Yet Brent’s words might have been prophetic, for Jean Bart came home that night.
Brent tramped on through Landrecies and Le Cateau, those tragic towns, half alive, half dead. It was when he came to the village of Maretz, lying all red and quiet under a flat grey sky, that Brent felt the new phase of his adventure, even as a man feels the nearness of the sea. He was on the edge of the wilderness, fifty rolling miles of grey-green desolation upon which a few broken villages floated like derelicts. Brent spent three days in Maretz, living with an old French couple in their cottage on the road to Serain, very busy as a forager and a collector of hard rations. He had the wilderness before him, a wilderness where he could count on neither water nor food. But Brent left Maretz rather suddenly. He was watching a party of German prisoners working at the red mountain of rubbish that had been the church when he became aware of a man in khaki standing a little to one side and staring at him intently.
Brent knew the man, a corporal who had served in the same battalion. He braced himself to the crisis, gave the man stare for stare, a blank look of curiosity, said something in French, and strolled on. Brent did not turn his head to see whether the corporal was still interested and suspicious, but he went straight to the cottage on the road to Serain, collected his bag and stick, and footed it out of Maretz.
That night he slept in a half-ruined cottage at Beaurevoir. The morning brought him luck, and a ride on a lorry that was travelling to Roisel, and at Roisel he won a hot dinner at the cook-house of a Labour Company. Things were going well. The lift on the lorry had saved him many miles of tramping and much food. That evening he reached Peronne, and saw the brown and battered town outlined against a February sunset, and all the blue waters of its valley full of the reflection of flushed clouds and gouts of gold. Brent found a corner in Peronne, a snuggish corner, even though the stars looked down on him, and it was in Peronne that he had his vision.
It was a strangely vivid affair, a dream and yet perhaps more than a dream. Brent found himself in Beaucourt, standing in the garden of the Café de la Victoire and looking at a resurrected Tom Beckett, a Beckett who sat on the heap of stones that he—Brent—had thrown over the burial-place of Manon Latour’s treasure. Beckett’s boots were muddy, so were his clothes, and his hair was full of blood and earth. Yet the face of Beckett was like white light. He sat and talked with the intensity of a man who was fiercely concerned in making his meaning clear, yet Brent could not understand a word of all that his dear friend said. He was conscious of effort, bafflement, suspense. He kept noticing the gap in the upper row of Beckett’s teeth, a gap that had always made Brent think of a hole in a white fence. He was astonished by the discovery that he could see Beckett’s heart beating under his soiled tunic, and see it as a reddish light that waxed and waned with each beat, a mysterious and palpitating piece of glowing human flesh. And all the while, Brent was trying to grasp what his dead friend said, for he was speaking to him, as though he, Brent, the live man, were in desperate need of some human message.
“Sweat,—sweat!”
That was the one crude, forcible and enigmatic word that Brent remembered. Then Beckett smiled at him, and vanished off the pile of stones like a puff of smoke dispersed by the wind. Brent woke up and stared at the stars. He was shivering.
“Beaucourt,” he said like a child repeating a lesson; “I have got to go to Beaucourt.”
VI
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.