Part 2

The cook dropped his camp-kettle, and went and laid hold of Brent.

“Here—chum—hold up! You come and sit down. Been in Germany,—what?”

“Yes—Germany,” said Paul.

They sat him down on a ration box,—but he flopped like a sackful of old clothes, and the sympathetic one had to act as a buttress.

“You’re done in, chum. Give us some of that stew in my mess-tin, Harry.”

But the sight and the smell of the stew made Brent feel sick. The cook held his head like a mother, and Brent’s head felt dry and hot.

“You want the doc, chum; that’s what’s the matter with you. Ten days in hospital in a real bed, between real sheets,—with a lovely little nurse feeding you with a spoon.”

Brent protested, gripping the cook’s wrist.

“I don’t want the doc, old chap. I’m done up, that’s all. I’d like a cup of tea, and a ration biscuit.”

“Rot,” said the cook, “you’re ill.”

One of the company stretcher-bearers happened to pass that way.

“Hi—Chucker, where’s the M.O.?”

“Headquarters mess.”

“Run along and tell him there’s a returned prisoner here; he’s sick.”

“Right-oh,” said Chucker; and he went.

The battalion doctor came back with the stretcher-bearer, feeling aggrieved that he should be dragged out at the end of a day’s march to see some casual devil who did not belong to his own crowd. Human nature is like that, and this doctor boy was unripe and insolent.

“Hallo, what’s the matter with you?”

Brent was crouching on the box, holding his head between his hands.

“Headache, sir.”

The M.O. looked at him, brought out a thermometer, glanced at the mercury and gave the glass tube a sharp flick.

“Under your tongue. Don’t bite it.”

The sympathetic cook was damning the doctor with a pair of truculent blue eyes, eyes that said “You blighter—I’d like to punch your jaw.” But the officer was not sensitive to psychical impressions; he had left a game of “Slippery Sam,” and he felt Brent’s pulse while Brent sat and sucked the thermometer with an air of vacant helplessness. The glass tube was tweaked out of his mouth, glanced at, and put back in its metal case.

“Hospital for you, boy.”

Brent looked scared. He did not want to go to hospital.

“I’m just done in, sir. I’ll be all right to-morrow.”

“Will you!” said the doctor tensely, pulling out a note-book and beginning to scribble, resting his foot on Brent’s box, and the note-book on his knee.

“Name and number?”

“I don’t want to go to hospital, sir.”

“Don’t argue. Name and number?”

“No. 756941 Pte. Beckett, T.” said Brent.

“Unit?”

“2-9th Fusiliers.”

“Bring him along to the medical inspection room, will you? Street by the church.”

The doctor snapped the black elastic round his note-book and walked off.

“He ought to be boiled in muck,” said the cook.

Five minutes later this sympathetic and expressive soul made a dash down the road after a figure in a muddy greatcoat, a figure that had sneaked out of the cook-house with a staggering determination to escape. Brent collapsed under a hedge outside a cottage, lying face downwards in the mud. His temperature was 104.7°.

“What did you do it for, chum?”

Brent could not explain. He had fainted.

A field ambulance car collected Paul Brent and carried him off to another village where he lay in a barn for half an hour, flushed and torpid, yet resenting the efforts of an orderly to make him drink hot cocoa. An officer came and examined him, a very quiet man with a big fair moustache and intelligent eyes. Ten minutes later Brent was put on a stretcher in one of the big Daimlers, with a card in a brown envelope fastened to one of the buttons of his greatcoat; there were two other patients in the car. The quiet officer climbed in and assured himself that Brent was well covered with blankets.

“Feel warm enough?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Don’t you worry. You’ll soon be comfortable.”

The officer’s voice made Brent do an absurd thing; he turned his face towards the canvas, and wept.

The car left its sick men at a casualty clearing station in Charleroi. Brent had a vague impression of a great red brick building glooming up into the murk of a winter night, of boots clattering on tiled floors, of many voices, and of people who would keep moving about. He was irritable, a blazing mass of physical discomfort, slipping over the edge of sanity into delirium. Two orderlies came and carried his stretcher into a ward. He was laid on a bed, and two other orderlies started to undress him.

Brent was struggling to get at something that was buttoned up in the right breast pocket of his tunic. The orderlies were trying to remove the tunic, and Brent began to fight.

“All right, old chap, all right!”

“Here, leave that alone.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I want my money.”

“You can’t have money in hospital.”

“B——y hell,—give me——”

“Let him have it,” said the elder of the two orderlies; “let the poor blighter have it. Shove it under his pillow. All right, old chap.”

Brent calmed down like a child, but the nurse in charge had heard the scrimmage, and came sailing up in her grey dress edged with red. She was a fair-haired, hard-faced woman, with thin, clean-cut features, her eyes set too close together, and little irritable lines crimping her mouth.

“What’s all this noise?”

Then a strange thing happened to Brent. He sat up in the bed, staring at the woman with eyes of anger and of horror.

“What’s she doing here? Take her away—take her away, or I’ll—I’ll cut her blasted throat!”

The nurse screwed up her eyes at him, and backed away.

“He’s delirious,” said one of the orderlies; “lie down, old chap.”

Brent made a sort of futile grab in the direction of the nurse.

“Let me . . . She’s a devil!”

The nurse walked away down the ward with the detached dignity of a woman whose professional soul moved calmly through the world of sickness and of words, and Brent fell back on his pillows.

“What’s she doing here,” he kept saying; “why can’t they let me alone?”

Paul Brent came very near death in that hospital at Charleroi. Influenza passed into broncho-pneumonia, and for days he lay there in a quiet stupor with bluish lips and a grey face. He was just so much pulp, not caring whether he lived or whether he died, and capable of but two semi-intelligent mental reflexes, the turning of his face to the wall when the yellow-haired nurse came near, and the insinuating of a flabby hand under his pillow to make sure that those German notes were there. He occupied a corner bed, and sometimes there was a red screen round it. His neighbour in the next bed nicknamed him “Arthur,” and told everybody that he was “a bit balmy.”

But Brent’s illness passed, and he lay there hour by hour, watching life, and beginning to react and to think.

He saw the high, bare, yellow walls, the rows of beds with red quilts, the scrubbed floor, the canvas-shoed orderlies, the nurse, the doctor with “gig-lamps” and a bald head, the other men who dozed and chattered, or read magazines and books and letters from home. Some of the men wrote letters, and Brent’s neighbour offered him a field postcard.

“What about the missis, Arthur?”

“Haven’t got one,” said Brent.

The red screen annoyed him. There was something irritating in the colour, a vague suggestion of officialdom, red tape, tyranny. Brent asked to have it taken away. He spent most of his time staring straight up at the ceiling, and at a black smudge of cobweb in the corner where the chimney jutted out. The dirty whiteness of the ceiling was restful; he saw pictures on it, pictures that helped him to think. There was no pattern on the ceiling; it was like a fresh sheet, a clean piece of canvas upon which Brent could paint what he pleased; and lying through those long days he worked out his pictures on the plaster, and underneath them was written the word, “Escape.”

He realized that he would have to lose himself again, for the Machine had reclaimed him and would pass him with stupid efficiency on its Trucker system to some place where he would be sorted out and railed back to England. He began to live in fear of being recognized by some chance friend. Even the blond-haired nurse’s absurd likeness to that other woman who had died in England still roused in Brent an elemental antipathy and a fierce alarm. He sulked, and turned over into the blind corner whenever she came near his bed.

“What is the matter to-day, Beckett?”

Her voice was an echo of that other woman’s voice, a metallic voice that attacked. Brent’s back remained churlishly on the defensive.

“Don’t want to be bothered—that’s all.”

IV

Brent was convalescent, and as his strength returned, his restlessness returned with it. He was allowed out in the hospital grounds, where he trudged about with the idea of getting himself fit, and feeling like an animal in a cage, and always afraid of meeting some disastrously inopportune friend. He had glimpses of Charleroi, that black and gray mining town with its slag-heaps and smoke and its air of shabby sumptuousness. There were women in Charleroi, swarthy little Belgian women, shops full of luxurious things at luxurious prices, the glitter of jewellery, the glare of electric light, Belgian flags, trams, red wine, pavements where a man could loiter and catch the smell of fleur-de-trèfle in a woman’s clothes. Charleroi made one think of the sallow face, the lowering cloth cap, and the sexual swagger of an apache.

“Escape” was written on Brent’s heart; and he had staged the first act of the adventure at Charleroi. He knew that the day of his discharge was drawing near, and he might expect to find himself handed to some casual R.T.O. who would pass him down the line to his base-depôt, and Brent had decided that he must vanish before such a thing could happen. He did not want to go back to England. He was thoroughly determined that he would never recross the Channel.

Early in January he received the final stimulus that shocked him into immediate action. He was wandering about the hospital grounds when he saw a little officer with a florid and familiar face limping down the path between the plane trees. Brent was caught off his guard. He stared, and then swung round on one heel, but the officer boy stopped.

“Hallo; isn’t it Brent?—You were in my platoon?”

Brent had to face it out.

“So I was, sir.”

“I got knocked out just before the retreat. What happened to you?”

“Prisoner,” said Brent.

“Been sick, have you?”

“Flue, sir, and pneumonia. I’m all right now. I expect to be discharged in a day or two.”

The officer boy shook Brent’s hand, feeling himself half a civilian and on the edge of demobilization. Besides, Brent had always been a gentlemanly chap.

“Well, good luck.”

“Good luck to you, sir,” said Brent.

That incident gave the necessary flick to his decision. Men who were ripe for discharge were allowed out on pass into Charleroi, and Brent got his pass that evening; it was dated for the following day. The N.C.O. in charge of the convalescent “wing” was a far more human person than the yellow-haired nurse.

So Paul Brent went down into Charleroi on a grey January morning, with the thrill of an adventure in his blood. He had scrounged a couple of tins of bully beef and a pocketful of biscuits, his reserve ration for the road. “Escape” was in the air. The trams clanged it, the shops were ready to help in the conspiracy: the crowded streets made Brent think of a dirty, commercialized but fascinating Baghdad. He began to feel himself part of this continental crowd and no English soldier numbered and labelled for an immediate return to some niche in that damned temple of Monotony, the Industrialism of England. He was a little Haroun al Raschid wandering as he pleased in this city of adventure.

Brent’s first business was to change that German money, for it would be no use to him on the road. He found a jeweller and goldsmith’s that was also a Bureau de Change, and they took a thousand of his German marks and gave him French notes in exchange. Brent thought it wise to spread the transaction over a varied surface. He tried a Belgian bank, and came out with six hundred francs in French paper. A second Bureau de Change converted the bulk of the remainder. Then Brent went shopping.

The first thing that he bought was a carpet-bag with black leather handles, and he bought it at a little shop in a shabby side street. This magasin sold workmen’s clothes.

A fat Belgian woman, with a moustache and overflowing cheeks and chin, showed some surprise when he asked the price of a pair of brown velvet trousers.

Brent laughed, and became confidential.

“We make what we call a stage-play, madame, a concert of varieties. The war is over; it is necessary for us to be amused.”

“Clothes are very dear, monsieur.”

“We English have plenty of money. At home—now—in England—what would you think I am?”

Madame scrutinized him with little black eyes half hidden between bladders of fat.

“Tiens!—how should I know?”

“I own three cotton mills and fifty houses. But in the war I was just this.”

She became very ready to oblige him, and Brent asked her advice.

“I am to be an apache, madame. A pair of velveteen breeches.—What next?”

“A cloth cap, monsieur.”

“Yes.”

“And a coat—a black coat, and a scarf to go round your neck.”

“Excellent. I will do it thoroughly and have a foreign shirt, also a leather belt.”

He packed the things into the carpet-bag, paid madame and asked to be allowed to leave the bag there behind the counter.

“I will return later.”

“Certainly, monsieur.”

Brent had brought a pack with him, and he had other things to buy, details of the adventure that he had worked out while he was lying sick in bed and seeing pictures on the ceiling. The list included matches, a few candles, some tinned food, cigarettes, a pair of civilian boots, a woollen vest, soap, a sponge, a comb, and six inches of tri-colour ribbon. He had a meal at an obscure restaurant, and the meal included a bottle of red wine that cost him thirty francs. He drank to the health of the adventure.

A winter dusk was falling over Charleroi when Brent returned to the shop where he had left his bag. The wine had made him merry, and he wasted ten minutes in a gallant little gossip with the lady of the flowing chin. It would be unwise to appear to be in a hurry; your true artist is never furtive nor a sloven in his manners.

“Au revoir, madame.”

“Au revoir, monsieur l’apache.”

Brent laughed.

“I’ll try the costume to-night and see how the boys like it.”

He went boldly through Charleroi, carrying that carpet-bag for all the world to see—but avoiding street corners where he might meet some inquisitive military policeman. The bag and its contents were explainable, but the explanation might prove embarrassing when the hospital authorities reported him missing. He came without adventure to the western outskirts of Charleroi, still warm with that good red wine. A few stars winked at him between the houses, and above the dark slag-heaps and the still darker hills.

In the lane at the back of a railway embankment, a lane that appeared to end in all the cabbage patches of a miners’ suburb, Brent found the “green room” of his dreams. It was a tin shed or shelter with no door, where someone had once stored vegetables and tools. Brent took possession, lit one of his candles, and carried out a rapid change. He discarded everything English save his greatcoat, socks and boots.

There was a big ditch at the back of the shed, full of sooty-looking water. Brent crammed his tunic, trousers, puttees, shirt and cap into his pack, added two heavy stones, and sank the whole caboodle in the ditch. Returning to the hut he completed the metamorphosis by threading the bit of tri-colour ribbon into his buttonhole and tying it in a bow. An old rake handle provided him with a stick. He ran the end of it through the handles of the carpet-bag, hoisted it over his shoulder, and launched out into the unknown.

V

Paul Brent tramped it through Solre le Château and Sars Poteries to Avesnes, winning his food from the English he passed upon the road, for there is no kinder hearted soul on earth than the plain Englishman when his generosity is challenged. Paul played the part of the French civilian deported from a captured village early in the war, and the men in khaki whom he met supplied him with food, and even shared with him their precious cigarettes.

Paul remained shy of the larger villages and towns. Sometimes he stopped at a farm-house or cottage and was given hot coffee fresh from the blue pot on the stove. He was a little nervous at first of his adopted lingo, and a pretended deafness helped him when he was posed. But these French folk accepted him, and were touchingly kind. He slept in their barns and sometimes in a bed, spending the evening sitting with the family round the kitchen stove, a rather silent and solemn man with many memories in his eyes.

A very gentle mood had fallen upon Brent. He was marching away from defeat, trudging step by step from his own past, that past that seemed so full of sordid yet pathetic futilities. He found his heart going out to children, dogs, and the poor old wrinkled women who had starved so bravely for four years. Often he shared his food with the cottagers, the bully beef and jam and biscuits he won upon the road.

A man who has tasted the full bitterness of failure looks eagerly, almost incredulously at the gleam in the sky that symbolizes a new hope. Brent felt that he was escaping from under a thundercloud, and that the edge of it was behind him. He had known that emptiness of the stomach, that sense of having fallen through himself into a mood of cynical apathy and tragic surrender, when a man wonders whether he shall end his life or struggle on, whether his dead self-respect is worth carrying upon his shoulders.

“That damned fool Brent! Had his chance and missed it.”

But Brent knew that his own incorrigible good nature had brought him to bankruptcy. He had trusted men, other men who had lived to make money, and he had been astonished when they had torn him asunder and used him both as a scapegoat and as a victim. His own wife had never forgiven him for the catastrophe. She, too, had been greedy. Brent knew that money was at the bottom of all the harlotry, the commercial treachery, and the fierce physical greed of a great part of modern life. He had found War far less savage and contemptible than the assassination of souls that a rich Peace encourages.

Other men had scrambled over his body, and, now that the war had set him on his feet again, he was possessed by a great yearning to begin life over again, to make some success of the years that were to come. He wanted to feel the grip of a new self-respect, the stiff back of a new manhood. He wanted to think that he mattered, that there was yet some measure of rich blood in him that could make some other creature happy. He was curiously humble over it, boyish and innocent. And yet as he foot-slogged it along those muddy winter roads, a pilgrim in search of his second chance, he became possessed by a vague yet spiritual conviction that he would find that chance somewhere in poor, battered, devastated France.

It was on the road from Avesnes to Maroilles that Brent met the girl with the black shawl. It was no more than an incident in his pilgrimage, but an incident that flushed him with the warm red wine of humanism.

He was sitting on the butt of a broken telegraph pole when the girl came along the road. She was pretty and dark and rather slender for a French peasant, and Brent was aware of her as an eager and hurrying figure with a black shawl folded over her shoulders, and the end of it held so as to cover her mouth. She came quickly towards him. Her eyes were big and bright with hope, the desperate hope that her man had come at last.

Brent saw her falter. Then the light died out of her eyes. Her face seemed to grow more sallow, and very sad. Yet she approached him, smiling with a sudden pity, a compassionate friendliness that warmed to all those lonely ones who returned.

“You are going home, monsieur?”

Brent raised his cloth cap.

“If I find a home.”

She sighed, dropped the shawl from her mouth, and sat down beside him. Brent felt that she had suffered very much; she looked ill, her soft eyes were growing old with watching.

“I thought you might be my Jean,” she said, with the simplicity of one who had lived in days of great sadness.

“I am sorry,” said Brent, “has he not come home yet?”

Her eyes looked far away. The fingers of her left hand pulled at a splinter that stood up from the round bulk of the pole.

“Four years. Yes, it is a long time. And our child died—died of starvation. For six months I have had no letter.”

“I am sorry,” said Brent.

She began to question him—for his presence there seemed to give her hope—and the lies that he had to tell her turned sour in Brent’s mouth.

“You have come a long way, monsieur, perhaps from the centre of Germany?”

“Yes, a long way. I was in Germany.”

“It may be that you met my Jean? Jean Bart is his name, a tall man with thoughtful blue eyes and a scar on his forehead.”

“I am afraid not, madame. But there must be hundreds of persons who have not yet come home.”

“You think so, monsieur?”

“Many are in hospital. Some were in Russia.”

She smiled bravely.

“Oh, I do not give up hope. Some day he will return. I pray to God each night and morning, when I work and when I eat.”

“Please God he will,” said Brent, and found that he had uttered a prayer.

The girl insisted on Paul going back to her home, a little red farm among poplars on the green slope of a hill above the windings of a river. Jean’s father and mother lived there, two quiet people to whom life had left but little to say. They were very kind to Paul, and he passed the night at the farm, sleeping in a feather bed in a narrow room whose window showed him the stars hanging in the bare branches of an old apple tree. There was the smell of home about the place, the home of the Frenchman who had not returned. Brent felt that the little house watched and listened with every window, its gables cocked like the ears of a dog waiting for its master.

Brent was touched by the kindness these poor people showed him. They sent him upon his way with a couple of hard-boiled eggs and some apples in his pockets, and a sense of the essential goodness of the humbler folk who suffer. The girl went with him to the gate opening upon the road.

“Bon voyage.”

Her soft eyes and her sadness put new life into Brent.

“May he return—very soon,” he said; “your husband; perhaps I have brought you good luck.”

She watched Brent march off down the road, and his going made her yearn all the more deeply for the other man who had not returned.

“Four years,” he said, “four years of his youth—and of mine.”

Yet Brent’s words might have been prophetic, for Jean Bart came home that night.

Brent tramped on through Landrecies and Le Cateau, those tragic towns, half alive, half dead. It was when he came to the village of Maretz, lying all red and quiet under a flat grey sky, that Brent felt the new phase of his adventure, even as a man feels the nearness of the sea. He was on the edge of the wilderness, fifty rolling miles of grey-green desolation upon which a few broken villages floated like derelicts. Brent spent three days in Maretz, living with an old French couple in their cottage on the road to Serain, very busy as a forager and a collector of hard rations. He had the wilderness before him, a wilderness where he could count on neither water nor food. But Brent left Maretz rather suddenly. He was watching a party of German prisoners working at the red mountain of rubbish that had been the church when he became aware of a man in khaki standing a little to one side and staring at him intently.