The washing up could be left till the morning, and feeling warm both within and without, he filled up the stove, lit a pipe, and considered his new home. A soldier learns to see the beauty of comfort in some shack that would make a civilian shiver, and to Brent this cellar of his was quite beautiful. The rusty old stove glowed like bronze. The flame from the candle and the glow from the hot iron lit up the white stone vaulting of the cellar; and the well-cut stones and the neat pointing in between them pleased the eye of a craftsman. The tea-cup, glinting white, had little pink roses on it. The pewter coffee-pot struck a note of luxury. Brent looked almost gloatingly at his store of food on the shelves. He took down some of the tins of bully beef and examined them. They were a little rusty here and there, but no sign of being “blown.” He had tested the meat from one of them at tea.
Again, he blessed the Australians.
And then his thoughts turned to less material things. He began to dream, while the smoke of his pipe drifted up towards the little grating where the stove-pipe met the outer air. He sat with knees spread about the stove, his body leaning forward, his hands outstretched to the warmth, a very simple and primitive man, a man who could dream dreams.
“Supposing I stay here?” he reflected.
A whole world of strange possibilities opened before him. He saw himself becoming a settler in Beaucourt, using his strength and his knowledge in helping these French folk to rebuild their broken houses. And then he began to wonder whether the French would accept him, and how far it would be possible for him to play the part of a Frenchman. His accent was passable, his fluency very fair, and he knew that he had met with no disaster on the way from Charleroi. He had posed as a southerner, and had trusted not a little to the vagaries of patois and provincialisms; but settling in such a place as Beaucourt was a very different problem. It was obvious that he could pose as a Frenchman who had been domiciled in England for ten years, and whose accent had become anglicized. It was equally obvious that he could produce no records and that he would have to depend upon an amiable acceptance of his tale and an atmosphere that included no enmity. Yet he could pack his bag and march at an hour’s notice. He had a little money, and a workman’s craft that could keep him. His original plan had been to wander, to go east or west as the chance offered, to spin a yarn about shell-shock and loss of memory if he found himself in an awkward situation. Nothing mattered so long as he disappeared.
Yet the adventure appealed to Brent, and Beaucourt had taken a mysterious grip of his manhood. As he sat and stared at the reddening stove and fed it with wood from the heap beside him, he could see the women and children and a few men coming back to live among these ruins, unfortunates obsessed by the tradition of “home.” He saw little Manon Latour trudging along the road from Bonnière and standing with blank face and hopeless eyes before this shell of a house. He saw old women grubbing in the ruins, bent figures bowed down and trying to clean the rubbish and the fallen beams and rafters from the floors. He saw men working savagely at little shanties, or hammering at some extemporized roof, and always with an eye on the sky. It would rain; it would blow. The gardens were full of weeds and rubbish, and would need cleaning before crops could be grown. The thing seemed almost beyond human patience.
What would they make of Beaucourt—these poor people? Would they have the heart and the courage to begin life over again?
Brent found himself becoming fascinated by the tragedy of this French village, a tragedy that was one of the bleeding wounds in the side of France. He was strangely yet humanly curious to see what would happen, and more than half tempted to lend a hand in the healing of it. The job would be a man’s job, better than punching holes in tickets, scribbling in a ledger, or passing groceries across the counter of a shop.
Still—it was no more than a dream, and Brent felt sleepy.
“I wonder what will turn up,” was his thought as he took off his boots and dragged the wire bed nearer the stove. Placing his carpet-bag to serve as a pillow, he lay down and wrapped his greatcoat round him.