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.
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.”