The dusk approached, and this ghost village had an inhuman silence. Old Durand’s car seemed to have trailed the last thread of life out of it, and a sharp shadow fell across Brent’s face. His chin went up; he stood listening. Somewhere in the Rue de Picardie a loose tile clattered down, and the fall of it was like the sound of an avalanche.
Brent slipped six cartridges into the drum of the revolver, and put it back in his pocket. He stood a moment looking up at the new roof that covered the western half of the house, and if his pride swelled itself out a little, the feeling was justified. Under the level light of the sunset the old house had warmed to a soft, ruddy brown, and those blind eyes needed only window-frames and shutters painted a battered blue to make it melt again into its green nest among the orchards. In all his life Brent had never done a piece of work better or more quickly, and the man in him exulted.
He entered the house, and hesitated in the kitchen with a half-puzzled look upon his face. The sunlight had reached out over Beaucourt like a great hand, a hand that was suddenly withdrawn, and through the oblong of the window he saw the outlines of the ghost-houses, ribs showing, eye-sockets grey and empty. The room itself was filling with the dusk; objects in it were growing indistinct; the chair on which Manon had sat looked like a ghost of a chair. The silence was extraordinary. Brent had known the same silence over No-Man’s Land on quiet nights, but there had been men near—other men. Here there was desolation, that and nothing else.
His own face had a touch of grimness. He was listening all the time, without perhaps realizing that the drums of his ears were tense; and he was conscious of a sudden feeling of acute loneliness, an uncomfortable loneliness, chilly, fidgety, unpleasant. He pulled out his pipe, filled the bowl, lit the tobacco, and found himself biting hard at the stem and ceasing to suck at it, in order to listen.
“Wind up!”
He smiled. An old soldier getting the wind up in Beaucourt! Did anyone ever meet a ghost coming down Tottenham Court Road? He sat down in Manon’s chair, stared at the blank emptiness of the window space, and thought of lighting the stove and going to bed. Brent had got out of the habit of locking doors and fastening windows, but Beaucourt, this silent, twilight Beaucourt, brought him back to a primitive understanding of the habit. He was a civilized man again who still takes precautions against primordial savagery. He was the hermit-crab in its borrowed shell, but this particular shell had gaps in it. And somehow in the chill of that dusk Brent knew that he did not relish sleeping in that cellar, where a man could creep down the steps in his stockinged feet and stun him before he could move.
He decided that he was not going to sleep in the cellar, and he went below and carried up the wire bed on his back. Then he brought half a dozen sheets of galvanized iron and some lengths of timber into the kitchen so that he could barricade the window and the door. The cunning of the old soldier suggested an additional device, some sort of harmless booby-trap to guard the front and back doors, a few old tins scattered about, a loosely slung wire that would bring a saucepan clattering down if anybody touched it. The virtues of a good house-dog, and of stout doors and shutters, needed no emphasizing.
Brent barricaded the door and window of the kitchen and went to bed. Manon’s revolver lay ready on a box; also a candle and a box of matches. Beaucourt was still, extraordinarily still, so silent that it kept Paul awake, listening for the sound of anyone moving outside the house.
He was growing accustomed to the stillness, and beginning to feel drowsy and less on the alert when something brought him back to a state of acute attention. He could remember having been scared as a boy by the sound made by a snail crawling across a window-pane, and this sound that he heard was just as peculiar and unexplainable. It made him think of a hand rubbing softly across some roughish surface. It seemed quite near, and yet he was unable to localize it in the darkness. Brent lay absolutely still, knowing that the confounded wire bed would creak and complain if he made the lightest movement.
The sound changed abruptly, became sharper and more metallic. It suggested finger-nails picking at the edge of a sheet of metal, and in a flash Brent seemed to visualize the origin and the meaning of the sound. A man’s hand had been feeling its way across the sheets of corrugated iron that closed the window until it had come in contact with the edge of one of the sheets. The hand had been testing the solidity of the improvised shutter, and whether it was possible to slip one of the sheets aside.