From that moment they were like children carried away by the excitement
of the adventure. The droop had gone from Manon’s eyelids. She glowed,
she laughed, she chattered, her brown eyes alight, her heart full of the
spirit of romance.
“What an adventure!”
“A very devil of an adventure,” said Brent. “I feel man enough to tackle
the pyramids.”
She laughed and laid hold of his hand.
“I shall call you Paul,” she said, “and you can call me Manon. Now, we
must not be in a hurry; we must consider everything—like wise people.”
“Heads first, hands afterwards. Let us go and look at the house, and get
our plans on paper.”
He carried the two boxes down into the street, while Manon searched in
her handbag for something. She joined him on the strip of grey pavé
between the wrecked houses, a note-book in one hand, a pencil in the
other.
“You see I have a head.”
Brent smiled like a boy.
“Trust a Frenchwoman to be practical! Just what I wanted. Now then.”
They sat down side by side in the open street, with the February
sunlight shining on them, and the silence of Beaucourt unbroken save by
their two voices. Brent had the note-book open on his knee, and he was
looking critically at the house.
“Now then, let’s be obvious. What do you see?”
Her intense and glowing seriousness delighted him. It was like playing a
game with a charming child.
“I see no roof,” she said.
“Exactly. That’s the most obvious thing. Let’s start with that. A roof
means timber, corrugated iron, nails, a saw, a hammer, a jemmy or iron
bar for getting the stuff. That’s bedrock. I’ll make notes of all
these—under the word ‘Roof.’”
She looked over his shoulder while he wrote.
“How pleasant it looks on paper. We must find all that we can in
Beaucourt. Can we not go now, at once?”
He turned and looked at her with eyes that laughed.
“Who was it said that we must not be in a hurry?”
“But I’m so excited.”
“Keep cool. Now, what next?”
“I see two holes in the wall, one just under where the roof was, the
other on the right of the window of the public room.”
“We have to fill up those holes before we start the roof. That means
lime, sand, bricks, and a bricklayer’s trowel. I write them down.”
“But can you lay bricks?”
“Yes.”
“What a wonderful man!”
“Now then—where the devil are we to get lime and sand?”
“Ah, where?”
She sat with her head slightly on one side, exquisitely solemn,
frowning.
“The factory! There used to be sand at the factory. And bricks—they are
everywhere. But lime? O mon Dieu!”
“We’ll manage somehow,” said Brent, “even if I have to use mud and
straw. Plenty of straw in the old palliasses lying about. What next?”
“No doors.”
“A carpenter’s job.”
“No windows.”
“H’m,” said Brent reflectively, “I wonder if there is a dump anywhere
about here. Oiled linen? Yes. I don’t mind what I thieve.”
She laughed.
“What morals! But—I like it. Oh, what an adventure—what life!”
Brent was making notes, and Manon pulled out her watch; its hands stood
at five minutes past twelve. There was dinner to be remembered; she
would be responsible for these household necessities, while her man
worked, but Manon was too excited to think of eating. She wanted to
explore Beaucourt, to discover all the wonderful things they needed,
stacks of timber, mountains of corrugated iron. The iron would look
horrible after the old red-brown tiles, but Manon reminded herself that
it could be painted and that it would be the first whole roof in
Beaucourt.
“Are you hungry, mon ami?”
“Not a bit.”
“I want to explore.”
He put the note-book away, and they started out on their first voyage of
discovery. Brent turned down into the Rosières road and through a stone
gateway into a grass field. He remembered having noticed half a dozen
army huts standing in this field, and he rediscovered them with Manon on
that February morning. There were six of these huts, and three of them
were in very fair condition; one had been wrecked by a shell, and the
other two damaged by splinters. There were doors to be had for the
unscrewing of the hinges, window-frames also, though the oiled linen had
been blown to ribbons.
Brent went through the huts, examining the rafters and the condition of
the timber framing. He paced the floor of one of them to find its width,
and then stood looking at Manon.
“Here is our roof.”
“Is there enough?”
“Enough in these six huts to roof half a dozen houses. And I think I can
use these rafters.”
“I shall help,” she said; “I shall work like a man.”
Brent found a single wire bed in one of the huts. He put it on his back,
and dropped it outside the café as they repassed it on their way into
the village.
“I can rig that up somewhere. There is the shelter in the kitchen.”
She looked horrified.
“But you cannot sleep there.”
“Why not?”
“You will be frozen.”
Brent laughed.
“I was a soldier for four years. It will be better than the fire-step of
a freezing trench. Now—what about this factory?”
As they walked along the little Rue Romaine, Brent discovered another
Manon, a Manon who kept stopping to look at some wreck of a house, a
Manon whose brown eyes were full of pity. She forgot the Café de la
Victoire for a moment and lost herself in the tragedy of these obscure
little cottages, and in looking through their broken nakedness at the
weedy gardens that showed behind them. Rain had pulped the fallen
plaster. There was a darkness, a slime about these ruins, a sense of
pollution. Manon’s face seemed to have aged. The irresponsible buoyancy
had disappeared from the adventure and she left the childhood of the day
behind her in passing through the Rue Romaine.
“O mon ami, my heart bleeds.”
She passed in front of a cottage in which a picture of the Sacré Cœur
still hung from a wall that had not fallen. “Grandmère Vitry lived here.
Do you see the picture—and the tiled floor all covered with rubbish?
She was so proud of her cottage—and whenever I looked in, Grandmère
seemed to be polishing that floor.”
She walked on a few steps and then paused again. Her face was serious,
compassionate, troubled.
“I seem to have been thinking of myself and of no one else. Do you think
me very selfish, Paul?”
Her eyes appealed to him.
“I am troubled. I begin to ask myself, ‘Ought we to pull down those
buildings—where people might shelter? Is it fair to snatch things for
ourselves, when others will need them?’”
Her sudden sensitive hesitation touched Brent. He was being shown
another Manon who thought of others as well as of herself. Brent’s heart
had gone hungry for many years, craving that spiritual food without
which no true man can be happy, and in the hands of this little
Frenchwoman he seemed to see the bread and wine of the great human
sacrament.
“Let us think it over,” he said.
He lit his pipe, and stood silent for a moment as though he was trying
to visualize Beaucourt and all that Beaucourt suggested. The war had
taught Brent to reduce life to its elemental facts. He had seen men do
incredibly selfish things, and incredibly generous things. In attacking
it had been necessary to keep your eyes and your mind on the objective,
on some shell-smashed bit of trench that had to be taken—and held. You
did not stop to look at the red poppies growing among the weeds.
“How many people were there in Beaucourt before the war?”
“How many? Perhaps two thousand.”
“And how many houses?”
“I can’t say—three hundred?”
“And all—without whole roofs. If we shared out the iron on these huts,
each house might claim three or four pieces. There would be no sense in
it. Besides—I will try to get all that we want from the huts that have
been damaged.”
They stood there for a while, arguing the ethics of the adventure—nor
did Brent find Manon easy to convince. He liked her none the less for
that. She stood out against herself with a sturdiness and a courage that
searched relentlessly for some sure inspiration that could satisfy the
religious heart of a woman.
It was Brent who found it.
“Listen,” he said; “I will tell you something that happened to my
comrade who lies in your orchard. It was in an attack on the ruins of a
village. We were being smashed to bits as we went up the hill; the men
faltered and began to lie down. My comrade went on. We saw him climb up
on a bit of wall and sit there. He lit his pipe, and waved his steel hat
at us. We got up and went on.”
His face lit up over that grim bit of courage.
“I can see it all,” she said.
“Well—we have got to be like that. We shall be the first up the hill.
Perhaps the others will be dismayed, ready to despair. We shall be on
our bit of wall, and we shall wave them on, and shout—‘Courage!’”
“That is true.”
And then he saw the light of vision in her eyes.
“And we can help, mon ami, we can help. I see it—now—and my heart is
happy. Allons! There is courage in what we do.”
The factory was a red brick building on the south of the Rue de
Bonnière, where the Rue Romaine joined it. Standing in the valley, its
chimney and ziz-zag of walls were not part of Beaucourt as the Café de
la Victoire saw it, the Arcadian Beaucourt with none of the grimy sweat
of industrialism upon it. Yet the factory was to prove a treasure mine
to Paul and Manon. Its glass roofs were shattered, and the machinery a
chaos of rusty iron, but lying as it did, well away from the Beaucourt
cross-roads, it had suffered less than any other building.
The very first thing that Brent saw in the factory yard was an iron
hand-barrow tilted against a wall.
“Hallo! Here’s luck.”
He got hold of the barrow and found that it was sound and strong. A
piece of shrapnel had torn a hole in the bottom—just for “drainage” as
Brent put it. He was quite exulted over this stroke of luck.
Manon was watching him with a glimmer of light in her eyes. She had
begun to like this man with his boy’s moods of seriousness and fun, his
moments of shyness and enthusiasm.
“It is a little present from le bon Dieu.”
“For two good children. Now, supposing you take all those buildings over
there, while I go through the workshops. It will save time. You know
what to look for?”
She repeated the list.
“Lime, sand, a trowel—tools, anything that looks useful.”
“By George—I had forgotten something. What is ladder in French?
Something you climb up, see?”
He made a show of climbing a ladder, and Manon understood.
“Echelle! Of course!”
Brent left her to go on her own voyage of discovery and made his way
into the factory. The tiled floor was littered with broken glass that
crisped and crackled under Brent’s feet. Here and there a girder had
fallen and the place looked as though a Zeppelin had plunged through the
roof and was rusting in a tangled mass of complex metal work. Brent saw
nothing here but scrap-iron. He walked through a doorway, and found
himself in what had been an engineer’s shop.
The opportune and heaven-blessed discoveries of the Swiss Family
Robinson were not more singular than Brent’s adventure in that
engineer’s shop. The indefatigable Boche appeared to have used the place
as a workshop and then left in a hurry, and the British troops who had
followed had passed through with equal speed. Luckily no Chinese had
been sent to clear up the village, and Brent was the first salvage man
on the spot. He collected a couple of hammers, a wrench, a tommy-bar,
two cold chisels, a brace and a set of bits, a rusty hack-saw—a whole
bag of nails, and an assortment of bolts and nuts. He was like an
excited miser grabbing gold. In a box under one of the benches he found
a jack-plane, a pair of pincers, some files, and a gimlet. The whole
affair was so enormously successful that it seemed absurd.
He filled a box with the precious treasure, and staggered out to meet
Manon. She, too, had rushed to meet him, a little flushed with
excitement, a blue lacquered tin of corned beef in her hand.
“I have found a ladder. Its top is broken—but you might mend it.”
“Great! Look here!”
He showed her his boxful of tools.
“O, mon Dieu!”
“Everything I want! It’s absurd!”
Her eyes filled with sudden seriousness.
“Someone watches over us. It is a benediction. Let us not forget.”
And then she showed him her blue tin.
“There are dozens of these scattered about in the buildings. We ought to
take care of them. They may help to feed some of the others when they
come.”
Brent’s heart blessed her.
“No wonder we are lucky,” he said.
They went to look at the ladder. Manon had discovered it lying behind
one of the sheds; it was a thirty-rung ladder, and Brent saw that the
right pole needed splinting about three feet from the top.
“Just long enough,” was the verdict, “I think I’ll take this home before
anyone else borrows it.”
He shouldered the ladder and marched off, and on his way back met Manon
trundling the barrow along the Rue Romaine. She had loaded the tools
into it, and the iron wheel was making a fine clatter over the cobbles.
Brent took charge of the barrow.
“I’m getting hungry,” he observed.
“Poor Monsieur Paul.”
She ran on ahead, and when Brent reached the café with his precious
plunder, he found that she had the table ready and had washed the
plates. The two glasses were set out, and in the middle of the table
stood a bottle of red wine.
“Thunder, what is this?”
“I brought this with me. We will drink the health of the adventure.”
She poured him out a glass of wine.
“And I have a secret.”
“Then—keep it.”
She laughed.
“No secrets between comrades. There are thirty bottles of red wine,
twenty of white, and a flask of cognac buried in the garden.”
Brent pretended to be shocked.
“You buried them?”
“Yes.”
“I wonder if they are still there. The Boche had a wonderful sense of
smell.”
“I put something to mark the place, and it has not been touched.”
“Heavens,” said Brent, “you will be able to stock your cellar. What a
good thing it is that Paul is a sober fellow. But I should like to
remind you, madame, that we have not found that lime.”
“Did I not tell you? I found a heap of it in the factory stable. I was
so excited about the ladder.”
“Something very terrible is going to happen to us. We are being too
lucky.”