XLII
Sunday came as a day of great heat, sultry and oppressive. There was thunder in the air, and Beaucourt did not go out to work in the fields, but remained at home sitting in the shade, or lazily busy in its gardens. At noon there was hardly a soul to be seen in the streets, and for an hour no one passed down the Rue de Bonnière save old Prosper Cordonnier, loping long-legged and guiltily to Bibi’s buvette. The hut among the apple trees above the factory was the one live, noisy spot in Beaucourt. The hut itself was like a baker’s oven, and the men lay about on the grass under the orchard trees and under an awning that Bibi had put up. Barbe was kept busy serving them with drink, for it was a thirsty and quarrelsome day, a day when men’s tempers feel the great heat.
As Anatole Durand said, after the event had happened, “What a confession—that so much trouble should be caused by a bottle of cognac, a drunken ‘sheep’s head’—and a few lies!” Yet Bibi’s plan was so simple and so dangerously human because it appealed to the baser passions. Given sufficient cognac, a fuddled and persuadable fool like old Cordonnier, and one stark audacious lie, and the machine would move. It happened that there was ample cognac; Cordonnier became valiant and obstinate in his silliness; and Bibi’s lie had all the assurance and the completeness of the truth. The Café de la Victoire was a bonfire to which these rowdies were to put a match.
Bibi handled the affair very cleverly. He sat on a stool, under the awning, and twitted Pompom Crapaud and Ledoux with the repulse that they had suffered at the hands of Paul and Manon. He was playful and sardonic, and as potent for evil as the cognac with which Barbe had drugged the wine.
“Those capitalist swine,” snarled Ledoux, with eyes that looked inflamed.
“Well, you funked it, old man,” said Crapaud; “the fellow put me out all right, and you stood by and watched.”
Ledoux was lying close to Bibi’s stool, and Louis Blanc bent over him with ironical playfulness.
“Did you ever bayonet a Boche, Lazare?”
“Plenty of them.”
“So did I. I was rather good with the toasting-fork. But I never ran away from a Boche.”
Ledoux looked at him fiercely.
“Is that a cut at me?”
“Well, you let a Boche throw your pal into the street. Ask old Cordonnier over there.”
That is how it began. Bibi had the whole crowd round him, and old Cordonnier was swearing to all sorts of things with nods and winks that were meant to be cunning. He was too fuddled to realize the seriousness of the affair or to understand whither these men’s passions were tending. It seemed no more than a riotous and irresponsible jest invented to make the day merry.
It was so easy to inflame these roughs whose blood and brains had been heated by the stuff Barbe had given them to drink. A mob never reflects. It spills itself like wine out of a split cask and makes straight for the gutter.
Bibi told his tale—the tale that his hatred had thought out in the darkness of those summer days. Cordonnier had given him the idea, and he had elaborated with an ingenuity that made it convincing. He asserted that Manon had remained in Beaucourt after the Germans had occupied it; that she had had an affair with a Boche, that this Boche had “deserted,” and taken her away with him through the lines.
“You see how it worked,” he said. “Women are queer fish, and this woman was infatuated. The fellow may have found out where she had buried her money. Everything was upside down just then; the ‘front’ was a sieve, and this Boche was fed up. He gets Manon through the lines, and is taken prisoner. After the armistice he escapes, and where does he make for? Beaucourt, of course. He knows that he will find the money and the woman there. A useful fellow, too, who can use his hands and speak French like a Frenchman! And there they are in Beaucourt with the best house in the place. A nice pair, what!”
There was a confusion of angry and excited voices.
“A Boche!”
“But I say, old man, it doesn’t sound possible!”
Bibi held up a fist.
“Listen. Cordonnier there heard the man talking German. When he told me that, I thought I would try it myself, and one night I got Mademoiselle Barbe to put me under their window. When a man is shut up in a house with a woman, does he talk German just for the fun of it?”
“You heard him?”
“I did. And I can tell you my blood felt hot; it made me think of those nights when one heard the swine talking in the trenches.”
It was Lazare Ledoux who jumped up and called for a crusade. He was the torch-bearer, the inflamer of mobs.
“Come on! We’ll cut the woman’s hair off, and kick the fellow into the street. Come on!”
At the Café de la Victoire the peaceful details of an idle summer day were proofs of how little this storm-burst was expected. Manon had run down to Mère Vitry’s with a few lettuces and a basket of beans, and had stayed chatting with the old lady. Marie Castener was washing up the dishes. Brent, in his shirt-sleeves, had pulled the arm-chair to the open window, and was lighting a pipe before sitting down to read a day-old copy of Le Petit Journal. Someone was splitting firewood in a barn across the way, and the steady chunk-chunk of the hatchet was almost as rhythmic as the ticking of a big clock.
Brent had begun to read an article on the coal problem in France, an article that contained some very bitter criticism of the British miner, when an unusual and yet familiar sound drew his attention from the paper. Back in his brain were many memories, sense impressions left by the war, and this particular sound reminded him of a company of infantry marching into its village billets. There was the unforgettable pounding of heavy boots on the pavé, and yet this noise was different. Troops marched in step. This footwork belonged to the undisciplined and scrambling rush of a crowd.
Paul turned in his chair and, leaning sideways, looked along the street. He remained quite motionless for some seconds, staring at this little mob of men debouching from the Rue Romaine. The two leading figures gave Brent the first hint of how the coming of this crowd might be a threat to the Café de la Victoire. Lazare Ledoux had blind Bibi by the hand, a Bibi whose face looked white and fatal beside the inflamed faces of the other men.
Brent stood up. His jaw and mouth seemed to set into hard, bleak lines as he saw the wild eyes of these men turned towards the house. Lazare Ledoux caught sight of him standing at the open window, and Ledoux’s mouth became a red-edged splodge of howling blackness.
“Voilà le Boche!”
The crowd howled in chorus, and Brent felt the cold hand of fear run its fingers down his spine. He had heard that human and bestial sound before when a company of drunken Bavarians had rushed over to raid a front-line trench. The courage in him had felt brittle as glass, and yet as hard. But now he was conscious of a swift and desperate coolness, an instant’s lucidity of thought between spasms of pain.
He went quickly to the door, opened it, and stood facing the crowd, and from the moment that he looked into the wild faces of these men who hung at Bibi’s flanks Brent knew that the mob-horror was upon him. There was no reason in those eyes—nothing in these furious men to which he could appeal. He had a glimpse of Bibi’s teeth flashing white in his black beard, and then he shut the door on them and shot the bolts.
“Fetch him out!”
“We want the woman.”
Marie was standing in the passage, her face like a great round wondering moon.
“Quick! Get out by the back door, and through the garden. Stop Manon; she mustn’t come here.”
Marie stared at him, and Paul went to her and pushed her bodily towards the back door.
“They think I’m a Boche. For God’s sake go and stop her. I’ll keep them interested here.”
She went blundering across the yard, and out by the gate leading into the orchard. Crapaud and half a dozen other men just missed the flick of her petticoat round the angle of the wall as they ran into the yard to guard the back door. Brent had closed and bolted it, and Marie got away.
Ledoux and several others had swarmed in through the kitchen window. They came into the passage as Paul sprang for the stairs. He had no weapon, but he turned on them there with the ferocity of an animal driven into a corner.
“What do you want, you devils? I’m an Englishman. Keep clear.”
“You are a Boche,” shouted Ledoux; “no more tricks. Drag him down, lads, out with him into the street.”