He noticed that the water-bottle, rifle and haversack that lay between them had not been touched. He remembered, that there was a little water left in the bottle, and he reached for it, drew the cork and drank. Some of the water dribbled down his dirty chin.
Brent put down the water-bottle, and groped in the right-hand pocket of his tunic. A few bits of broken biscuit resulted. He sat and munched them with sunken-eyed stolidity, alone in the midst of that extraordinary silence, and noticing how the sunlight glinted on the hob-nails in Tom Beckett’s boots.
It was that dangling identity disc that gradually absorbed Brent’s attention, like a little luminous spot of light, a red blur in the fog of his exhaustion, a point of fire in his brain. It seemed to spread and to expand, and to change from a little red circle stamped with a man’s name to a picture, a picture of the man Beckett himself, of his vagabondage and his triumphs and all his boisterous good-humour. It seemed to challenge Brent, even made him unfasten his own tunic and produce the likeness of the thing the dead man wore, that little circle that was himself, the badge of a broken man and of the patchwork of a broken man’s career. It became a circle through which he looked at pictures, the pictures of that other life before the war, his boyhood, the silly tragedy of his marriage, his cynical success and his still more cynical failure, those moments of anguish and of shame, the bitter gibes that covered hidden wounds.
A look of spiritualized intelligence sharpened Brent’s face. His eyes ceased to be dead and listless. Something stirred in him, a passion to escape, perhaps a hunger for the finer things that had passed out of his life. The coarse-mouthed but most lovable man who lay dead there had taught him much—the human fineness that mattered, those rough bits of courage or gentleness that make life something better than a selfish scramble. For Beckett had been a vagabond with a religion of his own, a homeless man, a childless man, and yet in his way a sort of savage Walt Whitman, finding life good and wholesome and free.
Brent sat and faced it out. Watching beside his dead friend in the early sunlight of that spring morning, he saw himself as the shabby failure that he was, a man who had accepted spiritual bankruptcy with the cynical apathy of a tramp who leaves his self-respect and his citizenship in some convenient ditch. Acceptance! It was just that blind and drifting attitude that had doomed him, while Beckett—the adventurer—had punched his way towards a rude religion.
In that most singular and prophetic moment of his life Paul Brent had his vision of non-acceptance. He saw the gap in the wall and leapt through it, feeling that the dead man was offering him his chance. The burly audacity of the thing would have drawn a laugh and an approving punch on the chest from the man who lay dead. Beckett had no wife, no children, no woman who would be hurt. Brent thought of all that before he made his choice.
There was an element of solemnity and of reverence in Paul Brent’s carrying out of that interchange of identities. He unfastened his own disc, and that solitary one of Beckett’s. He felt in his dead friend’s pockets and sorted out his possessions, a complex that included his pay-book, a pipe, some odd buttons, ten francs and fifty centimes in money, an English penny, a stubby pencil and a couple of dirty picture postcards, a hank of string and a few matches. Brent tied Beckett’s identity disc to his own braces, and put the dead man’s pay-book in his pocket. His own disc he fastened to the body and left the pay-book lying upon the grass.
Then the last comradely act suggested itself, and it stirred Brent to vague emotion and a softening of his red-lidded eyes. He picked up the rifle, shouldered it, and walked up the hill to Beaucourt village in search of a pick and a spade.
As he walked up between the orchards a strange calmness fell upon him, a calmness that was neither apathy nor indifference. He became conscious of the beauty of the morning, and of the more tragic beauty of this French village with its red roofs and its red and white walls showing vividly against the purple of the Bois du Renard. Beaucourt was on the altar of sacrifice. Brent entered it by the little Rue de Rosières, and he saw things in Beaucourt that he would never forget. It was like a woman bereft of her children, standing dazed, with blind eyes and open mouth. It was as though it could not believe that the thing had happened on that soft day in the coming of the spring.
The doors of nearly all the little houses and cottages were open, so that Brent could see into the lower rooms. A gallery of pictures, impressions of a silent tragedy. Rooms full of a tumult of escape and of little treasures searched for, snatched up and carried away out of a world of disorder. Floors littered with clothes, papers, bed-linen, furniture. Chests of drawers and cupboards standing open. The last meal left upon a table, dirty plates, bottles, the chairs pushed back as the people had left them. In one cottage Brent had a glimpse of a woman’s night-dress and a little black hat trimmed with red ribbon hanging on the post of a bed. An open window gave him a glimpse of a child’s cot with the clothes thrown back and one pink sock left lying. Beaucourt would have hurt the heart of a cynic. At the corner where the Rue de Rosières joined the Rue de Picardie a melancholy and forlorn brown dog came nosing up to Brent and followed at his heels.