Paul had found his pipe; he was filling it and staring at the floor,
when something yellow whisked into the kitchen. It was Philosophe,
Philosophe who had been missing all day and who now floated in with an
air of having been round the corner. The dog yapped and pawed at Manon’s
apron.
“A lot of use you have been to us,” said Brent.
But Manon kissed Philosophe’s head and then pushed him away.
“I could forgive anything to-night.”
“Even—that?”
She pressed her hands to her eyes.
“No, not that. What are we to do now?”
They heard a sudden sound in the silence, a queer sound that startled
both of them. Philosophe was licking Bibi’s face.
Brent stood up with a tightening of the mouth and limbs.
“Come here.”
The dog sneaked out from behind the table and went and lay down by the
stove.
Brent removed the chair and the table. He found Manon standing beside
him, and together they looked down at this mountain of a man who lay
stretched along the wall. Dusk had come; the room was filling with it,
and a little darkness covered the mask of Bibi’s mutilated face. He
moved a leg, stirred slightly, and seemed to become conscious of
physical pain.
Paul and Manon looked at each other.
“What’s to be done?” her eyes asked his.
Brent was grim. He stood biting the stem of his pipe, a man who had not
forgotten and who would never forget. Things might have turned out so
differently. He had no pity for the man down there.
“Don’t touch him,” he said; “keep away. He’s foul.”
She caught her breath.
“I couldn’t touch him. But must he stay here?”
“Good God, no,” said Brent. “This place has got to be cleaned.”
Bibi moved. He raised his head, propping himself on one elbow. He seemed
to be thinking, remembering, feeling, but like a dull, helpless animal.
He rubbed at his eyes and uttered a foul word. Brent’s back seemed to
stiffen.
“Hallo,” he said.
Louis Blanc raised himself to a sitting position, his back against the
wall. He looked up at Paul, his head rolling from side to side, his
slashed face a thing of loathing. Everything was dim to Louis Blanc,
even the voice of the man who spoke to him.
“Water,” he said.
Paul stood over him, yet keeping his distance, for though the beast was
maimed he might still be dangerous, and he was taking no chances with
Bibi.
“Don’t move. Do you hear what I say?”
Bibi used a foul word, but Brent caught him up.
“Drop that and listen. I have that pistol, see; we found it all right,
and if you try any tricks I shall shoot and shoot to kill. Sit there and
take your orders, and keep that foul tongue of yours quiet.”
Bibi said nothing; he was beaten, a battered thing, half blind, sullen
with pain. Paul had spoken to Manon, and she was pouring some wine and
water into a glass that had survived the storm. She brought it to Brent,
also a thick slice of bread cut from a loaf, and Brent put the glass and
the bread on the floor and pushed them within Bibi’s reach, using the
end of the iron bar.
“That’s the way to feed a wild beast,” he said, “if I touched you again
I might kill you.”
Bibi lifted the glass in his left hand; his head was very unsteady, and
he spilt some of the wine down his chin; the stuff stung his cut lips,
but he drank it down, and began to mumble the bread. The room was full
of the dusk, and Manon lit the candle. Paul had gone to the window, and
was sitting on the table, watching Bibi. The candle light lit up Brent’s
face; it was a serious, frowning face, the face of a man who had made up
his mind about something.
“I’ll take a sandwich with me,” he said.
The candle light flickered in Manon’s eyes.
“But where are you going?”
“Half-way to Ste. Claire; sort of slave-gang stunt. He has got to foot
it somehow.”
She looked into her man’s eyes and said nothing. There was a calm blue
glare in them that she could not have softened even if she had pitied
Bibi.
“Supposing he cannot walk so far?”
“We didn’t ask him to come here. He is going to walk four miles. After
that—I have finished with him.”
He turned to Bibi.
“Do you hear? You have got to get out of this. You want a doctor. I’ll
see you half-way to Ste. Claire.”
Bibi grunted.
“I can’t do it.”
Brent spoke quietly, but he showed no mercy.
“Get up. No, I’m not going to help you, or touch you. You will get a
doctor at Ste. Claire; you’ll get no doctor in Beaucourt.”
And Louis Blanc moved. He rose slowly on his feet, steadying himself
against the wall, and stood there, feeling his strength.
“Come on,” he said sullenly, “you are merciful sort of people, you two.
I’m half blind. You’d like to see me in the ditch, wouldn’t you? But
I’ll get to Ste. Claire.”
Manon had slipped a paper of bread and cheese into Paul’s pocket.
“Quick march.”
He watched Bibi grope to the door, and half feel his way out of the
house and down into the street. It was growing dark, and Brent followed
him at a distance of a couple of yards, the revolver in one hand, the
iron bar in the other.
“I shall be back soon,” he called to Manon.
And so he set out to drive this half-blind Polyphemus out of Beaucourt,
walking among the ruins like Bibi’s shadow, ready to shoot if the man in
front of him hesitated or hung back. Neither of them spoke, save when
Brent uttered a word of warning. “Right . . . Left . . . Keep in the
middle of the road.” He found that Bibi’s pace was lengthening when they
had passed the factory, and were on the road to Bonnière, and he went
along at a steady slouch. The stars were out overhead, and there was no
wind rustling the dead grass and weeds in the wild fields beside the
road. They heard the sound of their own feet on the broken pavé, nothing
more.
Brent wondered what was passing in the mind of the man in front of him,
and the picture of Bibi lurching along in the darkness brought back the
night of a memory in the Arras battle of 1917. Paul had marched a German
prisoner back from the line, a big, tusk-faced sergeant-major who had
been badly wounded in the right shoulder, and Brent remembered how all
the swagger had gone out of the German. He had thought of one thing and
one thing only, how long it would be before they reached a
dressing-station. He had kept on worrying Brent: “I bleed, Tommy, I
bleed.”
They had covered two miles when Louis Blanc spoke. He was sullen, but
something stronger than his hatred of Brent marched at his heels.
“What’s the time?”
“I don’t know. Perhaps about half past seven.”
Bibi walked on in silence for several minutes. Brent noticed that their
pace had increased.
“Have we passed Des Ormes?”
“Don’t know the place,” said Brent. “Why?”
“There’s a road that turns off there, the road to Boves.”
“Why do you want to go to Boves?”
“I shall find a doctor at Boves. I want one, don’t I?”
And Brent understood. Like that German at Arras, Louis Blanc was tame;
he had the fear of death in him, or the fear of blindness, which is the
living death. Every step that he took was so much ground covered on the
road to a place where a man might be found with hands that could heal.
A queer, elemental pity stirred in Brent, a feeling that even penetrated
and suffused itself through his physical loathing of this man.
“You want to go to Boves?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Where does the road turn off?”
“Past the farm called Des Ormes, a clump of dead elms close to the
road.”
“I’ll look out for it,” said Brent.
He kept his promise, and managed to make out these ghostly trees
reaching out their black and maimed tentacles towards the stars, and
learning from Bibi that the road to Boves branched off on the right hand
about a hundred yards farther on, he watched for it, and found the road
as a greyish streak diverging across the darker fields.
“This is the place.”
Louis Blanc grunted.
“You’ll be bringing in the police, I suppose?”
Brent did not answer him at once, and Bibi began to fidget. He stood
poking his head like an eager dog in the direction of Boves.
“It all depends,” said Brent, “on Madame Latour’s wishes.”
“Hell! Never mind; are you sure this is the road?”
“It’s the first road on the right after Des Ormes. Can you see?”
“Enough. I’m off.”
And he went slouching away into the darkness, leaving Brent standing
there, nor did Brent move until he could no longer hear the grinding of
Bibi’s boots upon the road.
At Beaucourt, in that room of her simple affection, Manon had sat for a
while by the light of the candle, looking at the débris left by those
two struggling men. What a sordid affair, what a horror to be forgotten
and washed out of the mind! A chair broken, furniture overturned,
crockery smashed on the floor,—a patch of blood on the tiles where Bibi
had been stretched by the wall. And Philosophe, true to his name, asleep
beside the stove, caring nothing for what had happened.
Manon jumped up. The inspiration was obvious, and yet passionate in its
demands. She must get rid of this pollution, put it at once out of her
life, her life that was Paul’s. A great tenderness was awake in her, a
feeling that this little room was sacred, and that it had to be
resanctified. She lit another candle and set to work to cleanse it;
sweeping up the broken glass and crockery and carrying it out in a box
to the ruins across the road. She set the furniture in order, and
finding the blue and white jug broken on the floor, and Paul’s bunch of
yellow palm lying beside it, she gathered up this emblem of the spring,
found another bowl for it, and placed it in the same place on the table.
There remained that red stain on the floor. It revolted her, but she
made a mop of an old sack, and washed out the stain. Yet her ideal of
purification was not complete; this room was to have a living
atmosphere, warmth, light, homeliness. She wanted Paul to see it again
as he had seen it before that savage fight. She lit the stove, put a pan
of water on to boil, spread a clean cloth on the table, laid two plates,
two cups, two knives and forks, a dish of meat, cheese and bread. Then
she drew the arm-chair close to the stove and sat down to wait.
Philosophe, undisturbed by these practical yet spiritual activities,
still slept, and the dog’s passivity was a piece of comforting
naturalism, like the bunch of yellow palm on the table.
Paul returned earlier than he had expected. She ran to the door to meet
him, and found him struggling with the bundle that he had left lying on
the path.
“I had forgotten this, and nearly fell over it.”
She caught hold of one end, and helped him in with it. Then she closed
the door, and, going to the stove, pretended to be busy making her
coffee, but she was all waiting—as a woman waits—to see whether her
man had the inward and the outward vision.
Paul noticed everything, the clean floor, the bunch of palm on the table
by the window, the white cloth, the tidy dresser. It was good, all good,
the very touch his heart asked for. He looked at Philosophe, who had not
troubled to get up and greet him. Tranquillity had returned; Manon had
washed away the stains.
He went softly across the kitchen, and put a shy man’s arm round her.
“What a good piece of work you make of life,” he said.
She turned to him quickly.
“Here is your chair by the stove.”
She was looking up into his face; he was grey, weary to the point of
exhaustion, but the shine in his eyes broke through all the physical
shadows.
“Just the same as before,” he said, “and like you, clean and good. Ma
chérie, I’m just all out.”
She made him sit down in the chair, and drew up the table so that he
could take his supper by the stove. Paul let himself relax, for there
was a sharp ache in the muscles that had been bruised by Bibi’s boot. He
looked at the stove, at the sleeping dog, at Manon, and the day’s work
seemed done.
“Would you like your plate on your lap?”
“No, I’ll turn to the table.”
She did not worry him with questions, sensing his weariness and the
happy and human sloth that had fallen upon his body. His face regained
its colour; the tired lines were softened; he had the air of a man who
was well content.
Presently he lit his pipe, and looked up at her with a flicker of tender
humour in his eyes.
“A lot of good that dog was to us! A good name—Philosophe. He got out
of the way, like the clever people during the war.”
She gave Philosophe a gentle kick, but he took not the least notice.
“And Bibi?” she asked.
“He’s beaten,” he said; “I believe we have finished with Bibi.”
He described Bibi as a big and frightened shadow lurching along the road
to Boves.
“Shall we put the police on him?” he asked her.
“It’s for you to say.”
Brent looked at her. Her eyes had darkened. There are things that no
woman likes to see dragged into the hard light of a law court.
“Let us leave it alone,” he said. “I have a feeling that we have
finished with Bibi. I hate stirring up mud; life’s been so clean here.”
She made a sudden movement towards him; and Paul sat up, took her face
between his hands and kissed her.
“Good God,” he said, “it seems a lot for a man like me to ask for! All
that I know is—that I’m going to make good here. Will you let me prove
it?”
Manon’s eyes held his.
“You are too much afraid of people, Paul. If we are partners, let us be
honest. Why should we not tell old Durand and the Casteners and people
like that——”
“What shall we tell them?”
“Mon ami, you are making me the man.”
He drew her face to him again, and kissed her slowly and with great
tenderness.
“All right,” he said; “but I’ll not marry you till this place is all
that I want to make it.”
She laid her hands on his shoulders.
“What queer things you men are, some of you. If it was not for that, I
would——”
“Tell me,” he said, his hands on her wrists.
She gave a quick, defensive smile.
“No, show me what is in that bundle. It’s so exciting, this new home.”