XXIII
Half an hour before dusk Anatole Durand started up the engine of his car, and glanced round for Manon, who had been putting on her cloak. Durand saw in this delay a loitering of lovers, nor had he any quarrel with a romance that seemed part of the soul of the new Beaucourt. “If I am loved by the young,” was one of his sayings, “the old can hate me as much as they please.” His protest was a mild bleat on the horn, and a jab at the accelerator that set the engine roaring for a couple of seconds. He had a side glimpse, as he turned the car, of Manon and Paul coming out of the doorway of the Café de la Victoire, Paul’s blue trousers very close to Manon’s black and white check skirt. There was an indescribable nearness about their figures, and yet just a little space between them, that magnetic space that separates the hearts of lovers who have not confessed.
Manon was saying something to Paul. She looked across at Durand.
“I am coming, monsieur.”
“I am thinking of those shell-holes in the road near Les Ormes.”
Manon climbed into the back seat, and Brent leant over and wrapped a blanket round her. She had a little canvas bag in her hand, a bag that contained something heavy, and she dropped the bag into one of the pockets of Paul’s coat.
“I managed to borrow it,” she said, “after much trouble.”
Old Durand refrained from looking over his shoulder.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
Manon gave Paul a nod and a brightening of the eyes.
“Be careful,” she said, “or I shall be worried.”
The red car squeezed its way round the well and disappeared into the Rue Romaine, leaving Paul Brent looking at the empty sunset and feeling the canvas bag that Manon had dropped into his pocket. He drew it out, unfastened the string at the mouth of the bag, and saw protruding the lacquered butt of a little revolver, a mere cheap toy of a pistol such as they made by the thousand in Belgium before the war. There were half a dozen cartridges at the bottom of the canvas bag, and Brent emptied them into the palm of his hand.
The forethought was Manon’s and therefore he had no quarrel with it, discovering in that little weapon associations of tenderness and pathos. The war had made him a fighting man, yet this pistol did not seem to be the tool of a fighting man, but rather a thing to be carried in a pocket like some hooligan’s knife. Brent smiled, but the memories of Manon were behind the smile. He had seen Bibi in action and the beastliness of it had sobered him, suggesting a wild dog among the ruins, a dog that might leap out and snap at your throat. The whole business was primitive and preposterous, rather unconvincing to an Englishman who had been trained to a disciplined and orderly way of killing Germans. The idea of being set upon and bludgeoned in a ruined French village suggested the Police News.
The dusk approached, and this ghost village had an inhuman silence. Old Durand’s car seemed to have trailed the last thread of life out of it, and a sharp shadow fell across Brent’s face. His chin went up; he stood listening. Somewhere in the Rue de Picardie a loose tile clattered down, and the fall of it was like the sound of an avalanche.
Brent slipped six cartridges into the drum of the revolver, and put it back in his pocket. He stood a moment looking up at the new roof that covered the western half of the house, and if his pride swelled itself out a little, the feeling was justified. Under the level light of the sunset the old house had warmed to a soft, ruddy brown, and those blind eyes needed only window-frames and shutters painted a battered blue to make it melt again into its green nest among the orchards. In all his life Brent had never done a piece of work better or more quickly, and the man in him exulted.
He entered the house, and hesitated in the kitchen with a half-puzzled look upon his face. The sunlight had reached out over Beaucourt like a great hand, a hand that was suddenly withdrawn, and through the oblong of the window he saw the outlines of the ghost-houses, ribs showing, eye-sockets grey and empty. The room itself was filling with the dusk; objects in it were growing indistinct; the chair on which Manon had sat looked like a ghost of a chair. The silence was extraordinary. Brent had known the same silence over No-Man’s Land on quiet nights, but there had been men near—other men. Here there was desolation, that and nothing else.
His own face had a touch of grimness. He was listening all the time, without perhaps realizing that the drums of his ears were tense; and he was conscious of a sudden feeling of acute loneliness, an uncomfortable loneliness, chilly, fidgety, unpleasant. He pulled out his pipe, filled the bowl, lit the tobacco, and found himself biting hard at the stem and ceasing to suck at it, in order to listen.
“Wind up!”
He smiled. An old soldier getting the wind up in Beaucourt! Did anyone ever meet a ghost coming down Tottenham Court Road? He sat down in Manon’s chair, stared at the blank emptiness of the window space, and thought of lighting the stove and going to bed. Brent had got out of the habit of locking doors and fastening windows, but Beaucourt, this silent, twilight Beaucourt, brought him back to a primitive understanding of the habit. He was a civilized man again who still takes precautions against primordial savagery. He was the hermit-crab in its borrowed shell, but this particular shell had gaps in it. And somehow in the chill of that dusk Brent knew that he did not relish sleeping in that cellar, where a man could creep down the steps in his stockinged feet and stun him before he could move.
He decided that he was not going to sleep in the cellar, and he went below and carried up the wire bed on his back. Then he brought half a dozen sheets of galvanized iron and some lengths of timber into the kitchen so that he could barricade the window and the door. The cunning of the old soldier suggested an additional device, some sort of harmless booby-trap to guard the front and back doors, a few old tins scattered about, a loosely slung wire that would bring a saucepan clattering down if anybody touched it. The virtues of a good house-dog, and of stout doors and shutters, needed no emphasizing.
Brent barricaded the door and window of the kitchen and went to bed. Manon’s revolver lay ready on a box; also a candle and a box of matches. Beaucourt was still, extraordinarily still, so silent that it kept Paul awake, listening for the sound of anyone moving outside the house.
He was growing accustomed to the stillness, and beginning to feel drowsy and less on the alert when something brought him back to a state of acute attention. He could remember having been scared as a boy by the sound made by a snail crawling across a window-pane, and this sound that he heard was just as peculiar and unexplainable. It made him think of a hand rubbing softly across some roughish surface. It seemed quite near, and yet he was unable to localize it in the darkness. Brent lay absolutely still, knowing that the confounded wire bed would creak and complain if he made the lightest movement.
The sound changed abruptly, became sharper and more metallic. It suggested finger-nails picking at the edge of a sheet of metal, and in a flash Brent seemed to visualize the origin and the meaning of the sound. A man’s hand had been feeling its way across the sheets of corrugated iron that closed the window until it had come in contact with the edge of one of the sheets. The hand had been testing the solidity of the improvised shutter, and whether it was possible to slip one of the sheets aside.
The sound ceased, and Brent’s hand went out for the revolver. He fancied that he could hear a movement along the raised path towards the street door, and he waited for the clink of one of those tins, but his booby-traps gave him no warning. There was an interval of silence, quite a long interval, and Brent’s ears were beginning to play him tricks. He was lying on his left side, his face turned towards the kitchen doorway, its barricade of iron sheets and timber a black patch in the plastered wall opposite him, when he saw a little thread of light outline the lower edge of the barricade. It was very faint, a mere greyness, diffused from some light that was burning in one of the rooms on the other side of the passage.
Brent pushed back the blankets, drew up his feet, and lifting his legs slowly over the edge of the bed, sat up. The wire netting creaked, but the sound coincided with a very distinct and crisp rustling in one of those other rooms, a rustling that suggested the brushing up of shavings in a carpenter’s shop. It was one of those sounds that struck an old familiar memory on Brent’s brain. He had taken the precaution of carrying the ladder into the kitchen, and it stood slanting against the partition wall just below the gap in the uncompleted roof. Paul felt his way to the ladder, tested its steadiness with a pressure of the hands, and mounted it slowly, Manon’s revolver in his left hand.
A sudden broadening glow of light met him as he reached the top of the wall. There was the distinct crackle of burning wood, and then Brent understood. He caught one of the rafters, pulled himself on to the wall, and lying flat along it, was able to look down into the back room on the other side of the passage.
He saw a man down there, a man who was bending forward and feeding chips and bits of wood on to the fire he had lit on the floor. He had piled his shavings against Brent’s stack of timber salved from the dismantled huts, and the flames were beginning to lick at the pile of floor boards. Brent set his teeth, and changed his pistol from his left hand to his right. The man was Louis Blanc; Paul knew him by his cap and clothes, and those angular projecting shoulders.
Brent might have saved himself much future suffering and travail if he had obeyed that first impulse and shot Bibi as he bent forward over the fire. He did not do it. It was one of those deeds that became impossible directly the instinctive impulse has been gripped and held. Brent fired straight at the fire, and the bullet sent a spurt of burning chips over the feet of the man below.
Bibi gave a leap like a cat, all four limbs spread. Paul had a momentary glimpse of his face, lips drawn back tight over the teeth, eyes furious and surprised. Then he dodged sideways out into the passage, and Paul heard the saucepan clatter against the stones as Bibi’s ankles struck the wire. There was a pause, a scuffle, an oath.
Brent used Bibi’s favourite expletive.
“Voilà!” he shouted. “I missed you on purpose. Next time I shan’t miss.”
“Go to the devil,” said the other voice from somewhere in the street.
Paul scrambled down to save his timber. Manon had brought him a little electric torch, and after dismantling the barricade across the kitchen doorway, he stepped into the passage. Bibi might still be hanging about outside the house, and since it was possible that Bibi was armed, Paul went to the street doorway, and flashed his torch along the path and across the road. Seeing no sign of Louis Blanc he made a dash for the back door, and using a bit of board scooped the mass of burning shavings away from the timber pile. The floor was of tiles, and Brent was able to beat out the scattered fire.
He had no more sleep that night, but sat on a box in the corner of the kitchen, his blankets wrapped round him, torch and revolver ready. During that long watch he did some very practical thinking on the subject of doors and shutters, and the values of a good watch-dog. If there was to be a battle of wits among the ruins of Beaucourt many of the advantages would rest with Bibi; he could attack when he pleased; an eternal “standing to” to repel some chance raid was not a pleasant prospect.
“I might put the police on him,” Paul thought, and immediately saw himself in a legal tangle, and being handed over as a deserter to a corporal’s guard.
Before the first greyness of the dawn he lit the fire, made himself some tea, and then started the day’s work. It took him less than an hour to finish sheeting the roof covering the right half of the house, and he saw the sun come up through the beech trees of the Bois du Roi and flood the broken walls with yellow light. There was nothing to break the silence save the sound of his hammer, and in the calm of the dawn Brent found it difficult to believe that Louis Blanc existed.
He knocked off for breakfast, and then took a stroll up the Rue de Picardie. Not twenty yards from the café he came upon a rather amusing and significant proof of the impetuosity of Louis Blanc’s retreat, a pair of boots standing neatly, even demurely, in the middle of the street. Bibi had pulled off his boots here before making his attack, and Brent pictured him in his socks pedalling that bicycle of his back to Ste. Claire.
Paul was inclined to be elated over the finding of those boots, and to attach too triumphant a significance to this rather ridiculous detail. Louis Blanc had the soul of a “sneak-thief,” and the courage of a bully. Shot at, he evaporated, and Brent was tempted to believe that he had finished with Bibi.
But he kept to his plan, and began by closing the back door of the house with a barricade of iron sheets and timber backed by ammunition boxes filled with bricks. There were three ground-floor windows in the unroofed half of the house and Paul covered them with more sheets, driving the nails into the hard old mortar of the walls. He was nailing up the last sheet when he heard the sound of a car.
Old Durand had chosen a different road that morning, and had come by way of the Rue de Rosières. He pulled up outside the house, and Paul, standing there hammer in hand, saw Manon’s eyes fixed on the barricaded windows.
She gave a look of interrogation, frowning slightly.
“Just to keep out the wind,” Paul told her.
She did not believe him, and while Paul was talking to Durand she went in and discovered the blackened tiles in the back room, the charred shavings, and the scorched pile of floor boards.
Durand drove on to the château. He wished to make a survey of the place and to examine the cellars, and Paul found Manon standing in the doorway, a very serious Manon, with eyes that demanded the truth.
“What happened last night?”
“What do you mean?”
Brent’s eyes were tired and red about the lids, the eyes of a man who had had no sleep.
“Someone tried to light a fire in there.”
He nodded.
“So you have seen it! Yes, it was that pleasant neighbour of ours, Bibi. He sneaked in when it was dark, but I happened to be awake.”
She wanted to know everything, and Brent described all that had happened, and how he had frightened Louis Blanc with the revolver she had left him.
“I wish you had killed the beast,” she said with a passion that surprised Brent; “no one would have been any the wiser.”
“I couldn’t shoot the man in cold blood.”
“Cold blood! You have too nice a sense of honour. Bibi would have burnt you alive, or suffocated you in cold blood, as you call it.”
And then her eyes softened.
“Yes, it is like you to be generous; but this madness of Bibi’s puts me in a different temper. I am coming to live in Beaucourt.”
“But Manon!”
“You can argue for ever and ever, but I am coming. I have a sense of honour, mon ami. And as for worrying about what old women might say to me, nom d’un chien! but they can go to the devil. I stand by my man.”