Philipon joined them, sombre and gentle.
“How is it with him? How did it happen?”
Manon raised her eyes to his.
“They have kicked him to death. It was Bibi’s doing.”
She bent over Paul.
“He still breathes. If only we had a doctor! Marie, what shall we do?”
Marie Castener had been passing her big, slow, capable hands over Brent’s body. She had felt his heart beating under his torn shirt. Marie kept her head.
“He is not dead—a doctor—that’s it! They always say, ‘Never pull an unconscious man about.’ Josephine, and you, Claire—run into the house for some blankets; pull them off the bed. Has anyone a bicycle?”
“If Anatole were here, he would drive to Amiens for a doctor. He is at Amiens, if he could be met and told.”
She raised her head to listen. Philipon, too, was listening with an attentive look on his face, and in that most dramatic moment in the history of Beaucourt the whole crowd seemed to turn instinctively to the opening of the Rue Romaine. They heard the musical bleating of a horn. Someone on the outskirts of the crowd held up a warning arm as the nose of a long grey car slid slowly out of the Rue Romaine. Old Durand’s De Dion was following at the tail of the grey car. The crowd edged back. They saw Monsieur Lefèbre standing up in Durand’s car, his hand on Anatole’s shoulder, his jocund face very stern and troubled. The grey car pushed on until it reached the space about those central figures; it stopped there like some intelligent beast wholly sensible of its own dramatic significance. There were four men in the grey car, and one of them had the white head and the indomitable and unforgettable face of the man who had refused to see France defeated. It was the “Tiger,” the Father of Victory, Georges Clemenceau.