For a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss.
His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.
He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them, where Louis Philippe mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings, and the frail grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.
At first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned 229in a toy aquarium—still staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially.
The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot of money 230to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for every penny—that is, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive conversation of her familiars.
“Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly young man with eye-glasses and glossy hair, who roamed about straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the teacups.
Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself 231to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.
All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.
To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire into the progress of his own portrait.
“I must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said jovially, tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over the painter’s head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled.
“You’ll owe it to me if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling back at the leer which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt a sudden pity for her innocence.
232“My wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you know,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again, like a diving animal; and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive eyes on Campton. “That kind of idiocy is all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say; and he nearly cried back to her: “But, you poor child, it’s the only honest thing anywhere near you!”
Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s reappearance, at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions to Cabinet Ministers and eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the Talkett house was so mirage-like that even the big red bulk of the international financier became imponderable in it.
But one day Campton, on his way home, ran across Dastrey, and remembered that they had not met for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked worn and preoccupied, and Campton was abruptly recalled to the world he had been trying to escape from.
“You seem rather knocked-up—what’s wrong with you?”
Dastrey stared. “Wrong with me? Well—did you like the communiqué this morning?”
“I didn’t read it,” said Campton curtly. They walked along a few steps in silence.
“You see,” the painter continued, “I’ve gone back to my job—my painting. I suddenly found I had to.”
Dastrey glanced at him with surprising kindliness. “Ah, that’s good news, my dear fellow!”
“You think so?” Campton half-sneered.
“Of course—why not? What are you painting? May I come and see?”
“Naturally.” Campton paused. “The fact is, I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that little will-o’-the-wisp of a Mrs. Talkett. Come to her house any afternoon and I’ll show you the thing.”
“To her house?” Dastrey paused with a frown. “Then the picture’s finished?”
“No—not by a long way. I’m doing it there—in her milieu, among her crowd. It amuses me; they amuse me. When will you come?” He shot out the sentences like challenges; and his friend took them up in the same tone.
“To Mrs. Talkett’s—to meet her crowd? Thanks—I’m too much tied down by my job.”
“No; you’re not. You’re too disapproving,” said Campton quarrelsomely. “You think we’re all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international loafers—I don’t know what you call us. But I’m one of them, so whatever name you give them I must answer to. Well, I’ll tell you what they are, my dear fellow—and I’m not ashamed to be among them: they’re people who’ve resolutely, unanimously, unshakeably decided, for a certain number of hours each day, to forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been, so that——”
“So that?”
“So that beauty shall not perish from the earth!” Campton shouted, bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement.
Dastrey broke into a laugh. “Allons donc! Decided to forget the war? Why, bless your heart, they’ve never, not one of ’em, ever been able to remember it for an hour together; no, not from the first day, except as it interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased their fortunes. You’re the only one of them, my dear chap, (since you class yourself among them) of whom what you’ve just said is true; and if you can forget the war while you’re at your work, so much the better for you and for us and for posterity; and I hope you’ll paint all Mrs. Talkett’s crowd, one after another. Though I doubt if they’re as good subjects now as when you caught them last July with the war-funk on.” He held out his hand with a dry smile. “Goodbye. I’m off to meet my nephew, who’s here on leave.”
He hastened away, leaving Campton in a crumbled world. Louis Dastrey on leave? But that was because he was at the front, the real front, in the trenches, had already had a slight wound and a fine citation. Staff-officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave just yet....
The thoughts excited by this encounter left Campton more than ever resolved to drug himself with work and frivolity. It was none of his business to pry into 235the consciences of the people about him, not even into Jorgenstein’s—into which one would presumably have had to be let down in a diver’s suit, with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the government tolerated Jorgenstein’s presence in France, probably on the ground that he could be useful—so the banker himself let it be known—it was silly of people like Adele Anthony and Dastrey to wince at the mere mention of his name. There woke in Campton all the old spirit of aimless random defiance—revolt for revolt’s sake—which had marked the first period of his life after his separation from his wife. He had long since come to regard it as a crude and juvenile phase—yet here he was reliving it.
Though he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Talkett and the Brants he had no fear of meeting Julia: it was impossible to picture her neat head battling with the blasts of that dishevelled drawing-room. But though she did not appear there, he heard her more and more often alluded to, in terms of startling familiarity, by Mrs. Talkett’s visitors. It was clear that they all saw her, chiefly in her own house, that they thought her, according to their respective vocabularies, “a perfect dear,” “une femme exquise” or “une bonne vieille” (ah, poor Julia!); and that their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the fact that she had got her marvellous chef demobilised, and was giving little “war-dinners” followed by a quiet turn at bridge.
Campton remembered Mme. de Tranlay’s rebuke to Mrs. Brant on the day when he had last called in the Avenue Marigny; then he remembered also that it was on that very day that he had returned to his painting.
“After all, she held out longer than I did—poor Julia!” he mused, annoyed at the idea of her being the complacent victim of all the voracities he saw about him, and yet reflecting that she was at last living her life, as they called it at Mrs. Talkett’s. After all, the fact that George was not at the front seemed to exonerate his parents—unless, indeed, it did just the opposite.
One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Talkett’s to put in a last afternoon’s work on her portrait, Campton, to his surprise, found his wife in front of it. Equally to his surprise he noticed that she was dressed with a juvenility quite new to her; and for the first time he thought she looked old-fashioned and also old. She met him with her usual embarrassment.
“I didn’t know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run in——” She waved her hand toward the portrait.
“I hope you like it,” he said, suddenly finding that he didn’t.
“It’s marvellous—marvellous.” She looked at him timidly. “It’s extraordinary, how you’ve caught her rhythm, her tempo,” she ventured in the jargon of the place. Campton, to hide a smile, turned away to get 237his brushes. “I’m so glad,” she continued hastily, “that you’ve begun to paint again. We all need to ... to....”
“Oh, not you and I, do we?” he rejoined with a scornful laugh.
She evidently caught the allusion, for she blushed all over her uncovered neck, up through the faintly wrinkled cheeks to the roots of her newly dyed hair; then he saw her eyes fill.
“What’s she crying for? Because George is not in danger?” he wondered, busying himself with his palette.
Mrs. Talkett hurried in with surprise and apologies; and one by one the habitués followed, with cheery greetings for Mrs. Brant and a moment of constraint as they noted Campton’s presence, and the relation between the two was mutely passed about. Then the bridge-tables were brought, Mr. Talkett began to straighten the cards nervously, and the guests broke up into groups, forgetting everything but their own affairs. As Campton turned back to his work he was aware of a last surprise in the sight of Mrs. Brant serene and almost sparkling, waving her adieux to the bridge-tables, and going out followed by Jorgenstein, with whom she seemed on terms of playful friendliness. Of all strange war promiscuities, Campton thought this the strangest.
The next time Campton saw Mrs. Brant was in his own studio.
He was preparing, one morning, to leave the melancholy place, when the bell rang and his bonne let her in. Her dress was less frivolous than at Mrs. Talkett’s, and she wore a densely patterned veil, like the ladies in cinema plays when they visit their seducers or their accomplices.
Through the veil she looked at him agitatedly, and said: “George is not at Sainte Menehould.”
He stared.
“No. Anderson was there the day before yesterday.”
“Brant? At Sainte Menehould?” Campton felt the blood rush to his temples. What! He, the boy’s father, had not so much as dared to ask for the almost unattainable permission to go into the war-zone; and this other man, who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no right whatever to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the priceless favour, and instead of passing it on, instead of offering at least to share it with the boy’s father, had sneaked off secretly to feast on the other’s lawful privilege!
“How the devil——?” Campton burst out.
“Oh, he got a Red Cross mission; it was arranged very suddenly—through a friend....”
“Yes—well?” Campton stammered, sitting down lest 239his legs should fail him, and signing to her to take a chair.
“Well—he was not there!” she repeated excitedly. “It’s what we might have known—since he’s changed his address.”
“Then he didn’t see him?” Campton interrupted, the ferocious joy of the discovery crowding out his wrath and wonder.
“Anderson didn’t? No. He wasn’t there, I tell you!”
“The H.Q. has been moved?”
“No, it hasn’t. Anderson saw one of the officers. He said George had been sent on a mission.”
“To another H.Q.?”
“That’s what they said. I don’t believe it.”
“What do you believe?”
“I don’t know. Anderson’s sure they told him the truth. The officer he saw is a friend of George’s, and he said George was expected back that very evening.”
Campton sat looking at her uncertainly. Did she dread, or did she rather wish, to disbelieve the officer’s statement? Where did she hope or fear that George had gone? And what were Campton’s own emotions? As confused, no doubt, as hers—as undefinable. The insecurity of his feelings moved him to a momentary compassion for hers, which were surely pitiable, whatever else they were. Then a savage impulse swept away every other, and he said: “Wherever George was, Brant’s visit will have done him no good.”
240She grew pale. “What do you mean?”
“I wonder it never occurred to you—or to your husband, since he’s so solicitous,” Campton went on, prolonging her distress.
“Please tell me what you mean,” she pleaded with frightened eyes.
“Why, in God’s name, couldn’t you both let well enough alone? Didn’t you guess why George never asked for leave—why I’ve always advised him not to? Don’t you know that nothing is as likely to get a young fellow into trouble as having his family force their way through to see him, use influence, seem to ask favours? I dare say that’s how that fool of a Dolmetsch woman got Isador killed. No one would have noticed where he was if she hadn’t gone on so about him. They had to send him to the front finally. And now the chances are——”
“Oh, no, no, no—don’t say it!” She held her hands before her face as if he had flung something flaming at her. “It was I who made Anderson go!”
“Well—Brant ought to have thought of that—I did,” he pursued sardonically.
Her answer disarmed him. “You’re his father.”
“I don’t mean,” he went on hastily, “that Brant’s not right: of course there’s nothing to be afraid of. I can’t imagine why you thought there was.”
She hung her head. “Sometimes when I hear the other women—other mothers—I feel as if our turn must come too. Even at Sainte Menehould a shell might hit the house. Anderson said the artillery fire seemed so near.”
He made no answer, and she sat silent, without apparent thought of leaving. Finally he said: “I was just going out——”
She stood up. “Oh, yes—that reminds me. I came to ask you to come with me.”
“With you——?”
“The motor’s waiting—you must.” She laid her hand on his arm. “To see Olida, the new clairvoyante. Everybody goes to her—everybody who’s anxious about anyone. Even the scientific people believe in her. She’s told people the most extraordinary things—it seems she warned Daisy de Dolmetsch.... Well, I’d rather know!” she burst out passionately.
Campton smiled. “She’ll tell you that George is back at his desk.”
“Well, then—isn’t that worth it? Please don’t refuse me!”
He disengaged himself gently. “My poor Julia, go by all means if it will reassure you.”
“Ah, but you’ve got to come too. You can’t say no: Madge Talkett tells me that if the two nearest go together Olida sees so much more clearly—especially a father and mother,” she added hastily, as if conscious of the inopportune “nearest.” After a moment she went on: “Even Mme. de Tranlay’s been; Daisy de Dolmetsch met her on the stairs. Olida told her that her youngest boy, from whom she’d had no news for weeks, was all right, and coming home on leave. Mme. de Tranlay didn’t know Daisy, except by sight, but she stopped her to tell her. Only fancy—the last person she would have spoken to in ordinary times! But she was so excited and happy! And two days afterward the boy turned up safe and sound. You must come!” she insisted.
Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of Mme. de Tranlay’s proud figure climbing a clairvoyante’s stairs.
“I’ll come if you want me to,” he said.
They drove to the Batignolles quarter. Mrs. Brant’s lips were twitching under her veil, and as the motor stopped she said childishly: “I’ve never been to this kind of place before.”
“I should hope not,” Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian lady’s rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers, and come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway, who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and olive-stones, and had found, by irrefutable signs, that he and she would “come together” again. “Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific humbug,” he mused, “because it was 243picturesque—and so was she—and she believed in it.”
Mrs. Brant rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A servant-woman showed them into a salon which was as commonplace as a doctor’s waiting-room. On the mantelpiece were vases of Pampas grass, and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolier. Evidently Mme. Olida was superior to the class of fortune-tellers who prepare a special stage-setting, and no astrologer’s robe or witch’s kitchen was to be feared.
The maid led them across a plain dining-room into an inner room. The shutters were partly closed, and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in loose black rose from a sofa. Gold earrings gleamed under her oiled black hair—and suddenly, through the billows of flesh, and behind the large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on Mrs. Brant; then they met his with the same heavy stare. But he noticed that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she pointed to two chairs.
“Sit down, please,” she said in a low rough voice, speaking in French. The door opened again, and a young man with Levantine eyes and a showy necktie looked in. She said sharply: “No,” and he disappeared. Campton noticed that a large emerald flashed on his 244manicured hand. Mme. Olida continued to look at her visitors.
Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: “We’re his parents—a son at the front....”
Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lips droop over her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow. Presently she held out both hands.
“You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please.” As her cushioned palm touched Campton’s he thought he felt a tremor of recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: “You should hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed.” She turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brant’s.
Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she had taught him, by signals tapped on his own knee, how to say what he chose to her without her brothers’ knowing it. He looked at the huge woman, seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip on which what used to be a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows, and recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round teeth while she threw back her head, showing the Agnus Dei in her neck. Now her mouth was like a withered flower, and in a crease of her neck a string of pearls was embedded.
“Take hands, please,” she commanded. Julia gave Campton her ungloved hand, and he sat between the two women.
“You are the parents? You want news of your son—ah, like so many!” Mme. Olida closed her eyes again.
“To know where he is—whereabouts—that is what we want,” Mrs. Brant whispered.
Mme. Olida sat as if labouring with difficult visions. The noises of the street came faintly through the closed windows and a smell of garlic and cheap scent oppressed Campton’s lungs and awakened old associations. With a final effort of memory he fixed his eyes on the clairvoyante’s darkened mask, and tapped her palm once or twice. She neither stirred nor looked at him.
“I see—I see——” she began in the consecrated phrase. “A veil—a thick veil of smoke between me and a face which is young and fair, with a short nose and reddish hair: thick, thick, thick hair, exactly like this gentleman’s when he was young....”
Mrs. Brant’s hand trembled in Campton’s. “It’s true,” she whispered, “before your hair turned grey it used to be as red as Georgie’s.”
“The veil grows denser—there are awful noises; 246there’s a face with blood—but not that first face. This is a very young man, as innocent as when he was born, with blue eyes like flax-flowers, but blood, blood ... why do I see that face? Ah, now it is on a hospital pillow—not your son’s face, the other; there is no one near, no one but some German soldiers laughing and drinking; the lips move, the hands are stretched out in agony; but no one notices. It is a face that has something to say to the gentleman; not to you, Madame. The uniform is different—is it an English uniform?... Ah, now the face turns grey; the eyes shut, there is foam on the lips. Now it is gone—there’s another man’s head on the pillow.... Now, now your son’s face comes back; but not near those others. The smoke has cleared ... I see a desk and papers; your son is writing....”
“Oh,” gasped Mrs. Brant.
“If you squeeze my hands you arrest the current,” Mme. Olida reminded her. There was another interval; Campton felt his wife’s fingers beating between his like trapped birds. The heat and darkness oppressed him; beads of sweat came out on his forehead. Did the woman really see things, and was that face with the blood on it Benny Upsher’s?
Mme. Olida droned on. “It is your son who is writing—the young man with the very thick hair. He is writing to you—trying to explain something. Perhaps you have hoped to see him lately? That is it; he is telling 247you why it could not be. He is sitting quietly in a room. There is no smoke.” She released Mrs. Brant’s hand and Campton’s. “Go home, Madame. You are fortunate. Perhaps his letter will reach you to-morrow.”
Mrs. Brant stood up sobbing. She found her gold bag and pushed it toward Campton. He had been feeling in his own pocket for money; but as he drew it forth Mme. Olida put back his hand. “No. I am superstitious; it’s so seldom that I can give good news. Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur. I commend your son to the blessed Virgin and to all the saints and angels.”
Campton put Julia into the motor. She was still crying, but her tears were radiant. “Isn’t she wonderful? Didn’t you see how she seemed to recognize George? There’s no mistaking his hair! How could she have known what it was like? Don’t think me foolish—I feel so comforted!”
“Of course; you’ll hear from him to-morrow,” Campton said. He was touched by her maternal passion, and ashamed of having allowed her so small a share in his jealous worship of his son. He walked away, thinking of the young man dying in a German hospital, and of the other man’s face succeeding his on the pillow.
Two days later, to Campton’s surprise, Anderson Brant appeared in the morning at the studio.
Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio-garb, saw his visitor peer cautiously about, as though fearing undressed models behind the screens or empty beer-bottles under the tables. It was the first time that Mr. Brant had entered the studio since his attempt to buy George’s portrait, and Campton guessed at once that he had come again about George.
He looked at the painter shyly, as if oppressed by the indiscretion of intruding at that hour.
“It was my—Mrs. Brant who insisted—when she got this letter,” he brought out between precautionary coughs.
Campton looked at him tolerantly: a barrier seemed to have fallen between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother, written two days after Mr. Brant’s visit to Sainte Menehould. It expressed, in George’s usual staccato style, his regret at having been away. “Hard luck, when one is riveted to the same square yard of earth for weeks on end, to have just happened to be somewhere else the day Uncle Andy broke through.” It was always the same tone of fluent banter, in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking stridency, like the scrape 249of an overworked gramophone containing only comic disks.
“Ah, well—his mother must be satisfied,” Campton said as he gave the letter back.
“Oh, completely. So much so that I’ve induced her to go off for a while to Biarritz. The doctor finds her overdone; she’d got it into her head that George had been sent to the front; I couldn’t convince her to the contrary.”
Campton looked at him. “You yourself never believed it?”
Mr. Brant, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his agate-headed stick.
“Oh, never.”
“It was not,” Campton pursued, “with that idea that you went to Sainte Menehould?”
Mr. Brant glanced at him in surprise. “No. On the contrary——”
“On the contrary?”
“I understood from—from his mother that, in the circumstances, you were opposed to his asking for leave; thought it unadvisable, that is. So, as it was such a long time since we’d seen him——” The “we,” pulling him up short, spread a brick-red blush over his baldness.
“Not longer than since I have—but then I’ve not your opportunities,” Campton retorted, the sneer breaking out in spite of him. Though he had grown kindly disposed toward Mr. Brant when they were apart, the old resentments still broke out in his presence.
Mr. Brant clasped and unclasped the knob of his stick. “I took the first chance that offered; I had his mother to think of.” Campton made no answer, and he continued: “I was sorry to hear you thought I’d perhaps been imprudent.”
“There’s no perhaps about it,” Campton retorted. “Since you say you were not anxious about the boy I can’t imagine why you made the attempt.”
Mr. Brant was silent. He seemed overwhelmed by the other’s disapprobation, and unable to find any argument in his own defence. “I never dreamed it could cause any trouble,” he said at length.
“That’s the ground you’ve always taken in your interference with my son!” Campton had risen, pushing back his chair, and Mr. Brant stood up also. They faced each other without speaking.
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Brant began, “that you should take such a view. It seemed to me natural ..., when Mr. Jorgenstein gave me the chance——”
“Jorgenstein! It was Jorgenstein who took you to the front? Took you to see my son?” Campton threw his head back and laughed. “That’s complete—that’s really complete!”
Mr. Brant reddened as if the laugh had been a blow. He stood very erect, his lips as tightly closed as a shut penknife. He had the attitude of a civilian under fire, considerably perturbed, but obliged to set the example of fortitude.
Campton looked at him. At last he had Mr. Brant at a disadvantage. Their respective situations were reversed, and he saw that the banker was aware of it, and oppressed by the fear that he might have done harm to George. He evidently wanted to say all this and did not know how.
His distress moved Campton, in whose ears the sound of his own outburst still echoed unpleasantly. If only Mr. Brant would have kept out of his way he would have found it so easy to be fair to him!
“I’m sorry,” he began in a quieter tone. “I dare say I’m unjust—perhaps it’s in the nature of our relation. Can’t you understand how I’ve felt, looking on helplessly all these years, while you’ve done for the boy everything I wanted to do for him myself? Haven’t you guessed why I jumped at my first success, and nursed my celebrity till I’d got half the fools in Europe lining up to be painted?” His excitement was mastering him again, and he went on hurriedly: “Do you suppose I’d have wasted all these precious years over their stupid faces if I hadn’t wanted to make my son independent of you? And he would have been, if the war hadn’t come; been my own son again and nobody else’s, leading his own life, whatever he chose it to be, instead of having to waste his youth in your bank, learning how to multiply your millions.”
The futility of this retrospect, and the inconsistency of his whole attitude, exasperated Campton more than anything his visitor could do or say, and he stopped, embarrassed by the sound of his own words, yet seeing no escape save to bury them under more and more. But Mr. Brant had opened his lips.
“They’ll be his, you know: the millions,” he said.
Campton’s anger dropped: he felt Mr. Brant at last too completely at his mercy. He waited for a moment before speaking.
“You tried to buy his portrait once—you remember I told you it was not for sale,” he then said.
Mr. Brant stood motionless, grasping his stick in one hand and stroking his moustache with the other. For a while he seemed to be considering Campton’s words without feeling their sting. “It was not the money ...” he stammered out at length, from the depth of some unutterable plea for understanding; then he added: “I wish you a good morning,” and walked out with his little stiff steps.
Campton was thoroughly ashamed of what he had said to Mr. Brant, or rather of his manner of saying it. If he could have put the same facts quietly, ironically, without forfeiting his dignity, and with the 253added emphasis which deliberateness and composure give, he would scarcely have regretted the opportunity. He had always secretly accused himself of a lack of courage in accepting Mr. Brant’s heavy benefactions for George when the boy was too young to know what they might pledge him to; and it had been a disappointment that George, on reaching the age of discrimination, had not appeared to find the burden heavy, or the obligations unpleasant.
Campton, having accepted Mr. Brant’s help, could hardly reproach his son for feeling grateful for it, and had therefore thought it “more decent” to postpone disparagement of their common benefactor till his own efforts had set them both free. Even then, it would be impossible to pay off the past—but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his own wrath had dug it up, and he had paid for the brief joy of casting its bones in Mr. Brant’s face by a deep disgust at his own weakness.
All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talkett’s since the banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet Jorgenstein, and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the clairvoyante, had somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his ears. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s vaticinations; but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.” Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office.
Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”
The young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!” he shouted. Across the page the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall.
The Berserker light on Boylston’s placid features transformed him into an avenging cherub. “Ah, now we’re in it—we’re in it at last!” he exulted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but the older man’s first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was “in it”: the gross tangible proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too 255proud to fight for others; and here she was brutally forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son’s first comment on the new fact that they were “in it.”
But his excitement and Boylston’s exultation were short-lived. Before many days it became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up overnight at the unproved outrage of the Maine was lying supine under the flagrant provocation of the Lusitania. The days which followed were, to many Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they seemed the ironic justification of the phase of indifference and self-absorption through which he had just passed. He could not go back to Mrs. Talkett and her group; but neither could he take up his work with even his former zeal. The bitter taste of the national humiliation was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a man dishonoured.
He wondered, as the days and the weeks passed, at having no word from George. Had he refrained from writing because he too felt the national humiliation too deeply either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned? Or was he so sunk in security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that nothing was changed? From such thoughts Campton’s soul recoiled; but they lay close under the surface of his tenderness, and reared their evil heads whenever they caught him alone.
As the summer dragged itself out he was more and more alone. Dastrey, cured of his rheumatism, had 256left the Ministry to resume his ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at Deauville (on the pretext of being near her hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts’ being with her, and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that he “needed rest,” and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brant had suggested his spending “a quiet fortnight” with her. “I’ve got to do it, if I’m to see this thing through,” Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice, as if commanding himself not to waver.
A few days later, glancing over the Herald, Campton read that Mme. de Dolmetsch, “the celebrated artiste,” was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brant at Deauville, where she had gone to give recitations for the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a tightening heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British Government) had bestowed a gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant’s hospital. It was rumoured, the paragraph ended, that Sir Cyril would soon receive the Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to France.
And still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, 257failure there, the menace of disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac, and from the near East news of the new landing at Suvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight” in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter.
The shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His portrait of Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused them all, and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart and brain, into the horror he had tried to escape from. “If thou ascend up into heaven I am there; if thou make thy bed in hell, behold I am there,” the war said to him; and as the daily head-lines shrieked out the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he groaned back like the Psalmist: “Whither shall I go from thee?”
258The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mlle. Davril, and all their band of tired resolute workers—plodded ahead, their eyes on their task, seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable oppression. The women especially, with their gift of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning’s work, went out to lunch together, that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly darkening the younger man’s face, moved the painter with an anguish like his own.
Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting: but the latter had merely rejoined: “We’ve each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way—” and the subject was not again raised between them.
The intervals between George’s letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in his pocket-diary the dates of all that he received, as well as those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to the Lusitania.
“It’s queer,” he said to Boylston, one day toward 259the end of July; “I don’t know yet what George thinks about the Lusitania.”
“Oh, yes, you do, sir!” Boylston returned, laughing; “but all the mails from the war-zone,” he added, “have been very much delayed lately. When there’s a big attack on anywhere they hold up everything along the line. And besides, no end of letters are lost.”
“I suppose so,” said Campton, pocketing the diary, and trying for the millionth time to call up a vision of his boy, seated at a desk in some still unvisualized place, his rumpled fair head bent above columns of figures or files of correspondence, while day after day the roof above him shook with the roar of the attacks which held up his letters.