“Blessed be all Cobbers!”
Brent salved seventeen tins of corned beef. He carried the hoard over to the café, and decided that the cellar was the only safe place for his store. He made quite a game of stacking his provisions on the rough shelves, reflecting that these shelves ought to hold books, but that books were of no use in Beaucourt.
He adventured out again, and tried the école in the Rue de Picardie, glimpsing it as a fairly well-preserved place that had been patched with corrugated iron. The école had two habitable rooms on the ground floor, rooms that astonished Brent with a display of furniture, an old tapestry-covered arm-chair with the stuffing bulging out of it, a dining-room table, a wash-hand stand that had been used as a buffet, some wooden chairs, even a picture or two. Brent began to realize the possibilities of Beaucourt.
But these were luxuries, and Brent was specializing in a supply of food. The école had been an officers’ mess, and in the room that had been used as a kitchen he found an old saucepan that looked capable of holding water, a mess-tin, and a spoon. The spoon was the colour of lead, but polish would have been superfluous, and Brent pocketed the spoon. In the brick coal-house at the back of the école he salved two unopened tins of army biscuits, and a canister full of tea. The tea was a trifle mouldy, but Brent had an idea that he could dry it over the stove.
The cellar of the Café de la Victoire began to look like a ration-store, and Brent attacked the other necessaries on his list. An army pick and a pile of ammunition boxes in the backyard provided him with unlimited firewood; he carried armfuls of it down into the cellar and stacked it by the stove. He had appropriated the bucket from the well, lest the next comer should take it away. The essentials were shaping splendidly, but Brent was too full of enthusiasm to play at lighting the stove. He had noticed that all sorts of wreckage had been thrown into the gardens at the backs of the houses. He had seen iron bedsteads there, the remains of mattresses, broken crockery, rusty stoves, garden tools, coffee grinders, old buckets, enamelled pans, and God knows what. He went out like a rag-and-bone picker and explored those gardens. Even a very superficial search among the weeds and rubbish sent him back with two good plates, a cup, a wine-glass, and a pewter coffee-pot. Moreover he had seen a couple of blankets and a ground sheet dangling in a cottage, where they had been nailed up to keep out the draught.
Brent carried the crockery, glass and plate to his billet, and returned for those blankets. He had expected to find them rotten, ready to fall to pieces when touched—but an army blanket has a toughness of fibre and a vitality that has made it salvable when soaked in liquid mud. These blankets were in a very fair condition, and Brent handled them with respect and affection. An ex-soldier is not too fastidious—but Paul decided to give the blankets a good soaking in the stream, even to use a little of his precious soap on them, and to hang them near the stove.
The later the hour the better the deed. He went down to the stream and found the very place where the poorer women of Beaucourt had washed their linen, a place where a little platform of flat stones jutted into the water. The sun was a great red ball behind the beeches of the Bois du Renard when Brent returned to the Café de la Victoire, lit his candle in the cellar and prepared for a snug night.
He hung one of the wet blankets across the cellar doorway, using the length of telephone wire that had been left there by the previous occupant. Then Brent made trial of the Canadian stove, and having neither straw nor paper, he cut shavings and splinters with his jack-knife, and contrived to get the fire alight with the expenditure of a single match. Matches were going to be precious; he had five boxes. The stove behaved like a gentleman, neither smoking nor sulking, but consuming with relish the wood that Brent fed into it, and developing a hearty and convivial glow. Paul crowned it with a saucepanful of water, and having previously washed out the pewter coffee-pot and put a palmful of the Australian tea into it, he opened a tin of milk with the point of his jack-knife and sat down to watch the water boil.
Brent enjoyed that meal more than he had enjoyed anything for a very long time. He pulled the table up in front of the stove, and felt completely and cheerfully at home. He had a cup to drink from, white plates for his meat, biscuits and jam; the tea tasted good—better than he had expected. And it was hot!
“Some billet,” he reflected.