XVIII
Horses were scarce in Ste. Claire, and Manon found that Etienne Castener could not hire himself and his brown nag to her more than once a week, so she made a bundle of the things Brent needed and prepared to walk to Beaucourt. It was rather a wonderful bundle, an omnium gatherum of tobacco, matches, nails, six fresh eggs, some brussels sprouts, half a loaf of bread, six slices of fresh meat, a few oranges, three candles, a new shirt, a pair of blue trousers and the dictionary. Marie watched the making of the bundle, and withheld her criticism until the end.
“You are not going to carry that to Beaucourt?”
“Yes, but I am. There is a saw, too, that will have to travel under my arm.”
Marie felt the weight of the bundle.
“Oh, la-la, it is too heavy!”
“I am stronger than you think. See, I push a stick through the cord, put a pad between the stick and my shoulder, and there you are!”
She was away at five o’clock, after a simple breakfast by lamplight in the red-tiled cottage. The morning was very dark and still, one of those mysterious and secret mornings when the heart thrills not a little to the eternal adventure of life. There had been a frost, and the air struck keen and clear, with the smell of fresh earth that some peasant had turned up with his plough. A few stars pricked the black sky. The great poplars guarding the road were still wrapped up in their coats of darkness and of sleep, and as Manon passed along the road and up the hill she felt rather than saw the branches of those trees meeting like a high vault above her head.
She trudged along with her bundle slung over one shoulder, and the saw swathed in paper under the other arm, not hurrying because of her knowledge of the twenty kilomètres that were to be marched that day, and of the work she wished to do at Beaucourt. She was a little woman with a great heart; also—she was happy. The blackness of the morning seemed to shut her up with her own thoughts, and Manon’s thoughts were many and varied as she pushed steadily along the road. The elements of life were mixed up with her thinking, and if, as the clever people tell us, ordinary thinking is but the glow thrown up by the emotions, then Manon’s thoughts were made of human stuff. She felt—and in feeling she knew, and in knowing grasped the quaint and seemingly irrational altruism of this English Paul, the essential badness of Bibi—the great truth that some people give while others take. If you do not give you will never know what life can give you in return. Manon’s view of life was quite simple yet shrewd. Men had to be managed. It was very necessary for a woman to have someone to love; she withered into a stick without it. Happiness can be planned, if you love someone very much, and go about the managing of your happiness like a cheerful little housewife. Simple things matter. Men like to be praised, women to be kissed. Always back your man with your tongue, finger-nails and heart. A comfortable bed, a well-cooked meal, and a glass of wine at the right moment are worth oceans of wise verbiage. A woman should never marry a man who was not a little shy before he kissed her for the first time. Greedy eaters are soon satisfied.
She trudged on, shifting her bundle from shoulder to shoulder, and presently the dawn came, a greyness that grew red like a fire. The bare trees of a wood showed up against it, the branches like some exquisitely carved rood-screen in a church. She heard a bird pipe up somewhere in the wood, and then another and yet another till a good score were singing, for the birds had multiplied during the war. Beyond the wood a great sweep of black and desolate country cut like a broad knife at the red throat of the dawn. A solitary house with half its roof gone, the broken stump of a tree, a rifle, butt end upwards, marking a grave, a pair of wagon-wheels in a shell-hole, all these were like black symbols against that red sky. Yet there was a silence over this wilderness, a beauty, a strangeness that called; and over yonder lay Beaucourt, waiting, waiting for those who would return.
“Yes, it’s beautiful,” said Manon to herself; “nôtre pays est malade; it calls for help. The strong ought to help the weak. I must not forget that; my little house is not going to stuff itself with food and do nothing for the others. What a pity all the Bibis in the world weren’t killed in the war!—it would have made things so much easier, and I have an idea that Bibi is going to be a nuisance. I wonder what Paul is doing? Lighting the stove?”
Her thoughts centred on Paul, and somehow this wild landscape with the red sky turning to a tawny gold swept away any little feeling of surprise that had lingered in Manon’s mind. The wind blew as it pleased over these leagues of desolate country. Life was a going back to the wilderness—a fight, face to face, with the elements in Nature and in man. The little stuffy conventions had no roof under which to create a moral fog. You went out into the open with your man and laboured till the sweat ran from you, swinging axe and hammer, or plying hoe and spade. Courage and a clear faith in your comrade, that was how Manon sensed it. Adam and Eve, with God looking on, and the Serpent out of a job.
Some three hours later Manon came to Beaucourt in the blue of a March morning. A great white wall stood up at the west end of the village like a gigantic notice board waiting for a message; the wall had been part of the factory owner’s house.
“Yes, there ought to be something on that,” said Manon, smiling in the eyes of the morning.
“Beware of Bibi!” she laughed.
“Or, Tommy’s word, ‘Cheero,’ or just ‘Courage.’ ”
She left the road and made her way over the higher ground, through the orchards above the Rue Romaine, and from this hill she had a view of the Café de la Victoire and a little human glimpse of Paul Brent. He had fixed up a length of telephone wire in the garden, and Manon saw him in the act of hanging out his washing—a shirt, two pairs of socks, and the things that he wore under his trousers.
Now Manon was strangely touched by that glimpse of him. She was smiling, but there was a little shimmer of tenderness in her smile.
“Mon ami, I would have done that for you. But it is rather sweet seeing you playing the blanchisseuse.”
When she came down the hill into the Rue de Picardie she noticed that the shell-holes in the walls of the house had disappeared. Two neat new patches of brickwork had been put in, and Brent had used facing bricks of the same colour as the walls of the house so that the new work was hardly noticeable. He had got the bedding-plates into place along the tops of the walls. Between one of the end gables and the inverted V of the main partition wall a length of timber hung suspended in the air by two lengths of telephone wire, some ingenious contraption of Brent’s for overcoming the problem of how a man could be in two places at the same time.
“Paul, hallo!”
He came through the old blue door in the garden wall, and stood a moment, looking down at her from the raised path. He had not expected her. The surprise and the pleasure of it were as obvious as the blue sky.
“What!—You have walked?”
“Yes.”
And suddenly she was aware of a new shyness in Paul Brent. He was looking at her as a man only looks at a woman when she has become the most wonderful thing in the world. He came down from the path and took her bundle.
“You have carried this from Ste. Claire?”
His shyness spread to Manon. She laughed. The feeling was rather exquisite, a little shiver of delight, the first note of a bird on a soft spring morning.
“Do I look tired?”
“A little.”
She noticed that he seemed afraid to look straight into her eyes.
“Well, there was no horse to be had to-day, and in war the transport must not fail—and here’s the saw.”
He took it with an air of eagerness, pulled off the wrappings, and looked along the line of the teeth.
“Oh, great! I have been wanting it badly.”
And then she fell to admiring the work he had done, and Brent stood and smiled as a shy man smiles on such occasions.
“It is splendid,” said Manon; “you would hardly know that there had been holes in the wall. How clever you are with your hands.”
“I learnt the business when I was no taller than you are.”
“And you have been so quick. I was astonished. And then—the poor man—has had to do his own washing!”
“I had a hot bath last night, and afterwards, I washed the clothes. Well, you see, they wanted it.”
She patted the bundle.
“I have something for you in there. And tell me, Paul, what is that beam doing, hung up there?”
“Oh, that ridge-beam,” said Brent; “it’s a bit awkward to get it into place, and I had rigged up that cradle, but I can do the job to-day with a little help.”
“We will do it together. And now, have you had breakfast? Because I could eat a second one.”
“So could I.”
“An omelette and coffee?”
“I can’t resist an omelette, but what about the eggs?”
“They are in that bundle. Do be careful.”
“Trust me,” said Brent.
Paul had cleaned and fitted the stove in Manon’s kitchen, and she did her cooking there while Paul went out to try the saw. He had contrived a carpenter’s bench in the front room on the other side of the passage, using boxes and the floor boards from one of the huts. There were some two by four battens to be worked up into a door-frame, and Brent squared the ends off with the new saw.
“It cuts like butter,” he called to Manon.
“Butter! Oh, mon ami, have you any butter left? I have forgotten to bring some.”
“Yes, quite a good-sized pat.”
“Thank God! How near we were to a tragedy.”
Half an hour later they sat down in the kitchen to that second breakfast. Manon had taken off her shoes in order to rest her feet, and she told an heroic lie when Brent accused her of having blistered them in walking from Ste. Claire. The omelette was excellent, golden food for the gods, and so was the French bread after a season of army biscuits and ration jam.
Manon Latour found herself looking at Paul as many a savage woman must have looked at the man whom she had chosen for a partner. Strength might matter in Beaucourt, and Paul Brent looked strong. He had a good chest and shoulders, and a squarish and intelligent head well set on a sinewy neck. She had seen him with his shirt-sleeves rolled up, and remembered noticing how big and powerful his arms were. She knew that Paul was not the man who would fight for the mere love of fighting. There was too little of the animal about him for such savagery. Moreover, he was too good-tempered, though when a good-tempered man gets angry, the fire is all the more to be feared.
“All Englishmen can box; is not that so, mon ami?”
Paul was drinking his third cup of coffee. He set the cup down and stared at Manon.
“No. Why?”
“It is useful. And you——?”
“I have never boxed in my life,” said Brent.
He saw the faintest of faint frowns on her forehead. Bibi could box, and his boxing included tricks with his feet.
And then she began to tell him about Bibi, how he had come to her and suggested a partnership, but she did not tell Paul that Louis Blanc had tried to get her into his arms.
“You see we quarrelled, and I packed him out of the house, and now we are in his way. His idea is to attract the tourists to Beaucourt, charge them ten francs a bottle for wretched wine, sell them souvenirs, and all that. It will take months to get that hotel of his rebuilt, and this place of mine would have suited him very well while he was rebuilding the hotel. You will have to be very careful of Bibi.”
Brent’s hand had felt instinctively for his pipe. Manon saw it, and leaning over, took a tin of tobacco out of her bundle.
“Voilà! And English too!”
His eyes lit up, not merely at the sight of the tobacco, but because she had remembered.
“That’s good of you, Manon. What did you pay for it?”
“That is my affair.”
“Nonsense. I am not going to let you pay.”
“This time it is a present,” she said; “and when you wish to pay for the next you will have to send me in a bill for the work you have done.”
But he was annoyed.
“Look here, I have fifteen hundred francs down in the cellar.”
“Very well, you shall give me ten presently, if you promise not to argue every time. Don’t you see that I wish to make some return?”
Brent’s face softened.
“I am sorry,” he said; “it is like you to put it in that way.”
He opened the tin, filled his pipe, lit it and puffed with immense relish.
“Now, what about this prize bully, Monsieur Blanc? Do you mean to say that he may come along and try to frighten me out of Beaucourt?”
“That is just what I do mean,” said Manon; “you do not know Bibi as I do.”
Brent’s eyes glimmered.
“I have met men like that. But they always left me alone. I used to laugh at them—and get on with my work. You can’t quarrel with a gatepost.”
“Bibi would,” said Manon; “he’s a savage. Do you know what he did once?”
“Well?”
“There was a bull on one of the farms, a fierce beast. It chased Bibi one day; he had to run. What does he do but come to Beaucourt, pick up an axe, and go back to fight the bull. And he killed it, battered its head all to bits, and then paid the owner. Threw the money at him. Bibi likes a swaggering gesture.”
“What a pleasant brute,” said Brent, but the glimmer had gone out of his eyes.
Manon began putting on her shoes.
“I wanted you to know. You see, if Bibi tried to hurt you, it would be because of me.”
“I don’t ask for a better reason,” he said, looking her straight in the eyes.
And Manon coloured. She bent over and picked up the bundle, and began to place the things in order upon the table.