Half an hour before dusk Anatole Durand started up the engine of his
car, and glanced round for Manon, who had been putting on her cloak.
Durand saw in this delay a loitering of lovers, nor had he any quarrel
with a romance that seemed part of the soul of the new Beaucourt. “If I
am loved by the young,” was one of his sayings, “the old can hate me as
much as they please.” His protest was a mild bleat on the horn, and a
jab at the accelerator that set the engine roaring for a couple of
seconds. He had a side glimpse, as he turned the car, of Manon and Paul
coming out of the doorway of the Café de la Victoire, Paul’s blue
trousers very close to Manon’s black and white check skirt. There was an
indescribable nearness about their figures, and yet just a little space
between them, that magnetic space that separates the hearts of lovers
who have not confessed.
Manon was saying something to Paul. She looked across at Durand.
“I am coming, monsieur.”
“I am thinking of those shell-holes in the road near Les Ormes.”
Manon climbed into the back seat, and Brent leant over and wrapped a
blanket round her. She had a little canvas bag in her hand, a bag that
contained something heavy, and she dropped the bag into one of the
pockets of Paul’s coat.
“I managed to borrow it,” she said, “after much trouble.”
Old Durand refrained from looking over his shoulder.
“Are you ready?”
“Yes, monsieur.”
Manon gave Paul a nod and a brightening of the eyes.
“Be careful,” she said, “or I shall be worried.”
The red car squeezed its way round the well and disappeared into the Rue
Romaine, leaving Paul Brent looking at the empty sunset and feeling the
canvas bag that Manon had dropped into his pocket. He drew it out,
unfastened the string at the mouth of the bag, and saw protruding the
lacquered butt of a little revolver, a mere cheap toy of a pistol such
as they made by the thousand in Belgium before the war. There were half
a dozen cartridges at the bottom of the canvas bag, and Brent emptied
them into the palm of his hand.
The forethought was Manon’s and therefore he had no quarrel with it,
discovering in that little weapon associations of tenderness and pathos.
The war had made him a fighting man, yet this pistol did not seem to be
the tool of a fighting man, but rather a thing to be carried in a pocket
like some hooligan’s knife. Brent smiled, but the memories of Manon were
behind the smile. He had seen Bibi in action and the beastliness of it
had sobered him, suggesting a wild dog among the ruins, a dog that might
leap out and snap at your throat. The whole business was primitive and
preposterous, rather unconvincing to an Englishman who had been trained
to a disciplined and orderly way of killing Germans. The idea of being
set upon and bludgeoned in a ruined French village suggested the _Police
News_.
The dusk approached, and this ghost village had an inhuman silence. Old
Durand’s car seemed to have trailed the last thread of life out of it,
and a sharp shadow fell across Brent’s face. His chin went up; he stood
listening. Somewhere in the Rue de Picardie a loose tile clattered down,
and the fall of it was like the sound of an avalanche.
Brent slipped six cartridges into the drum of the revolver, and put it
back in his pocket. He stood a moment looking up at the new roof that
covered the western half of the house, and if his pride swelled itself
out a little, the feeling was justified. Under the level light of the
sunset the old house had warmed to a soft, ruddy brown, and those blind
eyes needed only window-frames and shutters painted a battered blue to
make it melt again into its green nest among the orchards. In all his
life Brent had never done a piece of work better or more quickly, and
the man in him exulted.
He entered the house, and hesitated in the kitchen with a half-puzzled
look upon his face. The sunlight had reached out over Beaucourt like a
great hand, a hand that was suddenly withdrawn, and through the oblong
of the window he saw the outlines of the ghost-houses, ribs showing,
eye-sockets grey and empty. The room itself was filling with the dusk;
objects in it were growing indistinct; the chair on which Manon had sat
looked like a ghost of a chair. The silence was extraordinary. Brent had
known the same silence over No-Man’s Land on quiet nights, but there had
been men near—other men. Here there was desolation, that and nothing
else.
His own face had a touch of grimness. He was listening all the time,
without perhaps realizing that the drums of his ears were tense; and he
was conscious of a sudden feeling of acute loneliness, an uncomfortable
loneliness, chilly, fidgety, unpleasant. He pulled out his pipe, filled
the bowl, lit the tobacco, and found himself biting hard at the stem and
ceasing to suck at it, in order to listen.
“Wind up!”
He smiled. An old soldier getting the wind up in Beaucourt! Did anyone
ever meet a ghost coming down Tottenham Court Road? He sat down in
Manon’s chair, stared at the blank emptiness of the window space, and
thought of lighting the stove and going to bed. Brent had got out of the
habit of locking doors and fastening windows, but Beaucourt, this
silent, twilight Beaucourt, brought him back to a primitive
understanding of the habit. He was a civilized man again who still takes
precautions against primordial savagery. He was the hermit-crab in its
borrowed shell, but this particular shell had gaps in it. And somehow in
the chill of that dusk Brent knew that he did not relish sleeping in
that cellar, where a man could creep down the steps in his stockinged
feet and stun him before he could move.
He decided that he was not going to sleep in the cellar, and he went
below and carried up the wire bed on his back. Then he brought half a
dozen sheets of galvanized iron and some lengths of timber into the
kitchen so that he could barricade the window and the door. The cunning
of the old soldier suggested an additional device, some sort of harmless
booby-trap to guard the front and back doors, a few old tins scattered
about, a loosely slung wire that would bring a saucepan clattering down
if anybody touched it. The virtues of a good house-dog, and of stout
doors and shutters, needed no emphasizing.
Brent barricaded the door and window of the kitchen and went to bed.
Manon’s revolver lay ready on a box; also a candle and a box of matches.
Beaucourt was still, extraordinarily still, so silent that it kept Paul
awake, listening for the sound of anyone moving outside the house.
He was growing accustomed to the stillness, and beginning to feel drowsy
and less on the alert when something brought him back to a state of
acute attention. He could remember having been scared as a boy by the
sound made by a snail crawling across a window-pane, and this sound that
he heard was just as peculiar and unexplainable. It made him think of a
hand rubbing softly across some roughish surface. It seemed quite near,
and yet he was unable to localize it in the darkness. Brent lay
absolutely still, knowing that the confounded wire bed would creak and
complain if he made the lightest movement.
The sound changed abruptly, became sharper and more metallic. It
suggested finger-nails picking at the edge of a sheet of metal, and in a
flash Brent seemed to visualize the origin and the meaning of the sound.
A man’s hand had been feeling its way across the sheets of corrugated
iron that closed the window until it had come in contact with the edge
of one of the sheets. The hand had been testing the solidity of the
improvised shutter, and whether it was possible to slip one of the
sheets aside.
The sound ceased, and Brent’s hand went out for the revolver. He fancied
that he could hear a movement along the raised path towards the street
door, and he waited for the clink of one of those tins, but his
booby-traps gave him no warning. There was an interval of silence, quite
a long interval, and Brent’s ears were beginning to play him tricks. He
was lying on his left side, his face turned towards the kitchen doorway,
its barricade of iron sheets and timber a black patch in the plastered
wall opposite him, when he saw a little thread of light outline the
lower edge of the barricade. It was very faint, a mere greyness,
diffused from some light that was burning in one of the rooms on the
other side of the passage.
Brent pushed back the blankets, drew up his feet, and lifting his legs
slowly over the edge of the bed, sat up. The wire netting creaked, but
the sound coincided with a very distinct and crisp rustling in one of
those other rooms, a rustling that suggested the brushing up of shavings
in a carpenter’s shop. It was one of those sounds that struck an old
familiar memory on Brent’s brain. He had taken the precaution of
carrying the ladder into the kitchen, and it stood slanting against the
partition wall just below the gap in the uncompleted roof. Paul felt his
way to the ladder, tested its steadiness with a pressure of the hands,
and mounted it slowly, Manon’s revolver in his left hand.
A sudden broadening glow of light met him as he reached the top of the
wall. There was the distinct crackle of burning wood, and then Brent
understood. He caught one of the rafters, pulled himself on to the wall,
and lying flat along it, was able to look down into the back room on the
other side of the passage.
He saw a man down there, a man who was bending forward and feeding chips
and bits of wood on to the fire he had lit on the floor. He had piled
his shavings against Brent’s stack of timber salved from the dismantled
huts, and the flames were beginning to lick at the pile of floor boards.
Brent set his teeth, and changed his pistol from his left hand to his
right. The man was Louis Blanc; Paul knew him by his cap and clothes,
and those angular projecting shoulders.
Brent might have saved himself much future suffering and travail if he
had obeyed that first impulse and shot Bibi as he bent forward over the
fire. He did not do it. It was one of those deeds that became impossible
directly the instinctive impulse has been gripped and held. Brent fired
straight at the fire, and the bullet sent a spurt of burning chips over
the feet of the man below.
Bibi gave a leap like a cat, all four limbs spread. Paul had a momentary
glimpse of his face, lips drawn back tight over the teeth, eyes furious
and surprised. Then he dodged sideways out into the passage, and Paul
heard the saucepan clatter against the stones as Bibi’s ankles struck
the wire. There was a pause, a scuffle, an oath.
Brent used Bibi’s favourite expletive.
“Voilà!” he shouted. “I missed you on purpose. Next time I shan’t miss.”
“Go to the devil,” said the other voice from somewhere in the street.
Paul scrambled down to save his timber. Manon had brought him a little
electric torch, and after dismantling the barricade across the kitchen
doorway, he stepped into the passage. Bibi might still be hanging about
outside the house, and since it was possible that Bibi was armed, Paul
went to the street doorway, and flashed his torch along the path and
across the road. Seeing no sign of Louis Blanc he made a dash for the
back door, and using a bit of board scooped the mass of burning shavings
away from the timber pile. The floor was of tiles, and Brent was able to
beat out the scattered fire.
He had no more sleep that night, but sat on a box in the corner of the
kitchen, his blankets wrapped round him, torch and revolver ready.
During that long watch he did some very practical thinking on the
subject of doors and shutters, and the values of a good watch-dog. If
there was to be a battle of wits among the ruins of Beaucourt many of
the advantages would rest with Bibi; he could attack when he pleased; an
eternal “standing to” to repel some chance raid was not a pleasant
prospect.
“I might put the police on him,” Paul thought, and immediately saw
himself in a legal tangle, and being handed over as a deserter to a
corporal’s guard.
Before the first greyness of the dawn he lit the fire, made himself some
tea, and then started the day’s work. It took him less than an hour to
finish sheeting the roof covering the right half of the house, and he
saw the sun come up through the beech trees of the Bois du Roi and flood
the broken walls with yellow light. There was nothing to break the
silence save the sound of his hammer, and in the calm of the dawn Brent
found it difficult to believe that Louis Blanc existed.
He knocked off for breakfast, and then took a stroll up the Rue de
Picardie. Not twenty yards from the café he came upon a rather amusing
and significant proof of the impetuosity of Louis Blanc’s retreat, a
pair of boots standing neatly, even demurely, in the middle of the
street. Bibi had pulled off his boots here before making his attack, and
Brent pictured him in his socks pedalling that bicycle of his back to
Ste. Claire.
Paul was inclined to be elated over the finding of those boots, and to
attach too triumphant a significance to this rather ridiculous detail.
Louis Blanc had the soul of a “sneak-thief,” and the courage of a bully.
Shot at, he evaporated, and Brent was tempted to believe that he had
finished with Bibi.
But he kept to his plan, and began by closing the back door of the house
with a barricade of iron sheets and timber backed by ammunition boxes
filled with bricks. There were three ground-floor windows in the
unroofed half of the house and Paul covered them with more sheets,
driving the nails into the hard old mortar of the walls. He was nailing
up the last sheet when he heard the sound of a car.
Old Durand had chosen a different road that morning, and had come by way
of the Rue de Rosières. He pulled up outside the house, and Paul,
standing there hammer in hand, saw Manon’s eyes fixed on the barricaded
windows.
She gave a look of interrogation, frowning slightly.
“Just to keep out the wind,” Paul told her.
She did not believe him, and while Paul was talking to Durand she went
in and discovered the blackened tiles in the back room, the charred
shavings, and the scorched pile of floor boards.
Durand drove on to the château. He wished to make a survey of the place
and to examine the cellars, and Paul found Manon standing in the
doorway, a very serious Manon, with eyes that demanded the truth.
“What happened last night?”
“What do you mean?”
Brent’s eyes were tired and red about the lids, the eyes of a man who
had had no sleep.
“Someone tried to light a fire in there.”
He nodded.
“So you have seen it! Yes, it was that pleasant neighbour of ours, Bibi.
He sneaked in when it was dark, but I happened to be awake.”
She wanted to know everything, and Brent described all that had
happened, and how he had frightened Louis Blanc with the revolver she
had left him.
“I wish you had killed the beast,” she said with a passion that
surprised Brent; “no one would have been any the wiser.”
“I couldn’t shoot the man in cold blood.”
“Cold blood! You have too nice a sense of honour. Bibi would have burnt
you alive, or suffocated you in cold blood, as you call it.”
And then her eyes softened.
“Yes, it is like you to be generous; but this madness of Bibi’s puts me
in a different temper. I am coming to live in Beaucourt.”
“But Manon!”
“You can argue for ever and ever, but I am coming. I have a sense of
honour, mon ami. And as for worrying about what old women might say to
me, nom d’un chien! but they can go to the devil. I stand by my man.”