“A son in the war——”
The words followed Campton down the stairs. What did it mean, and what must it feel like, for parents in this safe denationalized modern world to be suddenly saying to each other with white lips: A son in the war?
He stood on the kerbstone, staring ahead of him and forgetting whither he was bound. The world seemed to lie under a spell, and its weight was on his limbs and brain. Usually any deep inward trouble made him more than ever alive to the outward aspect of things; but this new world in which people talked glibly of sons in the war had suddenly become invisible to him, and he did not know where he was, or what he was staring at. He noted the fact, and remembered a story of St. Bernard—he thought it was—walking beside a beautiful lake in supersensual ecstasy, and saying afterward: “Was there a lake? I didn’t see it.”
71On the way back to the hotel he passed the American Embassy, and had a vague idea of trying to see the Ambassador and find out if the United States were not going to devise some way of evading the tyrannous regulation that bound young Americans to France. “And they call this a free country!” he heard himself exclaiming.
The remark sounded exactly like one of Julia’s, and this reminded him that the Ambassador frequently dined at the Brants’. They had certainly not left his door untried; and since, to the Brant circles, Campton was still a shaggy Bohemian, his appeal was not likely to fortify theirs.
His mind turned to Jorgenstein, and the vast web of the speculator’s financial relations. But, after all, France was on the verge of war, if not in it; and following up the threads of the Jorgenstein web was likely to land one in Frankfort or Vienna.
At the hotel he found his sitting-room empty; but presently the door opened and George came in laden with books, fresh yellow and grey ones in Flammarion wrappers.
“Hullo, Dad,” he said; and added: “So the silly show is on.”
“Mobilisation is not war——,” said Campton.
“No——”
“What on earth are all those books?”
“Provender. It appears we may rot at the depot 72for weeks. I’ve just seen a chap who’s in my regiment.”
Campton felt a sudden relief. The purchase of the books proved that George was fairly sure he would not be sent to the front. His father went up to him and tapped him on the chest.
“How about this——?” He wanted to add: “I’ve just seen Fortin, who says he’ll get you off”; but though George’s eye was cool and unenthusiastic it did not encourage such confidences.
“Oh—lungs? I imagine I’m sound again.” He paused, and stooped to turn over the books. Carelessly, he added: “But then the stethoscope may think differently. Nothing to do but wait and see.”
“Of course,” Campton agreed.
It was clear that the boy hated what was ahead of him; and what more could his father ask? Of course he was not going to confess to a desire to shirk his duty; but it was easy to see that his whole lucid intelligence repudiated any sympathy with the ruinous adventure.
“Have you seen Adele?” Campton enquired, and George replied that he had dropped in for five minutes, and that Miss Anthony wanted to see his father.
“Is she—nervous?”
“Old Adele? I should say not: she’s fighting mad. La Revanche and all the rest of it. She doesn’t realize—sancta simplicitas!”
“Oh, I can see Adele throwing on the faggots!”
73Father and son were silent, both busy lighting cigarettes. When George’s was lit he remarked: “Well, if we’re not called at once it’ll be a good chance to read ‘The Golden Bough’ right through.”
Campton stared, not knowing the book even by name. What a queer changeling the boy was! But George’s composure, his deep and genuine indifference to the whole political turmoil, once more fortified his father.
“Have they any news—?” he ventured. “They,” in their private language, meant the Brants.
“Oh, yes, lots: Uncle Andy was stiff with it. But not really amounting to anything. Of course there’s no doubt there’ll be war.”
“How about England?”
“Nobody knows; but the bankers seem to think England’s all right.” George paused, and finally added: “Look here, dear old boy—before she leaves I think mother wants to see you.”
Campton hardened instantly. “She has seen me—yesterday.”
“I know; she told me.”
The son began to cut the pages of one of his books with a visiting-card he had picked up, and the father stood looking out on the Place de la Concorde through the leafy curtain of the terrace.
Campton knew that he could not refuse his son’s request; in his heart of hearts he was glad it had been 74made, since it might mean that “they” had found a way—perhaps through the Ambassador.
But he could never prevent a stiffening of his whole self at any summons or suggestion from the Brants. He thought of the seeming unity of the Fortin-Lescluze couple, and of the background of peaceful family life revealed by the scene about the checkered table-cloth. Perhaps that was one of the advantages of a social organization which still, as a whole, ignored divorce, and thought any private condonation better than the open breaking up of the family.
“All right; I’ll go——” he agreed. “Where are we dining?”
“Oh, I forgot—an awful orgy. Dastrey wants us at the union. Louis Dastrey is dining with him, and he let me ask Boylston——”
“Boylston——?”
“You don’t know him. A chap who was at Harvard with me. He’s out here studying painting at the Beaux Arts. He’s an awfully good sort, and he wanted to see me before I go.”
The father’s heart sank. Only one whole day more with his boy, and this last evening but one was to be spent with poor embittered Dastrey, and two youths, one unknown to Campton, who would drown them in stupid war-chatter! But it was what George wanted; and there must not be a shade, for George, on these last hours.
75“All right! You promised me something awful for to-night,” Campton grinned sardonically.
“Do you mind? I’m sorry.”
“It’s only Dastrey’s damned chauvinism that I mind. Why don’t you ask Adele to join the chorus?”
“Well—you’ll like Boylston,” said George.
Dastrey, after all, turned out less tragic and aggressive than Campton had feared. His irritability had vanished, and though he was very grave he seemed preoccupied only with the fate of Europe, and not with his personal stake in the affair.
But the older men said little. The youngsters had the floor, and Campton, as he listened to George and young Louis Dastrey, was overcome by a sense of such dizzy unreality that he had to grasp the arms of his ponderous leather armchair to assure himself that he was really in the flesh and in the world.
What! Two days ago they were still in the old easy Europe, a Europe in which one could make plans, engage passages on trains and steamers, argue about pictures, books, theatres, ideas, draw as much money as one chose out of the bank, and say: “The day after to-morrow I’ll be in Berlin or Vienna or Belgrade.” And here they sat in their same evening clothes, about the same shining mahogany writing-table, apparently the same group of free and independent youths and elderly men, and in reality prisoners, every one of 76them, hand-cuffed to this hideous masked bully of “War”!
The young men were sure that the conflict was inevitable—the evening papers left no doubt of it—and there was much animated discussion between young Dastrey and George.
Already their views diverged; the French youth, theoretically at one with his friend as to the senselessness of war in general, had at once resolutely disengaged from the mist of doctrine the fatal necessity of this particular war.
“It’s the old festering wound of Alsace-Lorraine: Bismarck foresaw it and feared it—or perhaps planned it and welcomed it: who knows? But as long as the wound was there, Germany believed that France would try to avenge it, and as long as Germany believed that, she had to keep up her own war-strength; and she’s kept it up to the toppling-over point, ruining herself and us. That’s the whole thing, as I see it. War’s rot; but to get rid of war forever we’ve got to fight this one first.”
It was wonderful to Campton that this slender learned youth should already have grasped the necessity of the conflict and its deep causes. While his own head was still spinning with wrath and bewilderment at the bottomless perversity of mankind, Louis Dastrey had analyzed and accepted the situation and his own part in it. And he was not simply resigned; he 77was trembling with eagerness to get the thing over. “If only England is with us we’re safe—it’s a matter of weeks,” he declared.
“Wait a bit—wait a bit; I want to know more about a whole lot of things before I fix a date for the fall of Berlin,” his uncle interposed; but Louis flung him a radiant look. “We’ve been there before, my uncle!”
“But there’s Russia too——” said Boylston explosively. He had not spoken before.
“‘Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand,’” quoted George, as he poured a golden Hock into his glass.
He was keenly interested, that was evident; but interested as a looker-on, a dilettante. He had neither Valmy nor Sedan in his blood, and it was as a sympathizing spectator that he ought by rights to have been sharing his friend’s enthusiasm, not as a combatant compelled to obey the same summons. Campton, glancing from one to another of their brilliant faces, felt his determination harden to save George from the consequences of his parents’ stupid blunder.
After dinner young Dastrey proposed a music-hall. The audience would be a curious sight: there would be wild enthusiasm, and singing of the Marseillaise. The other young men agreed, but their elders, after a tacitly exchanged glance, decided to remain at the club, on the plea that some one at the Ministry of War had promised to telephone if there were fresh news.
78Campton and Dastrey, left alone, stood on the balcony watching the Boulevards. The streets, so deserted during the day, had become suddenly and densely populated. Hardly any vehicles were in sight: the motor omnibuses were already carrying troops to the stations, there was a report abroad that private motors were to be requisitioned, and only a few taxis and horse-cabs, packed to the driver’s box with young men in spick-and-span uniforms, broke through the mass of pedestrians which filled the whole width of the Boulevards. This mass moved slowly and vaguely, swaying this way and that, as though it awaited a portent from the heavens. In the glare of electric lamps and glittering theatre-fronts the innumerable faces stood out vividly, grave, intent, slightly bewildered. Except when the soldiers passed no cries or songs came from the crowd, but only the deep inarticulate rumour which any vast body of people gives forth.
“Queer——! How silent they are: how do you think they’re taking it?” Campton questioned.
But Dastrey had grown belligerent again. He saw the throngs before him bounding toward the frontier like the unchained furies of Rude’s “Marseillaise”; whereas to Campton they seemed full of the dumb wrath of an orderly and laborious people upon whom an unrighteous quarrel has been forced. He knew that the thought of Alsace-Lorraine still stirred in French hearts; but all Dastrey’s eloquence could not convince him 79that these people wanted war, or would have sought it had it not been thrust on them. The whole monstrous injustice seemed to take shape before him, and to brood like a huge sky-filling dragon of the northern darknesses over his light-loving, pleasure-loving, labour-loving France.
George came home late.
It was two in the morning of his last day with his boy when Campton heard the door open, and saw a flash of turned on light.
All night he had lain staring into the darkness, and thinking, thinking: thinking of George’s future, George’s friends, George and women, of that unknown side of his boy’s life which, in this great upheaval of things, had suddenly lifted its face to the surface. If war came, if George were not discharged, if George were sent to the front, if George were killed, how strange to think that things the father did not know of might turn out to have been the central things of his son’s life!
The young man came in, and Campton looked at him as though he were a stranger.
“Hullo, Dad—any news from the Ministry?” George, tossing aside his hat and stick, sat down on the bed. He had a crumpled rose in his button-hole, and looked gay and fresh, with the indestructible freshness of youth.
80“What do I really know of him?” the father asked himself.
Yes: Dastrey had had news. Germany had already committed acts of overt hostility on the frontier: telegraph and telephone communications had been cut, French locomotives seized, troops massed along the border on the specious pretext of the “Kriegsgefahr-zustand.” It was war.
“Oh, well,” George shrugged. He lit a cigarette, and asked: “What did you think of Boylston?”
“Boylston——?”
“The fat brown chap at dinner.”
“Yes—yes—of course.” Campton became aware that he had not thought of Boylston at all, had hardly been aware of his presence. But the painter’s registering faculty was always latently at work, and in an instant he called up a round face, shyly jovial, with short-sighted brown eyes as sharp as needles, and dark hair curling tightly over a wide watchful forehead.
“Why—I liked him.”
“I’m glad, because it was a tremendous event for him, seeing you. He paints, and he’s been keen on your things for years.”
“I wish I’d known.... Why didn’t he say so? He didn’t say anything, did he?”
“No: he doesn’t, much, when he’s pleased. He’s the very best chap I know,” George concluded.
That morning the irrevocable stared at him from the head-lines of the papers. The German Ambassador was recalled. Germany had declared war on France at 6.40 the previous evening; there was an unintelligible allusion, in the declaration, to French aeroplanes throwing bombs on Nuremberg and Wesel. Campton read that part of the message over two or three times.
Aeroplanes throwing bombs? Aeroplanes as engines of destruction? He had always thought of them as a kind of giant kite that fools went up in when they were tired of breaking their necks in other ways. But aeroplane bombardment as a cause for declaring war? The bad faith of it was so manifest that he threw down the papers half relieved. Of course there would be a protest on the part of the allies; a great country like France would not allow herself to be bullied into war on such a pretext.
The ultimatum to Belgium was more serious; but Belgium’s gallant reply would no doubt check Germany on that side. After all, there was such a thing as international law, and Germany herself had recognized it.... So his mind spun on in vain circles, while under the frail web of his casuistry gloomed the obstinate fact that George was mobilised, that George was to leave the next morning.
82The day wore on: it was the shortest and yet most interminable that Campton had ever known. Paris, when he went out into it, was more dazzlingly empty than ever. In the hotel, in the hall, on the stairs, he was waylaid by flustered compatriots—“Oh, Mr. Campton, you don’t know me, but of course all Americans know you!”—who appealed to him for the very information he was trying to obtain for himself: how one could get money, how one could get hold of the concierge, how one could send cables, if there was any restaurant where the waiters had not all been mobilised, if he had any “pull” at the Embassy, or at any of the steamship offices, or any of the banks. One disordered beauty blurted out: “Of course, with your connection with Bullard and Brant”—and was only waked to her mistake by Campton’s indignant stare, and his plunge past her while she called out excuses.
But the name acted as a reminder of his promise to go and see Mrs. Brant, and he decided to make his visit after lunch, when George would be off collecting last things. Visiting the Brants with George would have been beyond his capacity.
The great drawing-rooms, their awnings spread against the sun, their tall windows wide to the glow of the garden, were empty when he entered; but in a moment he was joined by a tall angular woman with a veil pushed up untidily above her pink nose. Campton 83reflected that he had never seen Adele Anthony in the daytime without a veil pushed up above a flushed nose, and dangling in irregular wisps from the back of a small hard hat of which the shape never varied.
“Julia will be here in a minute. When she told me you were coming I waited.”
He was glad to have a word with her before meeting Mrs. Brant, though his impulse had been almost as strong to avoid the one as the other. He dreaded belligerent bluster as much as vain whimpering, and in the depths of his soul he had to own that it would have been easier to talk to Mr. Brant than to either of the women.
“Julia is powdering her nose,” Miss Anthony continued. “She has an idea that if you see she’s been crying you’ll be awfully angry.”
Campton made an impatient gesture. “If I were—much it would matter!”
“Ah, but you might tell George; and George is not to know.” She paused, and then bounced round on him abruptly. She always moved and spoke in explosions, as if the wires that agitated her got tangled, and then were too suddenly jerked loose.
“Does George know?”
“About his mother’s tears?”
“About this plan you’re all hatching to have him discharged?”
Campton reddened under her lashless blue gaze, 84and the consciousness of doing so made his answer all the curter.
“Probably not—unless you’ve told him!”
The shot appeared to reach the mark, for an answering blush suffused her sallow complexion. “You’d better not put ideas into my head!” she laughed. Something in her tone reminded him of all her old dogged loyalties, and made him ashamed of his taunt.
“Anyhow,” he grumbled, “his place is not in the French army.”
“That was for you and Julia to decide twenty-six years ago, wasn’t it? Now it’s up to him.”
Her capricious adoption of American slang, fitted anyhow into her old-fashioned and punctilious English, sometimes amused but oftener exasperated Campton.
“If you’re going to talk modern slang you ought to give up those ridiculous stays, and not wear a fringe like a mid-Victorian royalty,” he jeered, trying to laugh off his exasperation.
She let this pass with a smile. “Well, I wish I could find the language to make you understand how much better it would be to leave George alone. This war will be the making of him.”
“He’s made quite to my satisfaction as it is, thanks. But what’s the use of talking? You always get your phrases out of books.”
85The door opened, and Mrs. Brant came in.
Her appearance answered to Miss Anthony’s description. A pearly mist covered her face, and some reviving liquid had cleared her congested eyes. Her poor hands had suddenly grown so thin and dry that the heavy rings, slipping down to the joints, slid back into place as she shook hands with Campton.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Oh——” he protested, helpless, and disturbed by Miss Anthony’s presence. At the moment his former wife’s feelings were more intelligible to him than his friend’s: the maternal fibre stirred in her, and made her more appealing than any elderly virgin on the war-path.
“I’m off, my dears,” said the elderly virgin, as if guessing his thought. Her queer shallow eyes included them both in a sweeping glance, and she flung back from the threshold: “Be careful of what you say to George.”
What they had to say to each other did not last many minutes. The Brants had made various efforts, but had been baffled on all sides by the general agitation and confusion. In high quarters the people they wanted to see were inaccessible; and those who could be reached lent but a distracted ear. The Ambassador had at once declared that he could do nothing; others vaguely promised they “would see”—but hardly seemed to hear what they were being asked.
86“And meanwhile time is passing—and he’s going!” Mrs. Brant lamented.
The reassurance that Campton brought from Fortin-Lescluze, vague though it was, came to her as a miraculous promise, and raised Campton suddenly in her estimation. She looked at him with a new confidence, and he could almost hear her saying to Brant, as he had so often heard her say to himself: “You never seem able to get anything done. I don’t know how other people manage.”
Her gratitude gave him the feeling of having been engaged in something underhand and pusillanimous. He made haste to take leave, after promising to pass on any word he might receive from the physician; but he reminded her that he was not likely to hear anything till George had been for some days at his base.
She acknowledged the probability of this, and clung to him with trustful eyes. She was much disturbed by the preposterous fact that the Government had already requisitioned two of the Brant motors, and Campton had an idea that, dazzled by his newly-developed capacity to “manage,” she was about to implore him to rescue from the clutches of the authorities her Rolls-Royce and Anderson’s Delaunay.
He was hastening to leave when the door again opened. A rumpled-looking maid peered in, evidently perplexed, and giving way doubtfully to a young woman who entered with a rush, and then paused as if she too 87were doubtful. She was pretty in an odd dishevelled way, and with her elaborate clothes and bewildered look she reminded Campton of a fashion-plate torn from its page and helplessly blown about the world. He had seen the same type among his compatriots any number of times in the last days.
“Oh, Mrs. Brant—yes, I know you gave orders that you were not in to anybody, but I just wouldn’t listen, and it’s not that poor woman’s fault,” the visitor began, in a plaintive staccato which matched her sad eyes and her fluttered veils.
“You see, I simply had to get hold of Mr. Brant, because I’m here without a penny—literally!” She dangled before them a bejewelled mesh-bag. “And in a hotel where they don’t know me. And at the bank they wouldn’t listen to me, and they said Mr. Brant wasn’t there, though of course I suppose he was; so I said to the cashier: ‘Very well, then, I’ll simply go to the Avenue Marigny and batter in his door—unless you’d rather I jumped into the Seine?’”
“Oh, Mrs. Talkett——” murmured Mrs. Brant.
“Really: it’s a case of my money or my life!” the young lady continued with a studied laugh. She stood between them, artificial and yet so artless, conscious of intruding but evidently used to having her intrusions pardoned; and her large eyes turned interrogatively to Campton.
“Of course my husband will do all he can for you. 88I’ll telephone,” said Mrs. Brant; then, perceiving that her visitor continued to gaze at Campton, she added: “Oh, no, this is not ... this is Mr. Campton.”
“John Campton? I knew it!” Mrs. Talkett’s eyes became devouring and brilliant. “Of course I ought to have recognized you at once—from your photographs. I have one pinned up in my room. But I was so flurried when I came in.” She detained the painter’s hand. “Do forgive me! For years I’ve dreamed of your doing me ... you see, I paint a little myself ... but it’s ridiculous to speak of such things now.” She added, as if she were risking something: “I knew your son at St. Moritz. We saw a great deal of him there, and in New York last winter.”
“Ah——” said Campton, bowing awkwardly.
“Cursed fools—all women,” he anathematized her on the way downstairs.
In the street, however, he felt grateful to her for reducing Mrs. Brant to such confusion that she had made no attempt to detain him. His way of life lay so far apart from his former wife’s that they had hardly ever been exposed to accidents of the kind, and he saw that Julia’s embarrassment kept all its freshness.
The fact set him thinking curiously of what her existence had been since they had parted. She had long since forgotten her youthful art-jargon to learn others more consonant to her tastes. As the wife of the powerful American banker she dispensed the costliest 89hospitality with the simple air of one who has never learnt that human life may be sustained without the aid of orchids and champagne. With guests either brought up in the same convictions or bent on acquiring them she conversed earnestly and unweariedly about motors, clothes and morals; but perhaps her most stimulating hours were those brightened by the weekly visit of the Rector of her parish. With happy untrammelled hands she was now free to rebuild to her own measure a corner of the huge wicked welter of Paris; and immediately it became as neat, as empty, as air-tight as her own immaculate drawing-room. There he seemed to see her, throning year after year in an awful emptiness of wealth and luxury and respectability, seeing only dull people, doing only dull things, and fighting feverishly to defend the last traces of a beauty which had never given her anything but the tamest and most unprofitable material prosperity.
“She’s never even had the silly kind of success she wanted—poor Julia!” he mused, wondering that she had been able to put into her life so few of the sensations which can be bought by wealth and beauty. “And now what will be left—how on earth will she fit into a war?”
He was sure all her plans had been made for the coming six months: her week-end sets of heavy millionaires secured for Deauville, and after that for the shooting at the big château near Compiègne, and three 90weeks reserved for Biarritz before the return to Paris in January. One of the luxuries Julia had most enjoyed after her separation from Campton (Adele had told him) had been that of planning things ahead: Mr. Brant, thank heaven, was not impulsive. And now here was this black bolt of war falling among all her carefully balanced arrangements with a crash more violent than any of Campton’s inconsequences!
As he reached the Place de la Concorde a newsboy passed with the three o’clock papers, and he bought one and read of the crossing of Luxembourg and the invasion of Belgium. The Germans were arrogantly acting up to their menace: heedless of international law, they were driving straight for France and England by the road they thought the most accessible....
In the hotel he found George, red with rage, devouring the same paper: the boy’s whole look was changed.
“The howling blackguards! The brigands! This isn’t war—it’s simple murder!”
The two men stood and stared at each other. “Will England stand it?” sprang to their lips at the same moment.
Never—never! England would never permit such a violation of the laws regulating the relations between civilized peoples. They began to say both together that after all perhaps it was the best thing that could have happened, since, if there had been the least hesitation or reluctance in any section of English opinion, 91this abominable outrage would instantly sweep it away.
“They’ve been too damned clever for once!” George exulted. “France is saved—that’s certain anyhow!”
Yes; France was saved if England could put her army into the field at once. But could she? Oh, for the Channel tunnel at this hour! Would this lesson at last cure England of her obstinate insularity? Belgium had announced her intention of resisting; but what was that gallant declaration worth in face of Germany’s brutal assault? A poor little country pledged to a guaranteed neutrality could hardly be expected to hold her frontiers more than forty-eight hours against the most powerful army in Europe. And what a narrow strip Belgium was, viewed as an outpost of France!
These thoughts, racing through Campton’s mind, were swept out of it again by his absorbing preoccupation. What effect would the Belgian affair have on George’s view of his own participation in the war? For the first time the boy’s feelings were visibly engaged; his voice shook as he burst out: “Louis Dastrey’s right: this kind of thing has got to stop. We shall go straight back to cannibalism if it doesn’t.—God, what hounds!”
Yes, but—Campton pondered, tried to think up Pacifist arguments, remembered his own discussion with Paul Dastrey three days before. “My dear chap, hasn’t 92France perhaps gone about with a chip on her shoulder? Saverne, for instance: some people think——”
“Damn Saverne! Haven’t the Germans shown us what they are now? Belgium sheds all the light I want on Saverne. They’re not fit to live with white people, and the sooner they’re shown it the better.”
“Well, France and Russia and England are here to show them.”
George laughed. “Yes, and double quick.”
Both were silent again, each thinking his own thoughts. They were apparently the same, for just as Campton was about to ask where George had decided that they should take their last dinner, the young man said abruptly: “Look here, Dad; I’d planned a little tête-à-tête for us this evening.”
“Yes——?”
“Well—I can’t. I’m going to chuck you.” He smiled a little, his colour rising nervously. “For some people I’ve just run across—who were awfully kind to me at St. Moritz—and in New York last winter. I didn’t know they were here till ... till just now. I’m awfully sorry; but I’ve simply got to dine with them.”
There was a silence. Campton stared out over his son’s shoulder at the great sunlit square. “Oh, all right,” he said briskly.
This—on George’s last night!
“You don’t mind much, do you? I’ll be back early, for a last pow-wow on the terrace.” George paused, 93and finally brought out: “You see, it really wouldn’t have done to tell mother that I was deserting her on my last evening because I was dining with you!”
A weight was lifted from Campton’s heart, and he felt ashamed of having failed to guess the boy’s real motive.
“My dear fellow, naturally ... quite right. And you can stop in and see your mother on the way home. You’ll find me here whenever you turn up.”
George looked relieved. “Thanks a lot—you always know. And now for my adieux to Adele.”
He went off whistling the waltz from the Rosenkavalier, and Campton returned to his own thoughts.
He was still revolving them when he went upstairs after a solitary repast in the confused and servantless dining-room. Adele Anthony had telephoned to him to come and dine—after seeing George, he supposed; but he had declined. He wanted to be with his boy, or alone.
As he left the dining-room he ran across Adamson, the American newspaper correspondent, who had lived for years in Paris and was reputed to have “inside information.” Adamson was grave but confident. In his opinion Russia would probably not get to Berlin before November (he smiled at Campton’s astonished outcry); but if England—oh, they were sure of England!—could get her army over without delay, the whole 94business would very likely be settled before that, in one big battle in Belgium. (Yes—poor Belgium, indeed!) Anyhow, in the opinion of the military experts the war was not likely to last more than three or four months; and of course, even if things went badly on the western front, which was highly unlikely, there was Russia to clench the business as soon as her huge forces got in motion. Campton drew much comfort from this sober view of the situation, midway between that of the optimists who knew Russia would be in Berlin in three weeks, and of those who saw the Germans in Calais even sooner. Adamson was a levelheaded fellow, who weighed what he said and pinned his faith to facts.
Campton managed to evade several people whom he saw lurking for him, and mounted to his room. On the terrace, alone with the serene city, his confidence grew, and he began to feel more and more sure that, whatever happened, George was likely to be kept out of the fighting till the whole thing was over. With such formidable forces closing in on her it was fairly obvious that Germany must succumb before half or even a quarter of the allied reserves had been engaged. Sustained by the thought, he let his mind hover tenderly over George’s future, and the effect on his character of this brief and harmless plunge into a military career.
George was gone.
When, with a last whistle and scream, his train had ploughed its way out of the clanging station; when the last young figures clinging to the rear of the last carriage had vanished, and the bare rails again glittered up from the cindery tracks, Campton turned and looked about him.
All the platforms of the station were crowded as he had seldom seen any place crowded, and to his surprise he found himself taking in every detail of the scene with a morbid accuracy of observation. He had discovered, during these last days, that his artist’s vision had been strangely unsettled. Sometimes, as when he had left Fortin’s house, he saw nothing: the material world, which had always tugged at him with a thousand hands, vanished and left him in the void. Then again, as at present, he saw everything, saw it too clearly, in all its superfluous and negligible reality, instead of instinctively selecting, and disregarding what was not to his purpose.
Faces, faces—they swarmed about him, and his overwrought vision registered them one by one. Especially he noticed the faces of the women, women of all ages, all classes. These were the wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, mistresses of all those heavily laden trainfuls of French youth. He was struck with 96the same strong cheerfulness in all: some pale, some flushed, some serious, but all firmly and calmly smiling.
One young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a becoming dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because there was such assurance in her serenity that she did not have to constrain her lips and eyes, but could trust them to be what she wished. Yet he saw by the way she clung to the young artilleryman from whom she was parting that hers were no sisterly farewells.
An immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton caught the phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another in the windows—words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender names, mirthful allusions, last callings out: “Write often! Don’t forget to wrap up your throat.... Remember to send a line to Annette.... Bring home a Prussian helmet for the children! On les aura, pas, mon vieux?” It was all bright, brave and confident. “If Berlin could only see it!” Campton thought.
He tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but could not; yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a great deal. The train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier to let the crowd flood by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a turmoil.
Suddenly he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, 97and recognized the hat and hair of the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see them now, for they were buried in her hands and her whole body shook with woe. An elderly man was trying to draw her away—her father, probably.
“Come, come, my child——”
“Oh—oh—oh,” she hiccoughed, following blindly.
The people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew pale. Campton saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet who might have been his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
But they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the lives of their beloved! The same fear grasped Campton’s heart, a very present terror, such as he had hardly before imagined. Compared to it, all that he had felt hitherto seemed as faint as the sensations of a looker-on. His knees failed him, and he grasped a transverse bar of the pier.
People were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to belong to each other; only he was alone. George’s mother had not come to bid her son goodbye; she had declared that she would rather take leave of him quietly in her own house than in a crowd of dirty people at the station. But then it was impossible to conceive of her being up and dressed and at the Gare de l’Est at five in the morning—and how could she have got there without her motor? So 98Campton was alone, in that crowd which seemed all made up of families.
But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away alone, and recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony’s adamantine hat and tight knob of hair.
Poor Adele! So she had come too—and had evidently failed in her quest, not been able to fend a way through the crowd, and perhaps not even had a glimpse of her hero. The thought smote Campton with compunction: he regretted his sneering words when they had last met, regretted refusing to dine with her. He wished the barrier of people between them had been less impenetrable; but for the moment it was useless to try to force a way through it. He had to wait till the crowd shifted to other platforms, whence other trains were starting, and by that time she was lost to sight.
At last he was able to make his way through the throng, and as he came out of a side entrance he saw her. She appeared to be looking for a taxi—she waved her sunshade aimlessly. But no one who knew the Gare de l’Est would have gone around that corner to look for a taxi; least of all the practical Adele. Besides, Adele never took taxis: she travelled in the bowels of the earth or on the dizziest omnibus tops.
Campton knew at once that she was waiting for him. He went up to her and a guilty pink suffused her nose.
99“You missed him after all——?” he said.
“I—oh, no, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t? But I was with him all the time. We didn’t see you——”
“No, but I saw—distinctly. That was all I went for,” she jerked back.
He slipped his arm through hers. “This crowd terrifies me. I’m glad you waited for me,” he said.
He saw her pleasure, but she merely answered: “I’m dying of thirst, aren’t you?”
“Yes—or hunger, or something. Could we find a laiterie?”
They found one, and sat down among early clerks and shop-girls, and a few dishevelled women with swollen faces whom Campton had noticed in the station. One of them, who sat opposite an elderly man, had drawn out a pocket mirror and was powdering her nose.
Campton hated to see women powder their noses—one of the few merits with which he credited Julia Brant was that of never having adopted these dirty modern fashions, of continuing to make her toilet in private “like a lady,” as people used to say when he was young. But now the gesture charmed him, for he had recognized the girl who had been sobbing in the station.
“How game she is! I like that. But why is she so frightened?” he wondered. For he saw that her chocolate 100was untouched, and that the smile had stiffened on her lips.
Since his talk with Adamson he could not bring himself to be seriously alarmed. Fear had taken him by the throat for a moment in the station, at the sound of the girl’s sobs; but already he had thrown it off. Everybody agreed that the war was sure to be over in a few weeks; even Dastrey had come round to that view; and with Fortin’s protection, and the influences Anderson Brant could put in motion, George was surely safe—as safe at his depot as anywhere else in this precarious world. Campton poured out Adele’s coffee, and drank off his own as if it had been champagne.
“Do you know anything about the people George was dining with last night?” he enquired abruptly.
Miss Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in Paris; she was a clearing-house of Franco-American gossip, and it was likely enough that if George had special reasons for wishing to spend his last evening away from his family she would know why. But the chance of her knowing what had been kept from him made Campton’s question, as soon as it was put, seem indiscreet, and he added hastily: “Not that I want——”
She looked surprised. “No: he didn’t tell me. Some young man’s affair, I suppose....” She smirked absurdly, her lashless eyes blinking under the pushed-back veil.
101Campton’s mind had already strayed from the question. Nothing bored him more than Adele doing the “sad dog,” and he was vexed at having given her such a chance to be silly. What he wanted to know was whether George had spoken to his old friend about his future—about his own idea of his situation, and his intentions and wishes in view of the grim chance which people, with propitiatory vagueness, call “anything happening.” Had the boy left any word, any message with her for any one? But it was useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot that one could not imagine any one’s having trusted a secret to her.
Campton had no wish to surprise George’s secrets, if the boy had any. But their parting had been so hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, so curt and casual, that he would have liked to think his son had left, somewhere, a message for him, a word, a letter, in case ... in case there was anything premonitory in the sobbing of that girl at the next table.
But Adele’s pink nose confronted him, as guileless as a rabbit’s, and he went out with her unsatisfied. They parted at the door of the restaurant, and Campton went to the studio to see if there were any news of his maid-servant Mariette. He meant to return to sleep there that night, and even his simple housekeeping 102was likely to be troublesome if Mariette should not arrive.
On the way it occurred to him that he had not yet seen the morning papers, and he stopped and bought a handful.
Negotiations, hopes, fears, conjectures—but nothing new or definite, except the insolent fact of Germany’s aggression, and the almost-certainty of England’s intervention. When he reached the studio he found Mme. Lebel in her usual place, paler than usual, but with firm lips and bright eyes. Her three grandsons had left for their depots the day before: one was in the Chasseurs Alpins, and probably already on his way to Alsace, another in the infantry, the third in the heavy artillery; she did not know where the two latter were likely to be sent. Her eldest son, their father, was dead; the second, a man of fifty, and a cabinetmaker by trade, was in the territorials, and was not to report for another week. He hoped, before leaving, to see the return of his wife and little girl, who were in the Ardennes with the wife’s people. Mme. Lebel’s mind was made up and her philosophy ready for immediate application.
“It’s terribly hard for the younger people; but it had to be. I come from Nancy, Monsieur: I remember the German occupation. I understand better than my daughter-in-law....”
There was no news of Mariette, and small chance of having any for some days, much less of seeing her. 103No one could tell how long civilian travel would be interrupted. Mme. Lebel, moved by her lodger’s plight, promised to “find some one”; and Campton mounted to the studio.
He had left it only two days before, on the day when he had vainly waited for Fortin and his dancer; and an abyss already divided him from that vanished time. Then his little world still hung like a straw above an eddy; now it was spinning about in the central vortex.
The pictures stood about untidily, and he looked curiously at all those faces which belonged to the other life. Each bore the mark of its own immediate passions and interests; not one betrayed the least consciousness of coming disaster except the face of poor Madame de Dolmetsch, whose love had enlightened her. Campton began to think of the future from the painter’s point of view. What a modeller of faces a great war must be! What would the people who came through it look like, he wondered.
His bell tinkled, and he turned to answer it. Dastrey, he supposed ... he had caught a glimpse of his friend across the crowd at the Gare de l’Est, seeing off his nephew, but had purposely made no sign. He still wanted to be alone, and above all not to hear war-talk. Mme. Lebel, however, had no doubt revealed his presence in the studio, and he could not risk offending Dastrey.
When he opened the door it was a surprise to see 104there, instead of Dastrey’s anxious face, the round rosy countenance of a well-dressed youth with a shock of fair hair above eyes of childish candour.
“Oh—come in,” Campton said, surprised, but divining a compatriot in a difficulty.
The youth obeyed, blushing his apologies.
“I’m Benny Upsher, sir,” he said, in a tone modest yet confident, as if the name were an introduction.
“Oh——” Campton stammered, cursing his absent-mindedness and his unfailing faculty for forgetting names.
“You’re a friend of George’s, aren’t you?” he risked.
“Yes—tremendous. We were at Harvard together—he was two years ahead of me.”
“Ah—then you’re still there?”
Mr. Upsher’s blush became a mask of crimson. “Well—I thought I was, till this thing happened.”
“What thing?”
The youth stared at the older man with a look of celestial wonder.
“This war.—George has started already, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. Two hours ago.”
“So they said—I looked him up at the Crillon. I wanted most awfully to see him; if I had, of course I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“My dear young man, you’re not bothering me. But what can I do?”
Mr. Upsher’s composure seemed to be returning as 105the necessary preliminaries were cleared away. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Of course what I’d like best is to join his regiment.”
“Join his regiment—you!” Campton exclaimed.
“Oh, I know it’s difficult; I raced up from Biarritz quick as I could to catch him.” He seemed still to be panting with the effort. “I want to be in this,” he concluded.
Campton contemplated him with helpless perplexity. “But I don’t understand—there’s no reason, in your case. With George it was obligatory—on account of his being born here. But I suppose you were born in America?”
“Well, I guess so: in Utica. My mother was Madeline Mayhew. I think we’re a sort of cousins, sir, aren’t we?”
“Of course—of course. Excuse my not recalling it—just at first. But, my dear boy, I still don’t see——”
Mr. Upsher’s powers of stating his case were plainly limited. He pushed back his rumpled hair, looked hard again at his cousin, and repeated doggedly: “I want to be in this.”
“This war?”
He nodded.
Campton groaned. What did the boy mean, and why come to him with such tomfoolery? At that moment he felt even more unfitted than usual to deal with practical problems, and in spite of the forgotten 106cousinship it was no affair of his what Madeline Mayhew’s son wanted to be in.
But there was the boy himself, stolid, immovable, impenetrable to hints, and with something in his wide blue eyes like George—and yet so childishly different.
“Sit down—have a cigarette, won’t you?—You know, of course,” Campton began, “that what you propose is almost insuperably difficult?”
“Getting into George’s regiment?”
“Getting into the French army at all—for a foreigner, a neutral ... I’m afraid there’s really nothing I can do.”
Benny Upsher smiled indulgently. “I can fix that up all right; getting into the army, I mean. The only thing that might be hard would be getting into his regiment.”
“Oh, as to that—out of the question, I should think.” Campton was conscious of speaking curtly: the boy’s bland determination was beginning to get on his nerves.
“Thank you no end,” said Benny Upsher, getting up. “Sorry to have butted in,” he added, holding out a large brown hand.
Campton followed him to the door perplexedly. He knew that something ought to be done—but what? On the threshold he laid his hand impulsively on the youth’s shoulder. “Look here, my boy, we’re cousins, as you say, and if you’re Madeline Mayhew’s boy you’re an only son. Moreover you’re George’s friend—which 107matters still more to me. I can’t let you go like this. Just let me say a word to you before——”
A gleam of shrewdness flashed through Benny Upsher’s inarticulate blue eyes. “A word or two against, you mean? Why, it’s awfully kind, but not the least earthly use. I guess I’ve heard all the arguments. But all I see is that hulking bully trying to do Belgium in. England’s coming in, ain’t she? Well, then why ain’t we?”
“England? Why—why, there’s no analogy——”
The young man groped for the right word. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Only in tight places we always do seem to stand together.”
“You’re mad—this is not our war. Do you really want to go out and butcher people?”
“Yes—this kind of people,” said Benny Upsher cheerfully. “You see, I’ve had all this talk from Uncle Harvey Mayhew a good many times on the way over. We came out on the same boat: he wanted me to be his private secretary at the Hague Congress. But I was pretty sure I’d have a job of my own to attend to.”
Campton still contemplated him hopelessly. “Where is your uncle?” he wondered.
Benny grinned. “On his way to the Hague, I suppose.”
“He ought to be here to look after you—some one ought to!”
108“Then you don’t see your way to getting me into George’s regiment?” Benny simply replied.
An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question. It cost him an effort to shake off the vision.
He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George’s plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged something....
He tore open the message, and read: “Utica July thirty-first. No news from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher.”
“Good Lord!” Campton groaned—“and I never even asked the boy’s address!”
BOOK II 第十章节
The war was three months old—three centuries.
By virtue of some gift of adaptation which seemed forever to discredit human sensibility, people were already beginning to live into the monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its language, regard it as a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by day, and sleep on it—yes, and soundly—at night.
The war went on; life went on; Paris went on. She had had her great hour of resistance, when, alone, exposed and defenceless, she had held back the enemy and broken his strength. She had had, afterward, her hour of triumph, the hour of the Marne; then her hour of passionate and prayerful hope, when it seemed to the watching nations that the enemy was not only held back but thrust back, and victory finally in reach. That hour had passed in its turn, giving way to the grey reality of the trenches. A new speech was growing up in this new world. There were trenches now, there was a “Front”—people were beginning to talk of their sons at the front.
The first time John Campton heard the phrase it sent a shudder through him. Winter was coming on, and he was haunted by the vision of the youths out 112there, boys of George’s age, thousands and thousands of them, exposed by day in reeking wet ditches and sleeping at night under the rain and snow. People were talking calmly of victory in the spring—the spring that was still six long months away! And meanwhile, what cold and wet, what blood and agony, what shattered bodies out on that hideous front, what shattered homes in all the lands it guarded!
Campton could bear to think of these things now. His son was not at the front—was safe, thank God, and likely to remain so!
During the first awful weeks of silence and uncertainty, when every morning brought news of a fresh disaster, when no letters came from the army and no private messages could reach it—during those weeks, while Campton, like other fathers, was without news of his son, the war had been to him simply a huge featureless mass crushing him earthward, blinding him, letting him neither think nor move nor breathe.
But at last he had got permission to go to Chalons, whither Fortin, who chanced to have begun his career as a surgeon, had been hastily transferred. The physician, called from his incessant labours in a roughly-improvised operating-room, to which Campton was led between rows of stretchers laden with livid blood-splashed men, had said kindly, but with a shade of impatience, that he had not forgotten, had done what he could; that George’s health did not warrant his 113being discharged from the army, but that he was temporarily on a staff-job at the rear, and would probably be kept there if such and such influences were brought to bear. Then, calling for hot water and fresh towels, the surgeon vanished and Campton made his way back with lowered eyes between the stretchers.
The “influences” in question were brought to bear—not without Anderson Brant’s assistance—and now that George was fairly certain to be kept at clerical work a good many miles from the danger-zone Campton felt less like an ant under a landslide, and was able for the first time to think of the war as he might have thought of any other war: objectively, intellectually, almost dispassionately, as of history in the making.
It was not that he had any doubt as to the rights and wrongs of the case. The painfully preserved equilibrium of the neutrals made a pitiful show now that the monstrous facts of the first weeks were known: Germany’s diplomatic perfidy, her savagery in the field, her premeditated and systematized terrorizing of the civil populations. Nothing could efface what had been done in Belgium and Luxembourg, the burning of Louvain, the bombardment of Rheims. These successive outrages had roused in Campton the same incredulous wrath as in the rest of mankind; but being of a speculative mind—and fairly sure now that George would never lie in the mud and snow with the others—he had begun to consider the landslide in its universal 114relations, as well as in its effects on his private ant-heap.
His son’s situation, however, was still his central thought. That this lad, who was meant to have been born three thousand miles away in his own safe warless country, and who was regarded by the government of that country as having been born there, as subject to her laws and entitled to her protection—that this lad, by the most idiotic of blunders, a blunder perpetrated before he was born, should have been dragged into a conflict in which he was totally unconcerned, should become temporarily and arbitrarily the subject of a foreign state, exposed to whatever catastrophes that state might draw upon itself, this fact still seemed to Campton as unjust as when it first dawned on him that his boy’s very life might hang on some tortuous secret negotiation between the cabinets of Europe.
He still refused to admit that France had any claim on George, any right to his time, to his suffering or to his life. He had argued it out a hundred times with Adele Anthony. “You say Julia and I were to blame for not going home before the boy was born—and God knows I agree with you! But suppose we’d meant to go? Suppose we’d made every arrangement, taken every precaution, as my parents did in my own case, got to Havre or Cherbourg, say, and been told the steamer had broken her screw—or been prevented 115ourselves, at the last moment, by illness or accident, or any sudden grab of the Hand of God? You’ll admit we shouldn’t have been to blame for that; yet the law would have recognized no difference. George would still have found himself a French soldier on the second of last August because, by the same kind of unlucky accident, he and I were born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And I say that’s enough to prove it’s an iniquitous law, a travesty of justice. Nobody’s going to convince me that, because a steamer may happen to break a phlange of her screw at the wrong time, or a poor woman be frightened by a thunderstorm, France has the right to force an American boy to go and rot in the trenches.”
“In the trenches—is George in the trenches?” Adele Anthony asked, raising her pale eyebrows.
“No.” Campton thundered, his fist crashing down among her tea things; “and all your word-juggling isn’t going to convince me that he ought to be there.” He paused and stared furiously about the little ladylike drawing-room into which Miss Anthony’s sharp angles were so incongruously squeezed. She made no answer, and he went on: “George looks at the thing exactly as I do.”
“Has he told you so?” Miss Anthony enquired, rescuing his teacup and putting sugar into her own.
“He has told me nothing to the contrary. You don’t seem to be aware that military correspondence is censored, 116and that a soldier can’t always blurt out everything he thinks.”
Miss Anthony followed his glance about the room, and her eyes paused with his on her own portrait, now in the place of honour over the mantelpiece, where it hung incongruously above a menagerie of china animals and a collection of trophies from the Marne.
“I dropped in at the Luxembourg yesterday,” she said. “Do you know whom I saw there? Anderson Brant. He was looking at George’s portrait, and turned as red as a beet. You ought to do him a sketch of George some day—after this.”
Campton’s face darkened. He knew it was partly through Brant’s influence that George had been detached from his regiment and given a staff job in the Argonne; but Miss Anthony’s reminder annoyed him. The Brants had acted through sheer selfish cowardice, the desire to safeguard something which belonged to them, something they valued as they valued their pictures and tapestries, though of course in a greater degree; whereas he, Campton, was sustained by a principle which he could openly avow, and was ready to discuss with any one who had the leisure to listen.
He had explained all this so often to Miss Anthony that the words rose again to his lips without an effort. “If it had been a national issue I should have wanted him to be among the first: such as our having to fight Mexico, for instance——”
117“Yes; or the moon. For my part, I understand Julia and Anderson better. They don’t care a fig for national issues; they’re just animals defending their cub.”
“Their—thank you!” Campton exclaimed.
“Well, poor Anderson really was a dry-nurse to the boy. Who else was there to look after him? You were painting Spanish beauties at the time.” She frowned. “Life’s a puzzle. I see perfectly that if you’d let everything else go to keep George you’d never have become the great John Campton: the real John Campton you were meant to be. And it wouldn’t have been half as satisfactory for you—or for George either. Only, in the meanwhile, somebody had to blow the child’s nose, and pay his dentist and doctor; and you ought to be grateful to Anderson for doing it. Aren’t there bees or ants, or something, that are kept for such purposes?”
Campton’s lips were opened to reply when her face changed, and he saw that he had ceased to exist for her. He knew the reason. That look came over everybody’s face nowadays at the hour when the evening paper came. The old maid-servant brought it in, and lingered to hear the communiqué. At that hour, everywhere over the globe, business and labour and pleasure (if it still existed) were suspended for a moment while the hearts of all men gathered themselves up in a question and a prayer.
Miss Anthony sought for her lorgnon and failed to 118find it. With a shaking hand she passed the newspaper over to Campton.
“Violent enemy attacks in the region of Dixmude, Ypres, Armentières, Arras, in the Argonne, and on the advanced slopes of the Grand Couronné de Nancy, have been successfully repulsed. We have taken back the village of Soupir, near Vailly (Aisne); we have taken Maucourt and Mogeville, to the northeast of Verdun. Progress has been made in the region of Vermelles (Pas-de-Calais), south of Aix Noulette. Enemy attacks in the Hauts-de-Meuse and southeast of Saint-Mihiel have also been repulsed.
“In Poland the Austrian retreat is becoming general. The Russians are still advancing in the direction of Kielce-Sandomir and have progressed beyond the San in Galicia. Mlawa has been reoccupied, and the whole railway system of Poland is now controlled by the Russian forces.”
A good day—oh, decidedly a good day. At this rate, what became of the gloomy forecasts of the people who talked of a winter in the trenches, to be followed by a spring campaign? True, the Serbian army was still retreating before superior Austrian forces—but there too the scales would soon be turned if the Russians continued to progress. That day there was hope everywhere: the old maid-servant went away smiling, and Miss Anthony poured out another cup of tea.
Campton had not lifted his eyes from the paper. 119Suddenly they lit on a short paragraph: “Fallen on the Field of Honour.” One had got used to that with the rest; used even to the pang of reading names one knew, evoking familiar features, young faces blotted out in blood, young limbs convulsed in the fires of that hell called “the Front.” But this time Campton turned pale and the paper fell to his knee.
“Fortin-Lescluze; Jean-Jacques-Marie, lieutenant of Chasseurs à Pied, gloriously fallen for France....” There followed a ringing citation.
Fortin’s son, his only son, was dead.
Campton saw before him the honest bourgeois dining-room, so strangely out of keeping with the rest of the establishment; he saw the late August sun slanting in on the group about the table, on the ambitious and unscrupulous great man, the two quiet women hidden under his illustrious roof, and the youth who had held together these three dissimilar people, making an invisible home in the heart of all that publicity. Campton remembered his brief exchange of words with Fortin on the threshold, and the father’s uncontrollable outburst: “For his mother and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”
Campton shut his eyes and leaned back, sick with the memory. This man had had a share in saving George; but his own son he could not save.
“What’s the matter?” Miss Anthony asked, her hand on his arm.
120Campton could not bring the name to his lips. “Nothing—nothing. Only this room’s rather hot—and I must be off anyhow.” He got up, escaping from her solicitude, and made his way out. He must go at once to Fortin’s for news. The physician was still at Chalons; but there would surely be some one at the house, and Campton could at least leave a message and ask where to write.
Dusk had fallen. His eyes usually feasted on the beauty of the new Paris, the secret mysterious Paris of veiled lights and deserted streets; but to-night he was blind to it. He could see nothing but Fortin’s face, hear nothing but his voice when he said: “Our only son in the war.”
He groped along the pitch-black street for the remembered outline of the house (since no house-numbers were visible), and rang several times without result. He was just turning away when a big mud-splashed motor drove up. He noticed a soldier at the steering-wheel, then three people got out stiffly: two women smothered in crape and a haggard man in a dirty uniform. Campton stopped, and Fortin-Lescluze recognized him by the light of the motor-lamp. The four stood and looked at each other. The old mother, under her crape, appeared no bigger than a child.
“Ah—you know?” the doctor said. Campton nodded.
The father spoke in a firm voice. “It happened three 121days ago—at Suippes. You’ve seen his citation? They brought him in to me at Chalons without a warning—and too late. I took off both legs, but gangrene had set in. Ah—if I could have got hold of one of our big surgeons.... Yes, we’re just back from the funeral.... My mother and my wife ... they had that comfort....”
The two women stood beside him like shrouded statues. Suddenly Mme. Fortin’s deep voice came through the crape: “You saw him, Monsieur, that last day ... the day you came about your own son, I think?”
“I ... yes....” Campton stammered in anguish.
The physician intervened. “And, now, ma bonne mère, you’re not to be kept standing. You’re to go straight in and take your tisane and go to bed.” He kissed his mother and pushed her into his wife’s arms. “Goodbye, my dear. Take care of her.”
The women vanished under the porte-cochère, and Fortin turned to the painter.
“Thank you for coming. I can’t ask you in—I must go back immediately.”
“Back?”
“To my work. Thank God. If it were not for that——”
He jumped into the motor, called out “En route,” and was absorbed into the night.
Campton went home to his studio.
He still lived there, shiftlessly and uncomfortably—for Mariette had never come back from Lille. She had not come back, and there was no news of her. Lille had become a part of the “occupied provinces,” from which there was no escape; and people were beginning to find out what that living burial meant.
Adele Anthony had urged Campton to go back to the hotel, but he obstinately refused. What business had he to be living in expensive hotels when, for the Lord knew how long, his means of earning a livelihood were gone, and when it was his duty to save up for George—George, who was safe, who was definitely out of danger, and whom he longed more than ever, when the war was over, to withdraw from the stifling atmosphere of his stepfather’s millions?
He had been so near to having the boy to himself when the war broke out! He had almost had in sight the proud day when he should be able to say: “Look here: this is your own bank-account. Now you’re independent—for God’s sake stop and consider what you want to do with your life.”
The war had put an end to that—but only for a time. If victory came before long, Campton’s reputation would survive the eclipse, his chances of money-making 123would be as great as ever, and the new George, the George matured and disciplined by war, would come back with a finer sense of values, and a soul steeled against the vulgar opportunities of wealth.
Meanwhile, it behoved his father to save every penny. And the simplest way of saving was to go on camping in the studio, taking his meals at the nearest wine-shop, and entrusting his bed-making and dusting to old Mme. Lebel. In that way he could live for a long time without appreciably reducing his savings.
Mme. Lebel’s daughter-in-law, Mme. Jules, who was in the Ardennes with the little girl when the war broke out, was to have replaced Mariette. But, like Mariette, Mme. Jules never arrived, and no word came from her or the child. They too were in an occupied province. So Campton jogged on without a servant. It was very uncomfortable, even for his lax standards; but the dread of letting a stranger loose in the studio made him prefer to put up with Mme. Lebel’s intermittent services.
So far she had borne up bravely. Her orphan grandsons were all at the front (how that word had insinuated itself into the language!) but she continued to have fairly frequent reassuring news of them. The Chasseur Alpin, slightly wounded in Alsace, was safe in hospital; and the others were well, and wrote cheerfully. Her son Jules, the cabinetmaker, was guarding 124a bridge at St. Cloud, and came in regularly to see her; but Campton noticed that it was about him that she seemed most anxious.
He was a silent industrious man, who had worked hard to support his orphaned nephews and his mother, and had married in middle age, only four or five years before the war, when the lads could shift for themselves, and his own situation was secure enough to permit the luxury of a wife and baby.
Mme. Jules had waited patiently for him, though she had other chances; and finally they had married and the baby had been born, and blossomed into one of those finished little Frenchwomen who, at four or five, seem already to be musing on the great central problems of love and thrift. The parents used to bring the child to see Campton, and he had made a celebrated sketch of her, in her Sunday bonnet, with little earrings and a wise smile. And these two, mother and child, had disappeared on the second of August as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed them.
As Campton entered he glanced at the old woman’s den, saw that it was empty, and said to himself: “She’s at St. Cloud again.” For he knew that she seized every chance of being with her eldest.
He unlocked his door and felt his way into the dark studio. Mme. Lebel might at least have made up the fire! Campton lit the lamp, found some wood, and 125knelt down stiffly by the stove. Really, life was getting too uncomfortable....
He was trying to coax a flame when the door opened and he heard Mme. Lebel.
“Really, you know——” he turned to rebuke her; but the words died on his lips. She stood before him, taking no notice; then her shapeless black figure doubled up, and she sank down into his own armchair. Mme. Lebel, who, even when he offered her a seat, never did more than rest respectful knuckles on its back!
“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he exclaimed.
She lifted her aged face. “Monsieur, I came about your fire; but I am too unhappy. I have more than I can bear.” She fumbled vainly for a handkerchief, and wiped away her tears with the back of her old laborious hand.
“Jules has enlisted, Monsieur; enlisted in the infantry. He has left for the front without telling me.”
“Good Lord. Enlisted? At his age—is he crazy?”
“No, Monsieur. But the little girl—he’s had news——”
She waited to steady her voice, and then fishing in another slit of her multiple skirts, pulled out a letter. “I got that at midday. I hurried to St. Cloud—but he left yesterday.”
The letter was grim reading. The poor father had accidentally run across an escaped prisoner who had 126regained the French lines near the village where Mme. Jules and the child were staying. The man, who knew the wife’s family, had been charged by them with a message to the effect that Mme. Jules, who was a proud woman, had got into trouble with the authorities, and been sent off to a German prison on the charge of spying. The poor little girl had cried and clung to her mother, and had been so savagely pushed aside by the officer who made the arrest that she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and fractured her skull. The fugitive reported her as still alive, but unconscious, and dying.
Jules Lebel had received this news the previous day; and within twenty-four hours he was at the front. Guard a bridge at St. Cloud after that? All he asked was to kill and be killed. He knew the name and the regiment of the officer who had denounced his wife. “If I live long enough I shall run the swine down,” he wrote. “If not, I’ll kill as many of his kind as God lets me.”
Mme. Lebel sat silent, her head bowed on her hands; and Campton stood and watched her. Presently she got up, passed the back of her hand across her eyes, and said: “The room is cold. I’ll fetch some coal.”
Campton protested. “No, no, Mme. Lebel. Don’t worry about me. Make yourself something warm to drink, and try to sleep——”
“Oh, Monsieur, thank God for the work! If it were 127not for that——” she said, in the same words as the physician.
She hobbled away, and presently he heard her bumping up again with the coal.
When his fire was started, and the curtains drawn, and she had left him, the painter sat down and looked about the studio. Bare and untidy as it was, he did not find the sight unpleasant: he was used to it, and being used to things seemed to him the first requisite of comfort. But to-night his thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered tapestries with their huge heroes and kings, nor the blotched walls hung with pictures, nor the canvases stacked against the chair-legs, nor the long littered table at which he wrote and ate and mixed his colours. At one moment he was with Fortin-Lescluze, speeding through the night toward fresh scenes of death; at another, in the loge downstairs, where Mme. Lebel, her day’s work done, would no doubt sit down as usual by her smoky lamp and go on with her sewing. “Thank God for the work——” they had both said.
And here Campton sat with idle hands, and did nothing——
It was not exactly his fault. What was there for a portrait-painter to do? He was not a portrait-painter only, and on his brief trip to Chalons some of the scenes by the way—gaunt unshorn faces of territorials at railway bridges, soldiers grouped about a provision-lorry, 128a mud-splashed company returning to the rear, a long grey train of “seventy-fives” ploughing forward through the rain—at these sights the old graphic instinct had stirred in him. But the approaches of the front were sternly forbidden to civilians, and especially to neutrals (Campton was beginning to wince at the word); he himself, who had been taken to Chalons by a high official of the Army Medical Board, had been given only time enough for his interview with Fortin, and brought back to Paris the same night. If ever there came a time for art to interpret the war, as Raffet, for instance, had interpreted Napoleon’s campaigns, the day was not yet; the world in which men lived at present was one in which the word “art” had lost its meaning.
And what was Campton, what had he ever been, but an artist?... A father; yes, he had waked up to the practice of that other art, he was learning to be a father. And now, at a stroke, his only two reasons for living were gone: since the second of August he had had no portraits to paint, no son to guide and to companion.
Other people, he knew, had found jobs: most of his friends had been drawn into some form of war-work. Dastrey, after vain attempts to enlist, thwarted by an untimely sciatica, had found a post near the front, on the staff of a Red Cross Ambulance. Adele Anthony was working eight or nine hours a day in a Depot which 129distributed food and clothing to refugees from the invaded provinces; and Mrs. Brant’s name figured on the committees of most of the newly-organized war charities. Among Campton’s other friends many had accepted humbler tasks. Some devoted their time to listing and packing hospital supplies, keeping accounts in ambulance offices, sorting out refugees at the railway-stations, and telling them where to go for food and help; still others spent their days, and sometimes their nights, at the bitter-cold suburban sidings where the long train-loads of wounded stopped on the way to the hospitals of the interior. There was enough misery and confusion at the rear for every civilian volunteer to find his task.
Among them all, Campton could not see his place. His lameness put him at a disadvantage, since taxicabs were few, and it was difficult for him to travel in the crowded métro. He had no head for figures, and would have thrown the best-kept accounts into confusion; he could not climb steep stairs to seek out refugees, nor should he have known what to say to them when he reached their attics. And so it would have been at the railway canteens; he choked with rage and commiseration at all the suffering about him, but found no word to cheer the sufferers.
Secretly, too, he feared the demands that would be made on him if he once let himself be drawn into the network of war charities. Tiresome women would come 130and beg for money, or for pictures for bazaars: they were already getting up bazaars.
Money he could not spare, since it was his duty to save it for George; and as for pictures—why, there were a few sketches he might give, but here again he was checked by his fear of establishing a precedent. He had seen in the papers that the English painters were already giving blank canvases to be sold by auction to millionaires in quest of a portrait. But that form of philanthropy would lead to his having to paint all the unpaintable people who had been trying to bribe a picture out of him since his sudden celebrity. No artist had a right to cheapen his art in that way: it could only result in his turning out work that would injure his reputation and reduce his sales after the war.
So far, Campton had not been troubled by many appeals for help; but that was probably because he had kept out of sight, and thrown into the fire the letters of the few ladies who had begged a sketch for their sales, or his name for their committees.
One appeal, however, he had not been able to avoid. About two months earlier he had had a visit from George’s friend Boylston, the youth he had met at Dastrey’s dinner the night before war was declared. In the interval he had entirely forgotten Boylston; but as soon as he saw the fat brown young man with a twinkle in his eyes and his hair, Campton recalled him, and held out a cordial hand. Had not George said that Boylston was the best fellow he knew?
131Boylston seemed much impressed by the honour of waiting on the great man. In spite of his cool twinkling air he was evidently full of reverence for the things and people he esteemed, and Campton’s welcome sent the blood up to the edge of his tight curls. It also gave him courage to explain his visit.
He had come to beg Campton to accept the chairmanship of the American Committee of “The Friends of French Art,” an international group of painters who proposed to raise funds for the families of mobilised artists. The American group would naturally be the most active, since Americans had, in larger numbers than any other foreigners, sought artistic training in France; and all the members agreed that Campton’s name must figure at their head. But Campton was known to be inaccessible, and the committee, aware that Boylston was a friend of George’s, had asked him to transmit their request.
“You see, sir, nobody else represents....”
Campton thought as seldom as possible of what followed: he hated the part he had played. But, after all, what else could he have done? Everything in him recoiled from what acceptance would bring with it: publicity, committee meetings, speechifying, writing letters, seeing troublesome visitors, hearing harrowing stories, asking people for money—above all, having to give his own; a great deal of his own.
He stood before the young man, abject, irresolute, chinking a bunch of keys in his trouser-pocket, and 132remembering afterward that the chink must have sounded as if it were full of money. He remembered too, oddly enough, that as his own embarrassment increased Boylston’s vanished. It was as though the modest youth, taking his host’s measure, had reluctantly found him wanting, and from that moment had felt less in awe of his genius. Illogical, of course, and unfair—but there it was.
The talk had ended by Campton’s refusing the chairmanship, but agreeing to let his name figure on the list of honorary members, where he hoped it would be overshadowed by rival glories. And, having reached this conclusion, he had limped to his desk, produced a handful of notes, and after a moment’s hesitation held out two hundred francs with the stereotyped: “Sorry I can’t make it more....”
He had meant it to be two hundred and fifty; but, with his usual luck, all his fumbling had failed to produce a fifty-franc note; and he could hardly ask Boylston to “make the change.”
On the threshold the young man paused to ask for the last news of George; and on Campton’s assuring him that it was excellent, added, with evident sincerity: “Still hung up on that beastly staff-job? I do call that hard luck——” And now, of all the unpleasant memories of the visit, that phrase kept the sharpest sting.
Was it in fact hard luck? And did George himself 133think so? There was nothing in his letters to show it. He seemed to have undergone no change of view as to his own relation to the war; he had shown no desire to “be in it,” as that mad young Upsher said.
For the first time since he had seen George’s train pull out of the Gare de l’Est Campton found himself wondering at the perfection of his son’s moral balance. So many things had happened since; war had turned out to be so immeasurably more hideous and abominable than those who most abhorred war had dreamed it could be; the issues at stake had become so glaringly plain, right and wrong, honour and dishonour, humanity and savagery faced each other so squarely across the trenches, that it seemed strange to Campton that his boy, so eager, so impressionable, so quick on the uptake, should not have felt some such burst of wrath as had driven even poor Jules Lebel into the conflict.
The comparison, of course, was absurd. Lebel had been parted from his dearest, his wife dragged to prison, his child virtually murdered: any man, in his place, must have felt the blind impulse to kill. But what was Lebel’s private plight but a symbol of the larger wrong? This war could no longer be compared to other wars: Germany was conducting it on methods that civilization had made men forget. The occupation of Luxembourg; the systematic destruction of Belgium; the savage treatment of the people of the invaded regions; 134the outrages of Louvain and Rheims and Ypres; the voice with which these offences cried to heaven had waked the indignation of humanity. Yet George, in daily contact with all this woe and ruin, seemed as unmoved as though he had been behind a desk in the New York office of Bullard and Brant.
If there were any change in his letters it was rather that they were more indifferent. His reports of himself became drier, more stereotyped, his comments on the situation fewer: he seemed to have been subdued to the hideous business he worked in. It was true that his letters had never been expressive: his individuality seemed to dry up in contact with pen and paper. It was true also that letters from the front were severely censored, and that it would have been foolish to put in them anything likely to prevent their delivery. But George had managed to send several notes by hand, and these were as colourless as the others; and so were his letters to his mother, which Mrs. Brant always sent to Miss Anthony, who privately passed them on to Campton.
Besides, there were other means of comparison. People with sons at the front were beginning to hand about copies of their letters; a few passages, strangely moving and beautiful, had found their way into the papers. George, God be praised, was not at the front; but he was in the war-zone, far nearer the sights and sounds of death than his father, and he had comrades 135and friends in the trenches. Strange that what he wrote was still so cold to the touch....
“It’s the scientific mind, I suppose,” Campton reflected. “These youngsters are all rather like beautifully made machines....” Yet it had never before struck him that his son was like a beautifully made machine.
He remembered that he had not dined, and got up wearily. As he passed out he noticed on a pile of letters and papers a brand-new card: he could always tell the new cards by their whiteness, which twenty-four hours of studio-dust turned to grey.
Campton held the card to the light. It was large and glossy, a beautiful thick pre-war card; and on it was engraved:
HARVEY MAYHEW
Déléguê des Etats Unis au Congrès de la Paix
with a pen-stroke through the lower line. Beneath was written an imperative “p.t.o.”; and reversing the card, Campton read, in an agitated hand: “Must see you at once. Call up Nouveau Luxe”; and, lower down: “Excuse ridiculous card. Impossible get others under six weeks.”
So Mayhew had turned up! Well, it was a good thing: perhaps he might bring news of that mad Benny Upsher whose doings had caused Campton so much trouble in the early days that he could never recall the boy’s obstinate rosy face without a stir of irritation.
136“I want to be in this thing——” Well, young Upsher had apparently been in it with a vengeance; but what he had cost Campton in cables to his distracted family, and in weary pilgrimages to the War Office, the American Embassy, the Consulate, the Prefecture of Police, and divers other supposed sources of information, the painter meant some day to tell his young relative in no measured terms. That is, if the chance ever presented itself; for, since he had left the studio that morning four months ago, Benny had so completely vanished that Campton sometimes wondered, with a little shiver, if they were ever likely to exchange words again in this world.
“Mayhew will know; he wants to tell me about the boy, I suppose,” he mused.
Harvey Mayhew—Harvey Mayhew with a pen-stroke through the title which, so short a time since, it had been his chief ambition to display on his cards! No wonder it embarrassed him now. But where on earth had he been all this time? As Campton pondered on the card a memory flashed out. Mayhew? Mayhew? Why, wasn’t it Mayhew who had waylaid him in the Crillon a few hours before war was declared, to ask his advice about the safest way of travelling to the Hague? And hadn’t he, Campton, in all good faith, counselled him to go by Luxembourg “in order to be out of the way of trouble”?
The remembrance swept away the painter’s sombre 137thoughts, and he burst into a laugh that woke the echoes of the studio.
Not having it in his power to call up his cousin on the telephone, Campton went the next morning to the Nouveau Luxe.
It was the first time that he had entered the famous hotel since the beginning of the war; and at sight of the long hall his heart sank as it used to whenever some untoward necessity forced him to run its deadly blockade.
But the hall was empty when he entered, empty not only of the brilliant beings who filled his soul with such dismay, but also of the porters, footmen and lift-boys who, even in its unfrequented hours, lent it the lustre of their liveries.
A tired concierge sat at the desk, and near the door a boy scout, coiling his bare legs about a high stool, raised his head languidly from his book. But for these two, the world of the Nouveau Luxe had disappeared.
As the lift was not running there was nothing to disturb their meditations; and when Campton had learned that Mr. Mayhew would receive him he started alone up the deserted stairs.
Only a few dusty trunks remained in the corridors where luggage used to be piled as high as in the passages of the great liners on sailing-day; and instead of 138the murmur of ladies’-maids’ skirts, and explosions of laughter behind glazed service-doors, the swish of a charwoman’s mop alone broke the silence.
“After all,” Campton thought, “if war didn’t kill people how much pleasanter it might make the world!”
This was evidently not the opinion of Mr. Harvey Mayhew, whom he found agitatedly pacing a large room hung in shrimp-pink brocade, which opened on a vista of turquoise tiling and porcelain tub.
Mr. Mayhew’s round countenance, composed of the same simple curves as his nephew’s, had undergone a remarkable change. He was still round, but he was ravaged. His fringe of hair had grown greyer, and there were crow’s-feet about his blue eyes, and wrathful corrugations in his benignant forehead.
He seized Campton’s hands and glared at him through indignant eye-glasses.
“My dear fellow, I looked you up as soon as I arrived. I need you—we all need you—we need your powerful influence and your world-wide celebrity. Campton, the day for words has gone by. We must act!”
Campton let himself down into an armchair. No verb in the language terrified him as much as that which his cousin had flung at him. He gazed at the ex-Delegate with dismay. “I didn’t know you were here. Where have you come from?” he asked.
Mr. Mayhew, resting a manicured hand on the edge of a gilt table, looked down awfully on him.
139“I come,” he said, “from a German prison.”
“Good Lord—you?” Campton gasped.
He continued to gaze at his cousin with terror, but of a new kind. Here at last was someone who had actually been in the jaws of the monster, who had seen, heard, suffered—a witness who could speak of that which he knew! No wonder Mr. Mayhew took himself seriously—at last he had something to be serious about! Campton stared at him as if he had risen from the dead.
Mr. Mayhew cleared his throat and went on: “You may remember our meeting at the Crillon—on the 31st of last July it was—and my asking you the best way of getting to the Hague, in view of impending events. At that time” (his voice took a note of irony) “I was a Delegate to the Peace Congress at the Hague, and conceived it to be my duty to carry out my mandate at whatever personal risk. You advised me—as you may also remember—in order to be out of the way of trouble, to travel by Luxembourg,” (Campton stirred uneasily). “I followed your advice; and, not being able to go by train, I managed, with considerable difficulty, to get permission to travel by motor. I reached Luxembourg as the German army entered it—the next day I was in a German prison.”
The next day! Then this pink-and-white man who stood there with his rimless eye-glasses and neatly trimmed hair, and his shining nails reflected in the plate glass of the table-top, this perfectly typical, usual 140sort of harmless rich American, had been for four months in the depths of the abyss that men were beginning to sound with fearful hearts!
“It is a simple miracle,” said Mr. Mayhew, “that I was not shot as a spy.”
Campton’s voice choked in his throat. “Where were you imprisoned?”
“The first night, in the Police commissariat, with common thieves and vagabonds—with—” Mr. Mayhew lowered his voice and his eyes: “With prostitutes, Campton....”
He waited for this to take effect, and continued: “The next day, in consequence of the energetic intervention of our consul—who behaved extremely well, as I have taken care to let them know in Washington—I was sent back to my hotel on parole, and kept there, kept there, Campton—I, the official representative of a friendly country—under strict police surveillance, like ... like an unfortunate woman ... for eight days: a week and one day over!”
Mr. Mayhew sank into a chair and passed a scented handkerchief across his forehead. “When I was finally released I was without money, without luggage, without my motor or my wretched chauffeur—a Frenchman, who had been instantly carried off to Germany. In this state of destitution, and without an apology, I was shipped to Rotterdam and put on a steamer sailing for America.” He wiped his forehead again, 141and the corners of his agitated lips. “Peace, Campton—Peace? When I think that I believed in a thing called Peace! That I left Utica—always a difficult undertaking for me—because I deemed it my duty, in the interests of Peace,” (the word became a hiss) “to travel to the other side of the world, and use the weight of my influence and my experience in such a cause!”
He clenched his fist and shook it in the face of an invisible foe.
“My influence, if I have any; my experience—ha, I have had experience now, Campton! And, my God, sir, they shall both be used till my last breath to show up these people, to proclaim to the world what they really are, to rouse public opinion in America against a nation of savages who ought to be hunted off the face of the globe like vermin—like the vermin in their own prison cells! Campton—if I may say so without profanity—I come to bring not Peace but a Sword!”
It was some time before the flood of Mr. Mayhew’s wrath subsided, or before there floated up from its agitated depths some fragments of his subsequent history and present intentions. Eventually, however, Campton gathered that after a short sojourn in America, where he found opinion too lukewarm for him, he had come back to Europe to collect the experiences of other victims of German savagery. Mr. Mayhew, in short, meant to devote himself to Atrocities; and he had sought out Campton to ask his help, and especially 142to be put in contact with persons engaged in refugee-work, and likely to have come across flagrant offences against the law of nations.
It was easy to comply with the latter request. Campton scribbled a message to Adele Anthony at her refugee Depot; and he undertook also to find out from what officials Mr. Mayhew might obtain leave to visit the front.
“I know it’s difficult——” he began; but Mr. Mayhew laughed. “I am here to surmount difficulties—after what I’ve been through!”
It was not until then that Mr. Mayhew found time to answer an enquiry about his nephew.
“Benny Upsher ? Ha—I’m proud of Benny! He’s a hero, that nephew of mine—he was always my favourite.”
He went on to say that the youth, having failed to enlist in the French army, had managed to get back to England, and there, passing himself off as a Canadian (“Born at Murray Bay, sir—wasn’t it lucky?”) had joined an English regiment, and, after three months’ training, was now on his way to the front. His parents had made a great outcry—moved heaven and earth for news of him—but the boy had covered up his tracks so cleverly that they had had no word till he was starting for Boulogne with his draft. Rather high-handed—and poor Madeline had nearly gone out of her mind; but Mr. Mayhew confessed he had no patience with 143such feminine weakness. “Benny’s a man, and must act as a man. That boy, Campton, saw things as they were from the first.”
Campton took leave, dazed and crushed by the conversation. It was all one to him if Harvey Mayhew chose to call on America to avenge his wrongs; Campton himself was beginning to wish that his country would wake up to what was going on in the world; but that he, Campton, should be drawn into the affair, should have to write letters, accompany the ex-Delegate to Embassies and Red Crosses, languish with him in ministerial antechambers, and be deafened with appeals to his own celebrity and efficiency; that he should have ascribed to himself that mysterious gift of “knowing the ropes” in which his whole blundering career had proved him to be cruelly lacking: this was so dreadful to him as to obscure every other question.
“Thank the Lord,” he muttered, “I haven’t got the telephone anyhow!”
He glanced cautiously down the wide stairs of the hotel to assure himself of a safe retreat; but in the hall an appealing voice detained him.
“Dear Master! Dear great Master! I’ve been lying in wait for you!”
A Red Cross nurse advanced: not the majestic figure of the Crimean legend, but the new version evolved in the rue de la Paix: short skirts, long ankles, pearls and curls. The face under the coif was young, wistful, 144haggard with the perpetual hurry of the aimless. Where had he seen those tragic eyes, so full of questions and so invariably uninterested in the answers?
“I’m Madge Talkett—I saw you at—I saw you the day war was declared,” the young lady corrected herself. Campton remembered their meeting at Mrs. Brant’s, and was grateful for her evident embarrassment. So few of the new generation seemed aware that there were any privacies left to respect! He looked at Mrs. Talkett more kindly.
“You must come,” she continued, laying her hand on his arm (her imperatives were always in italics). “Just a step from here—to my hospital. There’s someone asking for you.”
“For me? Someone wounded?” What if it were Benny Upsher? A cold fear broke over Campton.
“Someone dying,” Mrs. Talkett said. “Oh, nobody you know—a poor young French soldier. He was brought here two days ago ... and he keeps on repeating your name....”
“My name? Why my name?”
“We don’t know. We don’t think he knows you ... but he’s shot to pieces and half delirious. He’s a painter, and he’s seen pictures of yours, and keeps talking about them, and saying he wants you to look at his.... You will come? It’s just next door, you know.”
He did not know—having carefully avoided all knowledge of hospitals in his dread of being drawn into 145war-work, and his horror of coming as a mere spectator to gaze on agony he could neither comfort nor relieve. Hospitals were for surgeons and women; if he had been rich he would have given big sums to aid them; being unable to do even that, he preferred to keep aloof.
He followed Mrs. Talkett out of the hotel and around the corner. The door of another hotel, with a big Red Cross above it, admitted them to a marble vestibule full of the cold smell of disinfectants. An orderly sat reading a newspaper behind the desk, and nurses whisked backward and forward with trays and pails. A lady with a bunch of flowers came down the stairs drying her eyes.
Campton’s whole being recoiled from what awaited him. Since the poor youth was delirious, what was the use of seeing him? But women took a morbid pleasure in making one do things that were useless!
On an upper floor they paused at a door where there was a moment’s parleying.
“Come,” Mrs. Talkett said; “he’s a little better.”
The room contained two beds. In one lay a haggard elderly man with closed eyes and lips drawn back from his clenched teeth. His legs stirred restlessly, and one of his arms was in a lifted sling attached to a horrible kind of gallows above the bed. It reminded Campton of Juan de Borgoña’s pictures of the Inquisition, in the Prado.
146“Oh, he’s all right; he’ll get well. It’s the other....”
The other lay quietly in his bed. No gallows overhung him, no visible bandaging showed his wound. There was a flush on his young cheeks and his eyes looked out, large and steady, from their hollow brows. But he was the one who would not get well.
Mrs. Talkett bent over him: her voice was sweet when it was lowered.
“I’ve kept my promise. Here he is.”
The eyes turned in the lad’s immovable head, and he and Campton looked at each other. The painter had never seen the face before him: a sharp irregular face, prematurely hollowed by pain, with thick chestnut hair tumbled above the forehead.
“It’s you, Master!” the boy said.
Campton sat down beside him. “How did you know? Have you seen me before?”
“Once—at one of your exhibitions.” He paused and drew a hard breath. “But the first thing was the portrait at the Luxembourg ... your son....”
“Ah, you look like him!” Campton broke out.
The eyes of the young soldier lit up. “Do I?... Someone told me he was your son. I went home from seeing that and began to paint. After the war, would you let me come and work with you? My things ... wait ... I’ll show you my things first.” He tried to raise himself. Mrs. Talkett slipped her arm under his shoulders, and resting against her he lifted his hand and pointed to the bare wall facing him.
147“There—there; you see? Look for yourself. The brushwork ... not too bad, eh? I was ... getting it.... There, that head of my grandfather, eh? And my lame sister.... Oh, I’m young ...” he smiled ... “never had any models.... But after the war you’ll see....”
Mrs. Talkett let him down again, and feverishly, vehemently, he began to describe, one by one, and over and over again, the pictures he saw on the naked wall in front of him.
A nurse had slipped in, and Mrs. Talkett signed to Campton to follow her out. The boy seemed aware that the painter was going, and interrupted his enumeration to say: “As soon as the war’s over you’ll let me come?”
“Of course I will,” Campton promised.
In the passage he asked: “Can nothing save him? Has everything possible been done?”
“Everything. We’re all so fond of him—the biggest surgeons have seen him. It seems he has great talent—but he never could afford models, so he has painted his family over and over again.” Mrs. Talkett looked at Campton with a good deal of feeling in her changing eyes. “You see, it did help, your coming. I know you thought it tiresome of me to insist.” She led him downstairs and into the office, where a lame officer with the Croix de Guerre sat at the desk. The officer wrote out the young soldier’s name—René Davril—and his family’s address.
148“They’re quite destitute, Monsieur. An old infirm grandfather, a lame sister who taught music, a widowed mother and several younger children....”
“I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” Campton again promised as he parted from Mrs. Talkett.
He had not thought it possible that he would ever feel so kindly toward her as at that moment. And then, a second later, she nearly spoiled it by saying: “Dear Master—you see the penalty of greatness!”
The name of René Davril was with Campton all day. The boy had believed in him—his eyes had been opened by the sight of George’s portrait! And now, in a day or two more, he would be filling a three-by-six ditch in a crowded graveyard. At twenty—and with eyes like George’s.
What could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations; the “little acts of kindness” recommended to his pious infancy had always seemed to him far harder to think of than to perform. But now some instinct carried him straight to the corner of his studio where he remembered having shoved out of sight a half-finished study for George’s portrait. He found it, examined it critically, scribbled his signature in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On the way he had to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew’s tiresome business, and was delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon. But 149in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate glass, and sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse came down, to whom, with embarrassment, he explained himself.
“Poor little Davril? Yes—he’s still alive. Will you come up? His family are with him.”
Campton shook his head and held out the parcel. “It’s a picture he wanted——”
The nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a vague benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the painter turned away with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken the picture up himself. But to see the death-change on a face so like his son’s, and its look reflected in other anguished faces, was more than he could endure. He turned away.
The next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that René Davril was better, that the fever had dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the sketch. “The only thing that troubles him is that he realizes now that you have not seen his pictures. But he is very happy, and blesses you for your goodness.”
His goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself for his stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have comforted the poor lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and judged; and that one thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst for the approbation of the men he 150revered—that one thing he had never thought of doing! The only way of atoning for his negligence was instantly to go out to the suburb where the Davril family lived. Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with whom he had an appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and devoted the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her impetuously.
“Well—I’ve seen them; I’ve seen his pictures, and he’s right. They’re astonishing! Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of air and mass. He’ll do things—May I go up and tell him?”
He broke off and looked at her.
“He died an hour ago. If only you’d seen them yesterday!” she said.
The killing of René Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless crimes the war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more vividly than the distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.
“Ah, you want genius, do you? Mere youth’s not enough ... and health and gaiety and courage; you want brains in the bud, imagination and poetry, ideas 151all folded up in their sheath! It takes that, does it, to tempt your jaded appetite?” He was reminded of the rich vulgarians who will eat only things out of season. “That’s what war is like,” he muttered savagely to himself.
The next morning he went to the funeral with Mrs. Talkett—between whom and himself the tragic episode had created a sort of improvised intimacy—walking at her side through the November rain, behind the poor hearse with the tricolour over it.
At the church, while the few mourners shivered in a damp side chapel, he had time to study the family: a poor sobbing mother, two anæmic little girls, and the lame sister who was musical—a piteous group, smelling of poverty and tears. Behind them, to his surprise, he saw the curly brown head and short-sighted eyes of Boylston. Campton wondered at the latter’s presence; then he remembered “The Friends of French Art,” and concluded that the association had probably been interested in poor Davril.
With some difficulty he escaped from the thanks of the mother and sisters, and picked up a taxi to take Mrs. Talkett home.
“No—back to the hospital,” she said. “A lot of bad cases have come in, and I’m on duty again all day.” She spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world; and he shuddered at the serenity with which women endure the unendurable.
152At the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had insisted that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be returned to him. Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in one of the drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse came in—but was it a nurse, or some haloed nun from a Umbrian triptych, her pure oval framed in white, her long fingers clasping a book and lily?
“Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he cried; and thought: “A new face again—what an artist!”
She seized his hands.
“I heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I’ve asked her to leave us together.” She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just risen from a penitential vigil.
“Come, please, into my little office: you didn’t know that I was the Infirmière-Major? My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I see no one now: all my days and nights are given to my soldiers.”
She glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of jade filled with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped cigarettes, stood on a desk among torn and discoloured livrets militaires. The room was empty, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So close to her, he saw that the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of suffering. “The woman really has 153a heart,” he thought, “or the war couldn’t have made her so much handsomer.”
Mme. de Dolmetsch leaned closer: a breath of incense floated from her conventual draperies.
“I know why you came,” she continued; “you were good to that poor little Davril.” She clutched Campton suddenly with a blue-veined hand. “My dear friend, can anything justify such horrors? Isn’t it abominable that boys like that should be murdered? That some senile old beast of a diplomatist should decree, after a good dinner, that all we love best must be offered up?” She caught his hands again, her liturgical scent enveloping him. “Campton, I know you feel as I do.” She paused, pressing his fingers hard, her beautiful mouth trembling. “For God’s sake tell me,” she implored, “how you’ve managed to keep your son from the front!”
Campton drew away, red and inarticulate. “I—my son? Those things depend on the authorities. My boy’s health....” he stammered.
“Yes, yes; I know. Your George is delicate. But so is my Ladislas—dreadfully. The lungs too. I’ve trembled for him for so long; and now, at any moment....” Two tears gathered on her long lashes and rolled down ... “at any moment he may be taken from the War Office, where he’s doing invaluable work, and forced into all that blood and horror; he may be brought back to me like those poor creatures upstairs, who are 154hardly men any longer ... mere vivisected animals, without eyes, without faces.” She lowered her voice and drew her lids together, so that her very eyes seemed to be whispering. “Ladislas has enemies who are jealous of him (I could give you their names); at this moment someone who ought to be at the front is intriguing to turn him out and get his place. Oh, Campton, you’ve known this terror—you know what one’s nights are like! Have pity—tell me how you managed!”
He had no idea of what he answered, or how he finally got away. Everything that was dearest to him, the thought of George, the vision of the lad dying upstairs, was defiled by this monstrous coupling of their names with that of the supple middle-aged adventurer safe in his spotless uniform at the War Office. And beneath the boiling-up of Campton’s disgust a new fear lifted its head. How did Mme. de Dolmetsch know about George? And what did she know? Evidently there had been foolish talk somewhere. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brant—or perhaps Fortin himself. All these great doctors forgot the professional secret with some one woman, if not with many. Had not Fortin revealed to his own wife the reason of Campton’s precipitate visit? The painter escaped from Mme. de Dolmetsch’s scented lair, and from the sights and sounds of the hospital, in a state of such perturbation that for a while he stood in the street wondering where he had meant to go next.
155He had his own reasons for agreeing to the Davrils’ suggestion that the picture should be returned to him; and presently these reasons came back. “They’d never dare to sell it themselves; but why shouldn’t I sell it for them?” he had thought, remembering their denuded rooms, and the rusty smell of the women’s mourning. It cost him a pang to part with a study of his boy; but he was in a superstitious and expiatory mood, and eager to act on it.
He remembered having been told by Boylston that “The Friends of French Art” had their office in the Palais Royal, and he made his way through the deserted arcades to the door of a once-famous restaurant.
Behind the plate-glass windows young women with rolled-up sleeves and straw in their hair were delving in packing-cases, while, divided from them by an improvised partition, another group were busy piling on the cloak-room shelves garments such as had never before dishonoured them.
Campton stood fascinated by the sight of the things these young women were sorting: pink silk combinations, sporting ulsters in glaring black and white checks, straw hats wreathed with last summer’s sunburnt flowers, high-heeled satin shoes split on the instep, and fringed and bugled garments that suggested obsolete names like “dolman” and “mantle,” and looked like the costumes dug out of a country-house attic by amateurs preparing to play “Caste.” Was it possible 156that “The Friends of French Art” proposed to clothe the families of fallen artists in these prehistoric properties?
Boylston appeared, flushed and delighted (and with straw in his hair also), and led his visitor up a corkscrew stair. They passed a room where a row of people in shabby mourning like that of the Davril family sat on restaurant chairs before a caissière’s desk; and at the desk Campton saw Miss Anthony, her veil pushed back and a card-catalogue at her elbow, listening to a young woman who was dramatically stating her case.
Boylston saw Campton’s surprise, and said: “Yes, we’re desperately short-handed, and Miss Anthony has deserted her refugees for a day or two to help me to straighten things out.”
His own office was in a faded cabinet particulier where the dinner-table had been turned into a desk, and the weak-springed divan was weighed down under suits of ready-made clothes bearing the label of a wholesale clothier.
“These are the things we really give them; but they cost a lot of money to buy,” Boylston explained. On the divan sat a handsomely dressed elderly lady with a long emaciated face and red eyes, who rose as they entered. Boylston spoke to her in an undertone and led her into another cabinet, where Campton saw her tragic figure sink down on the sofa, under a glass scrawled with amorous couplets.
157“That was Mme. Beausite.... You didn’t recognize her? Poor thing! Her youngest boy is blind: his eyes were put out by a shell. She is very unhappy, and she comes here and helps now and then. Beausite? Oh no, we never see him. He’s only our Honorary President.”
Boylston obviously spoke without afterthought; but Campton felt the sting. He too was on the honorary committee.
“Poor woman! What? The young fellow who did Cubist things? I hadn’t heard....” He remembered the cruel rumour that Beausite, when his glory began to wane, had encouraged his three sons in three different lines of art, so that there might always be a Beausite in the fashion.... “You must have to listen to pretty ghastly stories here,” he said.
The young man nodded, and Campton, with less embarrassment than he had expected, set forth his errand. In that atmosphere it seemed natural to be planning ways of relieving misery, and Boylston at once put him at his ease by looking pleased but not surprised.
“You mean to sell the sketch, sir? That will put the Davrils out of anxiety for a long time; and they’re in a bad way, as you saw.” Boylston undid the parcel, with a respectful: “May I?” and put the canvas on a chair. He gazed at it for a few moments, the blood rising sensitively over his face till it reached his tight ridge of hair. Campton remembered what George had 158said of his friend’s silent admirations; he was glad the young man did not speak.
When he did, it was to say with a businesslike accent: “We’re trying to get up an auction of pictures and sketches—and if we could lead off with this....”
It was Campton’s turn to redden. The possibility was one he had not thought of. If the picture were sold at auction, Anderson Brant would be sure to buy it! But he could not say this to Boylston. He hesitated, and the other, who seemed quick at feeling his way, added at once: “But perhaps you’d rather sell it privately? In that case we should get the money sooner.”
It was just the right thing to say: and Campton thanked him and picked up his sketch. At the door he hesitated, feeling that it became a member of the honorary committee to add something more.
“How are you getting on? Getting all the help you need?”
Boylston smiled. “We need such a lot. People have been very generous: we’ve had several big sums. But look at those ridiculous clothes downstairs—we get boxes and boxes of such rubbish! And there are so many applicants, and such hard cases. Take those poor Davrils, for instance. The lame Davril girl has a talent for music: plays the violin. Well, what good does it do her now? The artists are having an awful time. If this war goes on much longer, it won’t be only at the front that they’ll die.”
159“Ah——” said Campton. “Well, I’ll take this to a dealer——”
On the way down he turned in to greet Miss Anthony. She looked up in surprise, her tired face haloed in tumbling hairpins; but she was too busy to do more than nod across the group about her desk.
At his offer to take her home she shook her head. “I’m here till after seven. Mr. Boylston and I are nearly snowed under. We’ve got to go down presently and help unpack; and after that I’m due at my refugee canteen at the Nord. It’s my night shift.”
Campton, on the way back to Montmartre, fell to wondering if such excesses of altruism were necessary, or a mere vain overflow of energy. He was terrified by his first close glimpse of the ravages of war, and the efforts of the little band struggling to heal them seemed pitifully ineffectual. No doubt they did good here and there, made a few lives less intolerable; but how the insatiable monster must laugh at them as he spread his red havoc wider!
On reaching home, Campton forgot everything at sight of a letter from George. He had not had one for two weeks, and this interruption, just as the military mails were growing more regular, had made him anxious. But it was the usual letter: brief, cheerful, inexpressive. Apparently there was no change in George’s situation, nor any wish on his part that there should be. He grumbled humorously at the dulness of his 160work and the monotony of life in a war-zone town; and wondered whether, if this sort of thing went on, there might not soon be some talk of leave. And just at the end of his affectionate and unsatisfactory two pages, Campton lit on a name that roused him.
“I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher yesterday on his way to the English front. The young lunatic looked very fit. You know he volunteered in the English army when he found he couldn’t get into the French. He’s likely to get all the fighting he wants.” It was a relief to know that someone had seen Benny Upsher lately. The letter was but four days old, and he was then on his way to the front. Probably he was not yet in the fighting he wanted, and one could, without remorse, call up an unmutilated face and clear blue eyes.
Campton, re-reading the postscript, was struck by a small thing. George had originally written: “I saw Benny Upsher yesterday,” and had then altered the phrase to: “I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher.” There was nothing out of the way in that: it simply showed that he had written in haste and revised the sentence. But he added: “The young lunatic looked very fit.” Well: that too was natural. It was “the fellow” who reported Benny as looking fit; the phrase was rather elliptic, but Campton could hardly have said why it gave him the impression that it was George himself who had seen Upsher. The idea was manifestly absurd, since there was the length of the front between 161George’s staff-town and the fiery pit yawning for his cousin. Campton laid aside the letter with the distinct wish that his son had not called Benny Upsher a young lunatic.