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.