Go on guessing, ma petite.”

“That is all, monsieur.”

And then he bent over her suddenly from behind, tweaked her ear, and caught her by the shoulders. It had always been his way with women, to surprise them, get them into his arms. The magnetic male was very strong in Bibi; he had known women who had fought and then given him all that he wanted.

Manon had been waiting for that attack. She had expected it, knowing Bibi as she did. She said nothing, but picking up the scissors, made a deft jab at Louis Blanc’s left wrist.

“Keep your hands to yourself, if you please.”

She had challenged the beast in Bibi, and she sat there pretending to go on with her work, drawing her breath a little more deeply, ready to spring up, and to call for Marie Castener. Bibi had removed his hands from her shoulders, and was sucking his left wrist. She had drawn blood, quite a good red trickle of it.

“I think that is all, monsieur.”

She saw him come back from behind her chair and move to the other side of the table. He had pulled out a blue handkerchief and was wrapping it round his wrist.

“Your scissors are as sharp as your tongue. A nice way to receive a man who comes to propose a little bit of business.”

“What a fool you are,” she said very quietly. “Don’t you see that you cannot do with me what you have done with other women? You are not the sort of man who appeals to me. You are only wasting your time.”

Bibi stared at her a moment.

“It is as well to know these things,” he said coolly; “nothing like having reconnoitred the other fellow’s bit of trench. Shall I tell old Mother Castener that the talk is over?”

“I am going out there myself. Good-night, monsieur.”

Louis Blanc picked up his hat and opened the door. He stood there for a couple of seconds as though he were about to say something, but he said nothing, and when he closed the door he did it very quietly. Manon heard him walk away.

“A nice neighbour to have,” she said to herself. “I wonder if Paul can fight?”

XVIII

Horses were scarce in Ste. Claire, and Manon found that Etienne Castener could not hire himself and his brown nag to her more than once a week, so she made a bundle of the things Brent needed and prepared to walk to Beaucourt. It was rather a wonderful bundle, an omnium gatherum of tobacco, matches, nails, six fresh eggs, some brussels sprouts, half a loaf of bread, six slices of fresh meat, a few oranges, three candles, a new shirt, a pair of blue trousers and the dictionary. Marie watched the making of the bundle, and withheld her criticism until the end.

“You are not going to carry that to Beaucourt?”

“Yes, but I am. There is a saw, too, that will have to travel under my arm.”

Marie felt the weight of the bundle.

“Oh, la-la, it is too heavy!”

“I am stronger than you think. See, I push a stick through the cord, put a pad between the stick and my shoulder, and there you are!”

She was away at five o’clock, after a simple breakfast by lamplight in the red-tiled cottage. The morning was very dark and still, one of those mysterious and secret mornings when the heart thrills not a little to the eternal adventure of life. There had been a frost, and the air struck keen and clear, with the smell of fresh earth that some peasant had turned up with his plough. A few stars pricked the black sky. The great poplars guarding the road were still wrapped up in their coats of darkness and of sleep, and as Manon passed along the road and up the hill she felt rather than saw the branches of those trees meeting like a high vault above her head.

She trudged along with her bundle slung over one shoulder, and the saw swathed in paper under the other arm, not hurrying because of her knowledge of the twenty kilomètres that were to be marched that day, and of the work she wished to do at Beaucourt. She was a little woman with a great heart; also—she was happy. The blackness of the morning seemed to shut her up with her own thoughts, and Manon’s thoughts were many and varied as she pushed steadily along the road. The elements of life were mixed up with her thinking, and if, as the clever people tell us, ordinary thinking is but the glow thrown up by the emotions, then Manon’s thoughts were made of human stuff. She felt—and in feeling she knew, and in knowing grasped the quaint and seemingly irrational altruism of this English Paul, the essential badness of Bibi—the great truth that some people give while others take. If you do not give you will never know what life can give you in return. Manon’s view of life was quite simple yet shrewd. Men had to be managed. It was very necessary for a woman to have someone to love; she withered into a stick without it. Happiness can be planned, if you love someone very much, and go about the managing of your happiness like a cheerful little housewife. Simple things matter. Men like to be praised, women to be kissed. Always back your man with your tongue, finger-nails and heart. A comfortable bed, a well-cooked meal, and a glass of wine at the right moment are worth oceans of wise verbiage. A woman should never marry a man who was not a little shy before he kissed her for the first time. Greedy eaters are soon satisfied.

She trudged on, shifting her bundle from shoulder to shoulder, and presently the dawn came, a greyness that grew red like a fire. The bare trees of a wood showed up against it, the branches like some exquisitely carved rood-screen in a church. She heard a bird pipe up somewhere in the wood, and then another and yet another till a good score were singing, for the birds had multiplied during the war. Beyond the wood a great sweep of black and desolate country cut like a broad knife at the red throat of the dawn. A solitary house with half its roof gone, the broken stump of a tree, a rifle, butt end upwards, marking a grave, a pair of wagon-wheels in a shell-hole, all these were like black symbols against that red sky. Yet there was a silence over this wilderness, a beauty, a strangeness that called; and over yonder lay Beaucourt, waiting, waiting for those who would return.

“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Manon to herself; “nôtre pays est malade; it calls for help. The strong ought to help the weak. I must not forget that; my little house is not going to stuff itself with food and do nothing for the others. What a pity all the Bibis in the world weren’t killed in the war!—it would have made things so much easier, and I have an idea that Bibi is going to be a nuisance. I wonder what Paul is doing? Lighting the stove?”

Her thoughts centred on Paul, and somehow this wild landscape with the red sky turning to a tawny gold swept away any little feeling of surprise that had lingered in Manon’s mind. The wind blew as it pleased over these leagues of desolate country. Life was a going back to the wilderness—a fight, face to face, with the elements in Nature and in man. The little stuffy conventions had no roof under which to create a moral fog. You went out into the open with your man and laboured till the sweat ran from you, swinging axe and hammer, or plying hoe and spade. Courage and a clear faith in your comrade, that was how Manon sensed it. Adam and Eve, with God looking on, and the Serpent out of a job.

Some three hours later Manon came to Beaucourt in the blue of a March morning. A great white wall stood up at the west end of the village like a gigantic notice board waiting for a message; the wall had been part of the factory owner’s house.

“Yes, there ought to be something on that,” said Manon, smiling in the eyes of the morning.

“Beware of Bibi!” she laughed.

“Or, Tommy’s word, ‘Cheero,’ or just ‘Courage.’”

She left the road and made her way over the higher ground, through the orchards above the Rue Romaine, and from this hill she had a view of the Café de la Victoire and a little human glimpse of Paul Brent. He had fixed up a length of telephone wire in the garden, and Manon saw him in the act of hanging out his washing—a shirt, two pairs of socks, and the things that he wore under his trousers.

Now Manon was strangely touched by that glimpse of him. She was smiling, but there was a little shimmer of tenderness in her smile.

“Mon ami, I would have done that for you. But it is rather sweet seeing you playing the blanchisseuse.”

When she came down the hill into the Rue de Picardie she noticed that the shell-holes in the walls of the house had disappeared. Two neat new patches of brickwork had been put in, and Brent had used facing bricks of the same colour as the walls of the house so that the new work was hardly noticeable. He had got the bedding-plates into place along the tops of the walls. Between one of the end gables and the inverted V of the main partition wall a length of timber hung suspended in the air by two lengths of telephone wire, some ingenious contraption of Brent’s for overcoming the problem of how a man could be in two places at the same time.

“Paul, hallo!”

He came through the old blue door in the garden wall, and stood a moment, looking down at her from the raised path. He had not expected her. The surprise and the pleasure of it were as obvious as the blue sky.

“What!—You have walked?”

“Yes.”

And suddenly she was aware of a new shyness in Paul Brent. He was looking at her as a man only looks at a woman when she has become the most wonderful thing in the world. He came down from the path and took her bundle.

“You have carried this from Ste. Claire?”

His shyness spread to Manon. She laughed. The feeling was rather exquisite, a little shiver of delight, the first note of a bird on a soft spring morning.

“Do I look tired?”

“A little.”

She noticed that he seemed afraid to look straight into her eyes.

“Well, there was no horse to be had to-day, and in war the transport must not fail—and here’s the saw.”

He took it with an air of eagerness, pulled off the wrappings, and looked along the line of the teeth.

“Oh, great! I have been wanting it badly.”

And then she fell to admiring the work he had done, and Brent stood and smiled as a shy man smiles on such occasions.

“It is splendid,” said Manon; “you would hardly know that there had been holes in the wall. How clever you are with your hands.”

“I learnt the business when I was no taller than you are.”

“And you have been so quick. I was astonished. And then—the poor man—has had to do his own washing!”

“I had a hot bath last night, and afterwards, I washed the clothes. Well, you see, they wanted it.”

She patted the bundle.

“I have something for you in there. And tell me, Paul, what is that beam doing, hung up there?”

“Oh, that ridge-beam,” said Brent; “it’s a bit awkward to get it into place, and I had rigged up that cradle, but I can do the job to-day with a little help.”

“We will do it together. And now, have you had breakfast? Because I could eat a second one.”

“So could I.”

“An omelette and coffee?”

“I can’t resist an omelette, but what about the eggs?”

“They are in that bundle. Do be careful.”

“Trust me,” said Brent.

Paul had cleaned and fitted the stove in Manon’s kitchen, and she did her cooking there while Paul went out to try the saw. He had contrived a carpenter’s bench in the front room on the other side of the passage, using boxes and the floor boards from one of the huts. There were some two by four battens to be worked up into a door-frame, and Brent squared the ends off with the new saw.

“It cuts like butter,” he called to Manon.

“Butter! Oh, mon ami, have you any butter left? I have forgotten to bring some.”

“Yes, quite a good-sized pat.”

“Thank God! How near we were to a tragedy.”

Half an hour later they sat down in the kitchen to that second breakfast. Manon had taken off her shoes in order to rest her feet, and she told an heroic lie when Brent accused her of having blistered them in walking from Ste. Claire. The omelette was excellent, golden food for the gods, and so was the French bread after a season of army biscuits and ration jam.

Manon Latour found herself looking at Paul as many a savage woman must have looked at the man whom she had chosen for a partner. Strength might matter in Beaucourt, and Paul Brent looked strong. He had a good chest and shoulders, and a squarish and intelligent head well set on a sinewy neck. She had seen him with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and remembered noticing how big and powerful his arms were. She knew that Paul was not the man who would fight for the mere love of fighting. There was too little of the animal about him for such savagery. Moreover, he was too good-tempered, though when a good-tempered man gets angry, the fire is all the more to be feared.

“All Englishmen can box; is not that so, mon ami?”

Paul was drinking his third cup of coffee. He set the cup down and stared at Manon.

“No. Why?”

“It is useful. And you——?”

“I have never boxed in my life,” said Brent.

He saw the faintest of faint frowns on her forehead. Bibi could box, and his boxing included tricks with his feet.

And then she began to tell him about Bibi, how he had come to her and suggested a partnership, but she did not tell Paul that Louis Blanc had tried to get her into his arms.

“You see we quarrelled, and I packed him out of the house, and now we are in his way. His idea is to attract the tourists to Beaucourt, charge them ten francs a bottle for wretched wine, sell them souvenirs, and all that. It will take months to get that hotel of his rebuilt, and this place of mine would have suited him very well while he was rebuilding the hotel. You will have to be very careful of Bibi.”

Brent’s hand had felt instinctively for his pipe. Manon saw it, and leaning over, took a tin of tobacco out of her bundle.

“Voilà! And English too!”

His eyes lit up, not merely at the sight of the tobacco, but because she had remembered.

“That’s good of you, Manon. What did you pay for it?”

“That is my affair.”

“Nonsense. I am not going to let you pay.”

“This time it is a present,” she said; “and when you wish to pay for the next you will have to send me in a bill for the work you have done.”

But he was annoyed.

“Look here, I have fifteen hundred francs down in the cellar.”

“Very well, you shall give me ten presently, if you promise not to argue every time. Don’t you see that I wish to make some return?”

Brent’s face softened.

“I am sorry,” he said; “it is like you to put it in that way.”

He opened the tin, filled his pipe, lit it and puffed with immense relish.

“Now, what about this prize bully, Monsieur Blanc? Do you mean to say that he may come along and try to frighten me out of Beaucourt?”

“That is just what I do mean,” said Manon; “you do not know Bibi as I do.”

Brent’s eyes glimmered.

“I have met men like that. But they always left me alone. I used to laugh at them—and get on with my work. You can’t quarrel with a gatepost.”

“Bibi would,” said Manon; “he’s a savage. Do you know what he did once?”

“Well?”

“There was a bull on one of the farms, a fierce beast. It chased Bibi one day; he had to run. What does he do but come to Beaucourt, pick up an axe, and go back to fight the bull. And he killed it, battered its head all to bits, and then paid the owner. Threw the money at him. Bibi likes a swaggering gesture.”

“What a pleasant brute,” said Brent, but the glimmer had gone out of his eyes.

Manon began putting on her shoes.

“I wanted you to know. You see, if Bibi tried to hurt you, it would be because of me.”

“I don’t ask for a better reason,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.

And Manon coloured. She bent over and picked up the bundle, and began to place the things in order upon the table.

XIX

Paul watched 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 of _Le 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.”