XXI
Madame Castener had lit the lamp when someone knocked at the door of her cottage. The wind was roaring in the poplars and blowing the rain against the windows, and Marie Castener opened the door no more than an inch, for lamp glasses were terribly dear.
“Who is there?”
A man’s voice came out of the darkness, a brisk but quiet voice.
“Good evening, madame, I am sorry to trouble you on such a night, but they tell me that Madame Latour is here.”
Manon was sitting at the table with a sheet of red linen that was to be the cover of a duvet hanging over her knees. The lamp was turned low and the corners of the room were in comparative darkness. She saw a little man wearing a black-caped overcoat and a soft black hat step quickly into the room while Madame Castener closed the door behind him.
The visitor bowed to Manon, pulled off his hat, and, coming into the circle of light, began to unbutton his overcoat. He was a compact, square-shouldered little man, short in the neck and legs, with a shrewd, grey, close-cropped head, very bright eyes and an air of humorous benignity. He smiled at Manon as she put the red linen aside on the table, rose, and held out her hands for his coat.
“Monsieur Durand!”
“I have surprised you.”
She hung the wet coat over the back of a chair, turned up the lamp, and looked at Monsieur Anatole Durand with eyes that told him nothing. Monsieur Durand had owned the château at Beaucourt. He was neither an aristo nor a parvenu, but a solid little man whose father and grandfather had been solid men before him, millowners at Lille, men who had made money. Anatole had bought the château at Beaucourt about ten years before the war. A man of ideas and of energy, he had tried to teach Beaucourt certain things that it did not know, and Beaucourt—like most villages—had had no desire to be taught anything. Monsieur Durand had not been popular. He had lived up there in the château, and he had not belonged to the château. A peasant may abuse an aristo, but, even in abusing him, he recognizes the aristo’s indigenous right to be there. Durand was an importation, a city man, a big little fellow who appeared to think he had right to interfere with the other little fellows in Beaucourt. The soul of the peasant had shown its surliness. Durand was just a bumptious manufacturer who had come to amuse himself in the country. Beaucourt had held its nostrils at the smell of his autocar. What did Beaucourt want with an autocar? What did Beaucourt want with electric light, and a dynamo driven by water power? The man was a fussy, new-fangled fool.
“Be seated, monsieur.”
Anatole Durand sat down, knees well apart, his hands resting on them. Marie Castener had drawn up a chair on the other side of the table; she began to darn stockings with an air of phlegmatic detachment that left these other two free to talk.
“So you are like the rest of them, Manon,” said Durand, looking her straight in the face.
“How is that, monsieur?”
She glanced at him and went on with her work.
“Of course—I was unpopular. That busybody, Durand! Always wanting something new!”
“You know Beaucourt as well as I do, monsieur,” said Manon.
Anatole Durand sat squarely on his chair. He was a square man all over, square in the boots, the head, the jaw, rather like a little copy of Thiers, that irrepressible, compact bit of energy.
“Well, they can hate me as much as they please, but I always was a man who must push a stone out of the way or cut down a rotten tree. I’m an old fellow, Manon, but my work is over there. I have another ten years left.”
There was a little quiver of emotion in his voice.
“I have no children, you know, and plenty of money. I am not one of the ruined ones. You can’t take your money away with you when you die. Did ever an old fellow have such an opportunity?”
Manon raised her head, and her eyes seemed to see something.
“Why do you come to me, monsieur?”
“You have gone back to Beaucourt.”
“In a sense, yes.”
“You are rebuilding—you are one of those with courage.”
“I have hope, monsieur, and I have had good luck.”
Anatole Durand’s eyes glistened.
“Life is like this, madame; there are those who work and create; there are those who wait and grumble. Some people sit still and say, ‘What a tragedy! What can we do? When is the Government going to help us?’ Those people will not rebuild Beaucourt; they will not bring back the smile and the good sweat to all that poor desert.”
“You think as I think, Monsieur Durand.”
He gave an audacious and triumphant little wave of the hands.
“Do not call me an egotist, my dear, if I wish to consecrate the rest of my life to the healing of these wounds. What better work for a Frenchman! And that is one of the reasons why I have come to you, because you have the courage, because I felt that you must think as I have thought.”
Manon put down her work, and looked at Anatole Durand with eyes of immense seriousness.
“Monsieur, listen a moment. When I first went to Beaucourt I thought only of my own bit of property, myself, but when I had seen Beaucourt and felt the pity of it, I began to think of my neighbours. Yet I say to myself, to help others you must first be strong yourself. So I did not hesitate to look round and get what I could, timber and iron from some army huts, tins of beef, tools, bits of furniture—which I shall return.”
Durand smiled at her.
“It is the spirit of France; do not apologize for it, madame, for it is the spirit that will rebuild Beaucourt. But now, I ask you, what will have to be done for the others?”
“Food,” said Manon promptly.
“Yes.”
“Tools, material, wood to build with.”
Old Durand clapped his hands.
“Exactly. Well, it will be my business to try and arrange all that. The Americans and English will sell us their camps and their stores, and I shall be one of the first to buy. We shall have to open a canteen at Beaucourt. Now, madame, I shall drive over in my autocar to-morrow. Will you go with me?”
“With pleasure, monsieur,” said Manon; “and if I may take a little bundle——”
“Anything but a piano or a cupboard,” said Anatole, with a laugh.
The storm blew itself out during the night, leaving wet roads and a blue sky and a smell of spring in the air. Durand and his car, an old-fashioned four-seater De Dion, called for Manon at nine, with Anatole at the wheel and a luncheon basket on the back seat. Manon’s bundle was no terrible affair, stores for Paul tied up in a blanket.
But someone was before them on the Beaucourt road, Louis Blanc on his bicycle, a Louis Blanc who was not in the best of tempers. He had visited nearly every farm in Ste. Claire, offering good money for the hire of a wagon and a couple of horses, but no one had been able to oblige him. He came into Beaucourt by the Bonnière road. In the Place de l’Eglise he dismounted and stood staring. Something was missing from the broken outlines of the ruins of the Hôtel de Paris; the great central chimney had fallen.
Bibi dashed his bicycle down upon the cobbles. He was in a rage—the dramatic, white-faced rage of the French “rough,” a rage that must gesticulate, stamp up and down, let itself loose on something. He stormed in and looked at the ruin, and a pretty mess the chimney had made of it. Falling on the gable end next the Rue des Echelles, it had sent it crashing, and this mass of brickwork, striking the tottering wall of the Hospice across the way, had brought down the whole façade of the Hospice into the road. The mouth of the Rue des Echelles was full of broken bricks and stones.
Bibi looked at it all, and swore. The centre-piece of his house had gone; there were only three walls instead of four—nothing left that could carry a roof. The end fronting on the Rue des Echelles would have to be rebuilt before anything could be done in the way of putting up timber.
Bibi stamped about, kicking the bricks, and flapping his arms like some furious bird. He was not a man who could satisfy himself by cursing the elements or black-guarding a purely impersonal wind. He wanted a tangible, human enemy, a personal quarrel, a feud that could be prosecuted with boot and fist. He wanted to take somebody by the throat, smash his fists against real flesh, smell real blood. Bibi was a savage. His rage was the anthropomorphic rage of a savage that spits in the face of its idol-god and hammers it with a club.
That chimney had not fallen itself. Therefore someone had helped it to fall. Therefore someone had played him a dirty trick. These deductions following each other easily through Bibi’s mind, proved that someone could be none other than that fellow of Manon Latour’s.
“Voilà!”
The motive was obvious, so obvious that Bibi had not to search for an enemy. He had found his quarrel and he fastened on it like a snarling dog.
He walked up the Rue de Picardie with those cold eyes of his full of a hard glare. His fists were stuffed into his trouser pockets; he swung his shoulders as he walked, and jerked his head from side to side. The fighting mood flared in him.
Paul was at work on the roof. He had carried up about twenty sheets of corrugated iron, and his hammer began to ring on them as Louis Blanc came up the street. To Bibi the noise was like the clashing of sword and buckler, a barbaric sound echoing out of his savage Gaulish past.
“Hallo, there!”
Brent turned, and leaning against the roof, looked down at the man in the street. Bibi’s figure was foreshortened. His long chin seemed to stick out; he looked all shoulders and feet.
“Good morning,” said Paul, “it has turned fine after the storm.”
Bibi grinned and looked at the ladder that rested against the front of the house.
“So you thought that dirty trick of yours rather clever.”
“What trick, Monsieur Blanc?”
Bibi raised a big hand, its fingers hooked, as though he were reaching for the man up above. He looked ugly, devilish ugly.
“Come down,” he said.
Brent sat and considered him.
“What’s the matter? What are you talking about?”
“Come down,” said Bibi again; “you know what I mean.”
Brent’s eyes went hard. He knew what had happened to Louis Blanc’s house, having strolled up there soon after dawn, and he sensed some connexion between the fallen chimney and that ugly figure in the road. The fellow wanted a row; he had found an excuse for it; but Brent had made up his mind not to give Bibi his chance. A row might prove most damnably awkward, and Paul meant to smile the man off.
“Look here,” he said. “I’m busy. What’s all this about?”
“Come down,” barked Bibi, with the persistence of a furious dog.
Brent laughed, turned, and pretended to go on with his work, but he kept an eye on the top of the ladder that projected above the wall.
“You pig of a coward,” said the voice.
Brent began hammering.
“You knocked away the foundations of my chimney.”
Brent went on hammering.
Then he saw the top of the ladder give a jerk, and he was round in a flash. Bibi had one foot on the third rung, and the two men stared at each other.
“Look here,” said Brent, still smiling, “you keep off that ladder. I have had nothing to do with that chimney of yours.”
“Liar!” shouted the Frenchman.
Brent gave a French shrug.
“It’s the truth; take it or leave it. But get off that ladder.”
Bibi began to climb up, and Brent bent down, gripped the top rung, and held the ladder out from the wall.
“Look here, if you try to come up, I’ll pitch you over.”
Bibi did try, and Brent kept his promise. Man and ladder went over into the road, Bibi lying like a big beetle with the thing on top of him. He slipped from under it, got up, and began to behave like a madman. He picked up the ladder, dashed it against the raised path so that it broke in the middle, and then went on to kick it to pieces with his heavy boots. He was like a wild animal that had lost all control and all sense of pain, and Brent sat and watched him with something of the feeling of a man who is safe in the branches of a tree. He understood now why Manon had looked so serious when she had spoken of Louis Blanc. The fellow could behave like a beast, and he had the strength of a beast. Brent had ceased to smile.
“I shall want a long spoon,” he reflected, “a devilish long spoon. Life in Beaucourt is going to be hot stuff.”
Into the middle of this display of animal energy came Anatole Durand’s car, poking its red nose round the corner of the Rue Romaine, and stopping by the well, for Bibi still occupied the road. He had not finished kicking the ladder to pieces, and his heavy boots made such a noise that he had not heard the car.
There was a very droll look on old Durand’s face. Manon had glanced at Paul on the roof, and Paul had smiled at her, but Manon did not smile. Here was this evil spirit loose in Beaucourt, this man who had always behaved like a spoilt child when baulked of some desire.
“So that fellow hasn’t been killed,” said Monsieur Durand. “What a pity! Let us ring for the concierge.”
He sat there and blew blasts on his motor horn as though Louis Blanc were the walls of Jericho.
Bibi left the remains of the ladder and walked across to the car. The imperiousness of old Durand’s horn annoyed him, nor was it any pleasure to him to look into the quizzical and bright eyes of the manufacturer from Lille. Anatole was not afraid of anything or anybody, and he had always spoken of Bibi as a dog that wanted thrashing. The presence of Manon modified the situation, and brought the sex swagger back into Bibi’s attitude.
“You seem to have no respect for your boots, monsieur,” said old Durand.
Louis Blanc stood in front of the nose of the car, hands in pockets, feet well apart, his body swung back from the loins.
“If a fellow plays you a dirty trick, monsieur, you go round to give him a thrashing, hey. But that fellow up there was afraid to come down, so I have smashed his ladder for him. You see!”
“Tiens!” said old Durand, “but what is it all about?”
“If you ask that fellow up there,” and Bibi shook a fist at Paul, “whether he did not knock down the chimney and wall of my hotel, he will tell you a lie.”
The voice of Manon interposed itself.
“Monsieur Blanc imagines that other people behave as he would behave. That is the whole trouble.”
She looked up at Paul.
“Have you touched Monsieur Blanc’s house?”
“Is it likely? The storm blew the thing down. I heard it fall about nine o’clock last night.”
Bibi shrugged his shoulders. The violence was dying out of him; it had exhausted itself for the moment; and he had a certain astuteness; the grapes were sour on this particular morning.
“You are a man of the world, monsieur,” he said to Anatole Durand; “you know that things do not happen of themselves, especially when certain people wish them to happen. But the truth remains; that fellow is a coward and a liar, and it was to madame’s interest.”
Anatole gave a little bleat on the horn.
“I think you have got a bee in your head, Monsieur Blanc. We French do not play such tricks on each other.”
“So it is three to one,” said Bibi; “and against a man who was three times wounded. Voilà! Into the ditch with you all! I’m off.”
He went swinging up the Rue de Picardie, and Durand and Manon sat and looked at each other.
“What is the matter with that fellow?”
“What was always the matter with Bibi, monsieur? He has an idea that Beaucourt is an opportunity, that he is going to show off and make money. He always had the biggest voice in the place, you know.”
“Yes, a fog-horn of a man,” said Durand, “a big drum. But what about our St. Simon up there?”
They climbed out of the car, and joined in council with Paul. But old Durand’s attention was divided. He was in Beaucourt, the place of his Frenchman’s dreams, in the thick of these dear ruins that were to bloom again under his hand. He looked at Manon’s house, and was delighted, and his delight almost forgot the worker and the work. Here was his symbol, his example, his banner of hope. He wanted to run through all the village on those sturdy little legs of his, and dream hard-headed dreams of reconstruction.
Manon understood.
“Go and look at Beaucourt, monsieur. I will see to my partner.”
Anatole dashed off, opening a big note-book. He had carried a big note-book all his life; it was his Bible.
“Expect me in half an hour.”
Manon stood in the road and spoke to Paul.
“What happened?” she asked.
“He came round here like a mad bull, and when he tried to climb the ladder I pitched him over, ladder and all. It’s a nuisance; I shall have to make a new ladder.”
Manon laughed. She liked Paul’s shrewdness, his smile of restraint.
“And now I must get you down.”
She happened to know that old Durand carried a length of stout rope in the locker under the back seat of the car. He had told her it was there. “If we break down, well, I have a tow-rope.” He liked thoroughness, to be prepared for all eventualities.
The rope served its purpose. Manon threw up the coil, and at the third attempt Brent caught it. He fastened the end to one of the rafters and slid down.
“That’s that,” he said tersely.
Manon looked at him with eyes that were brighter than the eyes of a man.