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.”
That swinging ridge-beam overhead was the first thing to be tackled. Paul went up the ladder and straddled his way up the gable end to the chimney-stack, and gave his directions to Manon. She had grasped what he wanted her to do, and had run out into the yard and got hold of the telephone wire whose lower end was fastened to a bit of an iron bar that Brent had driven into the ground.
“I pull?”
“That’s it.”
There was a slot in the throat of the chimney-stack where the original beam had taken its bearing, and Manon pulled on the stout wire until Paul held up his hand. He lay along a sloping bit of wall, and guided the end of his beam into the slot.
“All right. Fasten the wire again.”
He scrambled down, shifted the ladder, and climbed the partition wall. Manon had run round into the room below and had hold of the other wire.
“Ready.”
She raised the beam, waiting for Paul’s signal.
“Enough.”
He worked the end into the slot at the top of the partition wall, and the thing was done.
Manon clapped her hands.
“How exciting! Now, what next!”
Paul came down to the top of the front wall of the house.
“I want to try one of the rafters from the hut. One of those long things there. If you could give me the end of it——”
She did so, and Paul tried a balancing feat, like Blondin with a pole. He had braced the wooden sleepers together so that they lay solidly along the top of the wall, and resting the butt of the rafter against one of them, he prepared to lower it towards the ridge-beam.
“Hallo! Just a minute.”
He had paused.
“If the thing falls, our crockery may suffer. Pull that table into the corner.”
Manon pushed the table into a safe place, and watched Brent handle that length of timber. It was a ticklish job; an attack of nerves or some lack of balance might have landed him down below with a broken neck. Moreover, it was a test of strength; and when the rafter came to rest with some three inches of its end projecting over the ridge-beam, Manon sent up a little cry of applause and triumph.
“Oh, mon ami, splendid! And how strong you are.”
It was the man who dominated for the moment their little world of adventure, the man with the strong hand and the contriving head. Brent stood looking down at her and smiling.
“Now, then, the hammer and gimlet, a packetful of long nails, and the saw. I shall have half those rafters up to-day.”
She collected the tools and nails, made two journeys up the ladder and handed them to Brent. One end of the rafter was all ready cut to fit on the bedding-plate and Brent secured it with a nail driven half home, and then went up the slope of the partition wall, sawed off the upper end at an angle so that it dropped flush against the ridge-beam, and drove nails home.
“Now—it is going to be easy.”
He told Manon to fasten another rafter to the end of the wire that they had used for raising the end of the ridge-beam, he pulled it up, unfastened the wire, ran the rafter down the opposite slope of the partition wall, rolled it over till it was on a line with the rafter on the other side, shaped the upper end with the saw, and nailed it to the beam; with the two lower ends fastened to the sleepers on the wall Brent had completed his first span.
The rest was repetition, with Manon acting as ladder boy, and Paul working along a framework that grew stronger and more rigid with each pair of rafters that were fixed.
Half-way through the morning Brent told Manon to rest.
“You have another thirteen kilomètres to walk, and I can get along on my own.”
“Very well, I am going to cook your dinner.”
“Is that resting?”
“Of course. I sit on a chair between the stove and the table. But take care, you must not drop sawdust into my frying-pan.”
“I have too much respect for my dinner.”
So Manon collected wood and her pots and pans, and did her cooking in the roofless kitchen, while Brent scrambled up above, hammering, sawing, and whistling “Roses in Picardie,” his blue trousers more vivid than the blue of the sky. He was happy and strenuous, and kept up such a merry piping that he made Manon think of a jolly bird in a cage. She sat and watched him with soft eyes.
“Quel oiseau y at-il?”
Brent looked down from his rafters and laughed.
“A blue bird, Madame Taquine. Blue birds are lucky.”
“The bird shall have a glass of wine for dinner. And what is that pretty song you whistle?”
He told her, and she began to imitate him, picking up the melody and whistling it while she fed the fire.
“Now, there are two birds in a cage,” she called up at him, “and what am I? A black bird with brown eyes?”
Perched up against the blue sky and climbing about the increasing intricacies of his roof timbers, Paul developed a healthy hunger, and the savoury smell of Manon’s cooking drifted up to him from below. All his old “tool sense” was coming back, and he was working with a speed and a precision that would have damned him in the world of Go Slow. But then Paul had an object, a spark of the sacred fire, and the little capitalist down below there—even Manon—who employed him, would have opened her eyes very wide if he had preached by his acts the Religion of Slackness. Paul had seen her slip away into the garden and begin digging in the corner where the iron summer house stood. She returned, holding up a bottle of wine to encourage her man.
“Now you know where it is.”
She felt that the wine was as safe as the silver.
The dinner was all that a dinner should be, and they drank the health of the new roof. To Manon’s eyes the house began to look quite “dressed,” and already she saw herself voyaging over from Ste. Claire in Etienne Castener’s big blue cart with the bits of furniture she had collected, and turning the Café de la Victoire into a home. This house of hers would lead the way in Beaucourt, and stand as a live thing to encourage the others.
“I want to look again at Bibi’s house.”
Her watch told her that she would have to be on the march in half an hour, and there was the washing up to be done. She was not going to leave Paul with a lot of dirty crockery.
“You can heat up the meat and the vegetables for another meal,” she told him, “and perhaps you know how to fry eggs.”
“I can boil them and judge the time,” laughed Paul.
When Manon was ready for the road, Brent walked with her by way of the Rue de Picardie to look at the Hôtel de Paris. The place, standing as it did at the cross-roads, had suffered badly from shell-fire, and the ragged walls rose out of a deplorable chaos of rubbish—old iron and broken brick. It had been a biggish building, and Brent saw that the house had gathered itself round the great central mass of brickwork in which were the chimney flues, a mass of brickwork that stood like a lonely tower in the middle of the ruin. The main beams of the roof and floors had taken their bearings from this central tower. The staircase had curled round it, and in any reconstructive scheme this mass of brickwork would serve as a point d’appui.
Brent climbed over the rubbish and examined the chimney-stack with the eyes of an expert. There was a great crack running up one side of it, a crack that spread upwards from a raw chasm at the base of the mass where a shell had exploded. A good third of the foundations had been blown away, and the whole pile seemed to balance itself precariously on the edge of the shell crater.
Manon had followed Brent over the heaps of brick.
“Look at that,” and he pointed at Louis Blanc’s chimney-stack.
“It seems ready to fall.”
Brent was frowning.
“Half-an-hour’s work with a pick, or a Mill’s hand-grenade, and a bit of wind, and the thing would come down like an old factory chimney. Take that gable end of the house with it too, probably,—and put our dear friend back for weeks.”
Manon’s eyes met his.
“It would be a blow to Bibi?”
“Well—that brick stack is going to be very useful when they begin reconstructing the house. And if it fell it would be pretty sure to bring that wall down.”
“But we could not do it, Paul.”
Her face had a touch of fierceness.
“It would be such a dirty trick, the sort of trick that Bibi would play on other people.”
“I thought you would say that,” he told her, with a significant little smile.
“Then you wanted to find out——?”
“Yes.”
“O my Paul,” she said.
Brent looked sheepish.
“I should have known that you had some strong reason—that the fellow is such a beast.”
“He may be that, but we could not fight him in that way. I don’t believe you would have done it, Paul, even if I had asked you.”
“I was pretty sure you would not ask me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Brent walked with her as far as the factory, and turned homewards along the Rue Romaine. She had given him a soft look of the eyes, and a little smile, and Brent was happy.
“She’s great,” he kept saying to himself; “by God, I’m glad she trusts me!”