“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.
XXVI
Paul Brent was bound for Harlech Dump, those huts and little hillocks of stores that Manon had seen on the road to Rosières.
Paul was not concerned with the economies of Harlech Dump. He had four fifty-franc notes in his pocket, and in his head a list of articles that would be very welcome at the Café de la Victoire. He wanted canvas, oiled linen, screws, nails, door-hinges, window-fittings, paint, paint-brushes, locks, an additional bucket, some extra tools. Harlech Dump was like a quarry in a land that had no stone. It was a temptation to any man involved in the primitive struggle for existence in such a wilderness. It was food laid out in sight of men who were hungry, and guarded by a bored N.C.O., two physically unfit privates and the theoretical fence of international commercial arrangements. Brent wanted to buy. He did not know what steps the Disposal Board, or whatever the authority might happen to be called, was taking to rid itself of these stores. Certain civilized needs cried out for satisfaction. Over there in England people had houses to live in, a grocer and a butcher round the corner, roofs to keep out the rain. Kent had not been pulped into brick dust and Maidstone pounded into a rubbish heap.
Harlech Dump stood in the corner of a field where the Rosières road crossed the railway line. The farm-house to which the field had belonged showed as a red ruin against the background of a wood of poplars. The dump had all the dreariness, the bald, boot-worn manginess of such places. There was a stodge of mud about it that was drying with the March wind and changing its colour from brown to a yellowish grey. Two rusty Nissen huts faced each other across a roadway made of cinders. Duck-board tracks lay about the place like huge dead worms oozing into the sludge and the slime of the soil.
The dump looked deserted when Brent came down the hill, and crossed a corduroy bridge over a big ditch. A brown figure sat on the doorstep of one of the Nissen huts, scraping a pair of boots with a jack-knife. The man was wearing no puttees; his buttons were dirty; he had not shaved. Even at a distance of thirty yards Brent recognized all the significant symptoms of a “fed-upness” that reminded him of Wipers and no leave.