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.
“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.”