XX
The day dawned very red, with the whole horizon flushed like the inside of a shell. The sky overhead was as grey as a pearl; there was no wind moving and the air lay soft and still.
Brent stood on the doorstep and scented a change in the weather. Rain was coming, and there might be wind with it, and he looked up at the new rafters overhead and was glad that he had fixed none of the iron sheeting. A gale could blow through the timber-work like a north-easter through the snoring rigging of a ship that has struck her sails, and do no damage, but Brent took the hint that that red sky gave him. He would have to block up those doorways and windows before sheeting the roof, or some malicious devil of a March wind might come crowding in, heave up the whole structure and deposit it in the backyard.
He had lit the stove and he had coffee, a boiled egg, and real bread and butter for breakfast. His pipe tasted good after that meal when he went up aloft to complete the fixing of the rafters on the half of the house over the kitchen. The sky looked like a great flat sheet of grey rubber, with a dirty patch of darker clouds sticking to it here and there.
“Yes, you are going to rain all right, damn you,” said Brent; “pity you couldn’t have put it off for three days.”
Paul had finished the fixing of the rafters and had been nailing on the battens that were to take the galvanized iron when Louis Blanc cycled into Beaucourt. He came by the road past the château, and from the high ground there he could not help seeing the fresh white timber-work of the Café de la Victoire’s roof showing up against the lead-coloured sky. Bibi dismounted and stood holding the machine by the handle-bars. Paul Brent was visible as a blue and white figure moving against the white timber, and Bibi could hear the faint tap-tap of his hammer.
The “propriétaire” of the Hôtel de Paris had the mentality of the superficially civilized man who has retained the worst blood of the savage. Louis Blanc was a Parisian, a Parisian of the cabaret type who happened to have been born in the provinces. He had a long head, immense appetites, and an exaggeration of the Latin temperament that the word “flamboyant” describes so well. A crowd made him brave, especially a crowd of women, and one woman would do the trick if she happened to be pretty. Bibi swaggered; but there was a streak of cowardice in the man when you cut the hair of his vanity. He was just the precocious, unlicked, boastful, dirty-minded boy of sixteen who had never been socialized, and who remained a boy at the age of forty.
But Bibi had a head. He was ingenious. He had avoided hard work, and he had prospered. “Always get somebody else to shift your muck for you,” was one of his sayings.
He had been very successful with women, though he had had his head bitten off on occasions. He did not understand that some women are fastidious. Bibi was not fastidious.
Beaucourt was in ruins, but the proprietor of the Hôtel de Paris had glimpsed the possibilities of a ruined village. For the plain person the problem of Beaucourt was shelter, work, food; the peasant, like Father Adam, would have to live on his own sweat, reclaiming those fields and gardens, gulping his potage, and swallowing his own potatoes and haricots. That was not Louis Blanc’s idea of life. He despised the peasant. He was modern, no agriculturist, but a manipulator of other men’s activities. He meant to create an artificial value in Beaucourt. He had money, and a man who was ready to back him with more money, a rich Parisian bourgeois whom he had met in the army who had been piqued by Bibi’s idea. Beaucourt was to be an “exhibition village,” a centre for the sentimental fools who would visit the battlefields, and might think it quaint and charming to stay in a village that was rising like the dead from its ruins.
A week ago Bibi and his man of money had visited the Tourist Agencies in Paris. Bibi had declaimed.
“In three months there will be an hotel in Beaucourt. Some experience, hey!—for Americans and English to stay in a devastated village! Table d’hôte inside, and people putting up rabbit hutches, or camping in the church or the cellars! The tourists will be able to see it all from my windows, and they will have their comforts too, good beds and full bellies. People like to be comfortable, messieurs, even after strolling down a devastated street. Wine—yes—plenty of wine. And relics—cartloads of relics. You can visit the graves, drive to Albert, Peronne, Villers Bretonneux, Chaulnes, Roye, Moreuil. Bus services to St. Quentin and the Hindenburg Line! Do you not see it all, messieurs?”
One of the principal Tourist Agencies saw it very vividly. Louis Blanc had an idea. They were ready to put him on their list and to advertise Beaucourt: “Spend three days in a devastated village. Comfort among the ruins. Unique provincial hotel just rebuilt after being demolished by shell-fire.” They rose to Bibi’s idea, but they were a little sceptical about his scheme for rebuilding the Hôtel de Paris.
“Thunder, but I am getting the stuff,” said Bibi, “and I am getting the men.”
Which was an exaggeration, for neither building material nor labour was to be had at a wave of the hand. Bibi was agitating his case with the Préfet and the Mayor of the Commune; he was trying to buy timber, tiles, army stores, army huts, anything and everything.
And there he stood on the château hill and saw that damned fellow of Manon Latour’s putting up a roof before he—Bibi—had bought a foot of timber!
“The devil scorch his blue trousers, but where did he get that wood?”
Louis Blanc walked his bicycle down the château hill, and left it leaning against the wall by the doorway of the Hôtel de Paris. He went in and had another critical look at this place of his, crunching over the broken bricks, examining the walls, the foundations. The precarious state of the great central chimney-stack was as obvious to him as it had been to Paul; the raw and ragged concavity at the base of it looked bigger than ever, so much so that Bibi’s eyes narrowed and little ugly wrinkles showed about his mouth and nostrils. He was a suspicious beast. A man who is ready to play dirty tricks on others is always imagining them being played upon himself. Bibi climbed down into the hole and examined the brickwork. There were no pick marks upon it, no signs of freshly broken surface, but Bibi was not satisfied.
He went and stood in the Place de l’Eglise and surveyed the stage upon which he was to mount this financial tableau of his. He looked at the church with its broken spire and worm-eaten walls. Yes, the church was just as it should be; the scenic effect of it was excellent; sensible people would leave the church just as it stood, a sensational and picturesque relic. Here was one of the outrages of the great war slap up against his windows; the tourists could stare at the church while they sat at dinner in the salle-à-manger. Bibi suspected that no funds would be available for the restoration of churches. That was excellent. Who wanted churches, unless they were of sufficient interest to be written up in guide-books? The shell-scarred lime trees, ranged round the Place like the pillars of a piazza, had a decorative and realistic effect, and Bibi decided that the lime trees must not be touched. He turned his attention to the Hospice. The Hospice was a very interesting ruin, and Bibi thought of trying to buy the building, visualizing it as an admirable annexe in the event of the scheme proving a success.
The tap-tap of Brent’s hammer echoed faintly through the ruins. The sound was insistent, challenging, busily competitive. It annoyed Louis Blanc, kept up a noise like the yapping of a dog, and disturbed his material visions.
“Confound that fellow!”
He called Brent a foul name, and then walked into the Rue de Picardie. Bibi was jealous of Manon, and jealous of the enterprise she had shown in gathering up the threads of life in broken Beaucourt. A woman had got ahead of him, and Bibi’s vanity felt the insult; women were created to be spectators and to supply the applause. Louis Blanc wanted Manon, and he wanted her house. She was so plump and pretty and provocative, and she would have made such an excellent little manageress, for even tourists like a pretty French madame busy about a house. But Manon had declared war upon Bibi; he had his grudge against her, and since she was only a woman, Bibi transferred the grudge to Brent.
Reaching the end of the Rue de Picardie, Louis Blanc had a view of the work that Paul had completed, and it was the work of a craftsman, no bodging job perpetrated in a back garden by an enthusiastic amateur. Bibi stood in the street and gazed, and the longer he looked, the more fiercely he disliked Paul. Brent was on the roof, nailing down battens at great speed, a couple of nails in his mouth, and his back to Louis Blanc. It was evident to Bibi that Manon had made a catch, and that the fellow up there on the roof was worth many smiles.
He shouted at Brent:
“Good morning, monsieur.”
And a moment later:
“Where the devil did you get that wood?”
Brent turned sharply, and sitting on one of the lower battens, looked down at Bibi. He saw him as a tall man, feet planted well apart, stomach thrown forward, his fists bulging out of his trouser pockets, a man who looked all angles, lean shoulders jutting out, jaw cocked, cap over one eye, elbows truculent. Bibi reminded Brent of a big and blackguardly variation of “Captain Kettle.”
He removed the nails from his mouth, and wished Bibi good morning. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall.
Louis Blanc repeated the question that Brent had failed to answer:
“Where the devil did you get that wood?”
Brent smiled down at him.
“Found it,” was all he said, and turning round, resumed his hammering.
Bibi looked hard at the middle of Paul’s back. It would have been a great pleasure to him to have climbed up and thrown that fellow off the roof, but there were things that Bibi wanted to find out. The rain drops fell on his face, and suggested shelter. Bibi mounted the path and entered the doorway of the Café de la Victoire. He poked his head into the room on the right of the passage and saw stacked in the farther room all that timber and galvanized iron that Paul and Manon had salved from the huts.
It was pure chance, but Brent’s hammer took it into its head to slide off one of the rafters and land on the stone floor of the passage within two feet of where Louis Blanc was standing. Brent looked down and saw Bibi, and Bibi was looking up at him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“It was an accident,” said Brent.
“Nicely arranged.”
“Well, you have no business there, anyway, monsieur.”
Bibi stooped, picked up the hammer, and sent it whirling into the ruins across the road.
“Voilà!”
He stamped into the other rooms and looked at everything at his leisure, while Paul came down the ladder to find his hammer. He knew the sort of man that Bibi was, and he had no intention of letting himself be tricked into a rough and tumble with him. Such men are best held at arm’s length by a show of good temper.
Brent had the luck to find his hammer almost at once, and he was up the ladder again and hammering hard before Louis Blanc had satisfied his curiosity. Bibi looked up at him, puzzled.
“Oh, there you are!”
“I shan’t drop it again, monsieur. There is no need for a tin helmet.”
He saw Bibi’s teeth.
“A nice little hoard you have here. Did you buy it?”
“We bought it by working for it, monsieur.”
“You stole it,” said Bibi.
Brent paused, smiling.
“Look here, monsieur, you tempt me to drop the hammer on you.”
“Try it, my boy, try it.”
Paul let fall a subtle hint instead of the hammer. He wanted to be left alone.
“Why don’t you go and look for some yourself, monsieur. The good God helps those——”
“Oh, go to hell!” said Bibi.
He slouched out of the house, turning up the collar of his coat because of the rain, and Brent saw him walk down the Rue de Rosières. It appeared that Louis Blanc did not know of those huts, which was amusing and rather suggestive; Bibi had despised Beaucourt, and had not bothered to discover what Beaucourt could give him. When a man has big ideas, he does not trouble to grub among rubbish heaps.
Brent descended, looped the ground sheet over his shoulders, and went back to his work. Louis Blanc had disappeared, but presently he came swinging back along the Rue de Rosières, and Brent had a feeling that he had seen those huts.
Bibi went past the café with a cocked chin and a gleaming eye.
“You had better not take any more of that,” he shouted at Brent; “it belongs to the State.”
Paul nodded at him.
“All right. It’s no use to you, I suppose? Good morning.”
Bibi called him a certain foul thing, and stalked on. He had made up his mind to hire a wagon and horses and salve some of that stuff for himself.
But he was feeling very evil towards Brent, and when Bibi hated a man he piled every imaginable infamy upon the enemy’s shoulders.
“That fellow would play me a dirty trick—if he dared, but I frightened him a bit about the hammer. Wonder what a woman can see in a tow-headed sheep like that?”
It was raining hard and beginning to blow when Bibi got on his bicycle and rode for Ste. Claire.
Early in the afternoon the rain came with such a pelt, driven by a rising wind, that Paul had to leave work on the roof. He began rigging up a shelter in the big front room on the other side of the passage—a shelter that would enable him to push on with his doors and window-frames and defy the weather. He had stacked a reserve supply of dry firewood in the cellar, and when dusk fell and shut out the wet and melancholy blur of the Beaucourt ruins, Brent was not sorry to retreat to the cellar, light the stove and feel snug and dry. He lit the candle, put the kettle on the stove, and spent the time cutting the mortices for the window-frames, using a couple of boxes as a bench.
By nine o’clock the wind had worked to a gale, and its bluster became so menacing that Brent climbed the cellar steps and stood in the passage under the shelter of the wall. The wind was snoring through the timber-work overhead, and now and again a gust would smite the house a full smack with the open hand, but the walls of the café took the blow without flinching. Brent thanked his luck that he had not been caught with the roof half covered, for the gale would have made a mess of the whole structure.
As he stood there in the darkness, he became aware of Beaucourt as a place of weird noises. The broken walls and hollow spaces made so many Pan’s pipes for the wind to play upon. There was the noise, too, of things falling. Blocks of brickwork and strips of wall that had braved it out in quieter times subsided under the push of this furious north-easter. Remnants of roof slithered down with a clattering of tiles. Plaster that had clung to the stud-work crumbled to join the rubbish below. A rusty piece of corrugated iron went clanking and clashing up the Rue de Picardie, till a gust tossed it into a doorway and left it at rest.
Suddenly, like a big gun loosing off in the thick of all the tumult of the wind’s attack, some mass of masonry or brickwork came down with a crash. Brent felt a distinct vibration of the earth, a thrill of the foundations under his feet.
“Hallo, there goes Bibi’s chimney!”
He was right.