XLIII
As Marie Castener turned into the Rue Romaine she heard Bibi shouting like a madman.
“Put me at the door, put me at the door.”
They humoured him, and he began to lash at it with his big feet till the flimsy thing broke away from its fastenings and showed the struggling group upon the stairs. Ledoux was leaning against the wall holding his head in his hands; three other men were dragging Brent down the stairs.
Marie Castener panted down the Rue Romaine, waving her hands in the air.
“Mon Dieu—ces hommes!”
For once in her life her phlegm deserted her, and her emotion overflowed her bulk. She was to stop Manon—prevent her returning to the Café de la Victoire—but beyond that her ideas were hazy and uncertain.
Fifty yards down the Rue Romaine she met Manon coming towards her, a Manon who had seen Bibi’s mob rush past Mère Vitry’s window. With the rush of those fatal figures an equal fear had leapt into her heart. She had hurried out, and here was Marie, stertorous and quaking, and trying to look calm. From that moment Manon knew what was happening at the Café de la Victoire, and that it was her love against the mob.
“They are there?”
Marie spread out her arms.
“Don’t go. Paul told me to stop you.”
“He told you that!”
She slipped past big Marie as easily as a dog dodges a bull, and began to run towards the corner where the three roads met. Marie Castener turned and lumbered after her, and now that the secret was out she began to use that deep, low voice of hers. Doors were opening, and people pushing their heads out into the street. Marie shouted to them, waving an arm like an Amazon heading a charge.
“Come on, all of you—come on. Help me to save Manon.”
When Manon came to the meeting of the roads she saw a sight that she was never likely to forget. A thing that looked like a bundle of torn clothes was lying in the middle of the street, and Bibi was kicking at it with his heavy boots. There was something grotesquely disgusting in this great blind beast feeling for Paul Brent’s body with his feet, trampling and hacking like a blind stallion. The crowd stood round with an animal stupidity that is fascinated by violent physical action.
Manon’s face lit up with a white and inward blaze. She picked up a loose cobble-stone and ran forward; a little figure of silence, purposeful and intense. No one in the crowd noticed her until she had opened the circle, that little arena held by certain elemental passions, and had flung her stone full in Bibi’s face. It took him between the eyes and laid him on the cobbles.
That physical act of hers dominated the crowd. She stood over Paul’s body and looked round at these men, these creatures of a brutal impulse whom strong drink and their passions had inflamed. It was a moment of physical balance, of hesitation, of poignant self-consciousness, when some little act or word turns men back from the smell of the shambles.
“Why did you do it?”
She spoke in a quiet and accusing voice, like a grown child who is unable to understand the ways of rough men.
“He had done nothing to you. He was a good man.”
They stood grouped around her, furtively awkward, suddenly self-conscious, and therefore very near to shame. She had turned and was bending over Paul Brent, when Lazare Ledoux, rocking on his heels, shot out a malignant and accusing hand.
“The fellow is a Boche.”
She straightened up and faced Ledoux.
“It is a lie.”
He grimaced at her.
“I say he is a Boche. And you—a Frenchwoman—have given yourself to a Boche.”
Manon did not move. Her eyes looked straight at Ledoux.
“It is a lie. This man is English, and I will prove it. But what have I to do with any of you? Oh, Marie, help me!”
Marie Castener appeared, pushing the men aside as though they were bits of furniture. There were other women with her, a dozen of them, and a few men. Manon was down on her knees with Paul’s head in her lap, bending over his grey, dirt-smeared face. He was bleeding from the mouth, and from a bruised wound on the forehead.
“He breathes!”
Marie was down beside her when Ledoux tried to interfere. She turned, and swinging a huge arm, caught him across the face with the back of her hand.
“Get out.”
Two other women pushed him back, and the crowd laughed. Ledoux, looking evil, went round to where Bibi was sitting up, still dazed but potentially dangerous. Ledoux helped him to his feet.
“It was the woman who hit you with a stone. Come on.”
Ledoux was too late, for Beaucourt intervened. It came in force down the Rue de Picardie, led by Philipon, who carried a blacksmith’s hammer. Someone sprang on the side-walk and collared Pompom Crapaud, who was caught at the café doorway with a tin of petroleum and a bunch of straw. The two crowds jostled each other, waiting for some inflammatory word or act that should set them alight, but that faction fight never developed. Philipon’s hammer may have had something to do with it; also, these peasants were quiet fellows; they had the strong bodies and the obstinate blue eyes of the men of the open country. Almost imperceptibly they pushed Goblet’s factory roughs back towards the Rue Romaine, took possession of the central scene, and held it.
Manon was kneeling, body erect, watching Bibi and Ledoux, who had been cut off from their friends. Her eyes met Philipon’s. She pointed.
“Those two.”
Ledoux had been trying to make away, but Bibi held him by the arm.
“Hold on, what’s happening? Is the house alight?”
Ledoux was frightened.
“Look out! The whole village is here, and the women are spiteful.”
“He’s dead, that chap, isn’t he? Whose hand is that? Hallo!”
“Mine!” said Philipon. “You stand where you are, Louis Blanc. And you, too, you dog with the red eyes. Here, look after these two beauties, some of you.”
And suddenly, yet with deliberation, he took Bibi by the beard and held him as a man might hold a goat.
“Yes, you, Louis Blanc, it is not for me to spit in the face of a blind man. Stand still, will you? If there is law in Beaucourt to-day it is the law of my hammer.”
Louis Blanc stood still. He had always been afraid of Philipon, the one man in Beaucourt who was stronger than himself.
Meanwhile, the unconscious figure of Paul Brent and the two kneeling women bending over it held the crowd silent and attentive. Here was a little human scene that had all the helplessness and the inevitableness of tragedy, a man lying dead in a village street, and a woman holding his poor head in her lap. That is how the crowd saw it. They looked at Manon with a shrinking curiosity, a sympathy that was kindly inarticulate. With her hands she was wiping away the dust from Paul’s hair, her eyes quite tearless, eyes that seemed to look at a sudden emptiness, a vacancy in life. Paul was not dead, but she believed that he was dying.
Philipon joined them, sombre and gentle.
“How is it with him? How did it happen?”
Manon raised her eyes to his.
“They have kicked him to death. It was Bibi’s doing.”
She bent over Paul.
“He still breathes. If only we had a doctor! Marie, what shall we do?”
Marie Castener had been passing her big, slow, capable hands over Brent’s body. She had felt his heart beating under his torn shirt. Marie kept her head.
“He is not dead—a doctor—that’s it! They always say, ‘Never pull an unconscious man about.’ Josephine, and you, Claire—run into the house for some blankets; pull them off the bed. Has anyone a bicycle?”
“If Anatole were here, he would drive to Amiens for a doctor. He is at Amiens, if he could be met and told.”
She raised her head to listen. Philipon, too, was listening with an attentive look on his face, and in that most dramatic moment in the history of Beaucourt the whole crowd seemed to turn instinctively to the opening of the Rue Romaine. They heard the musical bleating of a horn. Someone on the outskirts of the crowd held up a warning arm as the nose of a long grey car slid slowly out of the Rue Romaine. Old Durand’s De Dion was following at the tail of the grey car. The crowd edged back. They saw Monsieur Lefèbre standing up in Durand’s car, his hand on Anatole’s shoulder, his jocund face very stern and troubled. The grey car pushed on until it reached the space about those central figures; it stopped there like some intelligent beast wholly sensible of its own dramatic significance. There were four men in the grey car, and one of them had the white head and the indomitable and unforgettable face of the man who had refused to see France defeated. It was the “Tiger,” the Father of Victory, Georges Clemenceau.