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.”