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.
Yet the adventure appealed to Brent, and Beaucourt had taken a
mysterious grip of his manhood. As he sat and stared at the reddening
stove and fed it with wood from the heap beside him, he could see the
women and children and a few men coming back to live among these ruins,
unfortunates obsessed by the tradition of “home.” He saw little Manon
Latour trudging along the road from Bonnière and standing with blank
face and hopeless eyes before this shell of a house. He saw old women
grubbing in the ruins, bent figures bowed down and trying to clean the
rubbish and the fallen beams and rafters from the floors. He saw men
working savagely at little shanties, or hammering at some extemporized
roof, and always with an eye on the sky. It would rain; it would blow.
The gardens were full of weeds and rubbish, and would need cleaning
before crops could be grown. The thing seemed almost beyond human
patience.
What would they make of Beaucourt—these poor people? Would they have
the heart and the courage to begin life over again?
Brent found himself becoming fascinated by the tragedy of this French
village, a tragedy that was one of the bleeding wounds in the side of
France. He was strangely yet humanly curious to see what would happen,
and more than half tempted to lend a hand in the healing of it. The job
would be a man’s job, better than punching holes in tickets, scribbling
in a ledger, or passing groceries across the counter of a shop.
Still—it was no more than a dream, and Brent felt sleepy.
“I wonder what will turn up,” was his thought as he took off his boots
and dragged the wire bed nearer the stove. Placing his carpet-bag to
serve as a pillow, he lay down and wrapped his greatcoat round him.
And it was still a dream, and no more than a dream, when Brent fell
asleep.