“Look here, I can manage alone this afternoon. Supposing you collect bricks for these two holes in the wall!”
She refused to do any such thing.
“Do you think that I am some soft little cat from a villa in Paris? I used to dig and hoe all my garden during the war, and I can carry a sack of potatoes if someone puts it on my back. I don’t cry off because of a scratched hand.”
Brent liked her pluck and determination.
“Put a sandbag over each hand. There are some in the cellar. I don’t want you with your arm in a sling.”
As he crawled about the roof, wrenching off the iron sheets and sending them skiddering down to Manon, Paul was troubled by the face of Louis Blanc. The adventure had ceased to be an exciting game played by two grown-up children; it had taken on more primitive colours, colours that had not the innocence of the brown eyes and red lips of Manon, of the purple of the woods and the grey green of the fields. The world and Monsieur Bibi had come swaggering together into Beaucourt, and Brent was conscious of the unpleasant significance of the event.
Straddling the ridge of the roof, and looking at the chequer of red and white walls, the shadowy interspaces and the patches of broad sunlight that were Beaucourt, Brent realized that he had become responsible for Manon. He felt that she belonged to him, which of course was absurd. Less than two days of close comradeship did not justify a sense of possession, and yet the instinctive fierceness of the feeling astonished Brent. Why this bristling of the hair, this clenching of the fist? He had no difficulty in finding an answer.
But a far more sensitive and unselfish mood forced itself in front of these primitive emotions. Brent sat and looked into the face of his own past, a past that conjured up the present and the future. The coming of Bibi had made all the difference in the world to Brent’s outlook upon life. A cloud had wiped the irresponsible and un-self-conscious sunlight from the landscape. This polite and clever blackguard had reintroduced the social compact into Beaucourt. The village had ceased to be a wilderness, even though Louis Blanc’s presence in it had been a mere matter of hours. His appearance was more than a suggestion. Society had returned in the spirit, even if it remained absent in the flesh, and Brent saw Beaucourt full of eyes, mouths, ears and heads.
His thoughts centred upon Manon. What would Bibi tell people, those refugees scattered through the villages beyond the region of devastation? Brent knew how a man of Bibi’s kidney would talk. “Oh, yes, Manon Latour is living at Beaucourt with some fellow.” Brent swore to himself—but swearing did not solve the problem. He had discovered that he was responsible for Manon, even though he knew in his heart of hearts that this adventure promised to be the cleanest and most beautiful thing that had ever happened to him in life.
“Hallo!”