XXV
When Louis Blanc walked into the Coq d’Or, the old men seated at the white deal tables became as mute as birds when a hawk sails overhead. Mademoiselle Barbe was perched on a high chair behind the little comptoir, surveying the room with a pair of green-blue eyes, eyes that showed the white of the eyeballs between the lower lid and the edge of the iris. Mademoiselle Barbe had red hair, a big mouth, and a complexion like china clay. She was a thin young woman, an enigmatic young woman, with long limbs, narrow hips, and a rather prominent bosom.
“Good evening, Monsieur Blanc.”
Bibi sat down at the table in a corner, his hands in his trouser pockets, his feet thrust out. He looked in a bad temper. One by one the old men got up and went out, for there was no pleasure in gossiping with an uncomfortable fellow like Bibi in the room. He made himself felt like a thunderstorm concentrated within four walls, an oppressive person, explosive, threatening to make a noise and blow out the windows.
Mademoiselle Barbe watched Bibi. She had the arched and voracious nostrils of the woman who is a natural bird of prey. Her quick temper made men think her capable of a great passion, a creature who could bite in the excitement of a love affair, but Mademoiselle Barbe was as cold as a cat.
“You are in a bad temper to-night.”
She took a glass from the shelf, mixed Bibi a drink, and coming round from behind the comptoir, put the glass on Bibi’s table. She did not go back to the comptoir, but half leant, half sat on the table next to Bibi’s, her hands gripping the edge of the table, thin, loose-jointed hands, rather red about the knuckles.
Bibi drank.
“You mix a drink very well.”
“I always do things well,” said Barbe, with an insolent lift of the chin. “I have ideas, you know, like a man.”
Bibi looked up at her with eyes half closed. He had talked a good deal to Barbe of the Coq d’Or. She stimulated him. She was a clever girl, provocative, the sort of woman who was Bibi’s natural partner, a woman who could seize things with her claws. And Louis Blanc’s mentality was such that when the gas was out of an enterprise and his conceit somewhat deflated, he needed a woman like Barbe, a glass of absinthe, and a mouthful of rolling words.
He had boasted to Barbe of all that he meant to do in Beaucourt, how he was going to call his hotel the “Champ de Bataille,” and make a fortune out of American tourists, nor in Bibi’s vision were the people of Beaucourt forgotten. Army food bought cheaply and retailed at an immense profit seemed a mere question of shrewd foresight. Barbe had encouraged Bibi to talk, perhaps because he piqued the tigress in her, and she was bored with tame men. Mademoiselle was greedy and ambitious, and the Coq d’Or afforded a girl no scope.
“That old busybody of a Durand is going to be a nuisance to you,” she said.
Bibi jerked his shoulders. He had always posed before the red-haired girl as a devil of a fellow, a man who always got his own way.
“Durand! A talker, that’s all. Give me a little of this stuff in Beaucourt,” and he tapped the glass with a finger-nail, “and we will explode Anatole like a paper bag. Meanwhile, I have somebody else to settle with. When people get in my way, I push.”
Barbe nodded her head.
“That was a dirty trick, knocking down that chimney of yours.”
“I haven’t squared the account yet.”
“I thought you were rather fond of Manon Latour,” said the red-haired girl.
“She had a house that could easily be repaired.”
“How cunning you are!”
Bibi laughed.
“But she would not do business with me, you see. Not that I cared two sous about her; I don’t get excited over black-haired women. I shouldn’t have meddled with her and her man if they had left me alone; but when a fellow plays you a trick like that——!”
“He wants the boot,” said Barbe.
“He will get it, my dear. The fellow has a pistol and is rather free with it, but I shall manage. Meanwhile I have my plans.”
Barbe was interested in Bibi’s plans. She had begun to think that she would like to share in them, and she believed that she was the very woman for Louis Blanc. It appeared that Bibi had postponed the scheme for rebuilding the Hôtel de Paris; his new idea was to buy a couple of big Adrienne huts and erect them in an orchard at the back of the hotel. The red ruin would serve as a sort of placard, a dramatic advertisement for the wooden hotel among the apple trees. “You make your money quickly,” he explained, “and then clear out. In ten years the sentimental people will be tired of the battlefields.”
“But if Manon Latour has the same idea?” Barbe asked.
Bibi finished his drink.
“That’s it,” he said; “that place of hers is being repaired too quickly. But if I frighten that fellow of hers out of Beaucourt, she will be in a bit of a fix. I shall hire a gang to rush my huts up.”
“And when are you going to get the huts?” said Barbe, looking straight into Bibi’s eyes.
That was what she wanted to know—how much solidity there was behind this man’s march-music.
“I am going to Amiens to-morrow to see a contractor, and I expect to meet my friend who handles the money.”
“How exciting! And you will come back and tell me all about it?”
“You can bet on that,” said Bibi.
He was building hotels in the clouds to impress the red-haired girl and to encourage his own conceit. Boasting was Bibi’s food of the gods; and, when he had rolled a procession of fine words off his tongue, he began to believe that everything would be as he said it was. And yet there was a streak of cunning in all his vanity. He advertised his visit to Amiens, let all Ste. Claire know about it, because it was possible that he might wish people to think him in Amiens when he might be somewhere else. The contractor who had army huts to sell was a creature of the imagination, and even Bibi’s financial friend had begun to show an inconvenient cautiousness.
But he went to Amiens, walking to Boves with a little black bag in his hand, and taking the train from Boves to Amiens. He put up at a cheap hotel in the quarter north of the cathedral, and spent a day visiting certain agencies, a firm of builders, and an official at the hôtel de ville. Nobody seemed to know anything; there was a shrugging of shoulders, a suggestion that everything was waiting for the people at Paris. Monsieur Clemenceau, it was said, had made some sort of promise, and the Tiger was a man of his word. The builder whom Bibi visited hinted that he might be able to obtain one big hut, but it would cost Bibi forty thousand francs, and the price did not include charges for transport and re-erection.
“It is necessary to pay through the nose,” said the gentleman with brutal candour.
Bibi spat and went out denouncing profiteers. What was a soldier of the Republic to do with such wolves ready to tear the wool off a sheep’s back?
He fell into a rage, and could think of nothing but of Manon Latour and the way Brent had managed to baulk him. Bibi was always a man of one idea, one passion. Since his scheme for capturing and exploiting Beaucourt seemed in the air, its place was taken by an animal hatred of Paul and a desire to humiliate Manon. Louis Blanc had something of the mentality of a madman whose whole strength can be concentrated upon one definite and violent act. His power of self-expression was purely physical. He had the cunning of a savage, but very little self-control. It is difficult for decent people to understand how certain crimes are committed. Appetite will explain many of them, appetites that flush with hot blood those baser centres of a brain that have not received the living impress of social self-consciousness.
Louis Blanc settled his bill at the hotel, walked to the station and left his black bag at the consigne. He went out into the town again, bought some bread and cheese and a bottle of wine, and had supper at an estaminet. About nine o’clock he started out of Amiens on foot, not hurrying, for he had plenty of time to reach Beaucourt before daylight.
About an hour before sunrise he pushed through a gap in a hedge south of the Rue Romaine and worked his way through the orchards to the back of the stone house opposite Manon’s café. Bibi had explored the stone house on one of his previous visits. Its staircase had not been destroyed, and it was possible to reach the upper rooms, one of which still retained its joists and a few floor boards. This particular room faced the street and had had a ragged hole drilled in its front wall by the shell of an English sixteen-pounder. Bibi entered the stone house from the yard at the back, treading very carefully lest he should set a tin rolling or crack a piece of fallen tile under his boot. He sat down in one of the ground-floor rooms until there was sufficient light to prevent him bungling the climb up the rickety stairs. The ruin was full of the greyness of the dawn when he took his boots off, crawled up the stairs, and, scrambling across the joists, lay flat on the platform of floor boards, and close to the hole in the wall.
He had a good view of the house across the street, and by moving his head he found that he could see the whole of it, and also a large part of the garden. The shell-hole in the wall was less than a foot in diameter, and by keeping well back in the shadow Bibi felt pretty sure that his face would be almost invisible to any one across the way. He had been lying there about twenty minutes when he heard the café door unlocked, and saw Brent come out with a bucket in his hand. Paul dropped out of Bibi’s view when he jumped down from the raised path and went to the well to draw water. Bibi heard him washing in the street, and sousing his head in the bucket.
But Louis Blanc was tired. He had the whole day before him, and he had his own particular plan. He meant to make Paul fight, hand to hand and body to body, and he wanted to eliminate the odds in favour of a man who might carry a pistol in his pocket. So Bibi ate some of his bread and drank a few mouthfuls of wine, and went to sleep, curled up against the wall.
The day’s work was in full swing over the way when Louis Blanc woke up and looked out through his porthole. It was a March morning, with a wind humming in the ruins and clouds moving quickly across a broad blue sky. Paul was up on the roof, fixing the rafters on the other half of the house, and the splashes of passing sunlight played upon the white timber, his blue breeches and darker coat. It was the sound of his hammering that had awakened Bibi. Manon was at work in the garden, sleeves and skirt rolled up, turning over the soil with a spade.
Bibi lay like a big cat and watched them. The morning passed away, and about noon he saw Manon enter the house and move to and fro in the kitchen. Smoke showed at the top of the chimney, signalling the approach of the dinner hour. Presently Manon appeared on the path and called to her man, and Brent came down from the roof.
When the meal was over, Bibi saw Paul standing at the kitchen window, lighting his pipe. Manon was clearing the table, and talking to Paul. Brent loitered a moment, and then came out on to the footpath.
“I shall be back before dark.”
Bibi heard the words very clearly. He saw Brent turn back when he had passed the window, and take something out of his pocket.
“I’ll leave you this.”
“Put it on the table,” said Manon.
Bibi saw Paul reach in, place the revolver on the table, and walk away. He turned up the road to Rosières, and disappeared behind the ruined houses. Bibi lay and watched the window, the pistol lying there on the table and the figure of Manon moving about the room.
“If she forgets to pocket that pistol?” he thought.
And Manon did forget it. She went back to her work in the garden, and Bibi seized his chance.
He took off his boots, descended the stairs, looked cautiously out of the doorway, and then made a dash across the street. He came back with the revolver, and turned to his observation post in the upper room. Manon was still digging in the garden, turning up the brown soil under the shadow and sunlight of the March sky.