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.”