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.