Part 3

Brent knew the man, a corporal who had served in the same battalion. He braced himself to the crisis, gave the man stare for stare, a blank look of curiosity, said something in French, and strolled on. Brent did not turn his head to see whether the corporal was still interested and suspicious, but he went straight to the cottage on the road to Serain, collected his bag and stick, and footed it out of Maretz.

That night he slept in a half-ruined cottage at Beaurevoir. The morning brought him luck, and a ride on a lorry that was travelling to Roisel, and at Roisel he won a hot dinner at the cook-house of a Labour Company. Things were going well. The lift on the lorry had saved him many miles of tramping and much food. That evening he reached Peronne, and saw the brown and battered town outlined against a February sunset, and all the blue waters of its valley full of the reflection of flushed clouds and gouts of gold. Brent found a corner in Peronne, a snuggish corner, even though the stars looked down on him, and it was in Peronne that he had his vision.

It was a strangely vivid affair, a dream and yet perhaps more than a dream. Brent found himself in Beaucourt, standing in the garden of the Café de la Victoire and looking at a resurrected Tom Beckett, a Beckett who sat on the heap of stones that he—Brent—had thrown over the burial-place of Manon Latour’s treasure. Beckett’s boots were muddy, so were his clothes, and his hair was full of blood and earth. Yet the face of Beckett was like white light. He sat and talked with the intensity of a man who was fiercely concerned in making his meaning clear, yet Brent could not understand a word of all that his dear friend said. He was conscious of effort, bafflement, suspense. He kept noticing the gap in the upper row of Beckett’s teeth, a gap that had always made Brent think of a hole in a white fence. He was astonished by the discovery that he could see Beckett’s heart beating under his soiled tunic, and see it as a reddish light that waxed and waned with each beat, a mysterious and palpitating piece of glowing human flesh. And all the while, Brent was trying to grasp what his dead friend said, for he was speaking to him, as though he, Brent, the live man, were in desperate need of some human message.

“Sweat,—sweat!”

That was the one crude, forcible and enigmatic word that Brent remembered. Then Beckett smiled at him, and vanished off the pile of stones like a puff of smoke dispersed by the wind. Brent woke up and stared at the stars. He was shivering.

“Beaucourt,” he said like a child repeating a lesson; “I have got to go to Beaucourt.”

VI

There had been a slight frost. It was a brilliant February morning with a few rolling white clouds low in the blue of the western sky, and the green earth was covered with a web of silver.

Brent came to Beaucourt by the road from Rosières, and from the high ground above the Bois du Roi he could look down through the beech trees into the valley where Beaucourt lay. The valley seemed full of yellow sunlight, very tranquil and very still, and Brent could hear the stream falling over the dam by the mill. Beaucourt seemed to sleep the sleep of the dead. There was no smoke, no movement, no human sound, and Brent stood awed by the beauty of its desolation.

For beautiful it was—even as a ruin. There had been but little fighting at Beaucourt; it had been taken and passed, retaken and passed again, and yet Brent could see that there was hardly a whole roof left in the village. The church had lost half its steeple, and through the windows of the château the purple of the woods showed like a curtain. Beaucourt was a shell, a village of squared walls, gaunt gables, and a spidery web of blackened rafters, when there were any rafters at all. Fires had blazed here and there, and all about the church and the cross-roads the English shells had fallen heavily. Many of the little white houses had had the plaster shaken from the walls, and showed up as masses of intricate timber-work, pathetically naked, mere skeletons from whose bones the flesh had fallen. The woods had suffered but little. The thickets of pines and spruces beyond the church stood up green and clear. Very few shell-holes spotted the fields and orchards, nor had Beaucourt that indescribably sordid look of a village that has become a refuse-heap, a kitchen-midden of the war.

Brent went down into Beaucourt with a feeling of queer suspense. He was excited, conscious of a quickening of the heart. Some sub-conscious emotion seemed to be stirring in him, some quite unexplainable trembling of the deep waters of his self. It was not the mere fact that Beckett was buried there, nor the memory of Manon’s treasure, nor yet the vividness of that fantastic dream. It may have been that Beaucourt had an elemental yet spiritual meaning for Brent, that it symbolized the unexpectedness of his own past, and pointed with its broken spire to a sky that was blue with the coming of spring.

Beaucourt touched Brent’s heart. It was more than a ruined village; it was a picture of a broken life, a question mark, a half-realized opportunity.

Brent entered it by the Rue de Rosières. The stud and plaster cottages here were mere shells—doors, windows, woodwork and furniture gone, the ceilings fallen in, the tiles from the roofs making a red litter on the ground floors. Brent found himself standing in the triangle where the Rue de Picardie, the Rue Romaine and the Rue de Rosières met. The stone house at the corner had huge holes in its walls, and the stone-capped well in the centre of the triangle still carried a German inscription announcing the fact that the water was fit to drink. Brent stood and looked at the Café de la Victoire, or rather at the ghost of it; and pity—pity for a woman—filled his heart.

The red roof had gone with its quaintly inquisitive dormer windows. There were two ragged shell-holes in the front wall, and the gable ends and chimney-stack stood out bleakly against the blue of the sky. Hardly a shred of woodwork remained; the house was doorless, windowless. The gates of the yard gateway had gone. A smashed lime tree hung with its head over the wall of the garden, its boughs trailing on the raised path.

“What a damned shame!” said Brent.

He had seen hundreds of ruined houses, but somehow the mutilation of this house of Manon Latour’s affected him quite differently.

Brent climbed on to the path and entered the café. He found that much of the rubbish had been cleared away, and that someone had extemporized a shelter of corrugated iron in the big kitchen and living room on the left of the passage. He noticed, too, that the beams that had carried the upper floor were still in their places.

Brent put his bag down on the tiled floor. The act had a quaint suggestiveness. He was a traveller, and the Café de la Victoire stood with a very open doorway, offering him such hospitality as was left to it, though there was no Manon to cook an omelette and make coffee.

Then Brent went for a stroll. He wandered down to Beckett’s grave and found it as a low mound of weedy earth. The broken apple tree had been cut up and burnt. Brent stood there for some minutes, bare-headed, eyes looking back into the past, a sturdy, square-shouldered man with a fresh-coloured face, and a youthful moustache and beard. He looked like a peasant,—brown, blue-eyed, thoughtful.

Then he went back to Beaucourt.

Beaucourt surprised him. He walked down the Rue de Picardie to the Place de l’Eglise, and saw nothing that lived, not even a half wild cat. The Post Office, the Hospice, and the Hôtel de Paris were respectable and voiceless ruins. The école was a little less desolated. But Brent had expected to find a few people in Beaucourt, a few of those indomitable French folk who had won the war. The village lay less than ten miles from the undevastated country, yet Beaucourt seemed to have been side-tracked, forgotten.

There was one live thing in Beaucourt and Brent discovered it sitting on a fallen block of stone by the church, a grey old man, grey as the jumble of broken buttresses and fallen pinnacles, but far more sad. He seemed just a bit of the broken stone. Brent went and spoke to him, and the old man looked at Brent with eyes that seemed dead.

“Good day, monsieur. You are all alone here?”

“Yes, I am all alone,” said the old man.

His voice was flat—toneless and empty of all emotion. It seemed to Brent that the old Frenchman was beyond feeling things. He sat and munched a piece of bread; he was not interested in Brent; he was not interested in anything. When Brent spoke to him he answered like a man who had been mesmerized.

“You have come back, monsieur?”

“I walked twenty kilomètres this morning to see—that.”

He pointed quite calmly to a little house over the way, a house that had had its face smashed in, a house that was almost unrecognizable. Brent felt a pang of pity, yet there was nothing to be said.

“You stay here?”

“No, I walk another twenty kilomètres. That has happened to many people. Their hearts fail them when they see what has happened.”

“I can understand.”

“The authorities order us to go back—but can they give an old man a new heart and strong arms? They speak of help, but no help comes. I blame nobody; we have suffered so much.”

“But will no one return?”

“Oh, yes, we shall come back,” said the old man, “but we wait for the spring to come, and for food. Our roots are here, I suppose, right under the ruins of all those houses. But it will need courage—courage!”

He lit his pipe, got up, and made ready for his second twelve-mile walk. Endurance, a blind, patient, half-dazed endurance, that was what Brent saw in him, the endurance that had saved France. It was tragic and it was splendid, and it filled Brent with a feeling of deep humility.

“We young men shall have to help the others,” he said.

The Frenchman gave him a look of surprise.

“Those are good words. But I have found it a selfish world. Perhaps it will be a scramble. Everybody will be too busy.”

And he left Brent to think it over.

Paul returned to the Café de la Victoire, and it was then that he remembered that he had not looked at the place where Manon Latour had buried her treasure. He went out into the garden and saw the mound of stones had not been moved. Nettles had grown up in between the stones, and the inference was obvious.

“She will come back,” was Brent’s thought.

And he added:

“Unless she is dead.”

Brent felt hungry. He had carried a couple of empty ammunition boxes into the kitchen, one to serve as a seat, the other as a table, when he remembered the fact that his water-bottle was nearly empty. He went out at once to examine the well, not liking the idea of getting his water from the stream. The windlass, chain and bucket had been left behind, and Brent opened the queer little iron gate in the well-house and sent the bucket down for a sample. He heard it splash below, and felt the suck of it as it came up full at the end of the taut chain. When he lifted out the bucket into the sunlight he found the water looking clean and wholesome. Brent smelt it, took some in his palm and tasted it. The water had neither smell nor taste.

Paul was conscious of a pleasant and boyish elation. Beaucourt made him think of Crusoe’s Island. It was full of the adventure of finding things; it challenged a man’s wits, promised all sorts of surprises. The idea of trying to live in Beaucourt tickled the eternal boy in Brent. He brought out a battered enamelled mug and plate from his bag, sat himself down on his ammunition box, and made his first meal in Beaucourt, tackling the inevitable corned beef and biscuits with the relish of a clean hunger.

Satisfied, he lit his pipe, for he still had a little tobacco left, and carrying his box out into the doorway he sat in the sun and meditated. His pipe tasted good; the sky was blue; he felt warm, and his boots had kept out the mud. Even the ruins of Beaucourt had a beauty of their own, a fantastic unexpectedness, a droll yet pathetic irregularity of outline. These little ruined houses were very human; some had fallen in upon themselves and stood huddled in utter dejection; others had the staring eyes of despair; a few still seemed to be calling for help. The village resembled a little Pompeii, to be explored and dreamed about, and yet it differed from Pompeii in that it was potentially alive. It struck Brent as being rather odd and delightful that he should be the one and only inhabitant of Beaucourt, a stranger taking a holiday in this starlit and admirably ventilated ruin.

And then the old Frenchman’s words recurred to him:

“We shall come back.”

Brent’s blue eyes gave a sudden, interested gleam. He foresaw the return of Manon Latour, and he wondered what she would think of this house of hers, what she would make of it.

Brent left his box, jumped down into the roadway, and began to examine the Café de la Victoire with an intelligently reconstructive eye. There was something of the Jude in Brent. Twelve years ago he had been a jobbing builder, carrying on an obscure little business in a west-country town, a man who had used the trowel and the plumb-line by day, and read Maeterlinck, or Green’s “History of the English People” or Montaigne’s Essays at night. Chance, rather than his own inclination, had pushed him into bigger things, and his marriage had discovered him seven years later as the practical partner in the exploitation of a suburban building scheme. He had been the owner of an ambitious wife, a car, and a very passable library, until other people’s speculative cynicisms had brought him down with a crash.

And now, he stood looking at this French café with the critical eyes of a man who once had worked with his hands.

“Yes—if I had the stuff!”

The thought fired an extraordinary series of explosions in Brent’s brain. He began to walk up and down with his hands in his pockets, an excited man who glanced from time to time at the old red-walled building, calculating, contriving. His pipe went out, but remained gripped between his teeth. Then he re-entered the house. He wanted to examine the inside of it, every corner of it, even the cellar. One of his candles gave him the necessary light, and in the cellar he made a discovery.

Some man in the near past had been fairly comfortable here. Brent’s candles showed him a wire bed in one corner, a rough table with some shelves made of ammunition boxes standing against the wall, and what was of still more luxurious significance—a rusty but sound Canadian stove with its flue pipe connected with the little grating that opened just above the paving of the path. The cellar was quite dry.

“Well I’m damned!” said Brent; “here’s my new billet.”

VII

Brent went upstairs again, and sat down like Crusoe to consider the situation.

A billet in Beaucourt postulated the quest of a number of elemental necessities. Brent tore the white wood lid off the box on which he was sitting, produced a pencil, and began the creation of an inventory much like an ancient scribe dabbing his cuneiform letters upon a tablet of clay.

At the top of the board he printed:—

NECESSITIES

Under this heading he wrote:

Food. Water. Wood for Stove. Kettle or Saucepan. Basin to wash in.

He headed the second list:

LUXURIES

Blankets. A palliasse. Furniture. Plates and cups. Green food. What price Scurvy N.B. Try nettle tops. Milk. A looking-glass.

So much for the paper work. Brent bored a hole in the board, using his jack-knife, and hung his inventory to a nail on the kitchen wall. He was going to exploit Beaucourt in a thoroughly business-like way, and he was as full of excitement as a boy.

Brent took the first item—food. He had noticed some sandbags on the wire bed in the cellar, and he fetched one of them and started on the adventure. The last troops to occupy Beaucourt had been Colonials, and they had left Beaucourt in that open-handed, casual and spacious way of theirs, not troubling to carry away what they would be supplied with on the morrow. Brent began by exploring the big stone house across the road and found nothing that was of any use to him until he poked an inquisitive head into what had been a wash-house or scullery, a place that was weather proof and had been used as a kitchen. Brent had struck oil. He saw a pile of bully-beef tins in a corner, and on a shelf he found two unopened cartons of jam and one of marmalade, a tin half full of sugar, and two tins of Ideal Milk.

“Blessed be all Cobbers!”

Brent salved seventeen tins of corned beef. He carried the hoard over to the café, and decided that the cellar was the only safe place for his store. He made quite a game of stacking his provisions on the rough shelves, reflecting that these shelves ought to hold books, but that books were of no use in Beaucourt.

He adventured out again, and tried the école in the Rue de Picardie, glimpsing it as a fairly well-preserved place that had been patched with corrugated iron. The école had two habitable rooms on the ground floor, rooms that astonished Brent with a display of furniture, an old tapestry-covered arm-chair with the stuffing bulging out of it, a dining-room table, a wash-hand stand that had been used as a buffet, some wooden chairs, even a picture or two. Brent began to realize the possibilities of Beaucourt.

But these were luxuries, and Brent was specializing in a supply of food. The école had been an officers’ mess, and in the room that had been used as a kitchen he found an old saucepan that looked capable of holding water, a mess-tin, and a spoon. The spoon was the colour of lead, but polish would have been superfluous, and Brent pocketed the spoon. In the brick coal-house at the back of the école he salved two unopened tins of army biscuits, and a canister full of tea. The tea was a trifle mouldy, but Brent had an idea that he could dry it over the stove.

The cellar of the Café de la Victoire began to look like a ration-store, and Brent attacked the other necessaries on his list. An army pick and a pile of ammunition boxes in the backyard provided him with unlimited firewood; he carried armfuls of it down into the cellar and stacked it by the stove. He had appropriated the bucket from the well, lest the next comer should take it away. The essentials were shaping splendidly, but Brent was too full of enthusiasm to play at lighting the stove. He had noticed that all sorts of wreckage had been thrown into the gardens at the backs of the houses. He had seen iron bedsteads there, the remains of mattresses, broken crockery, rusty stoves, garden tools, coffee grinders, old buckets, enamelled pans, and God knows what. He went out like a rag-and-bone picker and explored those gardens. Even a very superficial search among the weeds and rubbish sent him back with two good plates, a cup, a wine-glass, and a pewter coffee-pot. Moreover he had seen a couple of blankets and a ground sheet dangling in a cottage, where they had been nailed up to keep out the draught.

Brent carried the crockery, glass and plate to his billet, and returned for those blankets. He had expected to find them rotten, ready to fall to pieces when touched—but an army blanket has a toughness of fibre and a vitality that has made it salvable when soaked in liquid mud. These blankets were in a very fair condition, and Brent handled them with respect and affection. An ex-soldier is not too fastidious—but Paul decided to give the blankets a good soaking in the stream, even to use a little of his precious soap on them, and to hang them near the stove.

The later the hour the better the deed. He went down to the stream and found the very place where the poorer women of Beaucourt had washed their linen, a place where a little platform of flat stones jutted into the water. The sun was a great red ball behind the beeches of the Bois du Renard when Brent returned to the Café de la Victoire, lit his candle in the cellar and prepared for a snug night.

He hung one of the wet blankets across the cellar doorway, using the length of telephone wire that had been left there by the previous occupant. Then Brent made trial of the Canadian stove, and having neither straw nor paper, he cut shavings and splinters with his jack-knife, and contrived to get the fire alight with the expenditure of a single match. Matches were going to be precious; he had five boxes. The stove behaved like a gentleman, neither smoking nor sulking, but consuming with relish the wood that Brent fed into it, and developing a hearty and convivial glow. Paul crowned it with a saucepanful of water, and having previously washed out the pewter coffee-pot and put a palmful of the Australian tea into it, he opened a tin of milk with the point of his jack-knife and sat down to watch the water boil.

Brent enjoyed that meal more than he had enjoyed anything for a very long time. He pulled the table up in front of the stove, and felt completely and cheerfully at home. He had a cup to drink from, white plates for his meat, biscuits and jam; the tea tasted good—better than he had expected. And it was hot!

“Some billet,” he reflected.

The washing up could be left till the morning, and feeling warm both within and without, he filled up the stove, lit a pipe, and considered his new home. A soldier learns to see the beauty of comfort in some shack that would make a civilian shiver, and to Brent this cellar of his was quite beautiful. The rusty old stove glowed like bronze. The flame from the candle and the glow from the hot iron lit up the white stone vaulting of the cellar; and the well-cut stones and the neat pointing in between them pleased the eye of a craftsman. The tea-cup, glinting white, had little pink roses on it. The pewter coffee-pot struck a note of luxury. Brent looked almost gloatingly at his store of food on the shelves. He took down some of the tins of bully beef and examined them. They were a little rusty here and there, but no sign of being “blown.” He had tested the meat from one of them at tea.

Again, he blessed the Australians.

And then his thoughts turned to less material things. He began to dream, while the smoke of his pipe drifted up towards the little grating where the stove-pipe met the outer air. He sat with knees spread about the stove, his body leaning forward, his hands outstretched to the warmth, a very simple and primitive man, a man who could dream dreams.

“Supposing I stay here?” he reflected.

A whole world of strange possibilities opened before him. He saw himself becoming a settler in Beaucourt, using his strength and his knowledge in helping these French folk to rebuild their broken houses. And then he began to wonder whether the French would accept him, and how far it would be possible for him to play the part of a Frenchman. His accent was passable, his fluency very fair, and he knew that he had met with no disaster on the way from Charleroi. He had posed as a southerner, and had trusted not a little to the vagaries of patois and provincialisms; but settling in such a place as Beaucourt was a very different problem. It was obvious that he could pose as a Frenchman who had been domiciled in England for ten years, and whose accent had become anglicized. It was equally obvious that he could produce no records and that he would have to depend upon an amiable acceptance of his tale and an atmosphere that included no enmity. Yet he could pack his bag and march at an hour’s notice. He had a little money, and a workman’s craft that could keep him. His original plan had been to wander, to go east or west as the chance offered, to spin a yarn about shell-shock and loss of memory if he found himself in an awkward situation. Nothing mattered so long as he disappeared.