else disappeared like a rolled-up curtain, and his inner vision centred
itself on the little yellow face he was to paint.
Peering through her cobwebby window, he saw old Mme. Lebel on the watch.
He knew she wanted to pounce out and ask if there would be war; and
composing his most taciturn countenance he gave her a preoccupied nod
and hurried by.
The studio looked grimy and disordered, and he remembered that he had
intended, the evening before, to come back and set it to rights. In
pursuance of this plan, he got out a canvas, fussed with his brushes and
colours, and then tried once more to make the place tidy. But his
attempts at order always resulted in worse confusion; the fact had been
one of Julia’s grievances against him, and he had often thought that a
reaction from his ways probably explained the lifeless neatness of the
Anderson Brant drawing-room.
Campton had fled to Montmartre to escape a number of things: first of
all, the possibility of meeting people who would want to talk about the
European situation, then of being called up by Mrs. Brant, and lastly of
having to lunch alone in a fashionable restaurant. In his morbid dread
of seeing people he would have preferred an omelette in the studio, if
only Mariette had been at hand to make it; and he decided, after a vain
struggle with his muddled “properties,” to cross over to the Luxembourg
quarter and pick up a meal in a wine-shop.
He did not own to himself his secret reason for this decision; but it
caused him, after a glance at his watch, to hasten his steps down the
rue Montmartre and bribe a passing taxi to carry him to the Museum of
the Luxembourg. He reached it ten minutes before the midday closing, and
hastening past the serried statues, turned into a room half-way down the
gallery. Whistler’s Mother and the Carmencita of Sargent wondered at
each other from its walls; and on the same wall with the Whistler hung
the picture Campton had come for: his portrait of his son. He had given
it to the Luxembourg the day after Mr. Brant had tried to buy it, with
the object of inflicting the most cruel slight he could think of on the
banker.
In the generous summer light the picture shone out on him with a
communicative warmth: never had he seen so far into its depths. “No
wonder,” he thought, “it opened people’s eyes to what I was trying for.”
He stood and stared his own eyes full, mentally comparing the features
before him with those of the firmer harder George he had left on the
terrace of the Crillon, and noting how time, while fulfilling the rich
promise of the younger face, had yet taken something from its
brightness.
Campton, at that moment, found more satisfaction than ever in thinking
how it must have humiliated Brant to have the picture given to France.
“He could have understood my keeping it myself—or holding it for a
bigger price—but _giving it_——!” The satisfaction was worth the
sacrifice of the best record he would ever have of that phase of his
son’s youth. At various times afterward he had tried for the same
George, but not one of his later studies had that magic light on it.
Still, he was glad he had given the picture. It was safe, safer than it
would have been with him. His great dread had always been that if his
will were mislaid (and his things were always getting mislaid) the
picture might be sold, and fall into Brant’s hands after his death.
The closing signal drove him out of the Museum, and he turned into the
first wine-shop. He had advised George to lunch with the Brants, but
there was disappointment in his heart. Seeing the turn things were
taking, he had hoped the boy would feel the impulse to remain with him.
But, after all, at such a time a son could not refuse to go to his
mother. Campton pictured the little party of three grouped about the
luncheon-table in the high cool dining-room of the Avenue Marigny, with
the famous Hubert Robert panels, and the Louis XV silver and Sèvres;
while he, the father, George’s father, sat alone at the soiled table of
a frowsy wine-shop.
Well—it was he who had so willed it. Life was too crazy a muddle—and who
could have foreseen that he might have been repaid for twenty-six years
with such a wife by keeping an undivided claim on such a son?
His meal over, he hastened back to the studio, hoping to find the dancer
there. Fortin-Lescluze had sworn to bring her at two, and Campton was
known to exact absolute punctuality. He had put the final touch to his
fame by refusing to paint the mad young Duchesse de la Tour Crenelée—who
was exceptionally paintable—because she had kept him waiting
three-quarters of an hour. But now, though it was nearly three, and the
dancer and her friend had not come, Campton dared not move, lest he
should miss Fortin-Lescluze.
“Sent for by a rich patient in a war-funk; or else hanging about in the
girl’s dressing-room while she polishes her toe-nails,” Campton
reflected; and sulkily sat down to wait.
He had never been willing to have a telephone. To him it was a live
thing, a kind of Laocoon-serpent that caught one in its coils and
dragged one struggling to the receiver. His friends had spent all their
logic in trying to argue away this belief; but he answered obstinately:
“Every one would be sure to call me up when Mariette was out.” Even the
Russian lady, during her brief reign, had pleaded in vain on this point.
He would have given a good deal now if he had listened to her. The
terror of having to cope with small material difficulties, always
strongest in him in moments of artistic inspiration—when the hushed
universe seemed hardly big enough to hold him and his model—this dread
anchored him to his seat while he tried to make up his mind to send Mme.
Lebel to the nearest telephone-station.
If he called to her, she would instantly begin: “And the war, sir?” And
he would have to settle that first. Besides, if he did not telephone
himself he could not make sure of another appointment with
Fortin-Lescluze. But the idea of battling alone with the telephone in a
public place covered his large body with a damp distress. If only George
had been in reach!
He waited till four, and then, furious, locked the studio and went down.
Mme. Lebel still sat in her spidery den. She looked at him gravely,
their eyes met, they exchanged a bow, but she did not move or speak. She
was busy as usual with some rusty sewing—he thought it odd that she
should not rush out to waylay him. Everything that day was odd.
He found all the telephone-booths besieged. The people waiting were
certainly bad cases of war-funk, to judge from their looks; after
scrutinizing them for a while he decided to return to his hotel, and try
to communicate with Fortin-Lescluze from there.
To his annoyance there was not a taxi to be seen. He limped down the
slope of Montmartre to the nearest métro-station, and just as he was
preparing to force his lame bulk into a crowded train, caught sight of a
solitary horse-cab: a vehicle he had not risked himself in for years.
The cab-driver, for gastronomic reasons, declined to take him farther
than the Madeleine; and getting out there, Campton walked along the rue
Royale. Everything still looked wonderfully as usual; and the fountains
in the Place sparkled gloriously.
Comparatively few people were about: he was surprised to see how few. A
small group of them, he noticed, had paused near the doorway of the
Ministry of Marine, and were looking—without visible excitement—at a
white paper pasted on the wall.
He crossed the street and looked too. In the middle of the paper, in
queer Gothic-looking characters, he saw the words
=“Les Armees De Terre et De Mer....”=
War had come——
He knew now that he had never for an instant believed it possible. Even
when he had had that white-lipped interview with the Brants, even when
he had planned to take Fortin-Lescluze by his senile infatuation, and
secure a medical certificate for George; even then, he had simply been
obeying the superstitious impulse which makes a man carry his umbrella
when he goes out on a cloudless morning.
War had come.
He stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and tried to think—now that it was
here—what it really meant: that is, what it meant to him. Beyond that he
had no intention of venturing. “This is not our job anyhow,” he
muttered, repeating the phrase with which he had bolstered up his talk
with Julia.
But abstract thinking was impossible: his confused mind could only
snatch at a few drifting scraps of purpose. “Let’s be practical,” he
said to himself.
The first thing to do was to get back to the hotel and call up the
physician. He strode along at his fastest limp, suddenly contemptuous of
the people who got in his way.
“War—and they’ve nothing to do but dawdle and gape! How like the
French!” He found himself hating the French.
He remembered that he had asked to have his sleepings engaged for the
following night. But even if he managed to secure his son’s discharge,
there could be no thought, now, of George’s leaving the country; and he
stopped at the desk to cancel the order.
There was no one behind the desk: one would have said that confusion
prevailed in the hall, if its emptiness had not made the word
incongruous. At last a waiter with rumpled hair strayed out of the
restaurant, and of him, imperiously, Campton demanded the concierge.
“The concierge? He’s gone.”
“To get my places for Naples?”
The waiter looked blank. “Gone: mobilised—to join his regiment. It’s the
war.”
“But look here, some one must have attended to getting my places, I
suppose,” cried Campton wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and
challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable
travellers, but who explained to him, patiently, that his sleepings had
certainly not been engaged, as no trains were leaving Paris for the
present. “Not for civilian travel,” he added, still more patiently.
Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris “for
the present”? But then people like himself—people who had nothing on
earth to do with the war—had been caught like rats in a trap! He
reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brant would not be able to return to
Deauville, and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day.
He asked: “How long is this preposterous state of things to last?”—but
no one answered, and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried
upstairs.
He was confident that George would be there waiting; but the
sitting-room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island, with
the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world.
After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin’s house,
and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left
Paris.
“Left—for where? For how long?”
And then the eternal answer: “The doctor is mobilised. _It’s the war._”
Mobilised—already? Within the first twenty-four hours? A man of Fortin’s
age and authority? Campton was terrified by the uncanny rapidity with
which events were moving, he whom haste had always confused and
disconcerted, as if there were a secret link between his lameness and
the movements of his will. He rang up Dastrey, but no one answered.
Evidently his friend was out, and his friend’s _bonne_ also. “I suppose
_she’s_ mobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.”
At last, from sheer over-agitation, his fatigued mind began to move more
deliberately: he collected his wits, laboured with his more immediate
difficulties, and decided that he would go to Fortin-Lescluze’s house,
on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started.
“Ten to one he won’t go till to-morrow,” Campton reasoned.
The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever, and no taxi was in sight
down the whole length of the rue Royale, or the rue Boissy d’Anglas, or
the rue de Rivoli: not even a horse-cab showed against the deserted
distances. He crossed to the métro, and painfully descended its many
stairs.
VI
Campton, proffering twenty francs to an astonished maid-servant, learned
that, yes, to his intimates—and of course Monsieur was one?—the doctor
_was_ in, was in fact dining, and did not leave till the next morning.
“Dining—at six o’clock?”
“Monsieur’s son, Monsieur Jean, is starting at once for his depot.
That’s the reason.”
Campton sent in his card. He expected to be received in the so-called
“studio,” a lofty room with Chinese hangings, Renaissance choir-stalls,
organ, grand piano, and post-impressionist paintings, where
Fortin-Lescluze received the celebrities of the hour. Mme. Fortin never
appeared there, and Campton associated the studio with amusing talk,
hot-house flowers, and ladies lolling on black velvet divans. He
supposed that the physician was separated from his wife, and that she
had a home of her own.
When the maid reappeared she did not lead him to the studio, but into a
small dining-room with the traditional Henri II sideboard of waxed
walnut, a hanging table-lamp under a beaded shade, an India-rubber plant
on a plush pedestal, and napkins that were just being restored to their
bone rings by the four persons seated about the red-and-white checkered
table-cloth.
These were: the great man himself, a tall large woman with grey hair, a
tiny old lady, her face framed in a peasant’s fluted cap, and a plain
young man wearing a private’s uniform, who had a nose like the doctor’s
and simple light blue eyes.
The two ladies and the young man—so much more interesting to the
painter’s eye than the sprawling beauties of the studio—were introduced
by Fortin-Lescluze as his wife, his mother and his son. Mme. Fortin
said, in a deep alto, a word or two about the privilege of meeting the
famous painter who had portrayed her husband, and the old mother, in a
piping voice, exclaimed: “Monsieur, I was at Sedan in 1870. I saw the
Germans. I saw the Emperor sitting on a bench. He was crying.”
“My mother’s heard everything, she’s seen everything. There’s no one in
the world like my mother!” the physician said, laying his hand on hers.
“You won’t see the Germans again, _ma bonne mère_!” her daughter-in-law
added, smiling.
Campton took coffee with them, bore with a little inevitable talk about
the war, and then eagerly questioned the son. The young man was a
chemist, a _préparateur_ in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He
was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archæology, and had written
a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely
serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it
appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to
join his regiment. “The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn’t go
on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.
He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on
the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper
interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever
absorbed the master of the house.
Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the
thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths
of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and
desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician.
In the consulting-room he explained: “It’s about my son——”
He had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the
young man who must have been just George’s age, and who was leaving in
an hour for his regiment. But between Campton and the father there were
complicities, and there might therefore be accommodations. In the
consulting-room one breathed a lower air.
It was not that Campton wanted to do anything underhand. He was
genuinely anxious about George’s health. After all, tuberculosis did not
disappear in a month or even a year: his anxiety was justified. And then
George, but for the stupid accident of his birth, would never have been
mixed up in the war. Campton felt that he could make his request with
his head high.
Fortin-Lescluze seemed to think so too; at any rate he expressed no
surprise. But could anything on earth have surprised him, after thirty
years in that confessional of a room?
The difficulty was that he did not see his way to doing anything—not
immediately, at any rate.
“You must let the boy join his base. He leaves to-morrow? Give me the
number of his regiment and the name of the town, and trust me to do what
I can.”
“But you’re off yourself?”
“Yes: I’m being sent to a hospital at Lyons. But I’ll leave you my
address.”
Campton lingered, unable to take this as final. He looked about him
uneasily, and then, for a moment, straight into the physician’s eyes.
“You must know how I feel; your boy is an only son, too.”
“Yes, yes,” the father assented, in the absent-minded tone of
professional sympathy. But Campton felt that he felt the deep
difference.
“Well, goodbye—and thanks.”
As Campton turned to go the physician laid a hand on his shoulder and
spoke with sudden fierce emotion. “Yes: Jean is an only son—an only
child. For his mother and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son
in the war.”
There was no allusion to the dancer, no hint that Fortin remembered her;
it was Campton who lowered his gaze before the look in the other
father’s eyes.
VII
“A son in the war——”
The words followed Campton down the stairs. What did it mean, and what
must it feel like, for parents in this safe denationalized modern world
to be suddenly saying to each other with white lips: A son in the war?
He stood on the kerbstone, staring ahead of him and forgetting whither
he was bound. The world seemed to lie under a spell, and its weight was
on his limbs and brain. Usually any deep inward trouble made him more
than ever alive to the outward aspect of things; but this new world in
which people talked glibly of sons in the war had suddenly become
invisible to him, and he did not know where he was, or what he was
staring at. He noted the fact, and remembered a story of St. Bernard—he
thought it was—walking beside a beautiful lake in supersensual ecstasy,
and saying afterward: “Was there a lake? I didn’t see it.”
On the way back to the hotel he passed the American Embassy, and had a
vague idea of trying to see the Ambassador and find out if the United
States were not going to devise some way of evading the tyrannous
regulation that bound young Americans to France. “And they call this a
free country!” he heard himself exclaiming.
The remark sounded exactly like one of Julia’s, and this reminded him
that the Ambassador frequently dined at the Brants’. They had certainly
not left his door untried; and since, to the Brant circles, Campton was
still a shaggy Bohemian, his appeal was not likely to fortify theirs.
His mind turned to Jorgenstein, and the vast web of the speculator’s
financial relations. But, after all, France was on the verge of war, if
not in it; and following up the threads of the Jorgenstein web was
likely to land one in Frankfort or Vienna.
At the hotel he found his sitting-room empty; but presently the door
opened and George came in laden with books, fresh yellow and grey ones
in Flammarion wrappers.
“Hullo, Dad,” he said; and added: “So the silly show is on.”
“Mobilisation is not war——,” said Campton.
“No——”
“What on earth are all those books?”
“Provender. It appears we may rot at the depot for weeks. I’ve just seen
a chap who’s in my regiment.”
Campton felt a sudden relief. The purchase of the books proved that
George was fairly sure he would not be sent to the front. His father
went up to him and tapped him on the chest.
“How about this——?” He wanted to add: “I’ve just seen Fortin, who says
he’ll get you off”; but though George’s eye was cool and unenthusiastic
it did not encourage such confidences.
“Oh—lungs? I imagine I’m sound again.” He paused, and stooped to turn
over the books. Carelessly, he added: “But then the stethoscope may
think differently. Nothing to do but wait and see.”
“Of course,” Campton agreed.
It was clear that the boy hated what was ahead of him; and what more
could his father ask? Of course he was not going to confess to a desire
to shirk his duty; but it was easy to see that his whole lucid
intelligence repudiated any sympathy with the ruinous adventure.
“Have you seen Adele?” Campton enquired, and George replied that he had
dropped in for five minutes, and that Miss Anthony wanted to see his
father.
“Is she—nervous?”
“Old Adele? I should say not: she’s fighting mad. _La Revanche_ and all
the rest of it. She doesn’t realize—_sancta simplicitas!_”
“Oh, I can see Adele throwing on the faggots!”
Father and son were silent, both busy lighting cigarettes. When George’s
was lit he remarked: “Well, if we’re not called at once it’ll be a good
chance to read ‘The Golden Bough’ right through.”
Campton stared, not knowing the book even by name. What a queer
changeling the boy was! But George’s composure, his deep and genuine
indifference to the whole political turmoil, once more fortified his
father.
“Have they any news—?” he ventured. “They,” in their private language,
meant the Brants.
“Oh, yes, lots: Uncle Andy was stiff with it. But not really amounting
to anything. Of course there’s no doubt there’ll be war.”
“How about England?”
“Nobody knows; but the bankers seem to think England’s all right.”
George paused, and finally added: “Look here, dear old boy—before she
leaves I think mother wants to see you.”
Campton hardened instantly. “She _has_ seen me—yesterday.”
“I know; she told me.”
The son began to cut the pages of one of his books with a visiting-card
he had picked up, and the father stood looking out on the Place de la
Concorde through the leafy curtain of the terrace.
Campton knew that he could not refuse his son’s request; in his heart of
hearts he was glad it had been made, since it might mean that “they” had
found a way—perhaps through the Ambassador.
But he could never prevent a stiffening of his whole self at any summons
or suggestion from the Brants. He thought of the seeming unity of the
Fortin-Lescluze couple, and of the background of peaceful family life
revealed by the scene about the checkered table-cloth. Perhaps that was
one of the advantages of a social organization which still, as a whole,
ignored divorce, and thought any private condonation better than the
open breaking up of the family.
“All right; I’ll go——” he agreed. “Where are we dining?”
“Oh, I forgot—an awful orgy. Dastrey wants us at the Union. Louis
Dastrey is dining with him, and he let me ask Boylston——”
“Boylston——?”
“You don’t know him. A chap who was at Harvard with me. He’s out here
studying painting at the Beaux Arts. He’s an awfully good sort, and he
wanted to see me before I go.”
The father’s heart sank. Only one whole day more with his boy, and this
last evening but one was to be spent with poor embittered Dastrey, and
two youths, one unknown to Campton, who would drown them in stupid
war-chatter! But it was what George wanted; and there must not be a
shade, for George, on these last hours.
“All right! You promised me something awful for to-night,” Campton
grinned sardonically.
“Do you mind? I’m sorry.”
“It’s only Dastrey’s damned chauvinism that I mind. Why don’t you ask
Adele to join the chorus?”
“Well—you’ll like Boylston,” said George.
* * * * *
Dastrey, after all, turned out less tragic and aggressive than Campton
had feared. His irritability had vanished, and though he was very grave
he seemed preoccupied only with the fate of Europe, and not with his
personal stake in the affair.
But the older men said little. The youngsters had the floor, and
Campton, as he listened to George and young Louis Dastrey, was overcome
by a sense of such dizzy unreality that he had to grasp the arms of his
ponderous leather armchair to assure himself that he was really in the
flesh and in the world.
What! Two days ago they were still in the old easy Europe, a Europe in
which one could make plans, engage passages on trains and steamers,
argue about pictures, books, theatres, ideas, draw as much money as one
chose out of the bank, and say: “The day after to-morrow I’ll be in
Berlin or Vienna or Belgrade.” And here they sat in their same evening
clothes, about the same shining mahogany writing-table, apparently the
same group of free and independent youths and elderly men, and in
reality prisoners, every one of them, hand-cuffed to this hideous masked
bully of “War”!
The young men were sure that the conflict was inevitable—the evening
papers left no doubt of it—and there was much animated discussion
between young Dastrey and George.
Already their views diverged; the French youth, theoretically at one
with his friend as to the senselessness of war in general, had at once
resolutely disengaged from the mist of doctrine the fatal necessity of
this particular war.
“It’s the old festering wound of Alsace-Lorraine: Bismarck foresaw it
and feared it—or perhaps planned it and welcomed it: who knows? But as
long as the wound was there, Germany believed that France would try to
avenge it, and as long as Germany believed that, she had to keep up her
own war-strength; and she’s kept it up to the toppling-over point,
ruining herself and us. That’s the whole thing, as I see it. War’s rot;
but to get rid of war forever we’ve got to fight this one first.”
It was wonderful to Campton that this slender learned youth should
already have grasped the necessity of the conflict and its deep causes.
While his own head was still spinning with wrath and bewilderment at the
bottomless perversity of mankind, Louis Dastrey had analyzed and
accepted the situation and his own part in it. And he was not simply
resigned; he was trembling with eagerness to get the thing over. “If
only England is with us we’re safe—it’s a matter of weeks,” he declared.
“Wait a bit—wait a bit; I want to know more about a whole lot of things
before I fix a date for the fall of Berlin,” his uncle interposed; but
Louis flung him a radiant look. “We’ve been there before, my uncle!”
“But there’s Russia too——” said Boylston explosively. He had not spoken
before.
“‘_Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand_,’” quoted George, as he poured
a golden Hock into his glass.
He was keenly interested, that was evident; but interested as a
looker-on, a dilettante. He had neither Valmy nor Sedan in his blood,
and it was as a sympathizing spectator that he ought by rights to have
been sharing his friend’s enthusiasm, not as a combatant compelled to
obey the same summons. Campton, glancing from one to another of their
brilliant faces, felt his determination harden to save George from the
consequences of his parents’ stupid blunder.
After dinner young Dastrey proposed a music-hall. The audience would be
a curious sight: there would be wild enthusiasm, and singing of the
Marseillaise. The other young men agreed, but their elders, after a
tacitly exchanged glance, decided to remain at the club, on the plea
that some one at the Ministry of War had promised to telephone if there
were fresh news.
Campton and Dastrey, left alone, stood on the balcony watching the
Boulevards. The streets, so deserted during the day, had become suddenly
and densely populated. Hardly any vehicles were in sight: the motor
omnibuses were already carrying troops to the stations, there was a
report abroad that private motors were to be requisitioned, and only a
few taxis and horse-cabs, packed to the driver’s box with young men in
spick-and-span uniforms, broke through the mass of pedestrians which
filled the whole width of the Boulevards. This mass moved slowly and
vaguely, swaying this way and that, as though it awaited a portent from
the heavens. In the glare of electric lamps and glittering
theatre-fronts the innumerable faces stood out vividly, grave, intent,
slightly bewildered. Except when the soldiers passed no cries or songs
came from the crowd, but only the deep inarticulate rumour which any
vast body of people gives forth.
“Queer——! How silent they are: how do you think they’re taking it?”
Campton questioned.
But Dastrey had grown belligerent again. He saw the throngs before him
bounding toward the frontier like the unchained furies of Rude’s
“Marseillaise”; whereas to Campton they seemed full of the dumb wrath of
an orderly and laborious people upon whom an unrighteous quarrel has
been forced. He knew that the thought of Alsace-Lorraine still stirred
in French hearts; but all Dastrey’s eloquence could not convince him
that these people wanted war, or would have sought it had it not been
thrust on them. The whole monstrous injustice seemed to take shape
before him, and to brood like a huge sky-filling dragon of the northern
darknesses over his light-loving, pleasure-loving, labour-loving France.
* * * * *
George came home late.
It was two in the morning of his last day with his boy when Campton
heard the door open, and saw a flash of turned on light.
All night he had lain staring into the darkness, and thinking, thinking:
thinking of George’s future, George’s friends, George and women, of that
unknown side of his boy’s life which, in this great upheaval of things,
had suddenly lifted its face to the surface. If war came, if George were
not discharged, if George were sent to the front, if George were killed,
how strange to think that things the father did not know of might turn
out to have been the central things of his son’s life!
The young man came in, and Campton looked at him as though he were a
stranger.
“Hullo, Dad—any news from the Ministry?” George, tossing aside his hat
and stick, sat down on the bed. He had a crumpled rose in his
button-hole, and looked gay and fresh, with the indestructible freshness
of youth.
“What do I really know of him?” the father asked himself.
Yes: Dastrey had had news. Germany had already committed acts of overt
hostility on the frontier: telegraph and telephone communications had
been cut, French locomotives seized, troops massed along the border on
the specious pretext of the “_Kriegsgefahr-zustand_.” It was war.
“Oh, well,” George shrugged. He lit a cigarette, and asked: “What did
you think of Boylston?”
“Boylston——?”
“The fat brown chap at dinner.”
“Yes—yes—of course.” Campton became aware that he had not thought of
Boylston at all, had hardly been aware of his presence. But the
painter’s registering faculty was always latently at work, and in an
instant he called up a round face, shyly jovial, with short-sighted
brown eyes as sharp as needles, and dark hair curling tightly over a
wide watchful forehead.
“Why—I liked him.”
“I’m glad, because it was a tremendous event for him, seeing you. He
paints, and he’s been keen on your things for years.”
“I wish I’d known.... Why didn’t he say so? He didn’t say anything, did
he?”
“No: he doesn’t, much, when he’s pleased. He’s the very best chap I
know,” George concluded.
VIII
That morning the irrevocable stared at him from the head-lines of the
papers. The German Ambassador was recalled. Germany had declared war on
France at 6.40 the previous evening; there was an unintelligible
allusion, in the declaration, to French aeroplanes throwing bombs on
Nuremberg and Wesel. Campton read that part of the message over two or
three times.
Aeroplanes throwing bombs? Aeroplanes as engines of destruction? He had
always thought of them as a kind of giant kite that fools went up in
when they were tired of breaking their necks in other ways. But
aeroplane bombardment as a cause for declaring war? The bad faith of it
was so manifest that he threw down the papers half relieved. Of course
there would be a protest on the part of the allies; a great country like
France would not allow herself to be bullied into war on such a pretext.
The ultimatum to Belgium was more serious; but Belgium’s gallant reply
would no doubt check Germany on that side. After all, there was such a
thing as international law, and Germany herself had recognized it.... So
his mind spun on in vain circles, while under the frail web of his
casuistry gloomed the obstinate fact that George was mobilised, that
George was to leave the next morning.
The day wore on: it was the shortest and yet most interminable that
Campton had ever known. Paris, when he went out into it, was more
dazzlingly empty than ever. In the hotel, in the hall, on the stairs, he
was waylaid by flustered compatriots—“Oh, Mr. Campton, you don’t know
me, but of course all Americans know _you_!”—who appealed to him for the
very information he was trying to obtain for himself: how one could get
money, how one could get hold of the concierge, how one could send
cables, if there was any restaurant where the waiters had not all been
mobilised, if he had any “pull” at the Embassy, or at any of the
steamship offices, or any of the banks. One disordered beauty blurted
out: “Of course, with your connection with Bullard and Brant”—and was
only waked to her mistake by Campton’s indignant stare, and his plunge
past her while she called out excuses.
But the name acted as a reminder of his promise to go and see Mrs.
Brant, and he decided to make his visit after lunch, when George would
be off collecting last things. Visiting the Brants with George would
have been beyond his capacity.
* * * * *
The great drawing-rooms, their awnings spread against the sun, their
tall windows wide to the glow of the garden, were empty when he entered;
but in a moment he was joined by a tall angular woman with a veil pushed
up untidily above her pink nose. Campton reflected that he had never
seen Adele Anthony in the daytime without a veil pushed up above a
flushed nose, and dangling in irregular wisps from the back of a small
hard hat of which the shape never varied.
“Julia will be here in a minute. When she told me you were coming I
waited.”
He was glad to have a word with her before meeting Mrs. Brant, though
his impulse had been almost as strong to avoid the one as the other. He
dreaded belligerent bluster as much as vain whimpering, and in the
depths of his soul he had to own that it would have been easier to talk
to Mr. Brant than to either of the women.
“Julia is powdering her nose,” Miss Anthony continued. “She has an idea
that if you see she’s been crying you’ll be awfully angry.”
Campton made an impatient gesture. “If I were—much it would matter!”
“Ah, but you might tell George; and George is not to know.” She paused,
and then bounced round on him abruptly. She always moved and spoke in
explosions, as if the wires that agitated her got tangled, and then were
too suddenly jerked loose.
“_Does_ George know?”
“About his mother’s tears?”
“About this plan you’re all hatching to have him discharged?”
Campton reddened under her lashless blue gaze, and the consciousness of
doing so made his answer all the curter.
“Probably not—unless you’ve told him!”
The shot appeared to reach the mark, for an answering blush suffused her
sallow complexion. “You’d better not put ideas into my head!” she
laughed. Something in her tone reminded him of all her old dogged
loyalties, and made him ashamed of his taunt.
“Anyhow,” he grumbled, “his place is not in the French army.”
“That was for you and Julia to decide twenty-six years ago, wasn’t it?
Now it’s up to him.”
Her capricious adoption of American slang, fitted anyhow into her
old-fashioned and punctilious English, sometimes amused but oftener
exasperated Campton.
“If you’re going to talk modern slang you ought to give up those
ridiculous stays, and not wear a fringe like a mid-Victorian royalty,”
he jeered, trying to laugh off his exasperation.
She let this pass with a smile. “Well, I wish I could find the language
to make you understand how much better it would be to leave George
alone. This war will be the making of him.”
“He’s made quite to my satisfaction as it is, thanks. But what’s the use
of talking? You always get your phrases out of books.”
The door opened, and Mrs. Brant came in.
Her appearance answered to Miss Anthony’s description. A pearly mist
covered her face, and some reviving liquid had cleared her congested
eyes. Her poor hands had suddenly grown so thin and dry that the heavy
rings, slipping down to the joints, slid back into place as she shook
hands with Campton.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“Oh——” he protested, helpless, and disturbed by Miss Anthony’s presence.
At the moment his former wife’s feelings were more intelligible to him
than his friend’s: the maternal fibre stirred in her, and made her more
appealing than any elderly virgin on the war-path.
“I’m off, my dears,” said the elderly virgin, as if guessing his
thought. Her queer shallow eyes included them both in a sweeping glance,
and she flung back from the threshold: “Be careful of what you say to
George.”
What they had to say to each other did not last many minutes. The Brants
had made various efforts, but had been baffled on all sides by the
general agitation and confusion. In high quarters the people they wanted
to see were inaccessible; and those who could be reached lent but a
distracted ear. The Ambassador had at once declared that he could do
nothing; others vaguely promised they “would see”—but hardly seemed to
hear what they were being asked.
“And meanwhile time is passing—and he’s going!” Mrs. Brant lamented.
The reassurance that Campton brought from Fortin-Lescluze, vague though
it was, came to her as a miraculous promise, and raised Campton suddenly
in her estimation. She looked at him with a new confidence, and he could
almost hear her saying to Brant, as he had so often heard her say to
himself: “You never seem able to get anything done. I don’t know how
other people manage.”
Her gratitude gave him the feeling of having been engaged in something
underhand and pusillanimous. He made haste to take leave, after
promising to pass on any word he might receive from the physician; but
he reminded her that he was not likely to hear anything till George had
been for some days at his base.
She acknowledged the probability of this, and clung to him with trustful
eyes. She was much disturbed by the preposterous fact that the
Government had already requisitioned two of the Brant motors, and
Campton had an idea that, dazzled by his newly-developed capacity to
“manage,” she was about to implore him to rescue from the clutches of
the authorities her Rolls-Royce and Anderson’s Delaunay.
He was hastening to leave when the door again opened. A rumpled-looking
maid peered in, evidently perplexed, and giving way doubtfully to a
young woman who entered with a rush, and then paused as if she too were
doubtful. She was pretty in an odd dishevelled way, and with her
elaborate clothes and bewildered look she reminded Campton of a
fashion-plate torn from its page and helplessly blown about the world.
He had seen the same type among his compatriots any number of times in
the last days.
“Oh, Mrs. Brant—yes, I _know_ you gave orders that you were not in to
anybody, but I just wouldn’t listen, and it’s not that poor woman’s
fault,” the visitor began, in a plaintive staccato which matched her sad
eyes and her fluttered veils.
“You see, I simply had to get hold of Mr. Brant, because I’m here
without a penny—literally!” She dangled before them a bejewelled
mesh-bag. “And in a hotel where they don’t know me. And at the bank they
wouldn’t listen to me, and they said Mr. Brant wasn’t there, though of
course I suppose he was; so I said to the cashier: ‘Very well, then,
I’ll simply go to the Avenue Marigny and batter in his door—unless you’d
rather I jumped into the Seine?’”
“Oh, Mrs. Talkett——” murmured Mrs. Brant.
“Really: it’s a case of my money or my life!” the young lady continued
with a studied laugh. She stood between them, artificial and yet so
artless, conscious of intruding but evidently used to having her
intrusions pardoned; and her large eyes turned interrogatively to
Campton.
“Of course my husband will do all he can for you. I’ll telephone,” said
Mrs. Brant; then, perceiving that her visitor continued to gaze at
Campton, she added: “Oh, no, _this_ is not ... this is Mr. Campton.”
“John Campton? I knew it!” Mrs. Talkett’s eyes became devouring and
brilliant. “Of course I ought to have recognized you at once—from your
photographs. I have one pinned up in my room. But I was so flurried when
I came in.” She detained the painter’s hand. “Do forgive me! For _years_
I’ve dreamed of your doing me ... you see, I paint a little myself ...
but it’s ridiculous to speak of such things now.” She added, as if she
were risking something: “I knew your son at St. Moritz. We saw a great
deal of him there, and in New York last winter.”
“Ah——” said Campton, bowing awkwardly.
“Cursed fools—all women,” he anathematized her on the way downstairs.
In the street, however, he felt grateful to her for reducing Mrs. Brant
to such confusion that she had made no attempt to detain him. His way of
life lay so far apart from his former wife’s that they had hardly ever
been exposed to accidents of the kind, and he saw that Julia’s
embarrassment kept all its freshness.
The fact set him thinking curiously of what her existence had been since
they had parted. She had long since forgotten her youthful art-jargon to
learn others more consonant to her tastes. As the wife of the powerful
American banker she dispensed the costliest hospitality with the simple
air of one who has never learnt that human life may be sustained without
the aid of orchids and champagne. With guests either brought up in the
same convictions or bent on acquiring them she conversed earnestly and
unweariedly about motors, clothes and morals; but perhaps her most
stimulating hours were those brightened by the weekly visit of the
Rector of her parish. With happy untrammelled hands she was now free to
rebuild to her own measure a corner of the huge wicked welter of Paris;
and immediately it became as neat, as empty, as air-tight as her own
immaculate drawing-room. There he seemed to see her, throning year after
year in an awful emptiness of wealth and luxury and respectability,
seeing only dull people, doing only dull things, and fighting feverishly
to defend the last traces of a beauty which had never given her anything
but the tamest and most unprofitable material prosperity.
“She’s never even had the silly kind of success she wanted—poor Julia!”
he mused, wondering that she had been able to put into her life so few
of the sensations which can be bought by wealth and beauty. “And now
what will be left—how on earth will she fit into a war?”
He was sure all her plans had been made for the coming six months: her
week-end sets of heavy millionaires secured for Deauville, and after
that for the shooting at the big château near Compiègne, and three weeks
reserved for Biarritz before the return to Paris in January. One of the
luxuries Julia had most enjoyed after her separation from Campton (Adele
had told him) had been that of planning things ahead: Mr. Brant, thank
heaven, was not impulsive. And now here was this black bolt of war
falling among all her carefully balanced arrangements with a crash more
violent than any of Campton’s inconsequences!
As he reached the Place de la Concorde a newsboy passed with the three
o’clock papers, and he bought one and read of the crossing of Luxembourg
and the invasion of Belgium. The Germans were arrogantly acting up to
their menace: heedless of international law, they were driving straight
for France and England by the road they thought the most accessible....
In the hotel he found George, red with rage, devouring the same paper:
the boy’s whole look was changed.
“The howling blackguards! The brigands! This isn’t war—it’s simple
murder!”
The two men stood and stared at each other. “Will England stand it?”
sprang to their lips at the same moment.
Never—never! England would never permit such a violation of the laws
regulating the relations between civilized peoples. They began to say
both together that after all perhaps it was the best thing that could
have happened, since, if there had been the least hesitation or
reluctance in any section of English opinion, this abominable outrage
would instantly sweep it away.
“They’ve been too damned clever for once!” George exulted. “France is
saved—that’s certain anyhow!”
Yes; France was saved if England could put her army into the field at
once. But could she? Oh, for the Channel tunnel at this hour! Would this
lesson at last cure England of her obstinate insularity? Belgium had
announced her intention of resisting; but what was that gallant
declaration worth in face of Germany’s brutal assault? A poor little
country pledged to a guaranteed neutrality could hardly be expected to
hold her frontiers more than forty-eight hours against the most powerful
army in Europe. And what a narrow strip Belgium was, viewed as an
outpost of France!
These thoughts, racing through Campton’s mind, were swept out of it
again by his absorbing preoccupation. What effect would the Belgian
affair have on George’s view of his own participation in the war? For
the first time the boy’s feelings were visibly engaged; his voice shook
as he burst out: “Louis Dastrey’s right: this kind of thing has got to
stop. We shall go straight back to cannibalism if it doesn’t.—God, what
hounds!”
Yes, but—Campton pondered, tried to think up Pacifist arguments,
remembered his own discussion with Paul Dastrey three days before. “My
dear chap, hasn’t France perhaps gone about with a chip on her shoulder?
Saverne, for instance: some people think——”
“Damn Saverne! Haven’t the Germans shown us what they are now? Belgium
sheds all the light _I_ want on Saverne. They’re not fit to live with
white people, and the sooner they’re shown it the better.”
“Well, France and Russia and England are here to show them.”
George laughed. “Yes, and double quick.”
Both were silent again, each thinking his own thoughts. They were
apparently the same, for just as Campton was about to ask where George
had decided that they should take their last dinner, the young man said
abruptly: “Look here, Dad; I’d planned a little tête-à-tête for us this
evening.”
“Yes——?”
“Well—I can’t. I’m going to chuck you.” He smiled a little, his colour
rising nervously. “For some people I’ve just run across—who were awfully
kind to me at St. Moritz—and in New York last winter. I didn’t know they
were here till ... till just now. I’m awfully sorry; but I’ve simply got
to dine with them.”
There was a silence. Campton stared out over his son’s shoulder at the
great sunlit square. “Oh, all right,” he said briskly.
This—on George’s last night!
“You don’t mind _much_, do you? I’ll be back early, for a last pow-wow
on the terrace.” George paused, and finally brought out: “You see, it
really wouldn’t have done to tell mother that I was deserting her on my
last evening because I was dining with you!”
A weight was lifted from Campton’s heart, and he felt ashamed of having
failed to guess the boy’s real motive.
“My dear fellow, naturally ... quite right. And you can stop in and see
your mother on the way home. You’ll find me here whenever you turn up.”
George looked relieved. “Thanks a lot—you always know. And now for my
adieux to Adele.”
He went off whistling the waltz from the Rosenkavalier, and Campton
returned to his own thoughts.
* * * * *
He was still revolving them when he went upstairs after a solitary
repast in the confused and servantless dining-room. Adele Anthony had
telephoned to him to come and dine—after seeing George, he supposed; but
he had declined. He wanted to be with his boy, or alone.
As he left the dining-room he ran across Adamson, the American newspaper
correspondent, who had lived for years in Paris and was reputed to have
“inside information.” Adamson was grave but confident. In his opinion
Russia would probably not get to Berlin before November (he smiled at
Campton’s astonished outcry); but if England—oh, they were sure of
England!—could get her army over without delay, the whole business would
very likely be settled before that, in one big battle in Belgium.
(Yes—poor Belgium, indeed!) Anyhow, in the opinion of the military
experts the war was not likely to last more than three or four months;
and of course, even if things went badly on the western front, which was
highly unlikely, there was Russia to clench the business as soon as her
huge forces got in motion. Campton drew much comfort from this sober
view of the situation, midway between that of the optimists who knew
Russia would be in Berlin in three weeks, and of those who saw the
Germans in Calais even sooner. Adamson was a levelheaded fellow, who
weighed what he said and pinned his faith to facts.
Campton managed to evade several people whom he saw lurking for him, and
mounted to his room. On the terrace, alone with the serene city, his
confidence grew, and he began to feel more and more sure that, whatever
happened, George was likely to be kept out of the fighting till the
whole thing was over. With such formidable forces closing in on her it
was fairly obvious that Germany must succumb before half or even a
quarter of the allied reserves had been engaged. Sustained by the
thought, he let his mind hover tenderly over George’s future, and the
effect on his character of this brief and harmless plunge into a
military career.
IX
George was gone.
When, with a last whistle and scream, his train had ploughed its way out
of the clanging station; when the last young figures clinging to the
rear of the last carriage had vanished, and the bare rails again
glittered up from the cindery tracks, Campton turned and looked about
him.
All the platforms of the station were crowded as he had seldom seen any
place crowded, and to his surprise he found himself taking in every
detail of the scene with a morbid accuracy of observation. He had
discovered, during these last days, that his artist’s vision had been
strangely unsettled. Sometimes, as when he had left Fortin’s house, he
saw nothing: the material world, which had always tugged at him with a
thousand hands, vanished and left him in the void. Then again, as at
present, he saw everything, saw it too clearly, in all its superfluous
and negligible reality, instead of instinctively selecting, and
disregarding what was not to his purpose.
Faces, faces—they swarmed about him, and his overwrought vision
registered them one by one. Especially he noticed the faces of the
women, women of all ages, all classes. These were the wives, mothers,
grandmothers, sisters, mistresses of all those heavily laden trainfuls
of French youth. He was struck with the same strong cheerfulness in all:
some pale, some flushed, some serious, but all firmly and calmly
smiling.
One young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a
becoming dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because
there was such assurance in her serenity that she did not have to
constrain her lips and eyes, but could trust them to be what she wished.
Yet he saw by the way she clung to the young artilleryman from whom she
was parting that hers were no sisterly farewells.
An immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton
caught the phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another
in the windows—words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender
names, mirthful allusions, last callings out: “Write often! Don’t forget
to wrap up your throat.... Remember to send a line to Annette.... Bring
home a Prussian helmet for the children! _On les aura, pas, mon vieux?_”
It was all bright, brave and confident. “If Berlin could only see it!”
Campton thought.
He tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but
could not; yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a
great deal. The train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier
to let the crowd flood by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a
turmoil.
Suddenly he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, and recognized the
hat and hair of the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see
them now, for they were buried in her hands and her whole body shook
with woe. An elderly man was trying to draw her away—her father,
probably.
“Come, come, my child——”
“Oh—oh—oh,” she hiccoughed, following blindly.
The people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew
pale. Campton saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet
who might have been his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
But they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the
lives of their beloved! The same fear grasped Campton’s heart, a very
present terror, such as he had hardly before imagined. Compared to it,
all that he had felt hitherto seemed as faint as the sensations of a
looker-on. His knees failed him, and he grasped a transverse bar of the
pier.
People were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to
belong to each other; only he was alone. George’s mother had not come to
bid her son goodbye; she had declared that she would rather take leave
of him quietly in her own house than in a crowd of dirty people at the
station. But then it was impossible to conceive of her being up and
dressed and at the Gare de l’Est at five in the morning—and how could
she have got there without her motor? So Campton was alone, in that
crowd which seemed all made up of families.
But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away alone, and
recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony’s adamantine hat
and tight knob of hair.
Poor Adele! So she had come too—and had evidently failed in her quest,
not been able to fend a way through the crowd, and perhaps not even had
a glimpse of her hero. The thought smote Campton with compunction: he
regretted his sneering words when they had last met, regretted refusing
to dine with her. He wished the barrier of people between them had been
less impenetrable; but for the moment it was useless to try to force a
way through it. He had to wait till the crowd shifted to other
platforms, whence other trains were starting, and by that time she was
lost to sight.
At last he was able to make his way through the throng, and as he came
out of a side entrance he saw her. She appeared to be looking for a
taxi—she waved her sunshade aimlessly. But no one who knew the Gare de
l’Est would have gone around that corner to look for a taxi; least of
all the practical Adele. Besides, Adele never took taxis: she travelled
in the bowels of the earth or on the dizziest omnibus tops.
Campton knew at once that she was waiting for him. He went up to her and
a guilty pink suffused her nose.
“You missed him after all——?” he said.
“I—oh, no, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t? But I was with him all the time. We didn’t see you——”
“No, but _I_ saw—distinctly. That was all I went for,” she jerked back.
He slipped his arm through hers. “This crowd terrifies me. I’m glad you
waited for me,” he said.
He saw her pleasure, but she merely answered: “I’m dying of thirst,
aren’t you?”
“Yes—or hunger, or something. Could we find a _laiterie_?”
They found one, and sat down among early clerks and shop-girls, and a
few dishevelled women with swollen faces whom Campton had noticed in the
station. One of them, who sat opposite an elderly man, had drawn out a
pocket mirror and was powdering her nose.
Campton hated to see women powder their noses—one of the few merits with
which he credited Julia Brant was that of never having adopted these
dirty modern fashions, of continuing to make her toilet in private “like
a lady,” as people used to say when he was young. But now the gesture
charmed him, for he had recognized the girl who had been sobbing in the
station.
“How game she is! I like that. But why is she so frightened?” he
wondered. For he saw that her chocolate was untouched, and that the
smile had stiffened on her lips.
Since his talk with Adamson he could not bring himself to be seriously
alarmed. Fear had taken him by the throat for a moment in the station,
at the sound of the girl’s sobs; but already he had thrown it off.
Everybody agreed that the war was sure to be over in a few weeks; even
Dastrey had come round to that view; and with Fortin’s protection, and
the influences Anderson Brant could put in motion, George was surely
safe—as safe at his depot as anywhere else in this precarious world.
Campton poured out Adele’s coffee, and drank off his own as if it had
been champagne.
“Do you know anything about the people George was dining with last
night?” he enquired abruptly.
Miss Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in
Paris; she was a clearing-house of Franco-American gossip, and it was
likely enough that if George had special reasons for wishing to spend
his last evening away from his family she would know why. But the chance
of her knowing what had been kept from him made Campton’s question, as
soon as it was put, seem indiscreet, and he added hastily: “Not that I
want——”
She looked surprised. “No: he didn’t tell me. Some young man’s affair, I
suppose....” She smirked absurdly, her lashless eyes blinking under the
pushed-back veil.
Campton’s mind had already strayed from the question. Nothing bored him
more than Adele doing the “sad dog,” and he was vexed at having given
her such a chance to be silly. What he wanted to know was whether George
had spoken to his old friend about his future—about his own idea of his
situation, and his intentions and wishes in view of the grim chance
which people, with propitiatory vagueness, call “anything happening.”
Had the boy left any word, any message with her for any one? But it was
useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would
never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when
it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot
that one could not imagine any one’s having trusted a secret to her.
Campton had no wish to surprise George’s secrets, if the boy had any.
But their parting had been so hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, so curt and
casual, that he would have liked to think his son had left, somewhere, a
message for him, a word, a letter, in case ... in case there was
anything premonitory in the sobbing of that girl at the next table.
But Adele’s pink nose confronted him, as guileless as a rabbit’s, and he
went out with her unsatisfied. They parted at the door of the
restaurant, and Campton went to the studio to see if there were any news
of his maid-servant Mariette. He meant to return to sleep there that
night, and even his simple housekeeping was likely to be troublesome if
Mariette should not arrive.
On the way it occurred to him that he had not yet seen the morning
papers, and he stopped and bought a handful.
Negotiations, hopes, fears, conjectures—but nothing new or definite,
except the insolent fact of Germany’s aggression, and the
almost-certainty of England’s intervention. When he reached the studio
he found Mme. Lebel in her usual place, paler than usual, but with firm
lips and bright eyes. Her three grandsons had left for their depots the
day before: one was in the _Chasseurs Alpins_, and probably already on
his way to Alsace, another in the infantry, the third in the heavy
artillery; she did not know where the two latter were likely to be sent.
Her eldest son, their father, was dead; the second, a man of fifty, and
a cabinetmaker by trade, was in the territorials, and was not to report
for another week. He hoped, before leaving, to see the return of his
wife and little girl, who were in the Ardennes with the wife’s people.
Mme. Lebel’s mind was made up and her philosophy ready for immediate
application.
“It’s terribly hard for the younger people; but it had to be. I come
from Nancy, Monsieur: I remember the German occupation. I understand
better than my daughter-in-law....”
There was no news of Mariette, and small chance of having any for some
days, much less of seeing her. No one could tell how long civilian
travel would be interrupted. Mme. Lebel, moved by her lodger’s plight,
promised to “find some one”; and Campton mounted to the studio.
He had left it only two days before, on the day when he had vainly
waited for Fortin and his dancer; and an abyss already divided him from
that vanished time. Then his little world still hung like a straw above
an eddy; now it was spinning about in the central vortex.
The pictures stood about untidily, and he looked curiously at all those
faces which belonged to the other life. Each bore the mark of its own
immediate passions and interests; not one betrayed the least
consciousness of coming disaster except the face of poor Madame de
Dolmetsch, whose love had enlightened her. Campton began to think of the
future from the painter’s point of view. What a modeller of faces a
great war must be! What would the people who came through it look like,
he wondered.
His bell tinkled, and he turned to answer it. Dastrey, he supposed ...
he had caught a glimpse of his friend across the crowd at the Gare de
l’Est, seeing off his nephew, but had purposely made no sign. He still
wanted to be alone, and above all not to hear war-talk. Mme. Lebel,
however, had no doubt revealed his presence in the studio, and he could
not risk offending Dastrey.
When he opened the door it was a surprise to see there, instead of
Dastrey’s anxious face, the round rosy countenance of a well-dressed
youth with a shock of fair hair above eyes of childish candour.
“Oh—come in,” Campton said, surprised, but divining a compatriot in a
difficulty.
The youth obeyed, blushing his apologies.
“I’m Benny Upsher, sir,” he said, in a tone modest yet confident, as if
the name were an introduction.
“Oh——” Campton stammered, cursing his absent-mindedness and his
unfailing faculty for forgetting names.
“You’re a friend of George’s, aren’t you?” he risked.
“Yes—tremendous. We were at Harvard together—he was two years ahead of
me.”
“Ah—then you’re still there?”
Mr. Upsher’s blush became a mask of crimson. “Well—I thought I was, till
this thing happened.”
“What thing?”
The youth stared at the older man with a look of celestial wonder.
“This war.—George has started already, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. Two hours ago.”
“So they said—I looked him up at the Crillon. I wanted most awfully to
see him; if I had, of course I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“My dear young man, you’re not bothering me. But what can I do?”
Mr. Upsher’s composure seemed to be returning as the necessary
preliminaries were cleared away. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Of course
what I’d like best is to join his regiment.”
“Join his regiment—_you_!” Campton exclaimed.
“Oh, I know it’s difficult; I raced up from Biarritz quick as I could to
catch him.” He seemed still to be panting with the effort. “I want to be
in this,” he concluded.
Campton contemplated him with helpless perplexity. “But I don’t
understand—there’s no reason, in your case. With George it was
obligatory—on account of his being born here. But I suppose you were
born in America?”
“Well, I guess so: in Utica. My mother was Madeline Mayhew. I think
we’re a sort of cousins, sir, aren’t we?”
“Of course—of course. Excuse my not recalling it—just at first. But, my
dear boy, I still don’t see——”
Mr. Upsher’s powers of stating his case were plainly limited. He pushed
back his rumpled hair, looked hard again at his cousin, and repeated
doggedly: “I want to be _in_ this.”
“This war?”
He nodded.
Campton groaned. What did the boy mean, and why come to him with such
tomfoolery? At that moment he felt even more unfitted than usual to deal
with practical problems, and in spite of the forgotten cousinship it was
no affair of his what Madeline Mayhew’s son wanted to be in.
But there was the boy himself, stolid, immovable, impenetrable to hints,
and with something in his wide blue eyes like George—and yet so
childishly different.
“Sit down—have a cigarette, won’t you?—You know, of course,” Campton
began, “that what you propose is almost insuperably difficult?”
“Getting into George’s regiment?”
“Getting into the French army at all—for a foreigner, a neutral ... I’m
afraid there’s really nothing I can do.”
Benny Upsher smiled indulgently. “I can fix that up all right; getting
into the army, I mean. The only thing that might be hard would be
getting into his regiment.”
“Oh, as to that—out of the question, I should think.” Campton was
conscious of speaking curtly: the boy’s bland determination was
beginning to get on his nerves.
“Thank you no end,” said Benny Upsher, getting up. “Sorry to have butted
in,” he added, holding out a large brown hand.
Campton followed him to the door perplexedly. He knew that something
ought to be done—but what? On the threshold he laid his hand impulsively
on the youth’s shoulder. “Look here, my boy, we’re cousins, as you say,
and if you’re Madeline Mayhew’s boy you’re an only son. Moreover you’re
George’s friend—which matters still more to me. I can’t let you go like
this. Just let me say a word to you before——”
A gleam of shrewdness flashed through Benny Upsher’s inarticulate blue
eyes. “A word or two _against_, you mean? Why, it’s awfully kind, but
not the least earthly use. I guess I’ve heard all the arguments. But all
I see is that hulking bully trying to do Belgium in. England’s coming
in, ain’t she? Well, then why ain’t we?”
“England? Why—why, there’s no analogy——”
The young man groped for the right word. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Only
in tight places we always _do_ seem to stand together.”
“You’re mad—this is not our war. Do you really want to go out and
butcher people?”
“Yes—this kind of people,” said Benny Upsher cheerfully. “You see, I’ve
had all this talk from Uncle Harvey Mayhew a good many times on the way
over. We came out on the same boat: he wanted me to be his private
secretary at the Hague Congress. But I was pretty sure I’d have a job of
my own to attend to.”
Campton still contemplated him hopelessly. “Where is your uncle?” he
wondered.
Benny grinned. “On his way to the Hague, I suppose.”
“He ought to be here to look after you—some one ought to!”
“Then you don’t see your way to getting me into George’s regiment?”
Benny simply replied.
An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with
obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question. It cost him
an effort to shake off the vision.
He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was
a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance
George’s plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had
already arranged something....
He tore open the message, and read: “Utica July thirty-first. No news
from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to
America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher.”
“Good Lord!” Campton groaned—“and I never even asked the boy’s address!”