“With pleasure, monsieur,” said Manon; “and if I may take a little bundle——”
“Anything but a piano or a cupboard,” said Anatole, with a laugh.
The storm blew itself out during the night, leaving wet roads and a blue sky and a smell of spring in the air. Durand and his car, an old-fashioned four-seater De Dion, called for Manon at nine, with Anatole at the wheel and a luncheon basket on the back seat. Manon’s bundle was no terrible affair, stores for Paul tied up in a blanket.
But someone was before them on the Beaucourt road, Louis Blanc on his bicycle, a Louis Blanc who was not in the best of tempers. He had visited nearly every farm in Ste. Claire, offering good money for the hire of a wagon and a couple of horses, but no one had been able to oblige him. He came into Beaucourt by the Bonnière road. In the Place de l’Eglise he dismounted and stood staring. Something was missing from the broken outlines of the ruins of the Hôtel de Paris; the great central chimney had fallen.
Bibi dashed his bicycle down upon the cobbles. He was in a rage—the dramatic, white-faced rage of the French “rough,” a rage that must gesticulate, stamp up and down, let itself loose on something. He stormed in and looked at the ruin, and a pretty mess the chimney had made of it. Falling on the gable end next the Rue des Echelles, it had sent it crashing, and this mass of brickwork, striking the tottering wall of the Hospice across the way, had brought down the whole façade of the Hospice into the road. The mouth of the Rue des Echelles was full of broken bricks and stones.
Bibi looked at it all, and swore. The centre-piece of his house had gone; there were only three walls instead of four—nothing left that could carry a roof. The end fronting on the Rue des Echelles would have to be rebuilt before anything could be done in the way of putting up timber.
Bibi stamped about, kicking the bricks, and flapping his arms like some furious bird. He was not a man who could satisfy himself by cursing the elements or black-guarding a purely impersonal wind. He wanted a tangible, human enemy, a personal quarrel, a feud that could be prosecuted with boot and fist. He wanted to take somebody by the throat, smash his fists against real flesh, smell real blood. Bibi was a savage. His rage was the anthropomorphic rage of a savage that spits in the face of its idol-god and hammers it with a club.
That chimney had not fallen itself. Therefore someone had helped it to fall. Therefore someone had played him a dirty trick. These deductions following each other easily through Bibi’s mind, proved that someone could be none other than that fellow of Manon Latour’s.
“Voilà!”
The motive was obvious, so obvious that Bibi had not to search for an enemy. He had found his quarrel and he fastened on it like a snarling dog.