“No.”
“But there is something; I am not to be deceived.”
He smiled up at her.
“How you notice things.”
“Yes. I saw Bibi and his new hut near the factory. Is that what is worrying you? Monsieur Talmas told me. It does not worry me.”
Brent’s face cleared. In some ways women are more courageous and more imperturbable than men.
“Well, then, it does not matter,” he said, “but I wish that fellow had taken his blind face somewhere else.”
In their happiness they were ready to forget Louis Blanc and that brown hut of his among the apple trees on the bank above the Bonnière road. The buvette was complete. Mademoiselle Barbe had her comptoir and her shelves for bottles, and at night the factory workmen crowded in and sat round the improvised tables and drank Bibi’s execrable wine. Those who were unable to find room in the hut made themselves at home under the apple trees. They were noisy; they sang. Bibi had a chair beside Barbe’s comptoir. He talked a great deal, but he never laughed. His blind face was the face of a man who listened for some particular voice, the voice of an enemy.
This hut of his was like an outpost, or a rallying point in the inevitable antagonisms that were stirring in the village. Peasant Beaucourt looked at it with unfriendly eyes. It was not that these peasants were saints; far from it; and yet it was as though that arch-peasant, Monsieur Lefèbre, had placed Bibi and his buvette under an interdict. There were elemental discords between the tiller of the fields and these ouvriers. The peasant had his home, his wife, his daughters, his work, his crops; the factory hand was an Ishmaelite, noisy, contentious, cynical, full of crude theories about double pay and less work. He had no woman with him, and your barrack-housed man is a troublesome dog. He will spend half his night sniffing after petticoats, and in Beaucourt the petticoats belonged to the peasants.
This tacit antagonism existed long before it was actually provoked by the inevitable escapades of the “Elephant’s” roughs. To Beaucourt, the Beaucourt that followed Durand, Lefèbre, Philipon and their party, Bibi’s buvette was out of bounds. No one went there. If a man wanted a little red wine, he got it at Manon’s café, and so, almost insensibly, the Café de la Victoire became involved in the feud.