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.