The officer blinked.
“Have I your permission to remove the body?”
“Certainly, monsieur. I will show you.”
He got the Englishman away before Manon could appear, and taking him round by way of the yard, showed him the grassy mound and the wooden cross below the bank in the orchard. The soldiers took off their coats and set to work. Brent turned away to rout a dozen inquisitive youngsters who wanted to see the body dug up.
“Allez!”
He looked white and fierce, and the children fled.
Brent sat on the bank and made himself watch this opening of Beckett’s grave. There was something final about it, something symbolical, and yet—as performed by these English Tommies—it was utterly without reverence. They smoked cigarettes; they were immensely casual and indolent; it was evident that they considered their officer a negligible old woman. Brent watched them with an increasing dislike. He saw one man spit into the grave, the instinctively dirty act of a mere common man, and for a moment he was almost on his feet and ready to call them “swine.” His eyes met the brown, short-sighted eyes of the officer. Brent understood that he, too, despised and loathed these men, but that he was afraid of their brute animal obtuseness. This, too, was symbolical. It reminded Brent of a saying of Anatole Durand’s: “In these days the brain of civilization is afraid to tell the body of civilization what an ignorant brute it is.”
Manon came out into the orchard, saw Paul sitting there, and understood. She gave him a mother-look, a caress of the eyes, and slipped away without his realizing that she had been so near to him.
One of the soldiers stuck his pick into something.
“The old ——’s there, chum!”