But he was feeling very evil towards Brent, and when Bibi hated a man he piled every imaginable infamy upon the enemy’s shoulders.
“That fellow would play me a dirty trick—if he dared, but I frightened him a bit about the hammer. Wonder what a woman can see in a tow-headed sheep like that?”
It was raining hard and beginning to blow when Bibi got on his bicycle and rode for Ste. Claire.
Early in the afternoon the rain came with such a pelt, driven by a rising wind, that Paul had to leave work on the roof. He began rigging up a shelter in the big front room on the other side of the passage—a shelter that would enable him to push on with his doors and window-frames and defy the weather. He had stacked a reserve supply of dry firewood in the cellar, and when dusk fell and shut out the wet and melancholy blur of the Beaucourt ruins, Brent was not sorry to retreat to the cellar, light the stove and feel snug and dry. He lit the candle, put the kettle on the stove, and spent the time cutting the mortices for the window-frames, using a couple of boxes as a bench.
By nine o’clock the wind had worked to a gale, and its bluster became so menacing that Brent climbed the cellar steps and stood in the passage under the shelter of the wall. The wind was snoring through the timber-work overhead, and now and again a gust would smite the house a full smack with the open hand, but the walls of the café took the blow without flinching. Brent thanked his luck that he had not been caught with the roof half covered, for the gale would have made a mess of the whole structure.
As he stood there in the darkness, he became aware of Beaucourt as a place of weird noises. The broken walls and hollow spaces made so many Pan’s pipes for the wind to play upon. There was the noise, too, of things falling. Blocks of brickwork and strips of wall that had braved it out in quieter times subsided under the push of this furious north-easter. Remnants of roof slithered down with a clattering of tiles. Plaster that had clung to the stud-work crumbled to join the rubbish below. A rusty piece of corrugated iron went clanking and clashing up the Rue de Picardie, till a gust tossed it into a doorway and left it at rest.
Suddenly, like a big gun loosing off in the thick of all the tumult of the wind’s attack, some mass of masonry or brickwork came down with a crash. Brent felt a distinct vibration of the earth, a thrill of the foundations under his feet.
“Hallo, there goes Bibi’s chimney!”
He was right.