Ledoux looked at him fiercely.
“Is that a cut at me?”
“Well, you let a Boche throw your pal into the street. Ask old Cordonnier over there.”
That is how it began. Bibi had the whole crowd round him, and old Cordonnier was swearing to all sorts of things with nods and winks that were meant to be cunning. He was too fuddled to realize the seriousness of the affair or to understand whither these men’s passions were tending. It seemed no more than a riotous and irresponsible jest invented to make the day merry.
It was so easy to inflame these roughs whose blood and brains had been heated by the stuff Barbe had given them to drink. A mob never reflects. It spills itself like wine out of a split cask and makes straight for the gutter.
Bibi told his tale—the tale that his hatred had thought out in the darkness of those summer days. Cordonnier had given him the idea, and he had elaborated with an ingenuity that made it convincing. He asserted that Manon had remained in Beaucourt after the Germans had occupied it; that she had had an affair with a Boche, that this Boche had “deserted,” and taken her away with him through the lines.
“You see how it worked,” he said. “Women are queer fish, and this woman was infatuated. The fellow may have found out where she had buried her money. Everything was upside down just then; the ‘front’ was a sieve, and this Boche was fed up. He gets Manon through the lines, and is taken prisoner. After the armistice he escapes, and where does he make for? Beaucourt, of course. He knows that he will find the money and the woman there. A useful fellow, too, who can use his hands and speak French like a Frenchman! And there they are in Beaucourt with the best house in the place. A nice pair, what!”
There was a confusion of angry and excited voices.
“A Boche!”
“But I say, old man, it doesn’t sound possible!”