Part 1

The HOUSE OF ADVENTURE

By WARWICK DEEPING

Author of “Sorrell and Son”

A. L. BURT COMPANY Publishers New York Published by arrangement with The Macmillan Company Printed in U. S. A.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright 1921 and 1922 By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

* * * * *

Set up and electrotyped. Published June, 1922. Reissued March, 1928.

To Dr. BEDFORD FENWICK IN MEMORY OF HIS GREAT KINDNESS

THE HOUSE OF ADVENTURE

I

Two stragglers lay sleeping in an orchard near the village of Beaucourt, sprawling upon a grass bank under the branches of an old apple tree. The sun had cleared the horizon and hung as a great yellow disc in the purple boughs of the beech trees on the other side of the stream. Overhead stretched the thin and cloudless blue of a March sky. The grass was silvered with hoar-frost—and in the wood across the stream a bird was singing.

The men slept, two brown figures on the green bank. One sprawled on his back; the other lay curled on his side. Their boots were the colour of clay; so were their faces, the clay-coloured faces of men who had been starved, and who had fallen down to sleep the sleep of exhaustion. They were dirty with the dirt of five days’ fighting and foot-slogging. Their chins were painted black with a stubble of hair, and their noses looked pinched and thin. They had no greatcoats, no packs, no puttees, no equipment; nothing but a rifle, a blue water-bottle, and a haversack between them. At the world’s end a man gets rid of unnecessary lumber.

The dawn was extraordinarily still. There was not a sound to be heard save the singing of the bird in the wood on the other side of the stream. The country rolled into blue-grey distances under the level sunlight and the tranquil sky, a strangely peaceful landscape, the landscape of an unvexed and impersonal dawn. Beaucourt village slept in the sunlight on the slopes of its two hills. No smoke rose from the chimneys; no human sound came from it. Beaucourt was empty. The blue spire of its church and the gold vaned flèches of the château showed up against the purple heights of the Bois du Renard.

The church clock struck six, six calm and level clangs that were quaintly challenging, almost ironical. From somewhere—a long way off—came the soft whoof of a gun, an English gun slewed round in some quiet orchard and firing a solitary shell or two into nothingness. There was a whine in the air, a whine that quickened over Beaucourt and became a menacing and snoring rush. The shell burst beyond the village, smashing an old apple tree and throwing up a great spurt of earth and smoke.

The man who had been sleeping curled up on his side, sat up and mopped the dirt out of his eyes, using his hands like the paws of a cat. A crack of lightning seemed to have broken the sky just above his head. The apple tree had been snapped off about three feet from the ground, and the splintered ends of the stump stood up like torn tendons.

The other sleeper was no longer a man, but a body. He was not recognizable, and from the ripped front of his tunic a red identity disc protruded, dangling pathetically at the end of a piece of frayed string.

756941 Pte. Beckett, T. 2—9——Fusiliers.

The live man looked dazed. War is an affair in which violent and absurd things happen, and men forget to be astonished. Moreover, Paul Brent was little more than a starved body, a dirty man sodden with a week’s weariness and moments of great excitement and blind fear.

“Tom’s dead.”

He uttered the words with the confidential and mumbling foolishness of a drunkard. It seemed quite natural that Tom should be dead. An immense apathy lay like so much stagnant water over the mud of Brent’s submerged emotions. He sat and stared and fingered the hair on his chin.

The man had been his comrade, his pal of pals, one of those rough-hewn, violent, warm-hearted creatures. They had fought together, drunk together, snuggled up close in the same barn or dug-out, shared their tobacco and a hole in the mud. Tom was dead, and yet if Brent was hurt by his death, it was a vague and animal pain, like the groanings of an empty belly.

He sat and stared.

His mouth felt dry.

He noticed that the water-bottle, rifle and haversack that lay between them had not been touched. He remembered, that there was a little water left in the bottle, and he reached for it, drew the cork and drank. Some of the water dribbled down his dirty chin.

Brent put down the water-bottle, and groped in the right-hand pocket of his tunic. A few bits of broken biscuit resulted. He sat and munched them with sunken-eyed stolidity, alone in the midst of that extraordinary silence, and noticing how the sunlight glinted on the hob-nails in Tom Beckett’s boots.

It was that dangling identity disc that gradually absorbed Brent’s attention, like a little luminous spot of light, a red blur in the fog of his exhaustion, a point of fire in his brain. It seemed to spread and to expand, and to change from a little red circle stamped with a man’s name to a picture, a picture of the man Beckett himself, of his vagabondage and his triumphs and all his boisterous good-humour. It seemed to challenge Brent, even made him unfasten his own tunic and produce the likeness of the thing the dead man wore, that little circle that was himself, the badge of a broken man and of the patchwork of a broken man’s career. It became a circle through which he looked at pictures, the pictures of that other life before the war, his boyhood, the silly tragedy of his marriage, his cynical success and his still more cynical failure, those moments of anguish and of shame, the bitter gibes that covered hidden wounds.

A look of spiritualized intelligence sharpened Brent’s face. His eyes ceased to be dead and listless. Something stirred in him, a passion to escape, perhaps a hunger for the finer things that had passed out of his life. The coarse-mouthed but most lovable man who lay dead there had taught him much—the human fineness that mattered, those rough bits of courage or gentleness that make life something better than a selfish scramble. For Beckett had been a vagabond with a religion of his own, a homeless man, a childless man, and yet in his way a sort of savage Walt Whitman, finding life good and wholesome and free.

Brent sat and faced it out. Watching beside his dead friend in the early sunlight of that spring morning, he saw himself as the shabby failure that he was, a man who had accepted spiritual bankruptcy with the cynical apathy of a tramp who leaves his self-respect and his citizenship in some convenient ditch. Acceptance! It was just that blind and drifting attitude that had doomed him, while Beckett—the adventurer—had punched his way towards a rude religion.

In that most singular and prophetic moment of his life Paul Brent had his vision of non-acceptance. He saw the gap in the wall and leapt through it, feeling that the dead man was offering him his chance. The burly audacity of the thing would have drawn a laugh and an approving punch on the chest from the man who lay dead. Beckett had no wife, no children, no woman who would be hurt. Brent thought of all that before he made his choice.

There was an element of solemnity and of reverence in Paul Brent’s carrying out of that interchange of identities. He unfastened his own disc, and that solitary one of Beckett’s. He felt in his dead friend’s pockets and sorted out his possessions, a complex that included his pay-book, a pipe, some odd buttons, ten francs and fifty centimes in money, an English penny, a stubby pencil and a couple of dirty picture postcards, a hank of string and a few matches. Brent tied Beckett’s identity disc to his own braces, and put the dead man’s pay-book in his pocket. His own disc he fastened to the body and left the pay-book lying upon the grass.

Then the last comradely act suggested itself, and it stirred Brent to vague emotion and a softening of his red-lidded eyes. He picked up the rifle, shouldered it, and walked up the hill to Beaucourt village in search of a pick and a spade.

As he walked up between the orchards a strange calmness fell upon him, a calmness that was neither apathy nor indifference. He became conscious of the beauty of the morning, and of the more tragic beauty of this French village with its red roofs and its red and white walls showing vividly against the purple of the Bois du Renard. Beaucourt was on the altar of sacrifice. Brent entered it by the little Rue de Rosières, and he saw things in Beaucourt that he would never forget. It was like a woman bereft of her children, standing dazed, with blind eyes and open mouth. It was as though it could not believe that the thing had happened on that soft day in the coming of the spring.

The doors of nearly all the little houses and cottages were open, so that Brent could see into the lower rooms. A gallery of pictures, impressions of a silent tragedy. Rooms full of a tumult of escape and of little treasures searched for, snatched up and carried away out of a world of disorder. Floors littered with clothes, papers, bed-linen, furniture. Chests of drawers and cupboards standing open. The last meal left upon a table, dirty plates, bottles, the chairs pushed back as the people had left them. In one cottage Brent had a glimpse of a woman’s night-dress and a little black hat trimmed with red ribbon hanging on the post of a bed. An open window gave him a glimpse of a child’s cot with the clothes thrown back and one pink sock left lying. Beaucourt would have hurt the heart of a cynic. At the corner where the Rue de Rosières joined the Rue de Picardie a melancholy and forlorn brown dog came nosing up to Brent and followed at his heels.

Brent petted the beast.

“You poor old devil.”

He paused outside the Café de la Victoire—ironical yet prophetic name! It was a long, two-storied, lovable old house in red brick, set back beyond a raised path of grey, squared stones, and looking with its dormer windows into the orchard and garden of the big stone house across the way. The green shutters hung open. A lace curtain fluttered from one of the windows. Brent knew the Café de la Victoire; for he and Tom Beckett had drunk red wine there.

Paul did not enter the house, but scrambled up on to the raised path and pushed through a blue door in the stone wall surrounding the garden. There were pollarded lines beyond the wall, and a quaint bosky path ran between the rows of trees. Brent followed the path, knowing that it would bring him to the yard at the back of the house, and that he might find what he needed in one of the sheds. He had turned the corner where a clump of old Picardie roses showed a shimmer of green shoots, when he became aware of the most unexpected of all things—a woman.

The woman was on the other side of the garden, and close to a gap in the stone wall where a casual shell had knocked a little avalanche of grey stones into the garden. She had a spade in her hand and she had just finished pushing back the earth into a hole, and she was treading a few green weeds into the raw surface when she turned her head and saw Brent.

Brent knew her. It was Manon Latour, who owned the café, and he guessed that she had been burying her little treasures there. She stood motionless, rigid, staring at him with eyes that looked big and black in her white face, the eyes of a woman who was afraid.

II

Brent felt challenged.

He crossed the garden towards her, knocking the moisture from the leaves of a bed of winter-greens, and still followed by the brown dog. Brent’s French was very British, the Army French of estaminets and billets, but his heart was concerned in the convincing of Manon.

“Madame, allez vous! Le Boche—il arrive toute suite!”

She stood and stared at him, and it was obvious that she believed that she had never seen him before; and his present appearance was not reassuring. She saw a very dirty man with a cut-throat’s beard and a haggard face, a starved face in which the blue eyes looked like the cold eyes of a corpse. There was nothing soldierly about him save the rifle on his shoulder. The disreputable indiscipline of Brent’s whole atmosphere suggested the one word “loot.”

“Monsieur, que faites-vous ici?”

She stood her ground, and kept her eyes on Brent’s face. She was a black-haired, black-eyed little woman with a skin of ivory; in age about six and twenty; very sturdy, very strong. Yet there was a softness about her, a white glow, a femininity, that were wholly pleasant and appealing. Manon Latour had a heart and courage. You saw the soul of her in her big, dark, watchful eyes, in her firm white throat, in her full-lipped, vivid mouth, in the confident poise of her head. She stood there and defied Brent—this disreputable straggler who had surprised her burying her treasure.

The brown dog was sniffing at her black skirt, and at the newly turned soil.

Brent managed to smile, and the thinness of his yellow face seemed to crack with it.

“Bon garçon,—bon garçon, moi. Allez, madame. Hang it,—do you think I would touch your stuff?”

She said nothing, but continued to watch his face.

Then Paul had an idea. He pointed the muzzle of his rifle at the place where she had been digging, fumbled for the bit of pencil he had found in Tom’s pocket, and walking to the wall, began to print three rapid and rather straggling letters on a piece of plaster.

“R. I. P.”

He stood back, cocked his head with a flick of humour, smiled.

“Compris?”

She understood.

“Monsieur, c’est vrai?”

“Oui—here,—catch hold.”

He pushed the butt of the rifle towards her.

“Fusillez, si vous voulez—moi. Cela ne fait rien. Oui. Mon ami, mon comrade, il est mort. Je suis fini.”

She put the butt of the rifle aside with a gentle little touch of the hand. Her eyes had softened, and they were very beautiful eyes.

“Je me confie à vous, monsieur.”

“Bon.”

The brown dog looked up at them both and wagged his tail. He appeared to approve of the affair, and of Manon’s faith in this scarecrow of a man.

She walked down the path and into the house, leaving the spade she had used standing against the wall. Some sudden impulse made her pause in the doorway and look back at Brent. He had followed her as far as the gateway leading into the yard, and was resting his crossed hands on the muzzle of his rifle, and she noticed that he rocked slightly from foot to foot. The man could hardly stand, and her heart smote her.

“Monsieur!”

She disappeared into the house, and returned almost immediately with her hat and coat, a little leather bag, and a bottle of red wine. The bottle was half full.

“Monsieur, pour votre santé.”

Brent stepped forward, and took the bottle from her. His hand shook.

“Ah, mon pauvre vieux—comme vous êtes fatigué!”

She pinned on her hat while Brent drank the wine, looking at him with eyes that were no longer hard and black, but softly brown and gentle. She was aware of his dry, cracked lips, the working of the muscles in his throat, a slight trembling of the arm that held the bottle.

“Monsieur, venez avec moi.”

Brent stared. He understood. Then he nodded his head at the spade she had left by the doorway.

“Non. Mon ami est mort.—Over there. Compris?”

“Le bon Dieu vous garde,” she said.

She put on her coat, picked up her little bag, and was ready to go. The brown dog looked at them both, and then made up his mind to escape with the woman. Brent went with her as far as the yard gate.

“Au revoir, monsieur.”

“Bon chance,” he said with a cracked smile.

He watched the little black figure disappear round the angle of the big stone house that jutted out across the end of the Rue Romaine on the way to Bonnière.

“Damned plucky,” he said aloud; “she ought to have gone long ago.”

Brent went back to the garden and the place where Manon had buried her treasure. The patch of raw earth was too noticeable and too obvious, in spite of the weeds she had trampled into it, and Brent looked about for something with which to camouflage it. The smashed walls and the scattered stones offered a suggestion. The main mass of the débris lay close to the spot that Manon Latour had chosen, and Brent set about re-arranging those stones with an art that aped reality. The pattern he made pretended that the shell had struck the wall at a slight angle, and his casual dotting of the outlying fragments made the trick quite convincing. The raw earth was covered; no one would trouble to go poking about there. He completed the job by smudging out the letters he had printed on the wall, using a bit of broken stone and the sleeve of his tunic.

“Bon,” he said; “Tom would never have touched the girl’s money. There was no dirt on Tom.”

Brent collected a pick from one of the outhouses, appropriated Manon’s spade, and returned to the orchard above the stream. This orchard belonged to Manon Latour; so did the meadow below it, and a strip of woodland on the other side of the little valley. Brent took off his tunic, hung it on the stump of the apple tree and began to dig. The red wine had flushed and heartened him, but it was food he needed, and the sting of the wine soon wore off. Sweat ran from him; the sweat of exhaustion; he panted and nearly fell forward over his spade when he had lifted the first layer of sods.

He sat down on the bank, and putting his head between his knees, remained thus for some minutes. The faintness passed. The spirit reasserted itself and coerced the body.

He got to work again,—and slowly deepened that narrow trench,—giving a little grunt of physical anguish each time he made a stroke with the pick. The thing was done at last, and Brent stood resting like an old man, leaning on the handle of the spade, and looking at Beckett’s body. He had been so absorbed in the work, and his senses were so dull and unalert, that he was quite unaware of the fact that a German patrol had straggled across the field and through the orchard, and that an N.C.O. and four privates were standing a few yards away, watching him. They, too, were very dirty, these “field-greys,” sallow-faced and heavy about the eyes. They looked at Brent with a mixture of curiosity, amusement, and the elemental sympathy of men for a soldier doing a soldier’s job.

“Hallo—Tommy!”

Brent turned and looked at these “field-greys,”—without surprise and without fear. It was as though he had expected them. They were just dirty, tired men like himself, part of the earth, part of the great machine.

“Morning,—Fritz.”

He jerked a thumb towards the body.

“My pal.—I’m done. Give me a hand, will you?”

The N.C.O. spoke English, but the affair was so elemental and so human that the whole group understood. They helped Brent to lift the body into the grave and to put back the earth, using their boots and the spade.

Brent picked up his pay-book and handed it to the N.C.O.

“You had better keep that, Fritz.”

A young, fair-haired German was standing close to Brent and looking at him intently. He noticed the Englishman’s dry lips and pinched nostrils, his dirty chin, and starved eyes and forehead.

He nudged Brent with his elbow.

Brent saw a bit of brown bread in the young German’s hand.

“Hungrig?”

Brent smiled.

“I am—that.”

He took the piece of bread, and ate with gross relish, for he was famished. The “field-greys” stood around and smoked cigarettes, English cigarettes picked up during the advance. The N.C.O. questioned Brent.

“Any English up there?”

Brent shook his head and went on eating. He was thinking of Manon Latour trudging along in the spring sunshine with the larks singing overhead.

“She ought to be safe,” he thought; “she had about an hour’s start. Damned nice little woman, that!”

III

So Brent went as a prisoner to Germany, and was catalogued as “Number 756941 Pte. Beckett, T.”; and Paul Brent’s name appeared among the “missing,” a casualty that was corrected a few weeks later to “killed.”

Paul Brent was a prisoner, but he had escaped, escaped from the tradition of blond hair and a thin mouth, Turkey carpets and a three-tiered cake-stand, and the memory of the greedy nostrils of a thoroughly respectable but wholly unprincipled woman. He was free, even while he sat and peeled potatoes in a prison hut, washed his one shirt, or slept square-backed on his bed of boards. A sense of liberty soaked into him. He saw a new sun, a new horizon, new stars, a sportsman’s chance, a renewal of the great adventure. His manhood tightened his belt, and discovered itself in better condition, despite its thirty-seven odd years and an incipient plumpness about the waist. That plumpness had disappeared in France and Belgium, and Brent’s mental flabbiness followed it out of the German prison camp.

Brent happened to be in a “mixed camp” for the first few months, and he set himself to learn French. He attacked it with such fierceness and assiduity that Alphonse,—his pedagogue, a French waiter with a family in Soho,—accused him of being in love. It was a crude accusation, and Brent demolished it.

“I finished with that—five years ago.”

“No nice little French girl, Mister Beckett?”

“Not even a mam’selle. I want to be able to earn more money. Business—just business.”

“I fall in love every month,” said Alphonse; “it is good for my digestion.”

“And Madame’s temper?”

“Oh, that is an affair apart,” said Alphonse; “there is no woman like my Josephine. It is quite different. She mends my socks, and sees that I have a clean collar. She has but to say ‘Alphonse,’ and I would leave all the beauties of the Sultan’s harem and carry her umbrella. It is the woman that mends one’s socks who matters.”

“I suppose so,” said Paul; “mine didn’t.”

But he became quite a creditable Frenchman, even picking up the slang and the atmosphere of the language, and teaching himself to think in French. His accent was not too English. “Bong” and “Bo-koop” ceased from his vocabulary. He learnt to imitate all Alphonse’s tricks, his little mannerisms, his expressive silences, the way he talked with his shoulders, hands, and even with his legs and buttons. Alphonse was a southerner, and gaillard. He did not merely converse; he was an amateur dramatic society in a shabby uniform of French blue.

Then the War ended, like a machine of which someone has forgotten to turn the handle. Brent happened to have been moved into Belgium about three weeks before the Armistice, and the coincidence rhymed with the idea he had in his head. Strange things happened one wet night in that particular prisoners’ camp. There were rumours, a panic, an explosion, a joyous scramble in the office of an alarmed and fugitive commandant. Someone discovered the official pay-box. German notes, wads of them, were stuffed into tunic pockets, and Brent was one of those who came by a quite respectable handful.

* * * * *

It was in a Belgian village on the road between Dinant and Philipville that Paul met the first English troops he had seen, a battalion that was settling into billets on its long march to the Rhine. Brent was sludging along a lane, a dirty grey sock showing through the toe of his right boot, all his worldly gear in a German sandbag slung over his shoulder. He had a vile headache, little prickles of heat and shivers of cold chasing each other up and down his back. He had not shaved for a week, and his greatcoat was all mud.

“Hallo, chum!”

Behind the outswung black door of a stable Brent saw a field-cooker in steaming fettle, and a couple of cooks hard at work. One of them was mopping out a camp-kettle with a handful of grass. An exquisite smell of hot stew wasted itself on Brent’s nostrils.

“Got any tea?”