Paul watched Manon arrange all this merchandise of hers upon the table,
the yellow oranges, the blue linen trousers, and the white and blue
striped shirt, the tobacco, matches, and candles, the old brown-covered
dictionary, the fresh greens from Veuve Castener’s garden, the slices of
cooked meat wrapped up in a page of _Le Petit Journal_. It was a
wonderful bundle that she had carried from Ste. Claire, and Brent was
touched by all the little things that she had troubled to remember.
After those three days of separation this visit of hers to Beaucourt
with this weight of good human stuff on her sturdy shoulders seemed to
give to their partnership an essential French and intimate solidity.
Brent felt that he mattered to Manon. She had shopped for him, and
shouldered the merchandise ten miles. A shallow man would have felt
flattered, but to Brent it brought a sense of warmth to the heart.
“Manon?”
She looked up, smiling.
“We are going to argue again as we argued over the tobacco.”
“Oh, very well,” she said with a little gleam of her brown eyes.
She felt in the pocket of her skirt for her purse, opened it with
serious deliberation, and picked out a few francs and some paper money.
She unfolded the notes, one of fifty francs, two of ten, and three of
five, and spread them on the table, putting an orange on each to keep
them from blowing away.
“We are going to be very business-like. Let us see; I suppose you are
working here at least ten hours a day, and I can afford to pay you a
franc an hour. Five days of ten hours makes fifty francs. So I begin by
paying you fifty francs.”
She held out the fifty-franc note to him, but Paul made no effort to
take it.
She pretended to be surprised.
“Isn’t it enough?”
Brent looked at her quickly.
“I don’t take your money.”
She flourished the note.
“There you are! How logical! And I don’t take your money, Paul, so there
is the end of it.”
Paul answered her with a slow, uneasy smile.
“That is all very well, but a man can’t live on a woman.”
And then she scolded him with a sudden fierceness that made Brent think
that she was angry.
“Do not be so foolish; you are not living on me. What should I do if I
had no one to help me here? Think. Men who can use their hands and their
heads are going to be little gods in a place like Beaucourt. Men are
scarce in France; we have lost so many of them and there is so much to
do. Are we partners, or are we not? If we are partners I pay you good
money, and you pay me for what I buy for you; and if you quarrel about
the money, mon Dieu, I will give you the sack!”
They burst out laughing—both of them—at the idea of Paul being sacked.
“There, you see how ridiculous you were making things, wanting to be so
proud.”
“Yes, but wait a minute. Supposing I decided that I should like you to
buy me a piano.”
“Then I should begin to think that Paul had been at the red wine. You
are not made that way. You give; you would always be wanting to give.
Now, be a good man and go and try on that shirt and those trousers.”
Paul went like an obedient boy, and reappeared some five minutes later,
looking quaintly self-conscious.
“They feel just right.”
She turned him round with a dominant forefinger.
“You must take care of your good clothes. I have bought you a fine pair
of velour-à-cotes trousers for Sundays, and a little black jacket. Those
linen trousers will wash. And now—I am quite rested; let us work.”
That swinging ridge-beam overhead was the first thing to be tackled.
Paul went up the ladder and straddled his way up the gable end to the
chimney-stack, and gave his directions to Manon. She had grasped what he
wanted her to do, and had run out into the yard and got hold of the
telephone wire whose lower end was fastened to a bit of an iron bar that
Brent had driven into the ground.
“I pull?”
“That’s it.”
There was a slot in the throat of the chimney-stack where the original
beam had taken its bearing, and Manon pulled on the stout wire until
Paul held up his hand. He lay along a sloping bit of wall, and guided
the end of his beam into the slot.
“All right. Fasten the wire again.”
He scrambled down, shifted the ladder, and climbed the partition wall.
Manon had run round into the room below and had hold of the other wire.
“Ready.”
She raised the beam, waiting for Paul’s signal.
“Enough.”
He worked the end into the slot at the top of the partition wall, and
the thing was done.
Manon clapped her hands.
“How exciting! Now, what next!”
Paul came down to the top of the front wall of the house.
“I want to try one of the rafters from the hut. One of those long things
there. If you could give me the end of it——”
She did so, and Paul tried a balancing feat, like Blondin with a pole.
He had braced the wooden sleepers together so that they lay solidly
along the top of the wall, and resting the butt of the rafter against
one of them, he prepared to lower it towards the ridge-beam.
“Hallo! Just a minute.”
He had paused.
“If the thing falls, our crockery may suffer. Pull that table into the
corner.”
Manon pushed the table into a safe place, and watched Brent handle that
length of timber. It was a ticklish job; an attack of nerves or some
lack of balance might have landed him down below with a broken neck.
Moreover, it was a test of strength; and when the rafter came to rest
with some three inches of its end projecting over the ridge-beam, Manon
sent up a little cry of applause and triumph.
“Oh, mon ami, splendid! And how strong you are.”
It was the man who dominated for the moment their little world of
adventure, the man with the strong hand and the contriving head. Brent
stood looking down at her and smiling.
“Now, then, the hammer and gimlet, a packetful of long nails, and the
saw. I shall have half those rafters up to-day.”
She collected the tools and nails, made two journeys up the ladder and
handed them to Brent. One end of the rafter was all ready cut to fit on
the bedding-plate and Brent secured it with a nail driven half home, and
then went up the slope of the partition wall, sawed off the upper end at
an angle so that it dropped flush against the ridge-beam, and drove
nails home.
“Now—it is going to be easy.”
He told Manon to fasten another rafter to the end of the wire that they
had used for raising the end of the ridge-beam, he pulled it up,
unfastened the wire, ran the rafter down the opposite slope of the
partition wall, rolled it over till it was on a line with the rafter on
the other side, shaped the upper end with the saw, and nailed it to the
beam; with the two lower ends fastened to the sleepers on the wall Brent
had completed his first span.
The rest was repetition, with Manon acting as ladder boy, and Paul
working along a framework that grew stronger and more rigid with each
pair of rafters that were fixed.
Half-way through the morning Brent told Manon to rest.
“You have another thirteen kilomètres to walk, and I can get along on my
own.”
“Very well, I am going to cook your dinner.”
“Is that resting?”
“Of course. I sit on a chair between the stove and the table. But take
care, you must not drop sawdust into my frying-pan.”
“I have too much respect for my dinner.”
So Manon collected wood and her pots and pans, and did her cooking in
the roofless kitchen, while Brent scrambled up above, hammering, sawing,
and whistling “Roses in Picardie,” his blue trousers more vivid than the
blue of the sky. He was happy and strenuous, and kept up such a merry
piping that he made Manon think of a jolly bird in a cage. She sat and
watched him with soft eyes.
“Quel oiseau y at-il?”
Brent looked down from his rafters and laughed.
“A blue bird, Madame Taquine. Blue birds are lucky.”
“The bird shall have a glass of wine for dinner. And what is that pretty
song you whistle?”
He told her, and she began to imitate him, picking up the melody and
whistling it while she fed the fire.
“Now, there are two birds in a cage,” she called up at him, “and what am
I? A black bird with brown eyes?”
Perched up against the blue sky and climbing about the increasing
intricacies of his roof timbers, Paul developed a healthy hunger, and
the savoury smell of Manon’s cooking drifted up to him from below. All
his old “tool sense” was coming back, and he was working with a speed
and a precision that would have damned him in the world of Go Slow. But
then Paul had an object, a spark of the sacred fire, and the little
capitalist down below there—even Manon—who employed him, would have
opened her eyes very wide if he had preached by his acts the Religion of
Slackness. Paul had seen her slip away into the garden and begin digging
in the corner where the iron summer house stood. She returned, holding
up a bottle of wine to encourage her man.
“Now you know where it is.”
She felt that the wine was as safe as the silver.
The dinner was all that a dinner should be, and they drank the health of
the new roof. To Manon’s eyes the house began to look quite “dressed,”
and already she saw herself voyaging over from Ste. Claire in Etienne
Castener’s big blue cart with the bits of furniture she had collected,
and turning the Café de la Victoire into a home. This house of hers
would lead the way in Beaucourt, and stand as a live thing to encourage
the others.
“I want to look again at Bibi’s house.”
Her watch told her that she would have to be on the march in half an
hour, and there was the washing up to be done. She was not going to
leave Paul with a lot of dirty crockery.
“You can heat up the meat and the vegetables for another meal,” she told
him, “and perhaps you know how to fry eggs.”
“I can boil them and judge the time,” laughed Paul.
When Manon was ready for the road, Brent walked with her by way of the
Rue de Picardie to look at the Hôtel de Paris. The place, standing as it
did at the cross-roads, had suffered badly from shell-fire, and the
ragged walls rose out of a deplorable chaos of rubbish—old iron and
broken brick. It had been a biggish building, and Brent saw that the
house had gathered itself round the great central mass of brickwork in
which were the chimney flues, a mass of brickwork that stood like a
lonely tower in the middle of the ruin. The main beams of the roof and
floors had taken their bearings from this central tower. The staircase
had curled round it, and in any reconstructive scheme this mass of
brickwork would serve as a point d’appui.
Brent climbed over the rubbish and examined the chimney-stack with the
eyes of an expert. There was a great crack running up one side of it, a
crack that spread upwards from a raw chasm at the base of the mass where
a shell had exploded. A good third of the foundations had been blown
away, and the whole pile seemed to balance itself precariously on the
edge of the shell crater.
Manon had followed Brent over the heaps of brick.
“Look at that,” and he pointed at Louis Blanc’s chimney-stack.
“It seems ready to fall.”
Brent was frowning.
“Half-an-hour’s work with a pick, or a Mill’s hand-grenade, and a bit of
wind, and the thing would come down like an old factory chimney. Take
that gable end of the house with it too, probably,—and put our dear
friend back for weeks.”
Manon’s eyes met his.
“It would be a blow to Bibi?”
“Well—that brick stack is going to be very useful when they begin
reconstructing the house. And if it fell it would be pretty sure to
bring that wall down.”
“But we could not do it, Paul.”
Her face had a touch of fierceness.
“It would be such a dirty trick, the sort of trick that Bibi would play
on other people.”
“I thought you would say that,” he told her, with a significant little
smile.
“Then you wanted to find out——?”
“Yes.”
“O my Paul,” she said.
Brent looked sheepish.
“I should have known that you had some strong reason—that the fellow is
such a beast.”
“He may be that, but we could not fight him in that way. I don’t believe
you would have done it, Paul, even if I had asked you.”
“I was pretty sure you would not ask me.”
“Thank you,” she said.
Brent walked with her as far as the factory, and turned homewards along
the Rue Romaine. She had given him a soft look of the eyes, and a little
smile, and Brent was happy.
“She’s great,” he kept saying to himself; “by God, I’m glad she trusts
me!”