BOOK II

X

The war was three months old—three centuries.

By virtue of some gift of adaptation which seemed forever to discredit

human sensibility, people were already beginning to live into the

monstrous idea of it, acquire its ways, speak its language, regard it as

a thinkable, endurable, arrangeable fact; to eat it by day, and sleep on

it—yes, and soundly—at night.

The war went on; life went on; Paris went on. She had had her great hour

of resistance, when, alone, exposed and defenceless, she had held back

the enemy and broken his strength. She had had, afterward, her hour of

triumph, the hour of the Marne; then her hour of passionate and

prayerful hope, when it seemed to the watching nations that the enemy

was not only held back but thrust back, and victory finally in reach.

That hour had passed in its turn, giving way to the grey reality of the

trenches. A new speech was growing up in this new world. There were

trenches now, there was a “Front”—people were beginning to talk of their

sons at the front.

The first time John Campton heard the phrase it sent a shudder through

him. Winter was coming on, and he was haunted by the vision of the

youths out there, boys of George’s age, thousands and thousands of them,

exposed by day in reeking wet ditches and sleeping at night under the

rain and snow. People were talking calmly of victory in the spring—the

spring that was still six long months away! And meanwhile, what cold and

wet, what blood and agony, what shattered bodies out on that hideous

front, what shattered homes in all the lands it guarded!

Campton could bear to think of these things now. _His_ son was not at

the front—was safe, thank God, and likely to remain so!

During the first awful weeks of silence and uncertainty, when every

morning brought news of a fresh disaster, when no letters came from the

army and no private messages could reach it—during those weeks, while

Campton, like other fathers, was without news of his son, the war had

been to him simply a huge featureless mass crushing him earthward,

blinding him, letting him neither think nor move nor breathe.

But at last he had got permission to go to Chalons, whither Fortin, who

chanced to have begun his career as a surgeon, had been hastily

transferred. The physician, called from his incessant labours in a

roughly-improvised operating-room, to which Campton was led between rows

of stretchers laden with livid blood-splashed men, had said kindly, but

with a shade of impatience, that he had not forgotten, had done what he

could; that George’s health did not warrant his being discharged from

the army, but that he was temporarily on a staff-job at the rear, and

would probably be kept there if such and such influences were brought to

bear. Then, calling for hot water and fresh towels, the surgeon vanished

and Campton made his way back with lowered eyes between the stretchers.

The “influences” in question were brought to bear—not without Anderson

Brant’s assistance—and now that George was fairly certain to be kept at

clerical work a good many miles from the danger-zone Campton felt less

like an ant under a landslide, and was able for the first time to think

of the war as he might have thought of any other war: objectively,

intellectually, almost dispassionately, as of history in the making.

It was not that he had any doubt as to the rights and wrongs of the

case. The painfully preserved equilibrium of the neutrals made a pitiful

show now that the monstrous facts of the first weeks were known:

Germany’s diplomatic perfidy, her savagery in the field, her

premeditated and systematized terrorizing of the civil populations.

Nothing could efface what had been done in Belgium and Luxembourg, the

burning of Louvain, the bombardment of Rheims. These successive outrages

had roused in Campton the same incredulous wrath as in the rest of

mankind; but being of a speculative mind—and fairly sure now that George

would never lie in the mud and snow with the others—he had begun to

consider the landslide in its universal relations, as well as in its

effects on his private ant-heap.

His son’s situation, however, was still his central thought. That this

lad, who was meant to have been born three thousand miles away in his

own safe warless country, and who was regarded by the government of that

country as having been born there, as subject to her laws and entitled

to her protection—that this lad, by the most idiotic of blunders, a

blunder perpetrated before he was born, should have been dragged into a

conflict in which he was totally unconcerned, should become temporarily

and arbitrarily the subject of a foreign state, exposed to whatever

catastrophes that state might draw upon itself, this fact still seemed

to Campton as unjust as when it first dawned on him that his boy’s very

life might hang on some tortuous secret negotiation between the cabinets

of Europe.

He still refused to admit that France had any claim on George, any right

to his time, to his suffering or to his life. He had argued it out a

hundred times with Adele Anthony. “You say Julia and I were to blame for

not going home before the boy was born—and God knows I agree with you!

But suppose we’d meant to go? Suppose we’d made every arrangement, taken

every precaution, as my parents did in my own case, got to Havre or

Cherbourg, say, and been told the steamer had broken her screw—or been

prevented ourselves, at the last moment, by illness or accident, or any

sudden grab of the Hand of God? You’ll admit we shouldn’t have been to

blame for that; yet the law would have recognized no difference. George

would still have found himself a French soldier on the second of last

August because, by the same kind of unlucky accident, he and I were born

on the wrong side of the Atlantic. And I say that’s enough to prove it’s

an iniquitous law, a travesty of justice. Nobody’s going to convince me

that, because a steamer may happen to break a phlange of her screw at

the wrong time, or a poor woman be frightened by a thunderstorm, France

has the right to force an American boy to go and rot in the trenches.”

“In the trenches—is George in the trenches?” Adele Anthony asked,

raising her pale eyebrows.

“No.” Campton thundered, his fist crashing down among her tea things;

“and all your word-juggling isn’t going to convince me that he ought to

be there.” He paused and stared furiously about the little ladylike

drawing-room into which Miss Anthony’s sharp angles were so

incongruously squeezed. She made no answer, and he went on: “George

looks at the thing exactly as I do.”

“Has he told you so?” Miss Anthony enquired, rescuing his teacup and

putting sugar into her own.

“He has told me nothing to the contrary. You don’t seem to be aware that

military correspondence is censored, and that a soldier can’t always

blurt out everything he thinks.”

Miss Anthony followed his glance about the room, and her eyes paused

with his on her own portrait, now in the place of honour over the

mantelpiece, where it hung incongruously above a menagerie of china

animals and a collection of trophies from the Marne.

“I dropped in at the Luxembourg yesterday,” she said. “Do you know whom

I saw there? Anderson Brant. He was looking at George’s portrait, and

turned as red as a beet. You ought to do him a sketch of George some

day—after this.”

Campton’s face darkened. He knew it was partly through Brant’s influence

that George had been detached from his regiment and given a staff job in

the Argonne; but Miss Anthony’s reminder annoyed him. The Brants had

acted through sheer selfish cowardice, the desire to safeguard something

which belonged to them, something they valued as they valued their

pictures and tapestries, though of course in a greater degree; whereas

he, Campton, was sustained by a principle which he could openly avow,

and was ready to discuss with any one who had the leisure to listen.

He had explained all this so often to Miss Anthony that the words rose

again to his lips without an effort. “If it had been a national issue I

should have wanted him to be among the first: such as our having to

fight Mexico, for instance——”

“Yes; or the moon. For my part, I understand Julia and Anderson better.

They don’t care a fig for national issues; they’re just animals

defending their cub.”

“_Their_—thank you!” Campton exclaimed.

“Well, poor Anderson really _was_ a dry-nurse to the boy. Who else was

there to look after him? You were painting Spanish beauties at the

time.” She frowned. “Life’s a puzzle. I see perfectly that if you’d let

everything else go to keep George you’d never have become the great John

Campton: the _real_ John Campton you were meant to be. And it wouldn’t

have been half as satisfactory for you—or for George either. Only, in

the meanwhile, somebody had to blow the child’s nose, and pay his

dentist and doctor; and you ought to be grateful to Anderson for doing

it. Aren’t there bees or ants, or something, that are kept for such

purposes?”

Campton’s lips were opened to reply when her face changed, and he saw

that he had ceased to exist for her. He knew the reason. That look came

over everybody’s face nowadays at the hour when the evening paper came.

The old maid-servant brought it in, and lingered to hear the

_communiqué_. At that hour, everywhere over the globe, business and

labour and pleasure (if it still existed) were suspended for a moment

while the hearts of all men gathered themselves up in a question and a

prayer.

Miss Anthony sought for her _lorgnon_ and failed to find it. With a

shaking hand she passed the newspaper over to Campton.

“Violent enemy attacks in the region of Dixmude, Ypres, Armentières,

Arras, in the Argonne, and on the advanced slopes of the Grand Couronné

de Nancy, have been successfully repulsed. We have taken back the

village of Soupir, near Vailly (Aisne); we have taken Maucourt and

Mogeville, to the northeast of Verdun. Progress has been made in the

region of Vermelles (Pas-de-Calais), south of Aix Noulette. Enemy

attacks in the Hauts-de-Meuse and southeast of Saint-Mihiel have also

been repulsed.

“In Poland the Austrian retreat is becoming general. The Russians are

still advancing in the direction of Kielce-Sandomir and have progressed

beyond the San in Galicia. Mlawa has been reoccupied, and the whole

railway system of Poland is now controlled by the Russian forces.”

A good day—oh, decidedly a good day. At this rate, what became of the

gloomy forecasts of the people who talked of a winter in the trenches,

to be followed by a spring campaign? True, the Serbian army was still

retreating before superior Austrian forces—but there too the scales

would soon be turned if the Russians continued to progress. That day

there was hope everywhere: the old maid-servant went away smiling, and

Miss Anthony poured out another cup of tea.

Campton had not lifted his eyes from the paper. Suddenly they lit on a

short paragraph: “Fallen on the Field of Honour.” One had got used to

that with the rest; used even to the pang of reading names one knew,

evoking familiar features, young faces blotted out in blood, young limbs

convulsed in the fires of that hell called “the Front.” But this time

Campton turned pale and the paper fell to his knee.

“Fortin-Lescluze; Jean-Jacques-Marie, lieutenant of _Chasseurs à Pied_,

gloriously fallen for France....” There followed a ringing citation.

Fortin’s son, his only son, was dead.

Campton saw before him the honest _bourgeois_ dining-room, so strangely

out of keeping with the rest of the establishment; he saw the late

August sun slanting in on the group about the table, on the ambitious

and unscrupulous great man, the two quiet women hidden under his

illustrious roof, and the youth who had held together these three

dissimilar people, making an invisible home in the heart of all that

publicity. Campton remembered his brief exchange of words with Fortin on

the threshold, and the father’s uncontrollable outburst: “For his mother

and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”

Campton shut his eyes and leaned back, sick with the memory. This man

had had a share in saving George; but his own son he could not save.

“What’s the matter?” Miss Anthony asked, her hand on his arm.

Campton could not bring the name to his lips. “Nothing—nothing. Only

this room’s rather hot—and I must be off anyhow.” He got up, escaping

from her solicitude, and made his way out. He must go at once to

Fortin’s for news. The physician was still at Chalons; but there would

surely be some one at the house, and Campton could at least leave a

message and ask where to write.

Dusk had fallen. His eyes usually feasted on the beauty of the new

Paris, the secret mysterious Paris of veiled lights and deserted

streets; but to-night he was blind to it. He could see nothing but

Fortin’s face, hear nothing but his voice when he said: “Our only son in

the war.”

He groped along the pitch-black street for the remembered outline of the

house (since no house-numbers were visible), and rang several times

without result. He was just turning away when a big mud-splashed motor

drove up. He noticed a soldier at the steering-wheel, then three people

got out stiffly: two women smothered in crape and a haggard man in a

dirty uniform. Campton stopped, and Fortin-Lescluze recognized him by

the light of the motor-lamp. The four stood and looked at each other.

The old mother, under her crape, appeared no bigger than a child.

“Ah—you know?” the doctor said. Campton nodded.

The father spoke in a firm voice. “It happened three days ago—at

Suippes. You’ve seen his citation? They brought him in to me at Chalons

without a warning—and too late. I took off both legs, but gangrene had

set in. Ah—if I could have got hold of one of our big surgeons.... Yes,

we’re just back from the funeral.... My mother and my wife ... they had

that comfort....”

The two women stood beside him like shrouded statues. Suddenly Mme.

Fortin’s deep voice came through the crape: “You saw him, Monsieur, that

last day ... the day you came about your own son, I think?”

“I ... yes....” Campton stammered in anguish.

The physician intervened. “And, now, _ma bonne mère_, you’re not to be

kept standing. You’re to go straight in and take your _tisane_ and go to

bed.” He kissed his mother and pushed her into his wife’s arms.

“Goodbye, my dear. Take care of her.”

The women vanished under the porte-cochère, and Fortin turned to the

painter.

“Thank you for coming. I can’t ask you in—I must go back immediately.”

“Back?”

“To my work. Thank God. If it were not for that——”

He jumped into the motor, called out “_En route_,” and was absorbed into

the night.

XI

Campton went home to his studio.

He still lived there, shiftlessly and uncomfortably—for Mariette had

never come back from Lille. She had not come back, and there was no news

of her. Lille had become a part of the “occupied provinces,” from which

there was no escape; and people were beginning to find out what that

living burial meant.

Adele Anthony had urged Campton to go back to the hotel, but he

obstinately refused. What business had he to be living in expensive

hotels when, for the Lord knew how long, his means of earning a

livelihood were gone, and when it was his duty to save up for

George—George, who was safe, who was definitely out of danger, and whom

he longed more than ever, when the war was over, to withdraw from the

stifling atmosphere of his stepfather’s millions?

He had been so near to having the boy to himself when the war broke out!

He had almost had in sight the proud day when he should be able to say:

“Look here: this is your own bank-account. Now you’re independent—for

God’s sake stop and consider what you want to do with your life.”

The war had put an end to that—but only for a time. If victory came

before long, Campton’s reputation would survive the eclipse, his chances

of money-making would be as great as ever, and the new George, the

George matured and disciplined by war, would come back with a finer

sense of values, and a soul steeled against the vulgar opportunities of

wealth.

Meanwhile, it behoved his father to save every penny. And the simplest

way of saving was to go on camping in the studio, taking his meals at

the nearest wine-shop, and entrusting his bed-making and dusting to old

Mme. Lebel. In that way he could live for a long time without

appreciably reducing his savings.

Mme. Lebel’s daughter-in-law, Mme. Jules, who was in the Ardennes with

the little girl when the war broke out, was to have replaced Mariette.

But, like Mariette, Mme. Jules never arrived, and no word came from her

or the child. They too were in an occupied province. So Campton jogged

on without a servant. It was very uncomfortable, even for his lax

standards; but the dread of letting a stranger loose in the studio made

him prefer to put up with Mme. Lebel’s intermittent services.

So far she had borne up bravely. Her orphan grandsons were all at the

front (how that word had insinuated itself into the language!) but she

continued to have fairly frequent reassuring news of them. The _Chasseur

Alpin_, slightly wounded in Alsace, was safe in hospital; and the others

were well, and wrote cheerfully. Her son Jules, the cabinetmaker, was

guarding a bridge at St. Cloud, and came in regularly to see her; but

Campton noticed that it was about him that she seemed most anxious.

He was a silent industrious man, who had worked hard to support his

orphaned nephews and his mother, and had married in middle age, only

four or five years before the war, when the lads could shift for

themselves, and his own situation was secure enough to permit the luxury

of a wife and baby.

Mme. Jules had waited patiently for him, though she had other chances;

and finally they had married and the baby had been born, and blossomed

into one of those finished little Frenchwomen who, at four or five, seem

already to be musing on the great central problems of love and thrift.

The parents used to bring the child to see Campton, and he had made a

celebrated sketch of her, in her Sunday bonnet, with little earrings and

a wise smile. And these two, mother and child, had disappeared on the

second of August as completely as if the earth had opened and swallowed

them.

As Campton entered he glanced at the old woman’s den, saw that it was

empty, and said to himself: “She’s at St. Cloud again.” For he knew that

she seized every chance of being with her eldest.

He unlocked his door and felt his way into the dark studio. Mme. Lebel

might at least have made up the fire! Campton lit the lamp, found some

wood, and knelt down stiffly by the stove. Really, life was getting too

uncomfortable....

He was trying to coax a flame when the door opened and he heard Mme.

Lebel.

“Really, you know——” he turned to rebuke her; but the words died on his

lips. She stood before him, taking no notice; then her shapeless black

figure doubled up, and she sank down into his own armchair. Mme. Lebel,

who, even when he offered her a seat, never did more than rest

respectful knuckles on its back!

“What’s the matter? What’s wrong?” he exclaimed.

She lifted her aged face. “Monsieur, I came about your fire; but I am

too unhappy. I have more than I can bear.” She fumbled vainly for a

handkerchief, and wiped away her tears with the back of her old

laborious hand.

“Jules has enlisted, Monsieur; enlisted in the infantry. He has left for

the front without telling me.”

“Good Lord. Enlisted? At his age—is he crazy?”

“No, Monsieur. But the little girl—he’s had news——”

She waited to steady her voice, and then fishing in another slit of her

multiple skirts, pulled out a letter. “I got that at midday. I hurried

to St. Cloud—but he left yesterday.”

The letter was grim reading. The poor father had accidentally run across

an escaped prisoner who had regained the French lines near the village

where Mme. Jules and the child were staying. The man, who knew the

wife’s family, had been charged by them with a message to the effect

that Mme. Jules, who was a proud woman, had got into trouble with the

authorities, and been sent off to a German prison on the charge of

spying. The poor little girl had cried and clung to her mother, and had

been so savagely pushed aside by the officer who made the arrest that

she had fallen on the stone steps of the “Kommandantur” and fractured

her skull. The fugitive reported her as still alive, but unconscious,

and dying.

Jules Lebel had received this news the previous day; and within

twenty-four hours he was at the front. Guard a bridge at St. Cloud after

that? All he asked was to kill and be killed. He knew the name and the

regiment of the officer who had denounced his wife. “If I live long

enough I shall run the swine down,” he wrote. “If not, I’ll kill as many

of his kind as God lets me.”

Mme. Lebel sat silent, her head bowed on her hands; and Campton stood

and watched her. Presently she got up, passed the back of her hand

across her eyes, and said: “The room is cold. I’ll fetch some coal.”

Campton protested. “No, no, Mme. Lebel. Don’t worry about me. Make

yourself something warm to drink, and try to sleep——”

“Oh, Monsieur, thank God for the work! If it were not for that——” she

said, in the same words as the physician.

She hobbled away, and presently he heard her bumping up again with the

coal.

When his fire was started, and the curtains drawn, and she had left him,

the painter sat down and looked about the studio. Bare and untidy as it

was, he did not find the sight unpleasant: he was used to it, and being

used to things seemed to him the first requisite of comfort. But

to-night his thoughts were elsewhere: he saw neither the tattered

tapestries with their huge heroes and kings, nor the blotched walls hung

with pictures, nor the canvases stacked against the chair-legs, nor the

long littered table at which he wrote and ate and mixed his colours. At

one moment he was with Fortin-Lescluze, speeding through the night

toward fresh scenes of death; at another, in the _loge_ downstairs,

where Mme. Lebel, her day’s work done, would no doubt sit down as usual

by her smoky lamp and go on with her sewing. “Thank God for the work——”

they had both said.

And here Campton sat with idle hands, and did nothing——

It was not exactly his fault. What was there for a portrait-painter to

do? He was not a portrait-painter only, and on his brief trip to Chalons

some of the scenes by the way—gaunt unshorn faces of territorials at

railway bridges, soldiers grouped about a provision-lorry, a

mud-splashed company returning to the rear, a long grey train of

“seventy-fives” ploughing forward through the rain—at these sights the

old graphic instinct had stirred in him. But the approaches of the front

were sternly forbidden to civilians, and especially to neutrals (Campton

was beginning to wince at the word); he himself, who had been taken to

Chalons by a high official of the Army Medical Board, had been given

only time enough for his interview with Fortin, and brought back to

Paris the same night. If ever there came a time for art to interpret the

war, as Raffet, for instance, had interpreted Napoleon’s campaigns, the

day was not yet; the world in which men lived at present was one in

which the word “art” had lost its meaning.

And what was Campton, what had he ever been, but an artist?... A father;

yes, he had waked up to the practice of that other art, he was learning

to be a father. And now, at a stroke, his only two reasons for living

were gone: since the second of August he had had no portraits to paint,

no son to guide and to companion.

Other people, he knew, had found jobs: most of his friends had been

drawn into some form of war-work. Dastrey, after vain attempts to

enlist, thwarted by an untimely sciatica, had found a post near the

front, on the staff of a Red Cross Ambulance. Adele Anthony was working

eight or nine hours a day in a Depot which distributed food and clothing

to refugees from the invaded provinces; and Mrs. Brant’s name figured on

the committees of most of the newly-organized war charities. Among

Campton’s other friends many had accepted humbler tasks. Some devoted

their time to listing and packing hospital supplies, keeping accounts in

ambulance offices, sorting out refugees at the railway-stations, and

telling them where to go for food and help; still others spent their

days, and sometimes their nights, at the bitter-cold suburban sidings

where the long train-loads of wounded stopped on the way to the

hospitals of the interior. There was enough misery and confusion at the

rear for every civilian volunteer to find his task.

Among them all, Campton could not see his place. His lameness put him at

a disadvantage, since taxicabs were few, and it was difficult for him to

travel in the crowded métro. He had no head for figures, and would have

thrown the best-kept accounts into confusion; he could not climb steep

stairs to seek out refugees, nor should he have known what to say to

them when he reached their attics. And so it would have been at the

railway canteens; he choked with rage and commiseration at all the

suffering about him, but found no word to cheer the sufferers.

Secretly, too, he feared the demands that would be made on him if he

once let himself be drawn into the network of war charities. Tiresome

women would come and beg for money, or for pictures for bazaars: they

were already getting up bazaars.

Money he could not spare, since it was his duty to save it for George;

and as for pictures—why, there were a few sketches he might give, but

here again he was checked by his fear of establishing a precedent. He

had seen in the papers that the English painters were already giving

blank canvases to be sold by auction to millionaires in quest of a

portrait. But that form of philanthropy would lead to his having to

paint all the unpaintable people who had been trying to bribe a picture

out of him since his sudden celebrity. No artist had a right to cheapen

his art in that way: it could only result in his turning out work that

would injure his reputation and reduce his sales after the war.

So far, Campton had not been troubled by many appeals for help; but that

was probably because he had kept out of sight, and thrown into the fire

the letters of the few ladies who had begged a sketch for their sales,

or his name for their committees.

One appeal, however, he had not been able to avoid. About two months

earlier he had had a visit from George’s friend Boylston, the youth he

had met at Dastrey’s dinner the night before war was declared. In the

interval he had entirely forgotten Boylston; but as soon as he saw the

fat brown young man with a twinkle in his eyes and his hair, Campton

recalled him, and held out a cordial hand. Had not George said that

Boylston was the best fellow he knew?

Boylston seemed much impressed by the honour of waiting on the great

man. In spite of his cool twinkling air he was evidently full of

reverence for the things and people he esteemed, and Campton’s welcome

sent the blood up to the edge of his tight curls. It also gave him

courage to explain his visit.

He had come to beg Campton to accept the chairmanship of the American

Committee of “The Friends of French Art,” an international group of

painters who proposed to raise funds for the families of mobilised

artists. The American group would naturally be the most active, since

Americans had, in larger numbers than any other foreigners, sought

artistic training in France; and all the members agreed that Campton’s

name must figure at their head. But Campton was known to be

inaccessible, and the committee, aware that Boylston was a friend of

George’s, had asked him to transmit their request.

“You see, sir, nobody else represents....”

Campton thought as seldom as possible of what followed: he hated the

part he had played. But, after all, what else could he have done?

Everything in him recoiled from what acceptance would bring with it:

publicity, committee meetings, speechifying, writing letters, seeing

troublesome visitors, hearing harrowing stories, asking people for

money—above all, having to give his own; a great deal of his own.

He stood before the young man, abject, irresolute, chinking a bunch of

keys in his trouser-pocket, and remembering afterward that the chink

must have sounded as if it were full of money. He remembered too, oddly

enough, that as his own embarrassment increased Boylston’s vanished. It

was as though the modest youth, taking his host’s measure, had

reluctantly found him wanting, and from that moment had felt less in awe

of his genius. Illogical, of course, and unfair—but there it was.

The talk had ended by Campton’s refusing the chairmanship, but agreeing

to let his name figure on the list of honorary members, where he hoped

it would be overshadowed by rival glories. And, having reached this

conclusion, he had limped to his desk, produced a handful of notes, and

after a moment’s hesitation held out two hundred francs with the

stereotyped: “Sorry I can’t make it more....”

He had meant it to be two hundred and fifty; but, with his usual luck,

all his fumbling had failed to produce a fifty-franc note; and he could

hardly ask Boylston to “make the change.”

On the threshold the young man paused to ask for the last news of

George; and on Campton’s assuring him that it was excellent, added, with

evident sincerity: “Still hung up on that beastly staff-job? I do call

that hard luck——” And now, of all the unpleasant memories of the visit,

that phrase kept the sharpest sting.

Was it in fact hard luck? And did George himself think so? There was

nothing in his letters to show it. He seemed to have undergone no change

of view as to his own relation to the war; he had shown no desire to “be

in it,” as that mad young Upsher said.

For the first time since he had seen George’s train pull out of the Gare

de l’Est Campton found himself wondering at the perfection of his son’s

moral balance. So many things had happened since; war had turned out to

be so immeasurably more hideous and abominable than those who most

abhorred war had dreamed it could be; the issues at stake had become so

glaringly plain, right and wrong, honour and dishonour, humanity and

savagery faced each other so squarely across the trenches, that it

seemed strange to Campton that his boy, so eager, so impressionable, so

quick on the uptake, should not have felt some such burst of wrath as

had driven even poor Jules Lebel into the conflict.

The comparison, of course, was absurd. Lebel had been parted from his

dearest, his wife dragged to prison, his child virtually murdered: any

man, in his place, must have felt the blind impulse to kill. But what

was Lebel’s private plight but a symbol of the larger wrong? This war

could no longer be compared to other wars: Germany was conducting it on

methods that civilization had made men forget. The occupation of

Luxembourg; the systematic destruction of Belgium; the savage treatment

of the people of the invaded regions; the outrages of Louvain and Rheims

and Ypres; the voice with which these offences cried to heaven had waked

the indignation of humanity. Yet George, in daily contact with all this

woe and ruin, seemed as unmoved as though he had been behind a desk in

the New York office of Bullard and Brant.

If there were any change in his letters it was rather that they were

more indifferent. His reports of himself became drier, more stereotyped,

his comments on the situation fewer: he seemed to have been subdued to

the hideous business he worked in. It was true that his letters had

never been expressive: his individuality seemed to dry up in contact

with pen and paper. It was true also that letters from the front were

severely censored, and that it would have been foolish to put in them

anything likely to prevent their delivery. But George had managed to

send several notes by hand, and these were as colourless as the others;

and so were his letters to his mother, which Mrs. Brant always sent to

Miss Anthony, who privately passed them on to Campton.

Besides, there were other means of comparison. People with sons at the

front were beginning to hand about copies of their letters; a few

passages, strangely moving and beautiful, had found their way into the

papers. George, God be praised, was not at the front; but he was in the

war-zone, far nearer the sights and sounds of death than his father, and

he had comrades and friends in the trenches. Strange that what he wrote

was still so cold to the touch....

“It’s the scientific mind, I suppose,” Campton reflected. “These

youngsters are all rather like beautifully made machines....” Yet it had

never before struck him that his son was like a beautifully made

machine.

He remembered that he had not dined, and got up wearily. As he passed

out he noticed on a pile of letters and papers a brand-new card: he

could always tell the new cards by their whiteness, which twenty-four

hours of studio-dust turned to grey.

Campton held the card to the light. It was large and glossy, a beautiful

thick pre-war card; and on it was engraved:

HARVEY MAYHEW

_Déléguê des Etats Unis au Congrès de la Paix_

with a pen-stroke through the lower line. Beneath was written an

imperative “p.t.o.”; and reversing the card, Campton read, in an

agitated hand: “Must see you at once. Call up Nouveau Luxe”; and, lower

down: “Excuse ridiculous card. Impossible get others under six weeks.”

So Mayhew had turned up! Well, it was a good thing: perhaps he might

bring news of that mad Benny Upsher whose doings had caused Campton so

much trouble in the early days that he could never recall the boy’s

obstinate rosy face without a stir of irritation.

“I want to be _in_ this thing——” Well, young Upsher had apparently been

in it with a vengeance; but what he had cost Campton in cables to his

distracted family, and in weary pilgrimages to the War Office, the

American Embassy, the Consulate, the Prefecture of Police, and divers

other supposed sources of information, the painter meant some day to

tell his young relative in no measured terms. That is, if the chance

ever presented itself; for, since he had left the studio that morning

four months ago, Benny had so completely vanished that Campton sometimes

wondered, with a little shiver, if they were ever likely to exchange

words again in this world.

“Mayhew will know; he wants to tell me about the boy, I suppose,” he

mused.

Harvey Mayhew—Harvey Mayhew with a pen-stroke through the title which,

so short a time since, it had been his chief ambition to display on his

cards! No wonder it embarrassed him now. But where on earth had he been

all this time? As Campton pondered on the card a memory flashed out.

Mayhew? Mayhew? Why, wasn’t it Mayhew who had waylaid him in the Crillon

a few hours before war was declared, to ask his advice about the safest

way of travelling to the Hague? And hadn’t he, Campton, in all good

faith, counselled him to go by Luxembourg “in order to be out of the way

of trouble”?

The remembrance swept away the painter’s sombre thoughts, and he burst

into a laugh that woke the echoes of the studio.

XII

Not having it in his power to call up his cousin on the telephone,

Campton went the next morning to the Nouveau Luxe.

It was the first time that he had entered the famous hotel since the

beginning of the war; and at sight of the long hall his heart sank as it

used to whenever some untoward necessity forced him to run its deadly

blockade.

But the hall was empty when he entered, empty not only of the brilliant

beings who filled his soul with such dismay, but also of the porters,

footmen and lift-boys who, even in its unfrequented hours, lent it the

lustre of their liveries.

A tired concierge sat at the desk, and near the door a boy scout,

coiling his bare legs about a high stool, raised his head languidly from

his book. But for these two, the world of the Nouveau Luxe had

disappeared.

As the lift was not running there was nothing to disturb their

meditations; and when Campton had learned that Mr. Mayhew would receive

him he started alone up the deserted stairs.

Only a few dusty trunks remained in the corridors where luggage used to

be piled as high as in the passages of the great liners on sailing-day;

and instead of the murmur of ladies’-maids’ skirts, and explosions of

laughter behind glazed service-doors, the swish of a charwoman’s mop

alone broke the silence.

“After all,” Campton thought, “if war didn’t kill people how much

pleasanter it might make the world!”

This was evidently not the opinion of Mr. Harvey Mayhew, whom he found

agitatedly pacing a large room hung in shrimp-pink brocade, which opened

on a vista of turquoise tiling and porcelain tub.

Mr. Mayhew’s round countenance, composed of the same simple curves as

his nephew’s, had undergone a remarkable change. He was still round, but

he was ravaged. His fringe of hair had grown greyer, and there were

crow’s-feet about his blue eyes, and wrathful corrugations in his

benignant forehead.

He seized Campton’s hands and glared at him through indignant

eye-glasses.

“My dear fellow, I looked you up as soon as I arrived. I need you—we all

need you—we need your powerful influence and your world-wide celebrity.

Campton, the day for words has gone by. We must _act_!”

Campton let himself down into an armchair. No verb in the language

terrified him as much as that which his cousin had flung at him. He

gazed at the ex-Delegate with dismay. “I didn’t know you were here.

Where have you come from?” he asked.

Mr. Mayhew, resting a manicured hand on the edge of a gilt table, looked

down awfully on him.

“I come,” he said, “from a German prison.”

“Good Lord—_you_?” Campton gasped.

He continued to gaze at his cousin with terror, but of a new kind. Here

at last was someone who had actually been in the jaws of the monster,

who had seen, heard, suffered—a witness who could speak of that which he

knew! No wonder Mr. Mayhew took himself seriously—at last he had

something to be serious about! Campton stared at him as if he had risen

from the dead.

Mr. Mayhew cleared his throat and went on: “You may remember our meeting

at the Crillon—on the 31st of last July it was—and my asking you the

best way of getting to the Hague, in view of impending events. At that

time” (his voice took a note of irony) “I was a Delegate to the Peace

Congress at the Hague, and conceived it to be my duty to carry out my

mandate at whatever personal risk. You advised me—as you may also

remember—in order to be out of the way of trouble, to travel by

Luxembourg,” (Campton stirred uneasily). “I followed your advice; and,

not being able to go by train, I managed, with considerable difficulty,

to get permission to travel by motor. I reached Luxembourg as the German

army entered it—the next day I was in a German prison.”

The next day! Then this pink-and-white man who stood there with his

rimless eye-glasses and neatly trimmed hair, and his shining nails

reflected in the plate glass of the table-top, this perfectly typical,

usual sort of harmless rich American, had been for four months in the

depths of the abyss that men were beginning to sound with fearful

hearts!

“It is a simple miracle,” said Mr. Mayhew, “that I was not shot as a

spy.”

Campton’s voice choked in his throat. “Where were you imprisoned?”

“The first night, in the Police commissariat, with common thieves and

vagabonds—with—” Mr. Mayhew lowered his voice and his eyes: “With

prostitutes, Campton....”

He waited for this to take effect, and continued: “The next day, in

consequence of the energetic intervention of our consul—who behaved

extremely well, as I have taken care to let them know in Washington—I

was sent back to my hotel on parole, and kept there, kept there,

Campton—_I_, the official representative of a friendly country—under

strict police surveillance, like ... like an unfortunate woman ... for

eight days: a week and one day over!”

Mr. Mayhew sank into a chair and passed a scented handkerchief across

his forehead. “When I was finally released I was without money, without

luggage, without my motor or my wretched chauffeur—a Frenchman, who had

been instantly carried off to Germany. In this state of destitution, and

without an apology, I was shipped to Rotterdam and put on a steamer

sailing for America.” He wiped his forehead again, and the corners of

his agitated lips. “Peace, Campton—_Peace_? When I think that I believed

in a thing called Peace! That I left Utica—always a difficult

undertaking for me—because I deemed it my duty, in the interests of

_Peace_,” (the word became a hiss) “to travel to the other side of the

world, and use the weight of my influence and my experience in such a

cause!”

He clenched his fist and shook it in the face of an invisible foe.

“My influence, if I have any; my experience—ha, I _have_ had experience

now, Campton! And, my God, sir, they shall both be used till my last

breath to show up these people, to proclaim to the world what they

really are, to rouse public opinion in America against a nation of

savages who ought to be hunted off the face of the globe like

vermin—like the vermin in their own prison cells! Campton—if I may say

so without profanity—I come to bring not Peace but a Sword!”

It was some time before the flood of Mr. Mayhew’s wrath subsided, or

before there floated up from its agitated depths some fragments of his

subsequent history and present intentions. Eventually, however, Campton

gathered that after a short sojourn in America, where he found opinion

too lukewarm for him, he had come back to Europe to collect the

experiences of other victims of German savagery. Mr. Mayhew, in short,

meant to devote himself to Atrocities; and he had sought out Campton to

ask his help, and especially to be put in contact with persons engaged

in refugee-work, and likely to have come across flagrant offences

against the law of nations.

It was easy to comply with the latter request. Campton scribbled a

message to Adele Anthony at her refugee Depot; and he undertook also to

find out from what officials Mr. Mayhew might obtain leave to visit the

front.

“I know it’s difficult——” he began; but Mr. Mayhew laughed. “I am here

to surmount difficulties—after what I’ve been through!”

It was not until then that Mr. Mayhew found time to answer an enquiry

about his nephew.

“Benny Upsher ? Ha—I’m proud of Benny! He’s a hero, that nephew of

mine—he was always my favourite.”

He went on to say that the youth, having failed to enlist in the French

army, had managed to get back to England, and there, passing himself off

as a Canadian (“Born at Murray Bay, sir—wasn’t it lucky?”) had joined an

English regiment, and, after three months’ training, was now on his way

to the front. His parents had made a great outcry—moved heaven and earth

for news of him—but the boy had covered up his tracks so cleverly that

they had had no word till he was starting for Boulogne with his draft.

Rather high-handed—and poor Madeline had nearly gone out of her mind;

but Mr. Mayhew confessed he had no patience with such feminine weakness.

“Benny’s a man, and must act as a man. That boy, Campton, saw things as

they were from the first.”

Campton took leave, dazed and crushed by the conversation. It was all

one to him if Harvey Mayhew chose to call on America to avenge his

wrongs; Campton himself was beginning to wish that his country would

wake up to what was going on in the world; but that he, Campton, should

be drawn into the affair, should have to write letters, accompany the

ex-Delegate to Embassies and Red Crosses, languish with him in

ministerial antechambers, and be deafened with appeals to his own

celebrity and efficiency; that he should have ascribed to himself that

mysterious gift of “knowing the ropes” in which his whole blundering

career had proved him to be cruelly lacking: this was so dreadful to him

as to obscure every other question.

“Thank the Lord,” he muttered, “I haven’t got the telephone anyhow!”

He glanced cautiously down the wide stairs of the hotel to assure

himself of a safe retreat; but in the hall an appealing voice detained

him.

“Dear Master! Dear great Master! I’ve been lying in wait for you!”

A Red Cross nurse advanced: not the majestic figure of the Crimean

legend, but the new version evolved in the rue de la Paix: short skirts,

long ankles, pearls and curls. The face under the coif was young,

wistful, haggard with the perpetual hurry of the aimless. Where had he

seen those tragic eyes, so full of questions and so invariably

uninterested in the answers?

“I’m Madge Talkett—I saw you at—I saw you the day war was declared,” the

young lady corrected herself. Campton remembered their meeting at Mrs.

Brant’s, and was grateful for her evident embarrassment. So few of the

new generation seemed aware that there were any privacies left to

respect! He looked at Mrs. Talkett more kindly.

“You _must_ come,” she continued, laying her hand on his arm (her

imperatives were always in italics). “Just a step from here—to my

hospital. There’s someone asking for you.”

“For me? Someone wounded?” What if it were Benny Upsher? A cold fear

broke over Campton.

“Someone dying,” Mrs. Talkett said. “Oh, nobody you know—a poor young

French soldier. He was brought here two days ago ... and he keeps on

repeating your name....”

“My name? Why my name?”

“We don’t know. We don’t think he knows you ... but he’s shot to pieces

and half delirious. He’s a painter, and he’s seen pictures of yours, and

keeps talking about them, and saying he wants you to look at his.... You

_will_ come? It’s just next door, you know.”

He did not know—having carefully avoided all knowledge of hospitals in

his dread of being drawn into war-work, and his horror of coming as a

mere spectator to gaze on agony he could neither comfort nor relieve.

Hospitals were for surgeons and women; if he had been rich he would have

given big sums to aid them; being unable to do even that, he preferred

to keep aloof.

He followed Mrs. Talkett out of the hotel and around the corner. The

door of another hotel, with a big Red Cross above it, admitted them to a

marble vestibule full of the cold smell of disinfectants. An orderly sat

reading a newspaper behind the desk, and nurses whisked backward and

forward with trays and pails. A lady with a bunch of flowers came down

the stairs drying her eyes.

Campton’s whole being recoiled from what awaited him. Since the poor

youth was delirious, what was the use of seeing him? But women took a

morbid pleasure in making one do things that were useless!

On an upper floor they paused at a door where there was a moment’s

parleying.

“Come,” Mrs. Talkett said; “he’s a little better.”

The room contained two beds. In one lay a haggard elderly man with

closed eyes and lips drawn back from his clenched teeth. His legs

stirred restlessly, and one of his arms was in a lifted sling attached

to a horrible kind of gallows above the bed. It reminded Campton of Juan

de Borgoña’s pictures of the Inquisition, in the Prado.

“Oh, _he’s_ all right; he’ll get well. It’s the other....”

The other lay quietly in his bed. No gallows overhung him, no visible

bandaging showed his wound. There was a flush on his young cheeks and

his eyes looked out, large and steady, from their hollow brows. But he

was the one who would not get well.

Mrs. Talkett bent over him: her voice was sweet when it was lowered.

“I’ve kept my promise. Here he is.”

The eyes turned in the lad’s immovable head, and he and Campton looked

at each other. The painter had never seen the face before him: a sharp

irregular face, prematurely hollowed by pain, with thick chestnut hair

tumbled above the forehead.

“It’s you, Master!” the boy said.

Campton sat down beside him. “How did you know? Have you seen me

before?”

“Once—at one of your exhibitions.” He paused and drew a hard breath.

“But the first thing was the portrait at the Luxembourg ... your

son....”

“Ah, you look like him!” Campton broke out.

The eyes of the young soldier lit up. “Do I?... Someone told me he was

your son. I went home from seeing that and began to paint. After the

war, would you let me come and work with you? My things ... wait ...

I’ll show you my things first.” He tried to raise himself. Mrs. Talkett

slipped her arm under his shoulders, and resting against her he lifted

his hand and pointed to the bare wall facing him.

“There—there; you see? Look for yourself. The brushwork ... not too bad,

eh? I was ... getting it.... There, that head of my grandfather, eh? And

my lame sister.... Oh, I’m young ...” he smiled ... “never had any

models.... But after the war you’ll see....”

Mrs. Talkett let him down again, and feverishly, vehemently, he began to

describe, one by one, and over and over again, the pictures he saw on

the naked wall in front of him.

A nurse had slipped in, and Mrs. Talkett signed to Campton to follow her

out. The boy seemed aware that the painter was going, and interrupted

his enumeration to say: “As soon as the war’s over you’ll let me come?”

“Of course I will,” Campton promised.

In the passage he asked: “Can nothing save him? Has everything possible

been done?”

“Everything. We’re all so fond of him—the biggest surgeons have seen

him. It seems he has great talent—but he never could afford models, so

he has painted his family over and over again.” Mrs. Talkett looked at

Campton with a good deal of feeling in her changing eyes. “You see, it

_did_ help, your coming. I know you thought it tiresome of me to

insist.” She led him downstairs and into the office, where a lame

officer with the Croix de Guerre sat at the desk. The officer wrote out

the young soldier’s name—René Davril—and his family’s address.

“They’re quite destitute, Monsieur. An old infirm grandfather, a lame

sister who taught music, a widowed mother and several younger

children....”

“I’ll come back, I’ll come back,” Campton again promised as he parted

from Mrs. Talkett.

He had not thought it possible that he would ever feel so kindly toward

her as at that moment. And then, a second later, she nearly spoiled it

by saying: “Dear Master—you see the penalty of greatness!”

* * * * *

The name of René Davril was with Campton all day. The boy had believed

in him—his eyes had been opened by the sight of George’s portrait! And

now, in a day or two more, he would be filling a three-by-six ditch in a

crowded graveyard. At twenty—and with eyes like George’s.

What could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations;

the “little acts of kindness” recommended to his pious infancy had

always seemed to him far harder to think of than to perform. But now

some instinct carried him straight to the corner of his studio where he

remembered having shoved out of sight a half-finished study for George’s

portrait. He found it, examined it critically, scribbled his signature

in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On the way he had

to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew’s tiresome business, and was

delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon.

But in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate

glass, and sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse

came down, to whom, with embarrassment, he explained himself.

“Poor little Davril? Yes—he’s still alive. Will you come up? His family

are with him.”

Campton shook his head and held out the parcel. “It’s a picture he

wanted——”

The nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a

vague benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the

painter turned away with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken

the picture up himself. But to see the death-change on a face so like

his son’s, and its look reflected in other anguished faces, was more

than he could endure. He turned away.

The next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that René Davril was better, that

the fever had dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the

sketch. “The only thing that troubles him is that he realizes now that

you have not seen his pictures. But he is very happy, and blesses you

for your goodness.”

His goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself

for his stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have

comforted the poor lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and

judged; and that one thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst

for the approbation of the men he revered—that one thing he had never

thought of doing! The only way of atoning for his negligence was

instantly to go out to the suburb where the Davril family lived.

Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with whom he had an

appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and devoted

the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached

the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her

impetuously.

“Well—I’ve seen them; I’ve seen his pictures, and he’s right. They’re

astonishing! Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of

air and mass. He’ll do things—May I go up and tell him?”

He broke off and looked at her.

“He died an hour ago. If only you’d seen them yesterday!” she said.

XIII

The killing of René Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless

crimes the war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more

vividly than the distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable

sum of gifts and virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.

“Ah, you want genius, do you? Mere youth’s not enough ... and health and

gaiety and courage; you want brains in the bud, imagination and poetry,

ideas all folded up in their sheath! It takes that, does it, to tempt

your jaded appetite?” He was reminded of the rich vulgarians who will

eat only things out of season. “That’s what war is like,” he muttered

savagely to himself.

The next morning he went to the funeral with Mrs. Talkett—between whom

and himself the tragic episode had created a sort of improvised

intimacy—walking at her side through the November rain, behind the poor

hearse with the tricolour over it.

At the church, while the few mourners shivered in a damp side chapel, he

had time to study the family: a poor sobbing mother, two anæmic little

girls, and the lame sister who was musical—a piteous group, smelling of

poverty and tears. Behind them, to his surprise, he saw the curly brown

head and short-sighted eyes of Boylston. Campton wondered at the

latter’s presence; then he remembered “The Friends of French Art,” and

concluded that the association had probably been interested in poor

Davril.

With some difficulty he escaped from the thanks of the mother and

sisters, and picked up a taxi to take Mrs. Talkett home.

“No—back to the hospital,” she said. “A lot of bad cases have come in,

and I’m on duty again all day.” She spoke as if it were the most natural

thing in the world; and he shuddered at the serenity with which women

endure the unendurable.

At the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had

insisted that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be

returned to him. Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in

one of the drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse

came in—but was it a nurse, or some haloed nun from a Umbrian triptych,

her pure oval framed in white, her long fingers clasping a book and

lily?

“Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he cried; and thought: “A new face again—what an

artist!”

She seized his hands.

“I heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I’ve asked her

to leave us together.” She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just

risen from a penitential vigil.

“Come, please, into my little office: you didn’t know that I was the

_Infirmière-Major_? My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I

see no one now: all my days and nights are given to my soldiers.”

She glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of

jade filled with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped

cigarettes, stood on a desk among torn and discoloured _livrets

militaires_. The room was empty, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the

door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So close to her, he saw that

the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of suffering. “The

woman really has a heart,” he thought, “or the war couldn’t have made

her so much handsomer.”

Mme. de Dolmetsch leaned closer: a breath of incense floated from her

conventual draperies.

“I know why you came,” she continued; “you were good to that poor little

Davril.” She clutched Campton suddenly with a blue-veined hand. “My dear

friend, can anything justify such horrors? Isn’t it abominable that boys

like that should be murdered? That some senile old beast of a

diplomatist should decree, after a good dinner, that all we love best

must be offered up?” She caught his hands again, her liturgical scent

enveloping him. “Campton, I know you feel as I do.” She paused, pressing

his fingers hard, her beautiful mouth trembling. “For God’s sake tell

me,” she implored, “how you’ve managed to keep your son from the front!”

Campton drew away, red and inarticulate. “I—my son? Those things depend

on the authorities. My boy’s health....” he stammered.

“Yes, yes; I know. Your George is delicate. But so is my

Ladislas—dreadfully. The lungs too. I’ve trembled for him for so long;

and now, at any moment....” Two tears gathered on her long lashes and

rolled down ... “at any moment he may be taken from the War Office,

where he’s doing invaluable work, and forced into all that blood and

horror; he may be brought back to me like those poor creatures upstairs,

who are hardly men any longer ... mere vivisected animals, without eyes,

without faces.” She lowered her voice and drew her lids together, so

that her very eyes seemed to be whispering. “Ladislas has enemies who

are jealous of him (I could give you their names); at this moment

someone who ought to be at the front is intriguing to turn him out and

get his place. Oh, Campton, you’ve known this terror—you know what one’s

nights are like! Have pity—tell me how you managed!”

He had no idea of what he answered, or how he finally got away.

Everything that was dearest to him, the thought of George, the vision of

the lad dying upstairs, was defiled by this monstrous coupling of their

names with that of the supple middle-aged adventurer safe in his

spotless uniform at the War Office. And beneath the boiling-up of

Campton’s disgust a new fear lifted its head. How did Mme. de Dolmetsch

know about George? And what did she know? Evidently there had been

foolish talk somewhere. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brant—or perhaps Fortin

himself. All these great doctors forgot the professional secret with

some one woman, if not with many. Had not Fortin revealed to his own

wife the reason of Campton’s precipitate visit? The painter escaped from

Mme. de Dolmetsch’s scented lair, and from the sights and sounds of the

hospital, in a state of such perturbation that for a while he stood in

the street wondering where he had meant to go next.

He had his own reasons for agreeing to the Davrils’ suggestion that the

picture should be returned to him; and presently these reasons came

back. “They’d never dare to sell it themselves; but why shouldn’t I sell

it for them?” he had thought, remembering their denuded rooms, and the

rusty smell of the women’s mourning. It cost him a pang to part with a

study of his boy; but he was in a superstitious and expiatory mood, and

eager to act on it.

He remembered having been told by Boylston that “The Friends of French

Art” had their office in the Palais Royal, and he made his way through

the deserted arcades to the door of a once-famous restaurant.

Behind the plate-glass windows young women with rolled-up sleeves and

straw in their hair were delving in packing-cases, while, divided from

them by an improvised partition, another group were busy piling on the

cloak-room shelves garments such as had never before dishonoured them.

Campton stood fascinated by the sight of the things these young women

were sorting: pink silk combinations, sporting ulsters in glaring black

and white checks, straw hats wreathed with last summer’s sunburnt

flowers, high-heeled satin shoes split on the instep, and fringed and

bugled garments that suggested obsolete names like “dolman” and

“mantle,” and looked like the costumes dug out of a country-house attic

by amateurs preparing to play “Caste.” Was it possible that “The Friends

of French Art” proposed to clothe the families of fallen artists in

these prehistoric properties?

Boylston appeared, flushed and delighted (and with straw in his hair

also), and led his visitor up a corkscrew stair. They passed a room

where a row of people in shabby mourning like that of the Davril family

sat on restaurant chairs before a _caissière’s_ desk; and at the desk

Campton saw Miss Anthony, her veil pushed back and a card-catalogue at

her elbow, listening to a young woman who was dramatically stating her

case.

Boylston saw Campton’s surprise, and said: “Yes, we’re desperately

short-handed, and Miss Anthony has deserted her refugees for a day or

two to help me to straighten things out.”

His own office was in a faded _cabinet particulier_ where the

dinner-table had been turned into a desk, and the weak-springed divan

was weighed down under suits of ready-made clothes bearing the label of

a wholesale clothier.

“These are the things we really give them; but they cost a lot of money

to buy,” Boylston explained. On the divan sat a handsomely dressed

elderly lady with a long emaciated face and red eyes, who rose as they

entered. Boylston spoke to her in an undertone and led her into another

_cabinet_, where Campton saw her tragic figure sink down on the sofa,

under a glass scrawled with amorous couplets.

“That was Mme. Beausite.... You didn’t recognize her? Poor thing! Her

youngest boy is blind: his eyes were put out by a shell. She is very

unhappy, and she comes here and helps now and then. Beausite? Oh no, we

never see _him_. He’s only our Honorary President.”

Boylston obviously spoke without afterthought; but Campton felt the

sting. He too was on the honorary committee.

“Poor woman! What? The young fellow who did Cubist things? I hadn’t

heard....” He remembered the cruel rumour that Beausite, when his glory

began to wane, had encouraged his three sons in three different lines of

art, so that there might always be a Beausite in the fashion.... “You

must have to listen to pretty ghastly stories here,” he said.

The young man nodded, and Campton, with less embarrassment than he had

expected, set forth his errand. In that atmosphere it seemed natural to

be planning ways of relieving misery, and Boylston at once put him at

his ease by looking pleased but not surprised.

“You mean to sell the sketch, sir? That will put the Davrils out of

anxiety for a long time; and they’re in a bad way, as you saw.” Boylston

undid the parcel, with a respectful: “May I?” and put the canvas on a

chair. He gazed at it for a few moments, the blood rising sensitively

over his face till it reached his tight ridge of hair. Campton

remembered what George had said of his friend’s silent admirations; he

was glad the young man did not speak.

When he did, it was to say with a businesslike accent: “We’re trying to

get up an auction of pictures and sketches—and if we could lead off with

this....”

It was Campton’s turn to redden. The possibility was one he had not

thought of. If the picture were sold at auction, Anderson Brant would be

sure to buy it! But he could not say this to Boylston. He hesitated, and

the other, who seemed quick at feeling his way, added at once: “But

perhaps you’d rather sell it privately? In that case we should get the

money sooner.”

It was just the right thing to say: and Campton thanked him and picked

up his sketch. At the door he hesitated, feeling that it became a member

of the honorary committee to add something more.

“How are you getting on? Getting all the help you need?”

Boylston smiled. “We need such a lot. People have been very generous:

we’ve had several big sums. But look at those ridiculous clothes

downstairs—we get boxes and boxes of such rubbish! And there are so many

applicants, and such hard cases. Take those poor Davrils, for instance.

The lame Davril girl has a talent for music: plays the violin. Well,

what good does it do her now? The artists are having an awful time. If

this war goes on much longer, it won’t be only at the front that they’ll

die.”

“Ah——” said Campton. “Well, I’ll take this to a dealer——”

On the way down he turned in to greet Miss Anthony. She looked up in

surprise, her tired face haloed in tumbling hairpins; but she was too

busy to do more than nod across the group about her desk.

At his offer to take her home she shook her head. “I’m here till after

seven. Mr. Boylston and I are nearly snowed under. We’ve got to go down

presently and help unpack; and after that I’m due at my refugee canteen

at the Nord. It’s my night shift.”

Campton, on the way back to Montmartre, fell to wondering if such

excesses of altruism were necessary, or a mere vain overflow of energy.

He was terrified by his first close glimpse of the ravages of war, and

the efforts of the little band struggling to heal them seemed pitifully

ineffectual. No doubt they did good here and there, made a few lives

less intolerable; but how the insatiable monster must laugh at them as

he spread his red havoc wider!

On reaching home, Campton forgot everything at sight of a letter from

George. He had not had one for two weeks, and this interruption, just as

the military mails were growing more regular, had made him anxious. But

it was the usual letter: brief, cheerful, inexpressive. Apparently there

was no change in George’s situation, nor any wish on his part that there

should be. He grumbled humorously at the dulness of his work and the

monotony of life in a war-zone town; and wondered whether, if this sort

of thing went on, there might not soon be some talk of leave. And just

at the end of his affectionate and unsatisfactory two pages, Campton lit

on a name that roused him.

“I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher yesterday on his way to the

English front. The young lunatic looked very fit. You know he

volunteered in the English army when he found he couldn’t get into the

French. He’s likely to get all the fighting he wants.” It was a relief

to know that someone had seen Benny Upsher lately. The letter was but

four days old, and he was then on his way to the front. Probably he was

not yet in the fighting he wanted, and one could, without remorse, call

up an unmutilated face and clear blue eyes.

Campton, re-reading the postscript, was struck by a small thing. George

had originally written: “I saw Benny Upsher yesterday,” and had then

altered the phrase to: “I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher.” There

was nothing out of the way in that: it simply showed that he had written

in haste and revised the sentence. But he added: “The young lunatic

looked very fit.” Well: that too was natural. It was “the fellow” who

reported Benny as looking fit; the phrase was rather elliptic, but

Campton could hardly have said why it gave him the impression that it

was George himself who had seen Upsher. The idea was manifestly absurd,

since there was the length of the front between George’s staff-town and

the fiery pit yawning for his cousin. Campton laid aside the letter with

the distinct wish that his son had not called Benny Upsher a young

lunatic.

XIV

When Campton took his sketch of George to Léonce Black, the dealer who

specialized in “Camptons,” he was surprised at the magnitude of the sum

which the great picture-broker, lounging in a glossy War Office uniform

among his Gauguins and Vuillards, immediately offered.

Léonce Black noted his surprise and smiled. “You think there’s nothing

doing nowadays? Don’t you believe it, Mr. Campton. Now that the big men

have stopped painting, the collectors are all the keener to snap up

what’s left in their portfolios.” He placed the cheque in Campton’s

hand, and drew back to study the effect of the sketch, which he had

slipped into a frame against a velvet curtain. “Ah——” he said, as if he

were tasting an old wine.

As Campton turned to go the dealer’s enthusiasm bubbled over. “Haven’t

you got anything more? Remember me if you have.”

“I don’t sell my sketches,” said Campton. “This was exceptional—for a

charity....”

“I know, I know. Well, you’re likely to have a good many more calls of

the same sort before we get this war over,” the dealer remarked

philosophically. “Anyhow, remember I can place anything you’ll give me.

When people want a Campton it’s to me they come. I’ve got standing

orders from two clients ... both given before the war, and both good

to-day.”

Campton paused in the doorway, seized by his old fear of the painting’s

passing into Anderson Brant’s possession.

“Look here: where is this one going?”

The dealer cocked his handsome grey head and glanced archly through

plump eyelids. “Violation of professional secrecy? Well.... Well ...

under constraint I’ll confess it’s to a young lady: great admirer,

artist herself. Had her order by cable from New York a year ago. Been on

the lookout ever since.”

“Oh, all right,” Campton answered, repocketing the money.

He set out at once for “The Friends of French Art,” and Léonce Black,

bound for the Ministry of War, walked by his side, regaling him

alternately with the gossip of the Ministry and with racy anecdotes of

the dealers’ world. In M. Black’s opinion the war was an inexcusable

blunder, since Germany was getting to be the best market for the kind of

freak painters out of whom the dealers who “know how to make a man

‘foam’” can make a big turn over. “I don’t know what on earth will

become of all those poor devils now: Paris cared for them only because

she knew Germany would give any money for their things. Personally, as

you know, I’ve always preferred sounder goods: I’m a classic, my dear

Campton, and I can feel only classic art,” said the dealer, swelling out

his uniformed breast and stroking his Assyrian nose as though its

handsome curve followed the pure Delphic line. “But, as long as things

go on as they are at present in _my_ department of the administration,

the war’s not going to end in a hurry,” he continued. “And now we’re in

for it, we’ve got to see the thing through.”

Campton found Boylston, as usual, in his melancholy _cabinet

particulier_. He was listening to the tale of a young woman with

streaming eyes and an extravagant hat. She was so absorbed in her

trouble that she did not notice Campton’s entrance, and behind her back

the painter made a sign to say that she was not to be interrupted.

He was as much interested in the suppliant’s tale as in watching

Boylston’s way of listening. That modest and commonplace-looking young

man was beginning to excite a lively curiosity in Campton. It was not

only that he remembered George’s commendation, for he knew that the

generous enthusiasms of youth may be inspired by trifles imperceptible

to the older. It was Boylston himself who interested the painter. He

knew no more of the young man than the scant details Miss Anthony could

give. Boylston, it appeared, was the oldest hope of a well-to-do

Connecticut family. On his leaving college a place had been reserved for

him in the paternal business; but he had announced good-humouredly that

he did not mean to spend his life in an office, and one day, after a ten

minutes’ conversation with his father, as to which details were lacking,

he had packed a suitcase and sailed for France. There he had lived ever

since, in shabby rooms in the rue de Verneuil, on the scant allowance

remitted by an irate parent: apparently never running into debt, yet

always ready to help a friend.

All the American art-students in Paris knew Boylston; and though he was

still in the early thirties, they all looked up to him. For Boylston had

one quality which always impresses youth: Boylston knew everybody.

Whether you went with him to a smart restaurant in the rue Royale, or to

a wine-shop of the Left Bank, the _patron_ welcomed him with the same

cordiality, and sent the same emphatic instructions to the cook. The

first fresh peas and the tenderest spring chicken were always for this

quiet youth, who, when he was alone, dined cheerfully on veal and _vin

ordinaire_. If you wanted to know where to get the best Burgundy,

Boylston could tell you; he could also tell you where to buy an

engagement ring for your girl, a Ford runabout going at half-price, or

the _papier timbré_ on which to address a summons to a recalcitrant

laundress.

If you got into a row with your landlady you found that Boylston knew

her, and that at sight of him she melted and withdrew her claim; or,

failing this, he knew the solicitor in whose office her son was a clerk,

or had other means of reducing her to reason. Boylston also knew a man

who could make old clocks go, another who could clean flannels without

their shrinking, and a third who could get you old picture-frames for a

song; and, best of all, when any inexperienced American youth was caught

in the dark Parisian cobweb (and the people at home were on no account

to hear about it) Boylston was found to be the friend and familiar of

certain occult authorities who, with a smile and a word of warning,

could break the mesh and free the victim.

The mystery was, how and why all these people did what Boylston wanted;

but the reason began to dawn on Campton as he watched the young woman in

the foolish hat deliver herself of her grievance. Boylston was simply a

perfect listener—and most of his life was spent in listening. Everything

about him listened: his round forehead and peering screwed-up eyes, his

lips twitching responsively under the close-clipped moustache, and every

crease and dimple of his sagacious and humorous young countenance; even

the attitude of his short fat body, with elbows comfortably bedded in

heaped up papers, and fingers plunged into his crinkled hair. There was

never a hint of hurry or impatience about him: having once asserted his

right to do what he liked with his life, he was apparently content to

let all his friends prey on it. You never caught his eye on the clock,

or his lips shaping an answer before you had turned the last corner of

your story. Yet when the story was told, and he had surveyed it in all

its bearings, you could be sure he would do what he could for you, and

do it before the day was over.

“Very well, Mademoiselle,” he said, when the young woman had finished.

“I promise you I’ll see Mme. Beausite, and try to get her to recognize

your claim.”

“Mind you, I don’t ask charity—I won’t _take_ charity from your

committee!” the young lady hissed, gathering up a tawdry hand-bag.

“Oh, we’re not forcing it on any one,” smiled Boylston, opening the door

for her.

When he turned back to Campton his face was flushed and frowning. “Poor

thing! She’s a nuisance, but I’ll fight to the last ditch for her. The

chap she lives with was Beausite’s secretary and understudy, and

devilled for him before the war. The poor fellow has come back from the

front a complete wreck, and can’t even collect the salary Beausite owes

him for the last three months before the war. Beausite’s plea is that

he’s too poor, and that the war lets him out of paying. Of course he

counts on our doing it for him.”

“And you’re not going to?”

“Well,” said Boylston humorously, “I shouldn’t wonder if he beat us in

the long run. But I’ll have a try first; and anyhow the poor girl

needn’t know. She used to earn a little money doing fashion-articles,

but of course there’s no market for that now, and I don’t see how the

pair can live. They have a little boy, and there’s an infirm mother, and

they’re waiting to get married till the girl can find a job.”

“Good Lord!” Campton groaned, with a sudden vision of the countless

little trades and traffics arrested by the war, and all the industrious

thousands reduced to querulous pauperism or slow death.

“How _do_ they live—all these people?”

“They don’t—always. I could tell you——”

“Don’t, for God’s sake; I can’t stand it.” Campton drew out the cheque.

“Here: this is what I’ve got for the Davrils.”

“Good Lord!” said Boylston, staring with round eyes.

“It will pull them through, anyhow, won’t it?” Campton triumphed.

“Well——” said Boylston. “It will if you’ll endorse it,” he added,

smiling. Campton laughed and took up a pen.

* * * * *

A day or two later Campton, returning home one afternoon, overtook a

small black-veiled figure with a limp like his own. He guessed at once

that it was the lame Davril girl, come to thank him; and his dislike of

such ceremonies caused him to glance about for a way of escape. But as

he did so the girl turned with a smile that put him to shame. He

remembered Adele Anthony’s saying, one day when he had found her in her

refugee office patiently undergoing a like ordeal: “We’ve no right to

refuse the only coin they can repay us in.”

The Davril girl was a plain likeness of her brother, with the same

hungry flame in her eyes. She wore the nondescript black that Campton

had remarked at the funeral; and knowing the importance which the French

attach to every detail of conventional mourning, he wondered that mother

and daughter had not laid out part of his gift in crape. But doubtless

the equally strong instinct of thrift had caused Mme. Davril to put away

the whole sum.

Mlle. Davril greeted Campton pleasantly, and assured him that she had

not found the long way from Villejuif to Montmartre too difficult.

“I would have gone to you,” the painter protested; but she answered that

she wanted to see with her own eyes where her brother’s friend lived.

In the studio she looked about her with a quick searching glance, said

“Oh, a piano——” as if the fact were connected with the object of her

errand—and then, settling herself in an armchair, unclasped her shabby

hand-bag.

“Monsieur, there has been a misunderstanding; this money is not ours.”

She laid Campton’s cheque on the table.

A flush of annoyance rose to the painter’s face. What on earth had

Boylston let him in for? If the Davrils were as proud as all that it was

not worth while to have sold a sketch it had cost him such a pang to

part with. He felt the exasperation of the would be philanthropist when

he first discovers that nothing complicates life as much as doing good.

“But, Mademoiselle——”

“This money is not ours. If René had lived he would never have sold your

picture; and we would starve rather than betray his trust.”

When stout ladies in velvet declare that they would starve rather than

sacrifice this or that principle, the statement has only the cold beauty

of rhetoric; but on the drawn lips of a thinly-clad young woman

evidently acquainted with the process, it becomes a fiery reality.

“Starve—nonsense! My dear young lady, you betray him when you talk like

that,” said Campton, moved.

She shook her head. “It depends, Monsieur, which things matter most to

one. We shall never—my mother and I—do anything that René would not have

done. The picture was not ours: we brought it back to you——”

“But if the picture’s not yours it’s mine,” Campton interrupted; “and

I’d a right to sell it, and a right to do what I choose with the money.”

His visitor smiled. “That’s what we feel; it was what I was coming to.”

And clasping her threadbare glove-tips about the arms of the chair Mlle.

Davril set forth with extreme precision the object of her visit.

It was to propose that Campton should hand over the cheque to “The

Friends of French Art,” devoting one-third to the aid of the families of

combatant painters, the rest to young musicians and authors. “It doesn’t

seem right that only the painters’ families should benefit by what your

committee are doing. And René would have thought so too. He knew so many

young men of letters and journalists who, before the war, just managed

to keep their families alive; and in my profession I could tell you of

poor music-teachers and accompanists whose work stopped the day war

broke out, and who have been living ever since on the crusts their

luckier comrades could spare them. René would have let us accept from

you help that was shared with others: he would have been so glad, often,

of a few francs to relieve the misery we see about us. And this great

sum might be the beginning of a co-operative work for artists ruined by

the war.”

She went on to explain that in the families of almost all the young

artists at the front there was at least one member at home who practised

one of the arts, or who was capable of doing some kind of useful work.

The value of Campton’s gift, Mlle. Davril argued, would be tripled if it

were so employed as to give the artists and their families occupation:

producing at least the illusion that those who could were earning their

living, or helping their less fortunate comrades. “It’s not only a

question of saving their dignity: I don’t believe much in that. You have

dignity or you haven’t—and if you have, it doesn’t need any saving,”

this clear-toned young woman remarked. “The real question, for all of us

artists, is that of keeping our hands in, and our interest in our work

alive; sometimes, too, of giving a new talent its first chance. At any

rate, it would mean work and not stagnation; which is all that most

charity produces.”

She developed her plan: for the musicians, concerts in private houses

(hence her glance at the piano); for the painters, small exhibitions in

the rooms of the committee, where their pictures would be sold with the

deduction of a percentage, to be returned to the general fund; and for

the writers—well, their lot was perhaps the hardest to deal with; but an

employment agency might be opened, where those who chose could put their

names down and take such work as was offered. Above all, Mlle. Davril

again insisted, the fund created by Campton’s gift was to be spent only

in giving employment, not for mere relief.

Campton listened with growing attention. Nothing hitherto had been less

in the line of his interests than the large schemes of general

amelioration which were coming to be classed under the transatlantic

term of “Social Welfare.” If questioned on the subject a few months

earlier he would probably have concealed his fundamental indifference

under the profession of an extreme individualism, and the assertion of

every man’s right to suffer and starve in his own way. Even since René

Davril’s death had brought home to him the boundless havoc of the war,

he had felt no more than the impulse to ease his own pain by putting his

hand in his pocket when a particular case was too poignant to be

ignored.

Yet here were people who had already offered their dearest to France,

and were now pleading to be allowed to give all the rest; and who had

had the courage and wisdom to think out in advance the form in which

their gift would do most good. Campton had the awe of the unpractical

man for anyone who knows how to apply his ideas. He felt that there was

no use in disputing Mlle. Davril’s plan: he must either agree to it or

repocket his cheque.

“I’ll do as you want, of course; but I’m not much good about details.

Hadn’t you better consult some one else?” he suggested.

Oh, that was already done: she had outlined her project to Miss Anthony

and Mr. Boylston, who approved. All she wanted was Campton’s consent;

and this he gave the more cordially when he learned that, for the

present at least, nothing more was expected of him. First steps in

beneficence, he felt, were unspeakably terrifying; yet he was already

aware that, resist as he might, he would never be able to keep his

footing on the brink of that abyss.

Into it, as the days went by, his gaze was oftener and oftener plunged.

He had begun to feel that pity was his only remaining link with his

kind, the one barrier between himself and the dreadful solitude which

awaited him when he returned to his studio. What would there have been

to think of there, alone among his unfinished pictures and his broken

memories, if not the wants and woes of people more bereft than himself?

His own future was not a thing to dwell on. George was safe: but what

George and he were likely to make of each other after the ordeal was

over was a question he preferred to put aside. He was more and more

taking George and his safety for granted, as a solid standing-ground

from which to reach out a hand to the thousands struggling in the

depths. As long as the world’s fate was in the balance it was every

man’s duty to throw into that balance his last ounce of brain and

muscle. Campton wondered how he had ever thought that an accident of

birth, a remoteness merely geographical, could justify, or even make

possible, an attitude of moral aloofness. Harvey Mayhew’s reasons for

wishing to annihilate Germany began to seem less grotesque than his own

for standing aside.

In the heat of his conversion he no longer grudged the hours given to

Mr. Mayhew. He patiently led his truculent relative from one government

office to another, everywhere laying stress on Mr. Mayhew’s sympathy

with France and his desire to advocate her cause in the United States,

and trying to curtail his enumeration of his grievances by a glance at

the clock, and the reminder that they had another Minister to see. Mr.

Mayhew was not very manageable. His adventure had grown with repetition,

and he was increasingly disposed to feel that the retaliation he called

down on Germany could best be justified by telling every one what he had

suffered from her. Intensely aware of the value of time in Utica, he was

less sensible of it in Paris, and seemed to think that, since he had

left a flourishing business to preach the Holy War, other people ought

to leave their affairs to give him a hearing. But his zeal and

persistence were irresistible, and doors which Campton had seen barred

against the most reasonable appeals flew open at the sound of Mr.

Mayhew’s trumpet. His pink face and silvery hair gave him an apostolic

air, and circles to which America had hitherto been a mere speck in

space suddenly discovered that he represented that legendary character,

the Typical American.

The keen Boylston, prompt to note and utilize the fact, urged Campton to

interest Mr. Mayhew in “The Friends of French Art,” and with

considerable flourish the former Peace Delegate was produced at a

committee meeting and given his head. But his interest flagged when he

found that the “Friends” concerned themselves with Atrocities only in so

far as any act of war is one, and that their immediate task was the

humdrum one of feeding and clothing the families of the combatants and

sending “comforts” to the trenches. He served up, with a somewhat

dog-eared eloquence, the usual account of his own experiences, and

pressed a modest gift upon the treasurer; but when he departed, after

wringing everybody’s hands, and leaving the French members bedewed with

emotion, Campton had the conviction that their quiet weekly meetings

would not often be fluttered by his presence.

Campton was spending an increasing amount of time in the Palais Royal

restaurant, where he performed any drudgery for which no initiative was

required. Once or twice, when Miss Anthony was submerged by a fresh

influx of refugees, he lent her a hand too; and on most days he dropped

in late at her office, waited for her to sift and dismiss the last

applicants, and saw her home through the incessant rain. It interested

him to note that the altruism she had so long wasted on pampered friends

was developing into a wise and orderly beneficence. He had always

thought of her as an eternal schoolgirl; now she had grown into a woman.

Sometimes he fancied the change dated from the moment when their eyes

had met across the station, the day they had seen George off. He

wondered whether it might not be interesting to paint her new face, if

ever painting became again thinkable.

“Passion—I suppose the great thing is a capacity for passion,” he mused.

In himself he imagined the capacity to be quite dead. He loved his son:

yes—but he was beginning to see that he loved him for certain qualities

he had read into him, and that perhaps after all——. Well, perhaps after

all the sin for which he was now atoning in loneliness was that of

having been too exclusively an artist, of having cherished George too

egotistically and self-indulgently, too much as his own most beautiful

creation. If he had loved him more humanly, more tenderly and

recklessly, might he have not put into his son the tenderness and

recklessness which were beginning to seem to him the qualities most

supremely human?

XV

A week or two later, coming home late from a long day’s work at the

office, Campton saw Mme. Lebel awaiting him.

He always stopped for a word now; fearing each time that there was bad

news of Jules Lebel, but not wishing to seem to avoid her.

To-day, however, Mme. Lebel, though mysterious, was not anxious.

“Monsieur will find the studio open. There’s a lady: she insisted on

going up.”

“A lady? Why did you let her in? What kind of a lady?”

“A lady—well, a lady with such magnificent furs that one couldn’t keep

her out in the cold,” Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity.

Campton went up apprehensively. The idea of unknown persons in

possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were,

whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed

the tranquil course of things, faced him with unexpected problems,

unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was

like dynamiting fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of

dismembered thoughts.

As he entered he perceived from the temperate atmosphere that Mme. Lebel

had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. The lady’s furs

must indeed be magnificent.

She sat at the farther end of the room, in a high-backed chair near the

stove, and when she rose he recognized his former wife. The long sable

cloak, which had slipped back over the chair, justified Mme. Lebel’s

description, but the dress beneath it appeared to Campton simpler than

Mrs. Brant’s habitual raiment. The lamplight, striking up into her

powdered face, puffed out her under-lids and made harsh hollows in her

cheeks. She looked frightened, ill and yet determined.

“John——” she began, laying her hand on his sleeve.

It was the first time she had ever set foot in his shabby quarters, and

in his astonishment he could only stammer out: “Julia——”

But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears.

“Not—bad news?” he broke out.

She shook her head and, drawing a handkerchief from a

diamond-monogrammed bag, wiped away the tears and the powder. Then she

pressed the handkerchief to her lips, gazing at him with eyes as

helpless as a child’s.

“Sit down,” said Campton.

As they faced each other across the long table, with papers and

paint-rags and writing materials pushed aside to make room for the

threadbare napkin on which his plate and glass, and bottle of _vin

ordinaire_, were set out, he wondered if the scene woke in her any

memory of their first days of gaiety and poverty, or if she merely

pitied him for still living in such squalor. And suddenly it occurred to

him that when the war was over, and George came back, it would be

pleasant to hunt out a little apartment in an old house in the Faubourg

St. Germain, put some good furniture in it, and oppose the discreeter

charm of such an interior to the heavy splendours of the Avenue Marigny.

How could he expect to hold a luxury-loving youth if he had only this

dingy studio to receive him in?

Mrs. Brant began to speak.

“I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not

Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short

breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I

think? She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has

happened ... too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much

in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his

books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful ... and of course men like

that ought not to be sent to the front....”

“Men like what?”

“Geniuses,” said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and

was doing admirable work on some military commission in Paris; I believe

he knew any number of languages. And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know

I’ve never approved of her; but things are so changed nowadays, and at

any rate she was madly attached to him, and had done everything to keep

him in Paris: medical certificates, people at Headquarters working for

her, and all the rest. But it seems there are no end of officers always

intriguing to get staff-jobs: strong able-bodied young men who ought to

be in the trenches, and are fit for nothing else, but who are jealous of

the others. And last week, in spite of all she could do, poor Isador was

ordered to the front.”

Campton made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him

to be appealed to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de

Dolmetsch in George’s. His gorge rose at the thought that people should

associate in their minds cases as different as those of his son and Mme.

de Dolmetsch’s lover.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask me to do something more

about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of

thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her

lover.”

Mrs. Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the

front.”

“Good Lord—Isador?”

Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no

effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with

his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on,

and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever

contriving devil drawn in his turn into that merciless red eddy, and

gulped down the Monster’s throat with the rest. What a mad world it was,

in which the same horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and

the hero!

“Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of

remorse her desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor

creature’s love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one

else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a

hero.

“Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing,

literally nothing, undone to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes

what was coming. “It’s impossible _now_ that George should not be

taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.

The same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had

hoped she would not say it.

“It may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.

They sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again

imploringly: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”

Campton picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an

oily rag. Mrs. Brant’s anguished voice still sounded on. “Unless

something is done immediately.... It appears there’s a regular hunt for

_embusqués_, as they’re called. As if it was everybody’s business to be

killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if they’re all taken? But

it’s certain that if we don’t act at once ... act energetically....”

He fixed his eyes on hers. “Why do you come to _me_?” he asked.

Her lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”

“Your husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me——”

She reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on

her lips.

“Why did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you

wanted to see me without Brant’s knowing it?”

She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still

automatically rubbing.

“Because Anderson thinks.... Anderson won’t.... He says he’s done all he

can.”

“Ah——” cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his

shoulders, as if to shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,”

he declared.

“You—you feel as he does? You, George’s father? But a father has never

done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he can

do!”

The words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her

from an ageing doll into a living and agonized woman. Campton had never

before felt as near to her, as moved to the depths by her. For the

length of a heart-beat he saw her again with a red-haired baby in her

arms, the light of morning on her face.

“My dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.

“Sorry—sorry? I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I

want you to save him!”

He faced her with bent head, gazing absently at their interwoven

fingers: each hand had forgotten to release the other.

“I can’t do anything more,” he repeated.

She started up with a despairing exclamation. “What’s happened to you?

Who has influenced you? What has changed you?”

How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been

conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind

animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of

attachment, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing to hers.

Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it

in, had formerly in its essence been no other. That his boy should

survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to

achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that

George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he

would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country

engaged had been his own.

In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had

seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a

ditch to oblige anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience of the

millions of the untaught and the unthinking, though it had its deep

pathetic significance, did not move Campton like the clear-eyed

sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying. Jean Fortin, René

Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his reasoned horror

of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the necessity

of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on

the dark problem.

Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and

the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component

elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had

shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell,

stripped of all the interwoven tendrils of association, habit,

background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out

of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or

lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it

in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to

put an end to it.

He heard Mrs. Brant crying.

“Julia,” he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see....”

She dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is _you_, sitting here

safe and saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to

say that you ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose

those young men out there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are

too high-minded and conscientious to protect them?”

He looked at her compassionately. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest

part of it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst

war for us old people to lie awake about.”

Mrs. Brant had stood up and was feverishly pulling on her gloves: he saw

that she no longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her,

and stood waiting while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves

of hair into place, her eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was

nothing more that either could say.

He lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.

“You needn’t come down,” she said in a sob; but leaning over the rail

into the darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the concierge has

forgotten the lamp on the stairs.”

He went ahead of her down the long greasy flights, and as they reached

the ground floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and

frightened voices exclaiming. In the doorway of the porter’s lodge Mrs.

Brant’s splendid chauffeur stood looking on compassionately at a group

of women gathered about Mme. Lebel.