Brent came to Beaucourt by the road from Rosières, and from the high ground above the Bois du Roi he could look down through the beech trees into the valley where Beaucourt lay. The valley seemed full of yellow sunlight, very tranquil and very still, and Brent could hear the stream falling over the dam by the mill. Beaucourt seemed to sleep the sleep of the dead. There was no smoke, no movement, no human sound, and Brent stood awed by the beauty of its desolation.
For beautiful it was—even as a ruin. There had been but little fighting at Beaucourt; it had been taken and passed, retaken and passed again, and yet Brent could see that there was hardly a whole roof left in the village. The church had lost half its steeple, and through the windows of the château the purple of the woods showed like a curtain. Beaucourt was a shell, a village of squared walls, gaunt gables, and a spidery web of blackened rafters, when there were any rafters at all. Fires had blazed here and there, and all about the church and the cross-roads the English shells had fallen heavily. Many of the little white houses had had the plaster shaken from the walls, and showed up as masses of intricate timber-work, pathetically naked, mere skeletons from whose bones the flesh had fallen. The woods had suffered but little. The thickets of pines and spruces beyond the church stood up green and clear. Very few shell-holes spotted the fields and orchards, nor had Beaucourt that indescribably sordid look of a village that has become a refuse-heap, a kitchen-midden of the war.
Brent went down into Beaucourt with a feeling of queer suspense. He was excited, conscious of a quickening of the heart. Some sub-conscious emotion seemed to be stirring in him, some quite unexplainable trembling of the deep waters of his self. It was not the mere fact that Beckett was buried there, nor the memory of Manon’s treasure, nor yet the vividness of that fantastic dream. It may have been that Beaucourt had an elemental yet spiritual meaning for Brent, that it symbolized the unexpectedness of his own past, and pointed with its broken spire to a sky that was blue with the coming of spring.
Beaucourt touched Brent’s heart. It was more than a ruined village; it was a picture of a broken life, a question mark, a half-realized opportunity.
Brent entered it by the Rue de Rosières. The stud and plaster cottages here were mere shells—doors, windows, woodwork and furniture gone, the ceilings fallen in, the tiles from the roofs making a red litter on the ground floors. Brent found himself standing in the triangle where the Rue de Picardie, the Rue Romaine and the Rue de Rosières met. The stone house at the corner had huge holes in its walls, and the stone-capped well in the centre of the triangle still carried a German inscription announcing the fact that the water was fit to drink. Brent stood and looked at the Café de la Victoire, or rather at the ghost of it; and pity—pity for a woman—filled his heart.
The red roof had gone with its quaintly inquisitive dormer windows. There were two ragged shell-holes in the front wall, and the gable ends and chimney-stack stood out bleakly against the blue of the sky. Hardly a shred of woodwork remained; the house was doorless, windowless. The gates of the yard gateway had gone. A smashed lime tree hung with its head over the wall of the garden, its boughs trailing on the raised path.
“What a damned shame!” said Brent.
He had seen hundreds of ruined houses, but somehow the mutilation of this house of Manon Latour’s affected him quite differently.
Brent climbed on to the path and entered the café. He found that much of the rubbish had been cleared away, and that someone had extemporized a shelter of corrugated iron in the big kitchen and living room on the left of the passage. He noticed, too, that the beams that had carried the upper floor were still in their places.
Brent put his bag down on the tiled floor. The act had a quaint suggestiveness. He was a traveller, and the Café de la Victoire stood with a very open doorway, offering him such hospitality as was left to it, though there was no Manon to cook an omelette and make coffee.