When Campton took his sketch of George to Léonce Black, the dealer who specialized in “Camptons,” he was surprised at the magnitude of the sum which the great picture-broker, lounging in a glossy War Office uniform among his Gauguins and Vuillards, immediately offered.
Léonce Black noted his surprise and smiled. “You think there’s nothing doing nowadays? Don’t you believe it, Mr. Campton. Now that the big men have stopped painting, the collectors are all the keener to snap up what’s left in their portfolios.” He placed the cheque in Campton’s hand, and drew back to study the effect of the sketch, which he had slipped into a frame against a velvet curtain. “Ah——” he said, as if he were tasting an old wine.
As Campton turned to go the dealer’s enthusiasm bubbled over. “Haven’t you got anything more? Remember me if you have.”
“I don’t sell my sketches,” said Campton. “This was exceptional—for a charity....”
“I know, I know. Well, you’re likely to have a good many more calls of the same sort before we get this 162war over,” the dealer remarked philosophically. “Anyhow, remember I can place anything you’ll give me. When people want a Campton it’s to me they come. I’ve got standing orders from two clients ... both given before the war, and both good to-day.”
Campton paused in the doorway, seized by his old fear of the painting’s passing into Anderson Brant’s possession.
“Look here: where is this one going?”
The dealer cocked his handsome grey head and glanced archly through plump eyelids. “Violation of professional secrecy? Well.... Well ... under constraint I’ll confess it’s to a young lady: great admirer, artist herself. Had her order by cable from New York a year ago. Been on the lookout ever since.”
“Oh, all right,” Campton answered, repocketing the money.
He set out at once for “The Friends of French Art,” and Léonce Black, bound for the Ministry of War, walked by his side, regaling him alternately with the gossip of the Ministry and with racy anecdotes of the dealers’ world. In M. Black’s opinion the war was an inexcusable blunder, since Germany was getting to be the best market for the kind of freak painters out of whom the dealers who “know how to make a man ‘foam’” can make a big turn over. “I don’t know what on earth will become of all those poor devils now: Paris cared for them only because she knew Germany would 163give any money for their things. Personally, as you know, I’ve always preferred sounder goods: I’m a classic, my dear Campton, and I can feel only classic art,” said the dealer, swelling out his uniformed breast and stroking his Assyrian nose as though its handsome curve followed the pure Delphic line. “But, as long as things go on as they are at present in my department of the administration, the war’s not going to end in a hurry,” he continued. “And now we’re in for it, we’ve got to see the thing through.”
Campton found Boylston, as usual, in his melancholy cabinet particulier. He was listening to the tale of a young woman with streaming eyes and an extravagant hat. She was so absorbed in her trouble that she did not notice Campton’s entrance, and behind her back the painter made a sign to say that she was not to be interrupted.
He was as much interested in the suppliant’s tale as in watching Boylston’s way of listening. That modest and commonplace-looking young man was beginning to excite a lively curiosity in Campton. It was not only that he remembered George’s commendation, for he knew that the generous enthusiasms of youth may be inspired by trifles imperceptible to the older. It was Boylston himself who interested the painter. He knew no more of the young man than the scant details Miss Anthony could give. Boylston, it appeared, was the oldest hope of a well-to-do Connecticut family. On his 164leaving college a place had been reserved for him in the paternal business; but he had announced good-humouredly that he did not mean to spend his life in an office, and one day, after a ten minutes’ conversation with his father, as to which details were lacking, he had packed a suitcase and sailed for France. There he had lived ever since, in shabby rooms in the rue de Verneuil, on the scant allowance remitted by an irate parent: apparently never running into debt, yet always ready to help a friend.
All the American art-students in Paris knew Boylston; and though he was still in the early thirties, they all looked up to him. For Boylston had one quality which always impresses youth: Boylston knew everybody. Whether you went with him to a smart restaurant in the rue Royale, or to a wine-shop of the Left Bank, the patron welcomed him with the same cordiality, and sent the same emphatic instructions to the cook. The first fresh peas and the tenderest spring chicken were always for this quiet youth, who, when he was alone, dined cheerfully on veal and vin ordinaire. If you wanted to know where to get the best Burgundy, Boylston could tell you; he could also tell you where to buy an engagement ring for your girl, a Ford runabout going at half-price, or the papier timbré on which to address a summons to a recalcitrant laundress.
If you got into a row with your landlady you found that Boylston knew her, and that at sight of him she 165melted and withdrew her claim; or, failing this, he knew the solicitor in whose office her son was a clerk, or had other means of reducing her to reason. Boylston also knew a man who could make old clocks go, another who could clean flannels without their shrinking, and a third who could get you old picture-frames for a song; and, best of all, when any inexperienced American youth was caught in the dark Parisian cobweb (and the people at home were on no account to hear about it) Boylston was found to be the friend and familiar of certain occult authorities who, with a smile and a word of warning, could break the mesh and free the victim.
The mystery was, how and why all these people did what Boylston wanted; but the reason began to dawn on Campton as he watched the young woman in the foolish hat deliver herself of her grievance. Boylston was simply a perfect listener—and most of his life was spent in listening. Everything about him listened: his round forehead and peering screwed-up eyes, his lips twitching responsively under the close-clipped moustache, and every crease and dimple of his sagacious and humorous young countenance; even the attitude of his short fat body, with elbows comfortably bedded in heaped up papers, and fingers plunged into his crinkled hair. There was never a hint of hurry or impatience about him: having once asserted his right to do what he liked with his life, he was apparently content 166to let all his friends prey on it. You never caught his eye on the clock, or his lips shaping an answer before you had turned the last corner of your story. Yet when the story was told, and he had surveyed it in all its bearings, you could be sure he would do what he could for you, and do it before the day was over.
“Very well, Mademoiselle,” he said, when the young woman had finished. “I promise you I’ll see Mme. Beausite, and try to get her to recognize your claim.”
“Mind you, I don’t ask charity—I won’t take charity from your committee!” the young lady hissed, gathering up a tawdry hand-bag.
“Oh, we’re not forcing it on any one,” smiled Boylston, opening the door for her.
When he turned back to Campton his face was flushed and frowning. “Poor thing! She’s a nuisance, but I’ll fight to the last ditch for her. The chap she lives with was Beausite’s secretary and understudy, and devilled for him before the war. The poor fellow has come back from the front a complete wreck, and can’t even collect the salary Beausite owes him for the last three months before the war. Beausite’s plea is that he’s too poor, and that the war lets him out of paying. Of course he counts on our doing it for him.”
“And you’re not going to?”
“Well,” said Boylston humorously, “I shouldn’t wonder if he beat us in the long run. But I’ll have a try first; and anyhow the poor girl needn’t know. She 167used to earn a little money doing fashion-articles, but of course there’s no market for that now, and I don’t see how the pair can live. They have a little boy, and there’s an infirm mother, and they’re waiting to get married till the girl can find a job.”
“Good Lord!” Campton groaned, with a sudden vision of the countless little trades and traffics arrested by the war, and all the industrious thousands reduced to querulous pauperism or slow death.
“How do they live—all these people?”
“They don’t—always. I could tell you——”
“Don’t, for God’s sake; I can’t stand it.” Campton drew out the cheque. “Here: this is what I’ve got for the Davrils.”
“Good Lord!” said Boylston, staring with round eyes.
“It will pull them through, anyhow, won’t it?” Campton triumphed.
“Well——” said Boylston. “It will if you’ll endorse it,” he added, smiling. Campton laughed and took up a pen.
A day or two later Campton, returning home one afternoon, overtook a small black-veiled figure with a limp like his own. He guessed at once that it was the lame Davril girl, come to thank him; and his dislike of such ceremonies caused him to glance about for a way of escape. But as he did so the girl turned with a smile 168that put him to shame. He remembered Adele Anthony’s saying, one day when he had found her in her refugee office patiently undergoing a like ordeal: “We’ve no right to refuse the only coin they can repay us in.”
The Davril girl was a plain likeness of her brother, with the same hungry flame in her eyes. She wore the nondescript black that Campton had remarked at the funeral; and knowing the importance which the French attach to every detail of conventional mourning, he wondered that mother and daughter had not laid out part of his gift in crape. But doubtless the equally strong instinct of thrift had caused Mme. Davril to put away the whole sum.
Mlle. Davril greeted Campton pleasantly, and assured him that she had not found the long way from Villejuif to Montmartre too difficult.
“I would have gone to you,” the painter protested; but she answered that she wanted to see with her own eyes where her brother’s friend lived.
In the studio she looked about her with a quick searching glance, said “Oh, a piano——” as if the fact were connected with the object of her errand—and then, settling herself in an armchair, unclasped her shabby hand-bag.
“Monsieur, there has been a misunderstanding; this money is not ours.” She laid Campton’s cheque on the table.
A flush of annoyance rose to the painter’s face. What 169on earth had Boylston let him in for? If the Davrils were as proud as all that it was not worth while to have sold a sketch it had cost him such a pang to part with. He felt the exasperation of the would be philanthropist when he first discovers that nothing complicates life as much as doing good.
“But, Mademoiselle——”
“This money is not ours. If René had lived he would never have sold your picture; and we would starve rather than betray his trust.”
When stout ladies in velvet declare that they would starve rather than sacrifice this or that principle, the statement has only the cold beauty of rhetoric; but on the drawn lips of a thinly-clad young woman evidently acquainted with the process, it becomes a fiery reality.
“Starve—nonsense! My dear young lady, you betray him when you talk like that,” said Campton, moved.
She shook her head. “It depends, Monsieur, which things matter most to one. We shall never—my mother and I—do anything that René would not have done. The picture was not ours: we brought it back to you——”
“But if the picture’s not yours it’s mine,” Campton interrupted; “and I’d a right to sell it, and a right to do what I choose with the money.”
His visitor smiled. “That’s what we feel; it was 170what I was coming to.” And clasping her threadbare glove-tips about the arms of the chair Mlle. Davril set forth with extreme precision the object of her visit.
It was to propose that Campton should hand over the cheque to “The Friends of French Art,” devoting one-third to the aid of the families of combatant painters, the rest to young musicians and authors. “It doesn’t seem right that only the painters’ families should benefit by what your committee are doing. And René would have thought so too. He knew so many young men of letters and journalists who, before the war, just managed to keep their families alive; and in my profession I could tell you of poor music-teachers and accompanists whose work stopped the day war broke out, and who have been living ever since on the crusts their luckier comrades could spare them. René would have let us accept from you help that was shared with others: he would have been so glad, often, of a few francs to relieve the misery we see about us. And this great sum might be the beginning of a co-operative work for artists ruined by the war.”
She went on to explain that in the families of almost all the young artists at the front there was at least one member at home who practised one of the arts, or who was capable of doing some kind of useful work. The value of Campton’s gift, Mlle. Davril argued, would be tripled if it were so employed as to give the artists and their families occupation: producing at 171least the illusion that those who could were earning their living, or helping their less fortunate comrades. “It’s not only a question of saving their dignity: I don’t believe much in that. You have dignity or you haven’t—and if you have, it doesn’t need any saving,” this clear-toned young woman remarked. “The real question, for all of us artists, is that of keeping our hands in, and our interest in our work alive; sometimes, too, of giving a new talent its first chance. At any rate, it would mean work and not stagnation; which is all that most charity produces.”
She developed her plan: for the musicians, concerts in private houses (hence her glance at the piano); for the painters, small exhibitions in the rooms of the committee, where their pictures would be sold with the deduction of a percentage, to be returned to the general fund; and for the writers—well, their lot was perhaps the hardest to deal with; but an employment agency might be opened, where those who chose could put their names down and take such work as was offered. Above all, Mlle. Davril again insisted, the fund created by Campton’s gift was to be spent only in giving employment, not for mere relief.
Campton listened with growing attention. Nothing hitherto had been less in the line of his interests than the large schemes of general amelioration which were coming to be classed under the transatlantic term of “Social Welfare.” If questioned on the subject a few 172months earlier he would probably have concealed his fundamental indifference under the profession of an extreme individualism, and the assertion of every man’s right to suffer and starve in his own way. Even since René Davril’s death had brought home to him the boundless havoc of the war, he had felt no more than the impulse to ease his own pain by putting his hand in his pocket when a particular case was too poignant to be ignored.
Yet here were people who had already offered their dearest to France, and were now pleading to be allowed to give all the rest; and who had had the courage and wisdom to think out in advance the form in which their gift would do most good. Campton had the awe of the unpractical man for anyone who knows how to apply his ideas. He felt that there was no use in disputing Mlle. Davril’s plan: he must either agree to it or repocket his cheque.
“I’ll do as you want, of course; but I’m not much good about details. Hadn’t you better consult some one else?” he suggested.
Oh, that was already done: she had outlined her project to Miss Anthony and Mr. Boylston, who approved. All she wanted was Campton’s consent; and this he gave the more cordially when he learned that, for the present at least, nothing more was expected of him. First steps in beneficence, he felt, were unspeakably terrifying; yet he was already aware that, 173resist as he might, he would never be able to keep his footing on the brink of that abyss.
Into it, as the days went by, his gaze was oftener and oftener plunged. He had begun to feel that pity was his only remaining link with his kind, the one barrier between himself and the dreadful solitude which awaited him when he returned to his studio. What would there have been to think of there, alone among his unfinished pictures and his broken memories, if not the wants and woes of people more bereft than himself? His own future was not a thing to dwell on. George was safe: but what George and he were likely to make of each other after the ordeal was over was a question he preferred to put aside. He was more and more taking George and his safety for granted, as a solid standing-ground from which to reach out a hand to the thousands struggling in the depths. As long as the world’s fate was in the balance it was every man’s duty to throw into that balance his last ounce of brain and muscle. Campton wondered how he had ever thought that an accident of birth, a remoteness merely geographical, could justify, or even make possible, an attitude of moral aloofness. Harvey Mayhew’s reasons for wishing to annihilate Germany began to seem less grotesque than his own for standing aside.
In the heat of his conversion he no longer grudged the hours given to Mr. Mayhew. He patiently led his truculent relative from one government office to another, 174everywhere laying stress on Mr. Mayhew’s sympathy with France and his desire to advocate her cause in the United States, and trying to curtail his enumeration of his grievances by a glance at the clock, and the reminder that they had another Minister to see. Mr. Mayhew was not very manageable. His adventure had grown with repetition, and he was increasingly disposed to feel that the retaliation he called down on Germany could best be justified by telling every one what he had suffered from her. Intensely aware of the value of time in Utica, he was less sensible of it in Paris, and seemed to think that, since he had left a flourishing business to preach the Holy War, other people ought to leave their affairs to give him a hearing. But his zeal and persistence were irresistible, and doors which Campton had seen barred against the most reasonable appeals flew open at the sound of Mr. Mayhew’s trumpet. His pink face and silvery hair gave him an apostolic air, and circles to which America had hitherto been a mere speck in space suddenly discovered that he represented that legendary character, the Typical American.
The keen Boylston, prompt to note and utilize the fact, urged Campton to interest Mr. Mayhew in “The Friends of French Art,” and with considerable flourish the former Peace Delegate was produced at a committee meeting and given his head. But his interest flagged when he found that the “Friends” concerned 175themselves with Atrocities only in so far as any act of war is one, and that their immediate task was the humdrum one of feeding and clothing the families of the combatants and sending “comforts” to the trenches. He served up, with a somewhat dog-eared eloquence, the usual account of his own experiences, and pressed a modest gift upon the treasurer; but when he departed, after wringing everybody’s hands, and leaving the French members bedewed with emotion, Campton had the conviction that their quiet weekly meetings would not often be fluttered by his presence.
Campton was spending an increasing amount of time in the Palais Royal restaurant, where he performed any drudgery for which no initiative was required. Once or twice, when Miss Anthony was submerged by a fresh influx of refugees, he lent her a hand too; and on most days he dropped in late at her office, waited for her to sift and dismiss the last applicants, and saw her home through the incessant rain. It interested him to note that the altruism she had so long wasted on pampered friends was developing into a wise and orderly beneficence. He had always thought of her as an eternal schoolgirl; now she had grown into a woman. Sometimes he fancied the change dated from the moment when their eyes had met across the station, the day they had seen George off. He wondered whether it might not be interesting to paint her new face, if ever painting became again thinkable.
“Passion—I suppose the great thing is a capacity for passion,” he mused.
In himself he imagined the capacity to be quite dead. He loved his son: yes—but he was beginning to see that he loved him for certain qualities he had read into him, and that perhaps after all——. Well, perhaps after all the sin for which he was now atoning in loneliness was that of having been too exclusively an artist, of having cherished George too egotistically and self-indulgently, too much as his own most beautiful creation. If he had loved him more humanly, more tenderly and recklessly, might he have not put into his son the tenderness and recklessness which were beginning to seem to him the qualities most supremely human?
A week or two later, coming home late from a long day’s work at the office, Campton saw Mme. Lebel awaiting him.
He always stopped for a word now; fearing each time that there was bad news of Jules Lebel, but not wishing to seem to avoid her.
To-day, however, Mme. Lebel, though mysterious, was not anxious.
“Monsieur will find the studio open. There’s a lady: she insisted on going up.”
“A lady? Why did you let her in? What kind of a lady?”
177“A lady—well, a lady with such magnificent furs that one couldn’t keep her out in the cold,” Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity.
Campton went up apprehensively. The idea of unknown persons in possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were, whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed the tranquil course of things, faced him with unexpected problems, unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was like dynamiting fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of dismembered thoughts.
As he entered he perceived from the temperate atmosphere that Mme. Lebel had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. The lady’s furs must indeed be magnificent.
She sat at the farther end of the room, in a high-backed chair near the stove, and when she rose he recognized his former wife. The long sable cloak, which had slipped back over the chair, justified Mme. Lebel’s description, but the dress beneath it appeared to Campton simpler than Mrs. Brant’s habitual raiment. The lamplight, striking up into her powdered face, puffed out her under-lids and made harsh hollows in her cheeks. She looked frightened, ill and yet determined.
“John——” she began, laying her hand on his sleeve.
It was the first time she had ever set foot in his shabby quarters, and in his astonishment he could only stammer out: “Julia——”
178But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears. “Not—bad news?” he broke out.
She shook her head and, drawing a handkerchief from a diamond-monogrammed bag, wiped away the tears and the powder. Then she pressed the handkerchief to her lips, gazing at him with eyes as helpless as a child’s.
“Sit down,” said Campton.
As they faced each other across the long table, with papers and paint-rags and writing materials pushed aside to make room for the threadbare napkin on which his plate and glass, and bottle of vin ordinaire, were set out, he wondered if the scene woke in her any memory of their first days of gaiety and poverty, or if she merely pitied him for still living in such squalor. And suddenly it occurred to him that when the war was over, and George came back, it would be pleasant to hunt out a little apartment in an old house in the Faubourg St. Germain, put some good furniture in it, and oppose the discreeter charm of such an interior to the heavy splendours of the Avenue Marigny. How could he expect to hold a luxury-loving youth if he had only this dingy studio to receive him in?
Mrs. Brant began to speak.
“I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I think? 179She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has happened ... too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful ... and of course men like that ought not to be sent to the front....”
“Men like what?”
“Geniuses,” said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and was doing admirable work on some military commission in Paris; I believe he knew any number of languages. And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know I’ve never approved of her; but things are so changed nowadays, and at any rate she was madly attached to him, and had done everything to keep him in Paris: medical certificates, people at Headquarters working for her, and all the rest. But it seems there are no end of officers always intriguing to get staff-jobs: strong able-bodied young men who ought to be in the trenches, and are fit for nothing else, but who are jealous of the others. And last week, in spite of all she could do, poor Isador was ordered to the front.”
Campton made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him to be appealed to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de Dolmetsch in George’s. His gorge rose at the thought that people should associate in their minds cases as different as those of his son and Mme. de Dolmetsch’s lover.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask 180me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”
Mrs. Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front.”
“Good Lord—Isador?”
Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving devil drawn in his turn into that merciless red eddy, and gulped down the Monster’s throat with the rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and the hero!
“Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse her desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor creature’s love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.
“Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing, literally nothing, undone to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes what was coming. “It’s impossible now that George should not be taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.
181The same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she would not say it.
“It may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.
They sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again imploringly: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”
Campton picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an oily rag. Mrs. Brant’s anguished voice still sounded on. “Unless something is done immediately.... It appears there’s a regular hunt for embusqués, as they’re called. As if it was everybody’s business to be killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if they’re all taken? But it’s certain that if we don’t act at once ... act energetically....”
He fixed his eyes on hers. “Why do you come to me?” he asked.
Her lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”
“Your husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me——”
She reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on her lips.
“Why did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you wanted to see me without Brant’s knowing it?”
She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still automatically rubbing.
“Because Anderson thinks.... Anderson won’t.... He says he’s done all he can.”
182“Ah——” cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his shoulders, as if to shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,” he declared.
“You—you feel as he does? You, George’s father? But a father has never done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he can do!”
The words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her from an ageing doll into a living and agonized woman. Campton had never before felt as near to her, as moved to the depths by her. For the length of a heart-beat he saw her again with a red-haired baby in her arms, the light of morning on her face.
“My dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.
“Sorry—sorry? I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I want you to save him!”
He faced her with bent head, gazing absently at their interwoven fingers: each hand had forgotten to release the other.
“I can’t do anything more,” he repeated.
She started up with a despairing exclamation. “What’s happened to you? Who has influenced you? What has changed you?”
How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing 183to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly in its essence been no other. That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.
In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience of the millions of the untaught and the unthinking, though it had its deep pathetic significance, did not move Campton like the clear-eyed sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying. Jean Fortin, René Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his reasoned horror of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the necessity of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on the dark problem.
Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils 184of association, habit, background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.
He heard Mrs. Brant crying.
“Julia,” he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see....”
She dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is you, sitting here safe and saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to say that you ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose those young men out there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are too high-minded and conscientious to protect them?”
He looked at her compassionately. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest part of it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst war for us old people to lie awake about.”
Mrs. Brant had stood up and was feverishly pulling on her gloves: he saw that she no longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her, and stood waiting while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves of hair into place, her eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was nothing more that either could say.
He lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.
“You needn’t come down,” she said in a sob; but leaning over the rail into the darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the concierge has forgotten the lamp on the stairs.”
He went ahead of her down the long greasy flights, and as they reached the ground floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and frightened voices exclaiming. In the doorway of the porter’s lodge Mrs. Brant’s splendid chauffeur stood looking on compassionately at a group of women gathered about Mme. Lebel.
The old woman sat in her den, her arms stretched across the table, her sewing fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s wife from the corner stood by, sobbing.
Mrs. Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his way through the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his with the mute reproach of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last Wednesday ... through the heart.”
Campton took her old withered hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush fell upon the stifling little room. When Campton looked up again he saw Julia Brant, pale and bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the vault of the porte-cochère sent back the chauffeur’s answer to her startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her only son’s been killed at the front.”
Campton sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter’s pleasant little entresol full of Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.
Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding of slender consoles.
On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.
“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?”
Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt of hers?
Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a 187problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of Paris.
He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.
“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?”
“Well—by any honourable means.”
Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”
“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their 188meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused a moment, and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”
Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, thank God, had remained perfectly detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice of his being mixed up in the thing at all.
But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.
“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”
Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.
“Whereas you——” Dastrey suggested.
“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, 189and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”
“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said Boylston.
Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why——” he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”
Even while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: 190as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”
Boylston grunted his assent.
“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among the women.”
“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”
The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows, deserted streets, the 191almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through the winter, life had seemed in suspense everywhere, as much on the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of rain and sleet and mud; day after day, week after week, of vague non-committal news from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but still menacing, everywhere death, suffering, destruction, without any perceptible oscillation of the scales, any compensating hope of good to come out of the long slow endless waste. The benumbed and darkened Paris of those February days seemed the visible image of a benumbed and darkened world.
Down the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights stretched interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and stood watching the rush of the Seine. Below them gloomed the vague bulk of deserted bath-houses, unlit barges, river-steamers out of commission. The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.
The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway. He, whom his lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory need to him. “Out there—out 192there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d think it was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse, driving on obstinately through rain and darkness.
The thought of “Out there” besieged him day and night, the phrase was always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly suffering and dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records were kept. Some of these histories were so heroically simple that the sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one were looking at suffering transmuted into poetry. But others were abominable, unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and filth and hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous mutilation, of men perishing of thirst in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies dragging themselves back to shelter only to die as they reached it. Worst of all were the perpetually recurring reports of military blunders, medical neglect, carelessness in high places: the torturing knowledge of the lives that might have been saved 193if this or that officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more promptly. An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy, prejudice, and the indifference of selfishness or of mortal fatigue, emanated from these narratives written home from the front, or faltered out by white lips on hospital pillows.
“The Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their range, had to do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of thought and criticism. A nation in arms does not judge a war as simply as an army of professional soldiers. All these young intelligences were so many subtly-adjusted instruments for the testing of the machinery of which they formed a part; and not one accepted the results passively. Yet in one respect all were agreed: the “had to be” of the first day was still on every lip. The German menace must be met: chance willed that theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that point speculation was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred them all was how the country they were defending was helping them to carry on the struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often scathingly explicit; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss, caught a shuddering glimpse of what might be—must be—if political blunders, inertia, tolerance, perhaps even evil ambitions and connivances, should at last outweigh the effort of the front. There was no logical argument against such a possibility. All civilizations 194had their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old. Yes—but woe to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their triumphs. Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great turning-points of progress, saw how the liberties of England had been born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest, and how even out of the hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had come more freedom and a wiser order. The point was to remember that the efficacy of the sacrifice was always in proportion to the worth of the victims; and there at least his faith was sure.
He could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a day or two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and asking in vague terms if George himself thought any change in his situation probable. His letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly time yet to ask for leave——”
ot long after his midnight tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post brought Campton two letters. One was postmarked Paris, the other bore the military frank and was addressed in his son’s hand: he laid it aside while he glanced at the first. It contained an engraved card:
Mrs. Anderson Brant
At Home on February 20th at 4 o’clock
Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account of his captivity in Germany
Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing
For the benefit of the “Friends of French Art Committee”
Tickets 100 francs
Enclosed was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at the Front, with which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the names of Mrs. Talkett, Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and American ladies.
Campton tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he knew that Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril were getting up a series of drawing-room 196entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the card had been sent to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any reminder of the sort always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in him. He turned to George’s letter.
It was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his son’s previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.
“Dear Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on skis, the snow here is so deep.” (There had, in fact, been a heavy snow-fall in the Argonne). “Sorry mother is bothering about things again; as you’ve often reminded me, they always have a way of ‘being as they will be,’ and even war doesn’t seem to change it. Nothing to worry her in my case—but you can’t expect her to believe that, can you? Neither you nor I can help it, I suppose.
“There’s one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting her feel that you’re a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things look differently, especially this sedentary kind of war: it’s rather like going over all the old odds-and-ends in one’s cupboards. And some of them do look so foolish.
“I wish you’d see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had happened. You know you’ve got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The said I. T. is doing well, and has nothing new to communicate up to now 197except a change of address. Hereafter please write to my Base instead of directing here, as there’s some chance of a shift of H.Q. The precaution is probably just a new twist of the old red tape, signifying nothing; but Base will always reach me if we are shifted. Let mother know, and explain, please; otherwise she’ll think the unthinkable.
“Interrupted by big drive—quill-drive, of course!
“As ever
“Georgius Scriblerius.
“P.S. Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy either.
“No. 2.—I had thought of leave; but perhaps you’re right about that.”
It was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His smiling policy had always been to let things alone, and go on impartially dividing his devotion between his parents, since they refused to share even that common blessing. But war gave everything a new look; and he had evidently, as he put it, been turning over the old things in his cupboards. How was it possible, Campton wondered, that after such a turning over he was still content to write “Nothing new to communicate,” and to make jokes about another big quill-drive? Glancing at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George was sitting a few miles off, safe 198in headquarters at Sainte Menehould, with a stout roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his boots, scribbling punning letters while his comrades fell back from that bloody summit....
Suddenly Campton’s eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter for the sake of the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before it. Ah, how young the boy was to imagine that his father would not see! Yes, as he said, war made so many of the old things look foolish....
Campton set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long time past: the tone of his boy’s letter seemed to correspond with his own secret change of spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring the Brants and himself together, but was glad that George had made the suggestion. He resolved to see Julia that afternoon.
At the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an exhibition of paintings sent home from the front, and Mlle. Davril helping to catalogue them. Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing fresh tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with poverty and sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about, tragic and ineffectual. Boylston had not been able to extract a penny from Beausite for his secretary and the latter’s left-handed family; but Mme. Beausite had discovered a newly-organized charity which lent money to “temporarily 199embarrassed” war-victims; and with an artless self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain a small loan for the victim of her own thrift. “For what other purpose are such charities founded?” she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which Miss Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton came in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful white head over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.
The telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the receiver.
“Mr. Campton!”
The painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed to him charged with explosives.
“Take the message, do. The thing always snaps at me.”
There was a listening pause: then Boylston said: “It’s about Upsher——”
Campton started up. “Killed——?”
“Not sure. It’s Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you to break it to Mr. Mayhew.”
“Oh, Lord,” the painter groaned, the boy’s face suddenly rising before his blurred eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he would have turned to her; at least she might have gone with him on his quest. He could not ask Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that curious incapacity to deal 200with the raw fact of sorrow which had often given an elfin unreality to the most poignant moments of his life. It was as though experience had to enter into the very substance of his soul before he could even feel it.
“Other people,” he thought, “would know what to say, and I shan’t....”
Some one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau Luxe, though with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had grown two secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an office. One of the secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She was a competent young woman, who instantly extracted from her pocket-diary the fact that her chief was at Mrs. Anderson Brant’s, rehearsing.
“Rehearsing——?”
“Why, yes; he’s to speak at Mrs. Brant’s next week on Atrocities,” she said, surprised at Campton’s ignorance.
She suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich, where but one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as difficult as in the understaffed hotels; and after one or two vain attempts Campton decided to go to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible might still in some vague way help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he was dead. “Or else it’s just the need to rush about,” he thought, 201conscious that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like agitation.
On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter’s visions wear. “I want to be in this thing,” he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.
“If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been alive and safe to-day,” Campton mused, “like George.... The average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of years ago, and never re-examined since.” But this consideration, though drawn from George’s own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.
At the Brants’ a bewildered concierge admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter’s armchair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.
In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pâtes tendres, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his last visit.
202The maid led him to the ball-room. Through double doors of glass Mr. Mayhew’s oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano, reached Campton’s ears: he paused and looked. At the far end of the great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr. Mayhew, a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers. Beside him was a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical perfume-burner; and on it Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in an attitude of affliction.
Beneath the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord from Chopin’s Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross nurses perched on bales of blankets and listened. Under one of their coifs Campton recognized Mrs. Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to the lady nearest her; and the latter, turning, revealed the astonished eyes of Julia Brant.
Campton’s first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr. Mayhew’s rolling periods, was of his former wife’s gift of adaptation. She had made herself a nurse’s face; not a theatrical imitation of it like Mme. de Dolmetsch’s, nor yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster, like Mrs. Talkett’s. Her lovely hair smoothed away under her strict coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs. Brant looked serious, tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found her vocation?
203She gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he had not come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger on her lip and pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails were as beautifully polished as ever.
Mr. Mayhew was saying: “All that I have to give, yes, all that is most precious to me, I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one of the first Victims of that barbarism....”
He paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano filled in the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her attitude, almost without moving her lips, sang a few notes of lamentation.
“Of that hideous barbarism——” Mr. Mayhew began again. “I repeat that I stand here ready to give up everything I hold most dear——”
“Do stop him,” Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.
Little Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her, sprang up and threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed from one widowed pose into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically descending, approached Mrs. Brant.
“You agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de Dolmetsch’s beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral accompaniment—would only weaken my effect? Where the facts are so overwhelming it is enough to state them; that is,” Mr. 204Mayhew added modestly, “if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I hope they are.”
Mme. de Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn from her cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton’s.
“Dear friend, you’ve heard?... You remember our talk? I am Cassandra, cursed with the hideous gift of divination.” Tears rained down her cheeks, washing off the paint like mud swept by a shower. “My only comfort,” she added, fixing her perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, “is to help our great good friend in this crusade against the assassins of my Ladislas.”
Mrs. Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent face go to pieces as if it had been vitrioled.
“Benny—Benny——” he screamed, “Benny hurt? My Benny? It’s some mistake! What makes you think——?” His eyes met Campton’s. “Oh, my God! Why, he’s my sister’s child!” he cried, plunging his face into his soft manicured hands.
In the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the full-throated sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast for an unfindable handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately weeping it into pulp.
Campton had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped Mr. Mayhew was in too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his entreaty.
205“It was you who saw Benny last—you can’t leave me!” the poor man implored; and Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.
Their names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at the unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first time entering the banker’s private office.
Mr. Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the visitors waited, the painter’s registering eye took in the details of the room, from the Barye cire-perdue on a peach-coloured marble mantel to the blue morocco armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table was an electric lamp in a celadon vase, and just the right number of neatly folded papers lay under a paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The room was as tidy as an expensive stage-setting or the cage of a well-kept canary: the only object marring its order was a telegram lying open on the desk.
Mr. Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He shook hands with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton, gave his usual cough, and said: “This is terrible.”
And suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important and powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the desk, Campton murmured to himself: “If this thing were to happen to me I couldn’t bear it.... I simply couldn’t bear it....”
206Benny Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had been seen to fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the telegram, from his commanding officer, reported him as “wounded and missing.”
The words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months. Freezing to death between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of slow agony in German hospitals: these were the alternative visions associated with the now familiar formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of his time collecting details about the treatment of those who had fallen, alive but wounded, into German hands; and Campton guessed that as he sat there every one of these details, cruel, sanguinary, remorseless, had started to life, and that all their victims wore the face of Benny.
The wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his grief that Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the thoughts he was thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each avoiding the other’s eye lest they should betray to one another the secret of their shared exultation at George’s safety.
Finally Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to go with him to the English Military Mission in the hope of getting farther information. He went away, small and shrunken, with the deprecating smile of a man who seeks to ward off a blow; as he left the room Campton heard him say 207timidly to the clerk: “No doubt you speak French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to me.”
Campton had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held him back. He remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy,” and wished he could think of some friendly phrase to ease off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant seemed to have the same wish. He stood, erect and tightly buttoned, one small hand resting on the arm of his desk-chair, as though he were posing for a cabinet size, with the photographer telling him to look natural. His lids twitched behind his protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as straight as a ruler, detached itself by a hair’s breadth from the lower; but no word came.
Campton glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke abruptly.
“There was no reason on earth,” he said, “why poor young Upsher should ever have been in this thing.”
Mr. Brant bowed.
“This sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people’s rows,” Campton continued with rising vehemence, “is of no more use to a civilized state than any other unreasoned instinct. At bottom it’s nothing but what George calls the baseball spirit: just an ignorant passion for fisticuffs.”
Mr. Brant looked at him intently. “When did—George say that?” he asked, with his usual cough before the name.
208Campton coloured. “Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think. It was the view of most thoughtful young fellows at that time.”
“Quite so,” said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.
Campton’s eyes again wandered about the room.
“Now, of course——”
“Ah—now....”
The two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr. Brant, growing pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and they shook hands in silence.
In the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as when he had watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalons, his dead son’s image in his eyes.
Each time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity had fallen he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had been Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to Chalons and resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less could he have accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really inconceivable, thought that Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery furnace like a crumpled letter tossed into a grate. Young Fortin was defending his country—but 209Upsher, in God’s name what was Benny Upsher of Connecticut doing in a war between the continental powers?
Suddenly Campton remembered that he had George’s letter in his pocket, and that he had meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant’s. He had started out that morning full of the good intentions the letter had inspired; but now he had no heart to carry them out. Yet George had said: “Let mother know, and explain, please;” and such an injunction could not be disregarded.
He was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss Anthony was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made haste he might find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive with him, in difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for shelter; her simple unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his mother’s solution of the dark riddles he used to propound in the nursery.
He found her in her little dining-room, with Delft plates askew on imitation Cordova leather, and a Death’s Head Pennon and a Prussian helmet surmounting the nymph in cast bronze on the mantelpiece. In entering he faced the relentless light of a ground-glass window opening on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a look, dropped her fork and sprang up crying: “George——”
“George—why George?” Campton recovered his 210presence of mind under the shock of her agitation. “What made you think of George?”
“Your—your face,” she stammered, sitting down again. “So absurd of me.... But you looked.... A seat for monsieur, Jeanne,” she cried over her shoulder to the pantry.
“Ah—my face? Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has disappeared—I’ve just had to break it to Mayhew.”
“Oh, that poor young Upsher? How dreadful!” Her own face grew instantly serene. “I’m so sorry—so very sorry.... Yes, yes, you shall lunch with me—I know there’s another cutlet,” she insisted.
He shook his head. “I couldn’t.”
“Well, then, I’ve finished.” She led the way into the drawing-room. There it was her turn to face the light, and he saw that her own features were as perturbed as she had apparently discovered his to be.
“Poor Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?
Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should you have been afraid for George?”
Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me open George’s name would run out of every vein,” she said.
“But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something had happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”
She shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.
“Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”
“I don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know where George is any longer.”
She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you mean?”
“Here—look at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother of the change.” He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair. “What can it mean,” he broke out, “except that he’s left Sainte Menehould, that he’s been sent 212elsewhere, and that he doesn’t want us to find out where?”
Miss Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter steadily, and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the same kind, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they were, that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her hands patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The hands folded the letter with precision, and handed it back to him.
“Yes: I see why you thought that—one might have,” she surprised him by conceding. Then, darting at his unprotected face a gaze he seemed to feel though he could not see it: “If it had meant that George had been ordered to the front, how would you have felt?” she demanded.
He had not expected the question, and though in the last weeks he had so often propounded it to himself, it caught him in the chest like a blow. A sense of humiliation, a longing to lay his weakness bare, suddenly rose in him, and he bowed his head. “I couldn’t ... I couldn’t bear it,” he stammered.
She was silent for an interval; then she stood up, and laying her hand on his shaking shoulder crossed the room to a desk in which he knew she kept her private papers. Her keys clinked, and a moment later she 213handed him a letter. It was in George’s writing, and dated on the same day as his own.
“Dearest old girl, nothing new but my address. Hereafter please write to our Base. This order has just been lowered from the empyrean at the end of an endless reel of red tape. What it means nobody knows. It does not appear to imply an immediate change of Headquarters; but even if such a change comes, my job is likely to remain the same. I’m getting used to it, and no wonder, for one day differeth not from another, and I’ve had many of them now. Take care of Dad and mother, and of your matchless self. I’m writing to father to-day. Your George the First—and Last (or I’ll know why).”
The two letters bore one another out in a way which carried conviction. Campton saw that his sudden doubts must have been produced (since he had not felt them that morning) by the agonizing experience he had undergone: the vision of Benny Upsher had unmanned him. George was safe, and asked only to remain so: that was evident from both letters. And as the certainty of his son’s acquiescence once more penetrated Campton it brought with it a fresh reaction of shame. Ashamed—yes, he had begun to be ashamed of George as well as of himself. Under the touch of Adele Anthony’s implacable honesty his last pretenses shrivelled up, and he longed to abase himself. He lifted his head and looked at her, remembering all she would be able to read in his eyes.
You’re satisfied?” she enquired.
“Yes. If that’s the word.” He stretched his hand toward her, and then drew it back. “But it’s not: it’s not the word any longer.” He laboured with the need of self-expression, and the opposing instinct of concealing feelings too complex for Miss Anthony’s simple gaze. How could he say: “I’m satisfied; but I wish to God that George were not”? And was he satisfied, after all? And how could he define, or even be sure that he was actually experiencing, a feeling so contradictory that it seemed to be made up of anxiety for his son’s safety, shame at that anxiety, shame at George’s own complacent acceptance of his lot, and terror of a possible change in that lot? There were hours when it seemed to Campton that the Furies were listening, and ready to fling their awful answer to him if he as much as whispered to himself: “Would to God that George were not satisfied!”
The sense of their haunting presence laid its clutch on him, and caused him, after a pause, to finish his phrase in another tone. “No; satisfied’s not the word; I’m glad George is out of it!” he exclaimed.
Miss Anthony was folding away the letter as calmly as if it had been a refugee record. She did not appear to notice the change in Campton’s voice.
“I don’t pretend to your sublime detachment: you’ve never had a child,” he sneered. (Certainly, if the Furies were listening, they would put that down to his credit!)
215“Oh, my poor John,” she said; then she locked the desk, took her hat from the lamp-chimney on which it had been hanging, jammed it down on her head like a helmet, and remarked: “We’ll go together, shall we? It’s time I got back to the office.”
On the way downstairs both were silent. Campton’s ears echoed with his stupid taunt, and he glanced at her without daring to speak. On the last landing she paused and said: “I’ll see Julia this evening about George’s change of address. She may be worried; and I can explain—I can take her my letter.”
“Oh, do,” he assented. “And tell her—tell her—if she needs me——”
It was as much of a message as he found courage for. Miss Anthony nodded.
One day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And monsieur must really buy himself some new shirts.”
Campton looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of sap, the spring need to go on living, through everything and in spite of everything.
On se fait une raison, as Mme. Lebel would have said. Life had to go on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but every one felt that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the poor broken marionettes with which the Furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler flappings, to the accustomed jerk.
In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on Mlle. Davril, on the greater number of his friends. But their ardour left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure, as earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.
“I give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give them yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who murmured: “Ah, Boylston——” as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.
“At his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of himself.”
“Or into himself, rather. He was a pottering boy before—now he’s a man, with a man’s sense of things.”
“Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary.”
“Not a bit of it.... But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all the young Americans are.”
Campton made an impatient movement. “Benny Upsher again——! Can’t we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?”
“I wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.
Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year’s incessant contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.
Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in 218a refulgent new motor emblazoned with a Red Cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings and conferences with the Service de Santé (for she and Mr. Brant were now among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and throwing open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.
On the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in blossom and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of such incentives. He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a concert for “The Friends of French Art” which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother Campton had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other.
The appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel’s announcement. Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above unfolding green; and Campton, looking up at them, remembered once thinking how Nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans the lamps and fans of the cafés chantants beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished, the fans folded up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the iron chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes, all heaped up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of Nature’s obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when spring had come?
Mrs. Brant, having reduced her household and given over her drawing-rooms to charity, received in her boudoir, a small room contrived by a clever upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she had never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing the door Campton saw George’s last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph, and thrust it into a drawer; he thought a young man on a safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight filled him with a secret dread.
Mrs. Brant was bidding goodbye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His approach through the carpeted antechamber had been unnoticed, and as he entered the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor: “Bridge, chère Madame? No; not yet. I confess I haven’t the courage to take up my old life. We mothers with sons at the front....”
“Ah,” exclaimed the other lady, “there I don’t agree with you. I think one owes it to them to go on as if one were as little afraid as they are. That is what 220all my sons prefer.... Even,” she added, lowering her voice but lifting her head higher, “even, I’m sure, the one who is buried by the Marne.” With a flush on her handsome face she pressed Mrs. Brant’s hand and passed out.
Mrs. Brant had caught sight of Campton as she received the rebuke. Her colour rose slightly, and she said with a smile: “So many women can’t get on without amusement.”
“No,” he agreed. There was a pause, and then he asked: “Who was it?”
“The Marquise de Tranlay—the widow.”
“Where are the sons she spoke of?”
“There are three left: one in the Chasseurs à Pied; the youngest, who volunteered at seventeen, in the artillery in the Argonne; the third, badly wounded, in hospital at Compiègne. And the eldest killed. I simply can’t understand....”
“Why,” Campton interrupted, “did you speak as if George were at the front? Do you usually speak of him in that way?”
Her silence and her deepening flush made him feel the unkindness of the question. “I didn’t mean ... forgive me,” he said. “Only sometimes, when I see women like that I’m——”
“Well?” she questioned.
He was silent in his turn, and she did not insist. They sat facing each other, each forgetting the purpose of their meeting. For the hundredth time he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George’s filial injunction: between himself and George’s mother these months of fiery trial seemed to have loosed instead of tightening the links.
He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city. The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonizing the grey stone, the pale foliage, and a sky piled with clouds which seemed to rebuild in translucid masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River, pavements, terraces heavy with trees, the whole crowded sky-line from Notre Dame to the Panthéon, instead of presenting themselves in their bare reality, were transposed into a painter’s vision. And the faces around him became again the starting-point of rapid incessant combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs. The reawakening of this instinct deepened Campton’s sense of unrest, and made him feel more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them.
He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table; but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding lilacs at the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old city in her summer dishabille while he planned his journey to Africa with George; and something George had once quoted from Faust came drifting through his mind: “Take care! You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.
His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett.
She said: “May I come in?” and did so without waiting for his answer. The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her appearance. But for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance, when she had rushed into Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room on the day after war was declared, he had seen her only in a nursing uniform, as absorbed in her work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before him in raiment so delicately springlike that it seemed an emanation of the day. Care had dropped 223from her with her professional garb, and she smiled as though he must guess the reason.
In ordinary times he would have thought: “She’s in love——” but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after René Davril’s death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting; and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.
With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat, tossed it on the divan, and said: “Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me.” She dropped down beside her hat, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: “Do you know, I’ve made up my 224mind to begin to live again—to live my own life, I mean, to be my real me, after all these dreadful months of exile from myself. I see now that that is my real duty—just as it is yours, just as it is that of every artist and every creator. Don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you agree with me? We must save Beauty for the world; before it is too late we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds ridiculously presumptuous, doesn’t it, to say ‘we’ in talking of a great genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me? But after all there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so—so objectively, and I ...” she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes, “I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn’t to be ashamed of my limitations, do you think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty; every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn’t it?” She drew a deep breath and added: “It has done me good already to sit here and listen to you.”
Campton, a few weeks previously, would have been amused, or perhaps merely irritated. But in the interval he had become aware in himself of the same 225irresistible craving to “live,” as she put it, and as he had heard it formulated, that very day, by the mourning mother who had so sharply rebuked Mrs. Brant. The spring was stirring them all in their different ways, secreting in them the sap which craved to burst into bridge-parties, or the painting of masterpieces, or a consciousness of the need for new shirts.
“But what am I in all this?” Mrs. Talkett rushed on, sparing him the trouble of a reply. “Nothing but the match that lights the flame! Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry ... I have scribbled a few things, you know ... but that’s not what I was going to tell you. It’s you, dear Master, who must set us the example of getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you done in all these dreadful months—the real You? Nothing! And the world will be the poorer for it ever after. Master, you must paint again—you must begin to-day!”
Campton gave an uneasy laugh. “Oh—paint!” He waved his hand toward the office files of “The Friends of French Art.” “There’s my work.”
“Not the real you. It’s your dummy’s work—just as my nursing has been mine. Oh, one did one’s best—but all the while beauty and art and the eternal things were perishing! And what will the world be like without them?”
“I shan’t be here,” Campton growled.
“But your son will.” She looked at him profoundly. “You know I know your son—we’re friends. And I’m sure he would feel as I feel—he would tell you to go back to your painting.”
For months past any allusion to George had put Campton on his guard, stiffening him with improvised defences. But this appeal of Mrs. Talkett’s found him unprepared, demoralized by the spring sweetness, and by his secret sense of his son’s connivance with it. What was war—any war—but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy? Campton reminded himself again that he was the son of free institutions, of a country in no way responsible for the centuries of sinister diplomacy which had brought Europe to ruin, and was now trying to drag down America. George was right, the Brants were right, this young woman through whose lips Campton’s own secret instinct spoke was right.
He was silent so long that she rose with the anxious frown that appeared to be her way of blushing, and faltered out: “I’m boring you—I’d better go.”
She picked up her hat and held its cataract of feathers poised above her slanted head.
“Wait—let me do you like that!” Campton cried. It had never before occurred to him that she was paintable; but as she stood there with uplifted arm the long line flowing from her wrist to her hip suddenly wound itself about him like a net.
“Me?” she stammered, standing motionless, as if frightened by the excess of her triumph.
“Do you mind?” he queried; and hardly hearing her faltered out: “Mind? When it was what I came for!” he dragged forth an easel, flung on it the first canvas he could lay hands on (though he knew it was the wrong shape and size), and found himself instantly transported into the lost world which was the only real one.