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?”