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.