XXIX
Paul had found his pipe; he was filling it and staring at the floor, when something yellow whisked into the kitchen. It was Philosophe, Philosophe who had been missing all day and who now floated in with an air of having been round the corner. The dog yapped and pawed at Manon’s apron.
“A lot of use you have been to us,” said Brent.
But Manon kissed Philosophe’s head and then pushed him away.
“I could forgive anything to-night.”
“Even—that?”
She pressed her hands to her eyes.
“No, not that. What are we to do now?”
They heard a sudden sound in the silence, a queer sound that startled both of them. Philosophe was licking Bibi’s face.
Brent stood up with a tightening of the mouth and limbs.
“Come here.”
The dog sneaked out from behind the table and went and lay down by the stove.
Brent removed the chair and the table. He found Manon standing beside him, and together they looked down at this mountain of a man who lay stretched along the wall. Dusk had come; the room was filling with it, and a little darkness covered the mask of Bibi’s mutilated face. He moved a leg, stirred slightly, and seemed to become conscious of physical pain.
Paul and Manon looked at each other.
“What’s to be done?” her eyes asked his.
Brent was grim. He stood biting the stem of his pipe, a man who had not forgotten and who would never forget. Things might have turned out so differently. He had no pity for the man down there.
“Don’t touch him,” he said; “keep away. He’s foul.”
She caught her breath.
“I couldn’t touch him. But must he stay here?”
“Good God, no,” said Brent. “This place has got to be cleaned.”
Bibi moved. He raised his head, propping himself on one elbow. He seemed to be thinking, remembering, feeling, but like a dull, helpless animal. He rubbed at his eyes and uttered a foul word. Brent’s back seemed to stiffen.
“Hallo,” he said.
Louis Blanc raised himself to a sitting position, his back against the wall. He looked up at Paul, his head rolling from side to side, his slashed face a thing of loathing. Everything was dim to Louis Blanc, even the voice of the man who spoke to him.
“Water,” he said.
Paul stood over him, yet keeping his distance, for though the beast was maimed he might still be dangerous, and he was taking no chances with Bibi.
“Don’t move. Do you hear what I say?”
Bibi used a foul word, but Brent caught him up.
“Drop that and listen. I have that pistol, see; we found it all right, and if you try any tricks I shall shoot and shoot to kill. Sit there and take your orders, and keep that foul tongue of yours quiet.”
Bibi said nothing; he was beaten, a battered thing, half blind, sullen with pain. Paul had spoken to Manon, and she was pouring some wine and water into a glass that had survived the storm. She brought it to Brent, also a thick slice of bread cut from a loaf, and Brent put the glass and the bread on the floor and pushed them within Bibi’s reach, using the end of the iron bar.
“That’s the way to feed a wild beast,” he said, “if I touched you again I might kill you.”
Bibi lifted the glass in his left hand; his head was very unsteady, and he spilt some of the wine down his chin; the stuff stung his cut lips, but he drank it down, and began to mumble the bread. The room was full of the dusk, and Manon lit the candle. Paul had gone to the window, and was sitting on the table, watching Bibi. The candle light lit up Brent’s face; it was a serious, frowning face, the face of a man who had made up his mind about something.
“I’ll take a sandwich with me,” he said.
The candle light flickered in Manon’s eyes.
“But where are you going?”
“Half-way to Ste. Claire; sort of slave-gang stunt. He has got to foot it somehow.”
She looked into her man’s eyes and said nothing. There was a calm blue glare in them that she could not have softened even if she had pitied Bibi.
“Supposing he cannot walk so far?”
“We didn’t ask him to come here. He is going to walk four miles. After that—I have finished with him.”
He turned to Bibi.
“Do you hear? You have got to get out of this. You want a doctor. I’ll see you half-way to Ste. Claire.”
Bibi grunted.
“I can’t do it.”
Brent spoke quietly, but he showed no mercy.
“Get up. No, I’m not going to help you, or touch you. You will get a doctor at Ste. Claire; you’ll get no doctor in Beaucourt.”
And Louis Blanc moved. He rose slowly on his feet, steadying himself against the wall, and stood there, feeling his strength.
“Come on,” he said sullenly, “you are merciful sort of people, you two. I’m half blind. You’d like to see me in the ditch, wouldn’t you? But I’ll get to Ste. Claire.”
Manon had slipped a paper of bread and cheese into Paul’s pocket.
“Quick march.”
He watched Bibi grope to the door, and half feel his way out of the house and down into the street. It was growing dark, and Brent followed him at a distance of a couple of yards, the revolver in one hand, the iron bar in the other.
“I shall be back soon,” he called to Manon.
And so he set out to drive this half-blind Polyphemus out of Beaucourt, walking among the ruins like Bibi’s shadow, ready to shoot if the man in front of him hesitated or hung back. Neither of them spoke, save when Brent uttered a word of warning. “Right . . . Left . . . Keep in the middle of the road.” He found that Bibi’s pace was lengthening when they had passed the factory, and were on the road to Bonnière, and he went along at a steady slouch. The stars were out overhead, and there was no wind rustling the dead grass and weeds in the wild fields beside the road. They heard the sound of their own feet on the broken pavé, nothing more.
Brent wondered what was passing in the mind of the man in front of him, and the picture of Bibi lurching along in the darkness brought back the night of a memory in the Arras battle of 1917. Paul had marched a German prisoner back from the line, a big, tusk-faced sergeant-major who had been badly wounded in the right shoulder, and Brent remembered how all the swagger had gone out of the German. He had thought of one thing and one thing only, how long it would be before they reached a dressing-station. He had kept on worrying Brent: “I bleed, Tommy, I bleed.”
They had covered two miles when Louis Blanc spoke. He was sullen, but something stronger than his hatred of Brent marched at his heels.
“What’s the time?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps about half past seven.”
Bibi walked on in silence for several minutes. Brent noticed that their pace had increased.
“Have we passed Des Ormes?”
“Don’t know the place,” said Brent. “Why?”
“There’s a road that turns off there, the road to Boves.”
“Why do you want to go to Boves?”
“I shall find a doctor at Boves. I want one, don’t I?”
And Brent understood. Like that German at Arras, Louis Blanc was tame; he had the fear of death in him, or the fear of blindness, which is the living death. Every step that he took was so much ground covered on the road to a place where a man might be found with hands that could heal.
A queer, elemental pity stirred in Brent, a feeling that even penetrated and suffused itself through his physical loathing of this man.
“You want to go to Boves?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Where does the road turn off?”
“Past the farm called Des Ormes, a clump of dead elms close to the road.”
“I’ll look out for it,” said Brent.
He kept his promise, and managed to make out these ghostly trees reaching out their black and maimed tentacles towards the stars, and learning from Bibi that the road to Boves branched off on the right hand about a hundred yards farther on, he watched for it, and found the road as a greyish streak diverging across the darker fields.
“This is the place.”
Louis Blanc grunted.
“You’ll be bringing in the police, I suppose?”
Brent did not answer him at once, and Bibi began to fidget. He stood poking his head like an eager dog in the direction of Boves.
“It all depends,” said Brent, “on Madame Latour’s wishes.”
“Hell! Never mind; are you sure this is the road?”
“It’s the first road on the right after Des Ormes. Can you see?”
“Enough. I’m off.”
And he went slouching away into the darkness, leaving Brent standing there, nor did Brent move until he could no longer hear the grinding of Bibi’s boots upon the road.
At Beaucourt, in that room of her simple affection, Manon had sat for a while by the light of the candle, looking at the débris left by those two struggling men. What a sordid affair, what a horror to be forgotten and washed out of the mind! A chair broken, furniture overturned, crockery smashed on the floor,—a patch of blood on the tiles where Bibi had been stretched by the wall. And Philosophe, true to his name, asleep beside the stove, caring nothing for what had happened.
Manon jumped up. The inspiration was obvious, and yet passionate in its demands. She must get rid of this pollution, put it at once out of her life, her life that was Paul’s. A great tenderness was awake in her, a feeling that this little room was sacred, and that it had to be resanctified. She lit another candle and set to work to cleanse it; sweeping up the broken glass and crockery and carrying it out in a box to the ruins across the road. She set the furniture in order, and finding the blue and white jug broken on the floor, and Paul’s bunch of yellow palm lying beside it, she gathered up this emblem of the spring, found another bowl for it, and placed it in the same place on the table. There remained that red stain on the floor. It revolted her, but she made a mop of an old sack, and washed out the stain. Yet her ideal of purification was not complete; this room was to have a living atmosphere, warmth, light, homeliness. She wanted Paul to see it again as he had seen it before that savage fight. She lit the stove, put a pan of water on to boil, spread a clean cloth on the table, laid two plates, two cups, two knives and forks, a dish of meat, cheese and bread. Then she drew the arm-chair close to the stove and sat down to wait. Philosophe, undisturbed by these practical yet spiritual activities, still slept, and the dog’s passivity was a piece of comforting naturalism, like the bunch of yellow palm on the table.
Paul returned earlier than he had expected. She ran to the door to meet him, and found him struggling with the bundle that he had left lying on the path.
“I had forgotten this, and nearly fell over it.”
She caught hold of one end, and helped him in with it. Then she closed the door, and, going to the stove, pretended to be busy making her coffee, but she was all waiting—as a woman waits—to see whether her man had the inward and the outward vision.
Paul noticed everything, the clean floor, the bunch of palm on the table by the window, the white cloth, the tidy dresser. It was good, all good, the very touch his heart asked for. He looked at Philosophe, who had not troubled to get up and greet him. Tranquillity had returned; Manon had washed away the stains.
He went softly across the kitchen, and put a shy man’s arm round her.
“What a good piece of work you make of life,” he said.
She turned to him quickly.
“Here is your chair by the stove.”
She was looking up into his face; he was grey, weary to the point of exhaustion, but the shine in his eyes broke through all the physical shadows.
“Just the same as before,” he said, “and like you, clean and good. Ma chérie, I’m just all out.”
She made him sit down in the chair, and drew up the table so that he could take his supper by the stove. Paul let himself relax, for there was a sharp ache in the muscles that had been bruised by Bibi’s boot. He looked at the stove, at the sleeping dog, at Manon, and the day’s work seemed done.
“Would you like your plate on your lap?”
“No, I’ll turn to the table.”
She did not worry him with questions, sensing his weariness and the happy and human sloth that had fallen upon his body. His face regained its colour; the tired lines were softened; he had the air of a man who was well content.
Presently he lit his pipe, and looked up at her with a flicker of tender humour in his eyes.
“A lot of good that dog was to us! A good name—Philosophe. He got out of the way, like the clever people during the war.”
She gave Philosophe a gentle kick, but he took not the least notice.
“And Bibi?” she asked.
“He’s beaten,” he said; “I believe we have finished with Bibi.”
He described Bibi as a big and frightened shadow lurching along the road to Boves.
“Shall we put the police on him?” he asked her.
“It’s for you to say.”
Brent looked at her. Her eyes had darkened. There are things that no woman likes to see dragged into the hard light of a law court.
“Let us leave it alone,” he said. “I have a feeling that we have finished with Bibi. I hate stirring up mud; life’s been so clean here.”
She made a sudden movement towards him; and Paul sat up, took her face between his hands and kissed her.
“Good God,” he said, “it seems a lot for a man like me to ask for! All that I know is—that I’m going to make good here. Will you let me prove it?”
Manon’s eyes held his.
“You are too much afraid of people, Paul. If we are partners, let us be honest. Why should we not tell old Durand and the Casteners and people like that——”
“What shall we tell them?”
“Mon ami, you are making me the man.”
He drew her face to him again, and kissed her slowly and with great tenderness.
“All right,” he said; “but I’ll not marry you till this place is all that I want to make it.”
She laid her hands on his shoulders.
“What queer things you men are, some of you. If it was not for that, I would——”
“Tell me,” he said, his hands on her wrists.
She gave a quick, defensive smile.
“No, show me what is in that bundle. It’s so exciting, this new home.”