“I haven’t all the words I want—the names of things.”
She made a note of the dictionary.
“Some paint and brushes. And nails—nails of all sizes. We shall eat nails.”
When she had completed her list she tore out the leaf and handed the note-book back to Brent.
“I am going to tidy the house,” she said.
Brent had schemes of his own. He went out and paced the length and breadth of the café, and then sat down on the steps of the stone house and did sums on paper. He reckoned that he would need some hundred sheets of corrugated iron if the sheets measured six feet by two feet, and allowing for overlap. The timber for the rafters worked out at 720 feet. Then there would be the tie-pieces and battens. He saw, too, that it would be necessary to fit bedding-plates for the rafters to bear upon along the tops of the walls. That was a problem that sent him wandering through Beaucourt on another voyage of discovery.
In an alley behind the Post Office Brent found a dump of pit-props and railway sleepers. The sleepers were seven feet in length, well squared, and in good condition, the very material he needed for his bedding-plates. He spent an hour shouldering a dozen of them across to the Café de la Victoire, and stacking them in one of the rooms on the right of the passage. Brent was shaping his plans with a forethought that contemplated a complete assembling of all the necessary material. He was not fool enough to begin building before he had made sure of his resources.
Seeing nothing of Manon, he went to explore the Rue de Bonnière between the Post Office and the factory. There were some biggish houses on the north of the street, and the remains of a few shops. Brent worked through the houses, making notes of anything that might be usefully borrowed. In what appeared to have been the yard of a local builder of Beaucourt, Brent found the head of a felling axe and a bricklayer’s rusty trowel. A carpenter’s saw was the one thing he coveted, but Beaucourt baulked him in the matter of a saw. He collected a coil of stout telephone wire, a French shovel, and the head of a hoe; but it was in the backyard of the last house that he made his great find.
In one corner of the yard, an old gig with black and yellow wheels was standing with its shafts uptilted, like a praying mantis. Dash-board and seat were gone, and three of the spokes were broken in one wheel, but Brent’s brain rushed to imagine the uses of such a vehicle. He got hold of the shafts, and found that the gig could be trundled quite successfully; it was light, and the injured wheel would function, provided that too much was not expected of it. Brent dragged the gig out of the yard and round into the Rue Romaine, and in the Rue Romaine he met Manon.
She was coming out of the ruins of Grandmère Vitry’s cottage, carrying the picture of the Sacré Cœur. She saw Brent between the shafts of the gig, lugging it along with an air of triumph. He pulled up—out of breath, for he had been trundling the gig up-hill.