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?”
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.”