The old woman sat in her den, her arms stretched across the table, her

sewing fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s

wife from the corner stood by, sobbing.

Mrs. Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his

way through the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his

with the mute reproach of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last

Wednesday ... through the heart.”

Campton took her old withered hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush

fell upon the stifling little room. When Campton looked up again he saw

Julia Brant, pale and bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the

vault of the porte-cochère sent back the chauffeur’s answer to her

startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her only son’s been killed at the

front.”

XVI

Campton sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter’s pleasant little

_entresol_ full of Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.

Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his

ambulance with an attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he

could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had

reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The

friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift;

and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating

across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding of slender consoles.

On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair,

smoked and listened.

“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously.

“What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by

this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and

your nephew?”

Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned

over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that

last taunt of hers?

Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he

could have submitted such a problem. Dastrey, in the black August days,

starting for the front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had

remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to

discuss the war. But three months of hard service in _Postes de Secours_

and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer

befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and

the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses

steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those

few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of Paris.

He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s

difficulty.

“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of

job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right _not_ to try to keep

your boy out of it if you can?”

“Well—by any honourable means.”

Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I

admit.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had

evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had

broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling,

“we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on

the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own

words have lost their meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour

lies in a case like yours.” He mused a moment, and then went on: “What

would George’s view be?”

Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have

welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, thank God, had

remained perfectly detached and objective, and that the cheerful

acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least

obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice of his being mixed up in

the thing at all.

But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his

father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view

alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized man could

afford to stand aside from such a conflict.

“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”

Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and

looked up at the ceiling.

“Whereas _you_——” Dastrey suggested.

“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of

having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can

anybody _not_ be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right

and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or

those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work?

Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been

ordered to do, and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like

me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”

“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr.

Campton,” said Boylston.

Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of

thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come

naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use

without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up

has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at

peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on

unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where

I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why——” he

paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly

gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in

not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to

him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s

individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at

an accident she isn’t in.”

Even while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself.

He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted

for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in

rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: as you have,

my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”

Boylston grunted his assent.

“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to

me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as

for anything one can _say_: how dare one say anything, in the face of

what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this

ragged end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed

to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic

pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the

tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to

blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held

on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a

safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among

the women.”

“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning

at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young

women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls

type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”

The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this

time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows,

deserted streets, the almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All

through the winter, life had seemed in suspense everywhere, as much on

the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of rain

and sleet and mud; day after day, week after week, of vague

non-committal news from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but

still menacing, everywhere death, suffering, destruction, without any

perceptible oscillation of the scales, any compensating hope of good to

come out of the long slow endless waste. The benumbed and darkened Paris

of those February days seemed the visible image of a benumbed and

darkened world.

Down the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights

stretched interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and

stood watching the rush of the Seine. Below them gloomed the vague bulk

of deserted bath-houses, unlit barges, river-steamers out of commission.

The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the

water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.

The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled

on to Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway.

He, whom his lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about

for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these

midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory need to him. “Out

there—out there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d think it

was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse, driving on obstinately

through rain and darkness.

The thought of “Out there” besieged him day and night, the phrase was

always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that

land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing

nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the

lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on

the return. His collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into

close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores

and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly suffering and

dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records

were kept. Some of these histories were so heroically simple that the

sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one were looking at

suffering transmuted into poetry. But others were abominable,

unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and

filth and hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous mutilation, of men

perishing of thirst in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies

dragging themselves back to shelter only to die as they reached it.

Worst of all were the perpetually recurring reports of military

blunders, medical neglect, carelessness in high places: the torturing

knowledge of the lives that might have been saved if this or that

officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more promptly.

An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy, prejudice, and

the indifference of selfishness or of mortal fatigue, emanated from

these narratives written home from the front, or faltered out by white

lips on hospital pillows.

“The Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their

range, had to do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of

thought and criticism. A nation in arms does not judge a war as simply

as an army of professional soldiers. All these young intelligences were

so many subtly-adjusted instruments for the testing of the machinery of

which they formed a part; and not one accepted the results passively.

Yet in one respect all were agreed: the “had to be” of the first day was

still on every lip. The German menace must be met: chance willed that

theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that point speculation

was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred them all was

how the country they were defending was helping them to carry on the

struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often

scathingly explicit; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss,

caught a shuddering glimpse of what might be—must be—if political

blunders, inertia, tolerance, perhaps even evil ambitions and

connivances, should at last outweigh the effort of the front. There was

no logical argument against such a possibility. All civilizations had

their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the

action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton

and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old. Yes—but woe to

them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such

a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their

hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their

triumphs. Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great

turning-points of progress, saw how the liberties of England had been

born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest, and how even out

of the hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars

had come more freedom and a wiser order. The point was to remember that

the efficacy of the sacrifice was always in proportion to the worth of

the victims; and there at least his faith was sure.

He could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a

day or two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and

asking in vague terms if George himself thought any change in his

situation probable. His letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly

time yet to ask for leave——”

XVII

Not long after his midnight tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post

brought Campton two letters. One was postmarked Paris, the other bore

the military frank and was addressed in his son’s hand: he laid it aside

while he glanced at the first. It contained an engraved card:

+---------------------------------------------------+

| |

| _Mrs. Anderson Brant_ |

| |

| _At Home on February 20th at 4 o’clock_ |

| |

| _Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account of his |

| captivity in Germany |

| Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing_ |

| |

| _For the benefit of the “Friends of French Art |

| Committee”_ |

| |

| _Tickets 100 francs_ |

| |

+---------------------------------------------------+

Enclosed was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at

the Front, with which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the

names of Mrs. Talkett, Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and

American ladies.

Campton tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he

knew that Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril were getting up a series of

drawing-room entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the

card had been sent to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any

reminder of the sort always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in

him. He turned to George’s letter.

It was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his

son’s previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.

“Dear Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on

skis, the snow here is so deep.” (There had, in fact, been a heavy

snow-fall in the Argonne). “Sorry mother is bothering about things

again; as you’ve often reminded me, they always have a way of ‘being as

they will be,’ and even war doesn’t seem to change it. Nothing to worry

her in my case—but you can’t expect her to believe that, can you?

Neither you nor I can help it, I suppose.

“There’s one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting

her feel that you’re a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things

look differently, especially this sedentary kind of war: it’s rather

like going over all the old odds-and-ends in one’s cupboards. And some

of them do look so foolish.

“I wish you’d see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had

happened. You know you’ve got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The

said I. T. is doing well, and has nothing new to communicate up to now

except a change of address. Hereafter please write to my Base instead of

directing here, as there’s some chance of a shift of H.Q. The precaution

is probably just a new twist of the old red tape, signifying nothing;

but Base will always reach me if we _are_ shifted. Let mother know, and

explain, please; otherwise she’ll think the unthinkable.

“Interrupted by big drive—quill-drive, of course!

“As ever

“GEORGIUS SCRIBLERIUS.

“P.S. Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy either.

“No. 2.—I _had_ thought of leave; but perhaps you’re right about that.”

It was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His

smiling policy had always been to let things alone, and go on

impartially dividing his devotion between his parents, since they

refused to share even that common blessing. But war gave everything a

new look; and he had evidently, as he put it, been turning over the old

things in his cupboards. How was it possible, Campton wondered, that

after such a turning over he was still content to write “Nothing new to

communicate,” and to make jokes about another big quill-drive? Glancing

at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the

day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George

was sitting a few miles off, safe in headquarters at Sainte Menehould,

with a stout roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his

boots, scribbling punning letters while his comrades fell back from that

bloody summit....

Suddenly Campton’s eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter

for the sake of the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before

it. Ah, how young the boy was to imagine that his father would not see!

Yes, as he said, war made so many of the old things look foolish....

Campton set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long

time past: the tone of his boy’s letter seemed to correspond with his

own secret change of spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring

the Brants and himself together, but was glad that George had made the

suggestion. He resolved to see Julia that afternoon.

At the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an

exhibition of paintings sent home from the front, and Mlle. Davril

helping to catalogue them. Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing

fresh tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with

poverty and sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about,

tragic and ineffectual. Boylston had not been able to extract a penny

from Beausite for his secretary and the latter’s left-handed family; but

Mme. Beausite had discovered a newly-organized charity which lent money

to “temporarily embarrassed” war-victims; and with an artless

self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain a small loan for the

victim of her own thrift. “For what other purpose are such charities

founded?” she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which Miss

Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton

came in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful

white head over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.

The telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the

receiver.

“Mr. Campton!”

The painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed

to him charged with explosives.

“Take the message, do. The thing always snaps at me.”

There was a listening pause: then Boylston said: “It’s about Upsher——”

Campton started up. “Killed——?”

“Not sure. It’s Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you

to break it to Mr. Mayhew.”

“Oh, Lord,” the painter groaned, the boy’s face suddenly rising before

his blurred eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he

would have turned to her; at least she might have gone with him on his

quest. He could not ask Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that

curious incapacity to deal with the raw fact of sorrow which had often

given an elfin unreality to the most poignant moments of his life. It

was as though experience had to enter into the very substance of his

soul before he could even feel it.

“Other people,” he thought, “would know what to say, and I shan’t....”

Some one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau

Luxe, though with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had

grown two secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an

office. One of the secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She

was a competent young woman, who instantly extracted from her

pocket-diary the fact that her chief was at Mrs. Anderson Brant’s,

rehearsing.

“Rehearsing——?”

“Why, yes; he’s to speak at Mrs. Brant’s next week on Atrocities,” she

said, surprised at Campton’s ignorance.

She suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich,

where but one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as

difficult as in the understaffed hotels; and after one or two vain

attempts Campton decided to go to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to

get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible might still in some vague way

help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he was dead. “Or else

it’s just the need to rush about,” he thought, conscious that the only

way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like

agitation.

On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before

him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter’s

visions wear. “I want to be _in_ this thing,” he heard the boy

repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through

centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.

“If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would

have been alive and safe to-day,” Campton mused, “like George.... The

average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of

years ago, and never re-examined since.” But this consideration, though

drawn from George’s own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.

At the Brants’ a bewildered concierge admitted him and rang a bell which

no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of

sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in

scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter’s armchair

beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from

above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.

In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and _pâtes

tendres_, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless

Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day

of his last visit.

The maid led him to the ball-room. Through double doors of glass Mr.

Mayhew’s oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano,

reached Campton’s ears: he paused and looked. At the far end of the

great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr.

Mayhew, a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers.

Beside him was a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical

perfume-burner; and on it Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in

an attitude of affliction.

Beneath the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord

from Chopin’s Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross

nurses perched on bales of blankets and listened. Under one of their

coifs Campton recognized Mrs. Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to

the lady nearest her; and the latter, turning, revealed the astonished

eyes of Julia Brant.

Campton’s first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr.

Mayhew’s rolling periods, was of his former wife’s gift of adaptation.

She had made herself a nurse’s face; not a theatrical imitation of it

like Mme. de Dolmetsch’s, nor yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster,

like Mrs. Talkett’s. Her lovely hair smoothed away under her strict

coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs. Brant looked serious,

tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found her vocation?

She gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he

had not come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger

on her lip and pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails

were as beautifully polished as ever.

Mr. Mayhew was saying: “All that I have to give, yes, all that is most

precious to me, I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the

Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one

of the first Victims of that barbarism....”

He paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano

filled in the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her

attitude, almost without moving her lips, sang a few notes of

lamentation.

“Of that hideous barbarism——” Mr. Mayhew began again. “I repeat that I

stand here ready to give up everything I hold most dear——”

“Do stop him,” Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.

Little Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her,

sprang up and threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed

from one widowed pose into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically

descending, approached Mrs. Brant.

“You agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de

Dolmetsch’s beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral

accompaniment—would only weaken my effect? Where the facts are so

overwhelming it is enough to state them; that is,” Mr. Mayhew added

modestly, “if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I hope they

are.”

Mme. de Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn from her

cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton’s.

“Dear friend, you’ve heard?... You remember our talk? I am Cassandra,

cursed with the hideous gift of divination.” Tears rained down her

cheeks, washing off the paint like mud swept by a shower. “My only

comfort,” she added, fixing her perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, “is to help

our great good friend in this crusade against the assassins of my

Ladislas.”

Mrs. Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent

face go to pieces as if it had been vitrioled.

“Benny—Benny——” he screamed, “Benny hurt? My Benny? It’s some mistake!

What makes you think——?” His eyes met Campton’s. “Oh, my God! Why, he’s

my sister’s child!” he cried, plunging his face into his soft manicured

hands.

In the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the

full-throated sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast

for an unfindable handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately

weeping it into pulp.

Campton had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped

Mr. Mayhew was in too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his

entreaty.

“It was you who saw Benny last—you can’t leave me!” the poor man

implored; and Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.

Their names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at

the unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first

time entering the banker’s private office.

Mr. Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the

visitors waited, the painter’s registering eye took in the details of

the room, from the Barye _cire-perdue_ on a peach-coloured marble mantel

to the blue morocco armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table

was an electric lamp in a celadon vase, and just the right number of

neatly folded papers lay under a paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The

room was as tidy as an expensive stage-setting or the cage of a

well-kept canary: the only object marring its order was a telegram lying

open on the desk.

Mr. Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He

shook hands with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton,

gave his usual cough, and said: “This is terrible.”

And suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important

and powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the

desk, Campton murmured to himself: “If this thing were to happen to me I

couldn’t bear it.... I simply couldn’t bear it....”

Benny Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had

been seen to fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the

telegram, from his commanding officer, reported him as “wounded and

missing.”

The words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months.

Freezing to death between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of

slow agony in German hospitals: these were the alternative visions

associated with the now familiar formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of

his time collecting details about the treatment of those who had fallen,

alive but wounded, into German hands; and Campton guessed that as he sat

there every one of these details, cruel, sanguinary, remorseless, had

started to life, and that all their victims wore the face of Benny.

The wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his

grief that Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the

thoughts he was thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each

avoiding the other’s eye lest they should betray to one another the

secret of their shared exultation at George’s safety.

Finally Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to

go with him to the English Military Mission in the hope of getting

farther information. He went away, small and shrunken, with the

deprecating smile of a man who seeks to ward off a blow; as he left the

room Campton heard him say timidly to the clerk: “No doubt you speak

French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to me.”

Campton had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held

him back. He remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to

Uncle Andy,” and wished he could think of some friendly phrase to ease

off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant seemed to have the same wish. He stood,

erect and tightly buttoned, one small hand resting on the arm of his

desk-chair, as though he were posing for a cabinet size, with the

photographer telling him to look natural. His lids twitched behind his

protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as straight as a ruler,

detached itself by a hair’s breadth from the lower; but no word came.

Campton glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke

abruptly.

“There was no reason on earth,” he said, “why poor young Upsher should

ever have been in this thing.”

Mr. Brant bowed.

“This sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people’s rows,” Campton

continued with rising vehemence, “is of no more use to a civilized state

than any other unreasoned instinct. At bottom it’s nothing but what

George calls the baseball spirit: just an ignorant passion for

fisticuffs.”

Mr. Brant looked at him intently. “When did—George say that?” he asked,

with his usual cough before the name.

Campton coloured. “Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think.

It was the view of most thoughtful young fellows at that time.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.

Campton’s eyes again wandered about the room.

“_Now_, of course——”

“Ah—_now_....”

The two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr.

Brant, growing pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and

they shook hands in silence.

XVIII

In the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as

when he had watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalons, his dead

son’s image in his eyes.

Each time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity

had fallen he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had

been Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to

Chalons and resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less

could he have accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really

inconceivable, thought that Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery

furnace like a crumpled letter tossed into a grate. Young Fortin was

defending his country—but Upsher, in God’s name what was Benny Upsher of

Connecticut doing in a war between the continental powers?

Suddenly Campton remembered that he had George’s letter in his pocket,

and that he had meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant’s. He had started

out that morning full of the good intentions the letter had inspired;

but now he had no heart to carry them out. Yet George had said: “Let

mother know, and explain, please;” and such an injunction could not be

disregarded.

He was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss

Anthony was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made

haste he might find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive

with him, in difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for

shelter; her simple unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his

mother’s solution of the dark riddles he used to propound in the

nursery.

He found her in her little dining-room, with Delft plates askew on

imitation Cordova leather, and a Death’s Head Pennon and a Prussian

helmet surmounting the nymph in cast bronze on the mantelpiece. In

entering he faced the relentless light of a ground-glass window opening

on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a look, dropped her fork

and sprang up crying: “George——”

“George—why George?” Campton recovered his presence of mind under the

shock of her agitation. “What made you think of George?”

“Your—your face,” she stammered, sitting down again. “So absurd of

me.... But you looked.... A seat for monsieur, Jeanne,” she cried over

her shoulder to the pantry.

“Ah—my face? Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has disappeared—I’ve just

had to break it to Mayhew.”

“Oh, that poor young Upsher? How dreadful!” Her own face grew instantly

serene. “I’m so sorry—so very sorry.... Yes, yes, you _shall_ lunch with

me—I know there’s another cutlet,” she insisted.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Well, then, I’ve finished.” She led the way into the drawing-room.

There it was her turn to face the light, and he saw that her own

features were as perturbed as she had apparently discovered his to be.

“Poor Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have

had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw

that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her

inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of

her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?

Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she

continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should

you have been afraid for George?”

Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the

armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the

light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her

words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of

confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me open George’s name would run

out of every vein,” she said.

“But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something

had happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”

She shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her

youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become

part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities

over the solid crystal block of her character.

“Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A

sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know

where George is any longer.”

She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you

mean?”

“Here—look at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother

of the change.” He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the

protecting back of her chair. “What can it mean,” he broke out, “except

that he’s left Sainte Menehould, that he’s been sent elsewhere, and that

he doesn’t want us to find out where?”

Miss Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter

steadily, and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the

same kind, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they were,

that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let

Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her

hands patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The

hands folded the letter with precision, and handed it back to him.

“Yes: I see why you thought that—one might have,” she surprised him by

conceding. Then, darting at his unprotected face a gaze he seemed to

feel though he could not see it: “If it had meant that George had been

ordered to the front, how would you have felt?” she demanded.

He had not expected the question, and though in the last weeks he had so

often propounded it to himself, it caught him in the chest like a blow.

A sense of humiliation, a longing to lay his weakness bare, suddenly

rose in him, and he bowed his head. “I couldn’t ... I couldn’t bear it,”

he stammered.

She was silent for an interval; then she stood up, and laying her hand

on his shaking shoulder crossed the room to a desk in which he knew she

kept her private papers. Her keys clinked, and a moment later she handed

him a letter. It was in George’s writing, and dated on the same day as

his own.

“Dearest old girl, nothing new but my address. Hereafter please write to

our Base. This order has just been lowered from the empyrean at the end

of an endless reel of red tape. What it means nobody knows. It does not

appear to imply an immediate change of Headquarters; but even if such a

change comes, my job is likely to remain the same. I’m getting used to

it, and no wonder, for one day differeth not from another, and I’ve had

many of them now. Take care of Dad and mother, and of your matchless

self. I’m writing to father to-day. Your George the First—and Last (or

I’ll know why).”

The two letters bore one another out in a way which carried conviction.

Campton saw that his sudden doubts must have been produced (since he had

not felt them that morning) by the agonizing experience he had

undergone: the vision of Benny Upsher had unmanned him. George was safe,

and asked only to remain so: that was evident from both letters. And as

the certainty of his son’s acquiescence once more penetrated Campton it

brought with it a fresh reaction of shame. Ashamed—yes, he had begun to

be ashamed of George as well as of himself. Under the touch of Adele

Anthony’s implacable honesty his last pretenses shrivelled up, and he

longed to abase himself. He lifted his head and looked at her,

remembering all she would be able to read in his eyes.

“You’re satisfied?” she enquired.

“Yes. If that’s the word.” He stretched his hand toward her, and then

drew it back. “But it’s _not_: it’s not the word any longer.” He

laboured with the need of self-expression, and the opposing instinct of

concealing feelings too complex for Miss Anthony’s simple gaze. How

could he say: “I’m satisfied; but I wish to God that George were not”?

And was he satisfied, after all? And how could he define, or even be

sure that he was actually experiencing, a feeling so contradictory that

it seemed to be made up of anxiety for his son’s safety, shame at that

anxiety, shame at George’s own complacent acceptance of his lot, and

terror of a possible change in that lot? There were hours when it seemed

to Campton that the Furies were listening, and ready to fling their

awful answer to him if he as much as whispered to himself: “Would to God

that George were not satisfied!”

The sense of their haunting presence laid its clutch on him, and caused

him, after a pause, to finish his phrase in another tone. “No;

satisfied’s not the word; I’m _glad_ George is out of it!” he exclaimed.

Miss Anthony was folding away the letter as calmly as if it had been a

refugee record. She did not appear to notice the change in Campton’s

voice.

“I don’t pretend to your sublime detachment: you’ve never had a child,”

he sneered. (Certainly, if the Furies were listening, they would put

that down to his credit!)

“Oh, my poor John,” she said; then she locked the desk, took her hat

from the lamp-chimney on which it had been hanging, jammed it down on

her head like a helmet, and remarked: “We’ll go together, shall we? It’s

time I got back to the office.”

On the way downstairs both were silent. Campton’s ears echoed with his

stupid taunt, and he glanced at her without daring to speak. On the last

landing she paused and said: “I’ll see Julia this evening about George’s

change of address. She may be worried; and I can explain—I can take her

my letter.”

“Oh, do,” he assented. “And tell her—tell her—if she needs me——”

It was as much of a message as he found courage for. Miss Anthony

nodded.

XIX

One day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And

monsieur must really buy himself some new shirts.”

Campton looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he

wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that

the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in

her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of

sap, the spring need to go on living, through everything and in spite of

everything.

_On se fait une raison_, as Mme. Lebel would have said. Life had to go

on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary,

but every one felt that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once

more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the

wires of the poor broken marionettes with which the Furies had been

playing, and they responded, though with feebler flappings, to the

accustomed jerk.

In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process,

chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had

tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed,

after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation

declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as

more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him:

perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his

effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The woe of

the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on

Mlle. Davril, on the greater number of his friends. But their ardour

left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure, as

earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he

felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.

“I give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give

them yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who

murmured: “Ah, _Boylston_——” as if that point of the remark were alone

worth noticing.

“At his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of

himself.”

“Or into himself, rather. He _was_ a pottering boy before—now he’s a

man, with a man’s sense of things.”

“Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their

prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like

the kind who was meant to be a missionary.”

“Not a bit of it.... But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in

the war—as all the young Americans are.”

Campton made an impatient movement. “Benny Upsher again——! Can’t we let

our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I

wonder?”

“I wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.

Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not

again raise the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was too simplifying to

penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year’s incessant

contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in

its old formulas.

Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant

was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at

Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in

a refulgent new motor emblazoned with a Red Cross, carrying supplies,

rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings

and conferences with the Service de Santé (for she and Mr. Brant were

now among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and throwing

open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such

sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.

On the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in

blossom and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of

such incentives. He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a

concert for “The Friends of French Art” which was to be held in her

house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother

Campton had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way

of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other.

The appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel’s

announcement. Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above

unfolding green; and Campton, looking up at them, remembered once

thinking how Nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with

her own pink lamps and green fans the lamps and fans of the _cafés

chantants_ beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished,

the fans folded up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of

electric light, the iron chairs and dead plants in paintless boxes, all

heaped up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of

Nature’s obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the

stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent,

a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when

spring had come?

Mrs. Brant, having reduced her household and given over her

drawing-rooms to charity, received in her boudoir, a small room

contrived by a clever upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she

had never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing

the door Campton saw George’s last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an

expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph, and thrust it

into a drawer; he thought a young man on a safe staff job rather

ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight filled him with a

secret dread.

Mrs. Brant was bidding goodbye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did

not know. His approach through the carpeted antechamber had been

unnoticed, and as he entered the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French,

apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor: “Bridge, _chère Madame_?

No; not yet. I confess I haven’t the courage to take up my old life. We

mothers with sons at the front....”

“Ah,” exclaimed the other lady, “there I don’t agree with you. I think

one owes it to them to go on as if one were as little afraid as _they_

are. That is what all my sons prefer.... Even,” she added, lowering her

voice but lifting her head higher, “even, I’m sure, the one who is

buried by the Marne.” With a flush on her handsome face she pressed Mrs.

Brant’s hand and passed out.

Mrs. Brant had caught sight of Campton as she received the rebuke. Her

colour rose slightly, and she said with a smile: “So many women can’t

get on without amusement.”

“No,” he agreed. There was a pause, and then he asked: “Who was it?”

“The Marquise de Tranlay—the widow.”

“Where are the sons she spoke of?”

“There are three left: one in the _Chasseurs à Pied_; the youngest, who

volunteered at seventeen, in the artillery in the Argonne; the third,

badly wounded, in hospital at Compiègne. And the eldest killed. I simply

can’t understand....”

“Why,” Campton interrupted, “did you speak as if George were at the

front? Do you usually speak of him in that way?”

Her silence and her deepening flush made him feel the unkindness of the

question. “I didn’t mean ... forgive me,” he said. “Only sometimes, when

I see women like that I’m——”

“Well?” she questioned.

He was silent in his turn, and she did not insist. They sat facing each

other, each forgetting the purpose of their meeting. For the hundredth

time he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George’s filial

injunction: between himself and George’s mother these months of fiery

trial seemed to have loosed instead of tightening the links.

He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city.

The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonizing the grey stone,

the pale foliage, and a sky piled with clouds which seemed to rebuild in

translucid masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more

viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River,

pavements, terraces heavy with trees, the whole crowded sky-line from

Notre Dame to the Panthéon, instead of presenting themselves in their

bare reality, were transposed into a painter’s vision. And the faces

around him became again the starting-point of rapid incessant

combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more

at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs. The reawakening

of this instinct deepened Campton’s sense of unrest, and made him feel

more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer

of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them.

He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work

which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table;

but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding lilacs at

the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he

had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old

city in her summer dishabille while he planned his journey to Africa

with George; and something George had once quoted from Faust came

drifting through his mind: “Take care! You’ve broken my beautiful world!

There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s

hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be

commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton

sat down to the task of collating office files.

His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest

events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or

Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if

it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett.

She said: “May I come in?” and did so without waiting for his answer.

The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her

appearance. But for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance, when

she had rushed into Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room on the day after war was

declared, he had seen her only in a nursing uniform, as absorbed in her

work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before

him in raiment so delicately springlike that it seemed an emanation of

the day. Care had dropped from her with her professional garb, and she

smiled as though he must guess the reason.

In ordinary times he would have thought: “She’s in love——” but that

explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded

him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after René

Davril’s death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had

entered it. Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at

Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the

background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of

her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her

empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of

her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with

which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these

indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn

from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting;

and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.

With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat,

tossed it on the divan, and said: “Dear Master, I just want to sit with

you and have you talk to me.” She dropped down beside her hat, clasped

her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already

forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: “Do you know, I’ve made up

my mind to begin to live again—to live my own life, I mean, to be my

real _me_, after all these dreadful months of exile from myself. I see

now _that_ that is my real duty—just as it is yours, just as it is that

of every artist and every creator. Don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you

agree with me? We _must_ save Beauty for the world; before it is too

late we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds

ridiculously presumptuous, doesn’t it, to say ‘we’ in talking of a great

genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me? But after all

there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to

realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so—so objectively,

and I ...” she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely

bewildered eyes, “I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a

vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the

right light. But I oughtn’t to be ashamed of my limitations, do you

think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty;

every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else

the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the

only _real_ death, isn’t it?” She drew a deep breath and added: “It has

done me good already to sit here and listen to you.”

Campton, a few weeks previously, would have been amused, or perhaps

merely irritated. But in the interval he had become aware in himself of

the same irresistible craving to “live,” as she put it, and as he had

heard it formulated, that very day, by the mourning mother who had so

sharply rebuked Mrs. Brant. The spring was stirring them all in their

different ways, secreting in them the sap which craved to burst into

bridge-parties, or the painting of masterpieces, or a consciousness of

the need for new shirts.

“But what am I in all this?” Mrs. Talkett rushed on, sparing him the

trouble of a reply. “Nothing but the match that lights the flame!

Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry ... I

_have_ scribbled a few things, you know ... but that’s not what I was

going to tell you. It’s you, dear Master, who must set us the example of

getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you

done in all these dreadful months—the real You? Nothing! And the world

will be the poorer for it ever after. Master, you must paint again—you

must begin to-day!”

Campton gave an uneasy laugh. “Oh—paint!” He waved his hand toward the

office files of “The Friends of French Art.” “There’s my work.”

“Not the real you. It’s your dummy’s work—just as my nursing has been

mine. Oh, one did one’s best—but all the while beauty and art and the

eternal things were perishing! And what will the world be like without

them?”

“I shan’t be here,” Campton growled.

“But your son will.” She looked at him profoundly. “You know I know your

son—we’re friends. And I’m sure he would feel as I feel—he would tell

you to go back to your painting.”

For months past any allusion to George had put Campton on his guard,

stiffening him with improvised defences. But this appeal of Mrs.

Talkett’s found him unprepared, demoralized by the spring sweetness, and

by his secret sense of his son’s connivance with it. What was war—any

war—but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on

the first pretext to slake its frenzy? Campton reminded himself again

that he was the son of free institutions, of a country in no way

responsible for the centuries of sinister diplomacy which had brought

Europe to ruin, and was now trying to drag down America. George was

right, the Brants were right, this young woman through whose lips

Campton’s own secret instinct spoke was right.

He was silent so long that she rose with the anxious frown that appeared

to be her way of blushing, and faltered out: “I’m boring you—I’d better

go.”

She picked up her hat and held its cataract of feathers poised above her

slanted head.

“Wait—let me do you like that!” Campton cried. It had never before

occurred to him that she was paintable; but as she stood there with

uplifted arm the long line flowing from her wrist to her hip suddenly

wound itself about him like a net.

“Me?” she stammered, standing motionless, as if frightened by the excess

of her triumph.

“Do you mind?” he queried; and hardly hearing her faltered out: “Mind?

When it was what I came for!” he dragged forth an easel, flung on it the

first canvas he could lay hands on (though he knew it was the wrong

shape and size), and found himself instantly transported into the lost

world which was the only real one.

XX

For a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss.

His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where

all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and

breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged

into their whirling circles like a stranded sea-creature into the sea.

Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a curtain drawn before

an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of art, a flower in

a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel.

During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of

insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a

strange ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a

musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.

He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd

patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash

surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them,

where Louis Philippe mahogany had entrenched itself against the

aggression of _art nouveau_ hangings, and the frail grace of

eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture

painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs.

Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be

filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There

were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world

was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in

their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the

reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky

grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.

At first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but

after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs.

Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to

“recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who

struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or

too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not

trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself, somehow,

like a drowned body—but drowned in a toy aquarium—still staring about

with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming

by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of

them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the

reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since

he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So,

through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially.

The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey

Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he

was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather

ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had

discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by

frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had

found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the

performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence

which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become

his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling

activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe.

Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had

allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that

Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot

of money to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for

every penny—that is, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly

explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr.

Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense

sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by

the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in

French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how

the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was

owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light

conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a

smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive conversation

of her familiars.

“Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in

attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in

particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly young man with

eye-glasses and glossy hair, who roamed about straightening the

furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a

wedding—owned to Campton that _he_ was subversive; and on the painter’s

pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything

_she_ doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his

wife’s course among the teacups.

Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr.

Mayhew, did not restrict herself to such mild fare, but exercised her

matchless eyes on a troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who

accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American

diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South

American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who designed the

costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.

All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality

and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them,

excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely

masquerading.

To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at

Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected

solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein,

who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s

studio to enquire into the progress of his own portrait.

“I must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said

jovially, tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over

the painter’s head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image

seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled.

“You’ll owe it to _me_ if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling

back at the leer which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt

a sudden pity for her innocence.

“My wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you

know,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again,

like a diving animal; and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive eyes on

Campton. “That kind of idiocy is all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say;

and he nearly cried back to her: “But, you poor child, it’s the only

honest thing anywhere near you!”

Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s

reappearance, at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions

to Cabinet Ministers and eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the

Talkett house was so mirage-like that even the big red bulk of the

international financier became imponderable in it.

But one day Campton, on his way home, ran across Dastrey, and remembered

that they had not met for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked worn and

preoccupied, and Campton was abruptly recalled to the world he had been

trying to escape from.

“You seem rather knocked-up—what’s wrong with you?”

Dastrey stared. “Wrong with me? Well—did you like the communiqué this

morning?”

“I didn’t read it,” said Campton curtly. They walked along a few steps

in silence.

“You see,” the painter continued, “I’ve gone back to my job—my painting.

I suddenly found I had to.”

Dastrey glanced at him with surprising kindliness. “Ah, that’s good

news, my dear fellow!”

“You think so?” Campton half-sneered.

“Of course—why not? What are you painting? May I come and see?”

“Naturally.” Campton paused. “The fact is, I was bitten the other day

with a desire to depict that little will-o’-the-wisp of a Mrs. Talkett.

Come to her house any afternoon and I’ll show you the thing.”

“To her house?” Dastrey paused with a frown. “Then the picture’s

finished?”

“No—not by a long way. I’m doing it there—in her _milieu_, among her

crowd. It amuses me; they amuse me. When will you come?” He shot out the

sentences like challenges; and his friend took them up in the same tone.

“To Mrs. Talkett’s—to meet her crowd? Thanks—I’m too much tied down by

my job.”

“No; you’re not. You’re too disapproving,” said Campton quarrelsomely.

“You think we’re all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international

loafers—I don’t know what you call us. But I’m one of them, so whatever

name you give them I must answer to. Well, I’ll tell you what they are,

my dear fellow—and I’m not ashamed to be among them: they’re people

who’ve resolutely, unanimously, unshakeably decided, for a certain

number of hours each day, to forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if

it were not and never had been, so that——”

“So that?”

“So that beauty shall not perish from the earth!” Campton shouted,

bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement.

Dastrey broke into a laugh. “_Allons donc!_ Decided to forget the war?

Why, bless your heart, they’ve never, not one of ’em, ever been able to

remember it for an hour together; no, not from the first day, except as

it interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased

their fortunes. You’re the only one of them, my dear chap, (since you

class yourself among them) of whom what you’ve just said is true; and if

you can forget the war while you’re at your work, so much the better for

you and for us and for posterity; and I hope you’ll paint all Mrs.

Talkett’s crowd, one after another. Though I doubt if they’re as good

subjects now as when you caught them last July with the war-funk on.” He

held out his hand with a dry smile. “Goodbye. I’m off to meet my nephew,

who’s here on leave.”

He hastened away, leaving Campton in a crumbled world. Louis Dastrey on

leave? But that was because he was at the front, the real front, in the

trenches, had already had a slight wound and a fine citation.

Staff-officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave

just yet....

The thoughts excited by this encounter left Campton more than ever

resolved to drug himself with work and frivolity. It was none of his

business to pry into the consciences of the people about him, not even

into Jorgenstein’s—into which one would presumably have had to be let

down in a diver’s suit, with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the

government tolerated Jorgenstein’s presence in France, probably on the

ground that he could be useful—so the banker himself let it be known—it

was silly of people like Adele Anthony and Dastrey to wince at the mere

mention of his name. There woke in Campton all the old spirit of aimless

random defiance—revolt for revolt’s sake—which had marked the first

period of his life after his separation from his wife. He had long since

come to regard it as a crude and juvenile phase—yet here he was reliving

it.

Though he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Talkett and the Brants he

had no fear of meeting Julia: it was impossible to picture her neat head

battling with the blasts of that dishevelled drawing-room. But though

she did not appear there, he heard her more and more often alluded to,

in terms of startling familiarity, by Mrs. Talkett’s visitors. It was

clear that they all saw her, chiefly in her own house, that they thought

her, according to their respective vocabularies, “a perfect dear,” “_une

femme exquise_” or “_une bonne vieille_” (ah, poor Julia!); and that

their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the fact that she

had got her marvellous _chef_ demobilised, and was giving little

“war-dinners” followed by a quiet turn at bridge.

Campton remembered Mme. de Tranlay’s rebuke to Mrs. Brant on the day

when he had last called in the Avenue Marigny; then he remembered also

that it was on that very day that he had returned to his painting.

“After all, she held out longer than I did—poor Julia!” he mused,

annoyed at the idea of her being the complacent victim of all the

voracities he saw about him, and yet reflecting that she was at last

living her life, as they called it at Mrs. Talkett’s. After all, the

fact that George was not at the front seemed to exonerate his

parents—unless, indeed, it did just the opposite.

One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Talkett’s to put in a last

afternoon’s work on her portrait, Campton, to his surprise, found his

wife in front of it. Equally to his surprise he noticed that she was

dressed with a juvenility quite new to her; and for the first time he

thought she looked old-fashioned and also old. She met him with her

usual embarrassment.

“I didn’t know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run

in——” She waved her hand toward the portrait.

“I hope you like it,” he said, suddenly finding that he didn’t.

“It’s marvellous—marvellous.” She looked at him timidly. “It’s

extraordinary, how you’ve caught her rhythm, her _tempo_,” she ventured

in the jargon of the place. Campton, to hide a smile, turned away to get

his brushes. “I’m so glad,” she continued hastily, “that you’ve begun to

paint again. We all need to ... to....”

“Oh, not you and I, do we?” he rejoined with a scornful laugh.

She evidently caught the allusion, for she blushed all over her

uncovered neck, up through the faintly wrinkled cheeks to the roots of

her newly dyed hair; then he saw her eyes fill.

“What’s she crying for? Because George is _not_ in danger?” he wondered,

busying himself with his palette.

Mrs. Talkett hurried in with surprise and apologies; and one by one the

habitués followed, with cheery greetings for Mrs. Brant and a moment of

constraint as they noted Campton’s presence, and the relation between

the two was mutely passed about. Then the bridge-tables were brought,

Mr. Talkett began to straighten the cards nervously, and the guests

broke up into groups, forgetting everything but their own affairs. As

Campton turned back to his work he was aware of a last surprise in the

sight of Mrs. Brant serene and almost sparkling, waving her adieux to

the bridge-tables, and going out followed by Jorgenstein, with whom she

seemed on terms of playful friendliness. Of all strange war

promiscuities, Campton thought this the strangest.

XXI

The next time Campton saw Mrs. Brant was in his own studio.

He was preparing, one morning, to leave the melancholy place, when the

bell rang and his _bonne_ let her in. Her dress was less frivolous than

at Mrs. Talkett’s, and she wore a densely patterned veil, like the

ladies in cinema plays when they visit their seducers or their

accomplices.

Through the veil she looked at him agitatedly, and said: “George is not

at Sainte Menehould.”

He stared.

“No. Anderson was there the day before yesterday.”

“Brant? At Sainte Menehould?” Campton felt the blood rush to his

temples. What! He, the boy’s father, had not so much as dared to ask for

the almost unattainable permission to go into the war-zone; and this

other man, who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no

right whatever to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the

priceless favour, and instead of passing it on, instead of offering at

least to share it with the boy’s father, had sneaked off secretly to

feast on the other’s lawful privilege!

“How the devil——?” Campton burst out.

“Oh, he got a Red Cross mission; it was arranged very suddenly—through a

friend....”

“Yes—well?” Campton stammered, sitting down lest his legs should fail

him, and signing to her to take a chair.

“Well—he was not there!” she repeated excitedly. “It’s what we might

have known—since he’s changed his address.”

“Then he didn’t see him?” Campton interrupted, the ferocious joy of the

discovery crowding out his wrath and wonder.

“Anderson didn’t? No. He wasn’t there, I tell you!”

“The H.Q. has been moved?”

“No, it hasn’t. Anderson saw one of the officers. He said George had

been sent on a mission.”

“To another H.Q.?”

“That’s what they said. I don’t believe it.”

“What do you believe?”

“I don’t know. Anderson’s sure they told him the truth. The officer he

saw is a friend of George’s, and he said George was expected back that

very evening.”

Campton sat looking at her uncertainly. Did she dread, or did she rather

wish, to disbelieve the officer’s statement? Where did she hope or fear

that George had gone? And what were Campton’s own emotions? As confused,

no doubt, as hers—as undefinable. The insecurity of his feelings moved

him to a momentary compassion for hers, which were surely pitiable,

whatever else they were. Then a savage impulse swept away every other,

and he said: “Wherever George was, Brant’s visit will have done him no

good.”

She grew pale. “What do you mean?”

“I wonder it never occurred to you—or to your husband, since he’s so

solicitous,” Campton went on, prolonging her distress.

“Please tell me what you mean,” she pleaded with frightened eyes.

“Why, in God’s name, couldn’t you both let well enough alone? Didn’t you

guess why George never asked for leave—why I’ve always advised him not

to? Don’t you know that nothing is as likely to get a young fellow into

trouble as having his family force their way through to see him, use

influence, seem to ask favours? I dare say that’s how that fool of a

Dolmetsch woman got Isador killed. No one would have noticed where he

was if she hadn’t gone on so about him. They _had_ to send him to the

front finally. And now the chances are——”

“Oh, no, no, no—don’t say it!” She held her hands before her face as if

he had flung something flaming at her. “It was I who made Anderson go!”

“Well—Brant ought to have thought of that—_I_ did,” he pursued

sardonically.

Her answer disarmed him. “You’re his father.”

“I don’t mean,” he went on hastily, “that Brant’s not right: of course

there’s nothing to be afraid of. I can’t imagine why you thought there

was.”

She hung her head. “Sometimes when I hear the other women—other

mothers—I feel as if our turn must come too. Even at Sainte Menehould a

shell might hit the house. Anderson said the artillery fire seemed so

near.”

He made no answer, and she sat silent, without apparent thought of

leaving. Finally he said: “I was just going out——”

She stood up. “Oh, yes—that reminds me. I came to ask you to come with

me.”

“With you——?”

“The motor’s waiting—you must.” She laid her hand on his arm. “To see

Olida, the new _clairvoyante_. Everybody goes to her—everybody who’s

anxious about anyone. Even the scientific people believe in her. She’s

told people the most extraordinary things—it seems she warned Daisy de

Dolmetsch.... Well, I’d _rather_ know!” she burst out passionately.

Campton smiled. “She’ll tell you that George is back at his desk.”

“Well, then—isn’t that worth it? Please don’t refuse me!”

He disengaged himself gently. “My poor Julia, go by all means if it will

reassure you.”

“Ah, but you’ve got to come too. You can’t say no: Madge Talkett tells

me that if _the two nearest_ go together Olida sees so much more

clearly—especially a father and mother,” she added hastily, as if

conscious of the inopportune “nearest.” After a moment she went on:

“Even Mme. de Tranlay’s been; Daisy de Dolmetsch met her on the stairs.

Olida told her that her youngest boy, from whom she’d had no news for

weeks, was all right, and coming home on leave. Mme. de Tranlay didn’t

know Daisy, except by sight, but she stopped her to tell her. Only

fancy—the last person she would have spoken to in ordinary times! But

she was so excited and happy! And two days afterward the boy turned up

safe and sound. You must come!” she insisted.

Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women

groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of

Mme. de Tranlay’s proud figure climbing a _clairvoyante’s_ stairs.

“I’ll come if you want me to,” he said.

They drove to the Batignolles quarter. Mrs. Brant’s lips were twitching

under her veil, and as the motor stopped she said childishly: “I’ve

never been to this kind of place before.”

“I should hope not,” Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian

lady’s rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers, and

come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly

remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway,

who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and

olive-stones, and had found, by irrefutable signs, that he and she would

“come together” again. “Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific

humbug,” he mused, “because it was picturesque—and so was she—and she

believed in it.”

Mrs. Brant rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A

servant-woman showed them into a _salon_ which was as commonplace as a

doctor’s waiting-room. On the mantelpiece were vases of Pampas grass,

and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolier. Evidently Mme. Olida

was superior to the class of fortune-tellers who prepare a special

stage-setting, and no astrologer’s robe or witch’s kitchen was to be

feared.

The maid led them across a plain dining-room into an inner room. The

shutters were partly closed, and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in

loose black rose from a sofa. Gold earrings gleamed under her oiled

black hair—and suddenly, through the billows of flesh, and behind the

large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read

his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on

Mrs. Brant; then they met his with the same heavy stare. But he noticed

that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she

pointed to two chairs.

“Sit down, please,” she said in a low rough voice, speaking in French.

The door opened again, and a young man with Levantine eyes and a showy

necktie looked in. She said sharply: “No,” and he disappeared. Campton

noticed that a large emerald flashed on his manicured hand. Mme. Olida

continued to look at her visitors.

Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: “We’re his parents—a son at

the front....”

Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lips droop over

her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow.

Presently she held out both hands.

“You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please.” As her

cushioned palm touched Campton’s he thought he felt a tremor of

recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself

to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked

straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: “You should

hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed.” She

turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a

keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had

placed in Mrs. Brant’s.

Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she

had taught him, by signals tapped on his own knee, how to say what he

chose to her without her brothers’ knowing it. He looked at the huge

woman, seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip on which what used to be

a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows, and

recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round

teeth while she threw back her head, showing the Agnus Dei in her neck.

Now her mouth was like a withered flower, and in a crease of her neck a

string of pearls was embedded.

“Take hands, please,” she commanded. Julia gave Campton her ungloved

hand, and he sat between the two women.

“You are the parents? You want news of your son—ah, like so many!” Mme.

Olida closed her eyes again.

“To know where he is—whereabouts—that is what we want,” Mrs. Brant

whispered.

Mme. Olida sat as if labouring with difficult visions. The noises of the

street came faintly through the closed windows and a smell of garlic and

cheap scent oppressed Campton’s lungs and awakened old associations.

With a final effort of memory he fixed his eyes on the _clairvoyante’s_

darkened mask, and tapped her palm once or twice. She neither stirred

nor looked at him.

“I see—I see——” she began in the consecrated phrase. “A veil—a thick

veil of smoke between me and a face which is young and fair, with a

short nose and reddish hair: thick, thick, thick hair, exactly like this

gentleman’s when he was young....”

Mrs. Brant’s hand trembled in Campton’s. “It’s true,” she whispered,

“before your hair turned grey it used to be as red as Georgie’s.”

“The veil grows denser—there are awful noises; there’s a face with

blood—but not that first face. This is a very young man, as innocent as

when he was born, with blue eyes like flax-flowers, but blood, blood ...

why do I see that face? Ah, now it is on a hospital pillow—not your

son’s face, the other; there is no one near, no one but some German

soldiers laughing and drinking; the lips move, the hands are stretched

out in agony; but no one notices. It is a face that has something to say

to the gentleman; not to you, Madame. The uniform is different—is it an

English uniform?... Ah, now the face turns grey; the eyes shut, there is

foam on the lips. Now it is gone—there’s another man’s head on the

pillow.... Now, now your son’s face comes back; but not near those

others. The smoke has cleared ... I see a desk and papers; your son is

writing....”

“Oh,” gasped Mrs. Brant.

“If you squeeze my hands you arrest the current,” Mme. Olida reminded

her. There was another interval; Campton felt his wife’s fingers beating

between his like trapped birds. The heat and darkness oppressed him;

beads of sweat came out on his forehead. Did the woman really see

things, and was that face with the blood on it Benny Upsher’s?

Mme. Olida droned on. “It is your son who is writing—the young man with

the very thick hair. He is writing to you—trying to explain something.

Perhaps you have hoped to see him lately? That is it; he is telling you

why it could not be. He is sitting quietly in a room. There is no

smoke.” She released Mrs. Brant’s hand and Campton’s. “Go home, Madame.

You are fortunate. Perhaps his letter will reach you to-morrow.”

Mrs. Brant stood up sobbing. She found her gold bag and pushed it toward

Campton. He had been feeling in his own pocket for money; but as he drew

it forth Mme. Olida put back his hand. “No. I am superstitious; it’s so

seldom that I can give good news. _Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur._

I commend your son to the blessed Virgin and to all the saints and

angels.”

Campton put Julia into the motor. She was still crying, but her tears

were radiant. “Isn’t she wonderful? Didn’t you see how she seemed to

_recognize_ George? There’s no mistaking his hair! How could she have

known what it was like? Don’t think me foolish—I feel so comforted!”

“Of course; you’ll hear from him to-morrow,” Campton said. He was

touched by her maternal passion, and ashamed of having allowed her so

small a share in his jealous worship of his son. He walked away,

thinking of the young man dying in a German hospital, and of the other

man’s face succeeding his on the pillow.

XXII

Two days later, to Campton’s surprise, Anderson Brant appeared in the

morning at the studio.

Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio-garb, saw his

visitor peer cautiously about, as though fearing undressed models behind

the screens or empty beer-bottles under the tables. It was the first

time that Mr. Brant had entered the studio since his attempt to buy

George’s portrait, and Campton guessed at once that he had come again

about George.

He looked at the painter shyly, as if oppressed by the indiscretion of

intruding at that hour.

“It was my—Mrs. Brant who insisted—when she got this letter,” he brought

out between precautionary coughs.

Campton looked at him tolerantly: a barrier seemed to have fallen

between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The

letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother,

written two days after Mr. Brant’s visit to Sainte Menehould. It

expressed, in George’s usual staccato style, his regret at having been

away. “Hard luck, when one is riveted to the same square yard of earth

for weeks on end, to have just happened to be somewhere else the day

Uncle Andy broke through.” It was always the same tone of fluent banter,

in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking stridency, like the

scrape of an overworked gramophone containing only comic disks.

“Ah, well—his mother must be satisfied,” Campton said as he gave the

letter back.

“Oh, completely. So much so that I’ve induced her to go off for a while

to Biarritz. The doctor finds her overdone; she’d got it into her head

that George had been sent to the front; I couldn’t convince her to the

contrary.”

Campton looked at him. “You yourself never believed it?”

Mr. Brant, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was

done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his

agate-headed stick.

“Oh, never.”

“It was not,” Campton pursued, “with that idea that you went to Sainte

Menehould?”

Mr. Brant glanced at him in surprise. “No. On the contrary——”

“On the contrary?”

“I understood from—from his mother that, in the circumstances, you were

opposed to his asking for leave; thought it unadvisable, that is. So, as

it was such a long time since we’d seen him——” The “we,” pulling him up

short, spread a brick-red blush over his baldness.

“Not longer than since I have—but then I’ve not your opportunities,”

Campton retorted, the sneer breaking out in spite of him. Though he had

grown kindly disposed toward Mr. Brant when they were apart, the old

resentments still broke out in his presence.

Mr. Brant clasped and unclasped the knob of his stick. “I took the first

chance that offered; I had his mother to think of.” Campton made no

answer, and he continued: “I was sorry to hear you thought I’d perhaps

been imprudent.”

“There’s no perhaps about it,” Campton retorted. “Since you say you were

not anxious about the boy I can’t imagine why you made the attempt.”

Mr. Brant was silent. He seemed overwhelmed by the other’s

disapprobation, and unable to find any argument in his own defence. “I

never dreamed it could cause any trouble,” he said at length.

“That’s the ground you’ve always taken in your interference with my

son!” Campton had risen, pushing back his chair, and Mr. Brant stood up

also. They faced each other without speaking.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Brant began, “that you should take such a view. It

seemed to me natural ..., when Mr. Jorgenstein gave me the chance——”

“Jorgenstein! It was Jorgenstein who took you to the front? Took you to

see my son?” Campton threw his head back and laughed. “That’s

complete—that’s really complete!”

Mr. Brant reddened as if the laugh had been a blow. He stood very erect,

his lips as tightly closed as a shut penknife. He had the attitude of a

civilian under fire, considerably perturbed, but obliged to set the

example of fortitude.

Campton looked at him. At last he had Mr. Brant at a disadvantage. Their

respective situations were reversed, and he saw that the banker was

aware of it, and oppressed by the fear that he might have done harm to

George. He evidently wanted to say all this and did not know how.

His distress moved Campton, in whose ears the sound of his own outburst

still echoed unpleasantly. If only Mr. Brant would have kept out of his

way he would have found it so easy to be fair to him!

“I’m sorry,” he began in a quieter tone. “I dare say I’m unjust—perhaps

it’s in the nature of our relation. Can’t you understand how I’ve felt,

looking on helplessly all these years, while you’ve done for the boy

everything I wanted to do for him myself? Haven’t you guessed why I

jumped at my first success, and nursed my celebrity till I’d got half

the fools in Europe lining up to be painted?” His excitement was

mastering him again, and he went on hurriedly: “Do you suppose I’d have

wasted all these precious years over their stupid faces if I hadn’t

wanted to make my son independent of you? And he _would_ have been, if

the war hadn’t come; been my own son again and nobody else’s, leading

his own life, whatever he chose it to be, instead of having to waste his

youth in your bank, learning how to multiply your millions.”

The futility of this retrospect, and the inconsistency of his whole

attitude, exasperated Campton more than anything his visitor could do or

say, and he stopped, embarrassed by the sound of his own words, yet

seeing no escape save to bury them under more and more. But Mr. Brant

had opened his lips.

“They’ll be _his_, you know: the millions,” he said.

Campton’s anger dropped: he felt Mr. Brant at last too completely at his

mercy. He waited for a moment before speaking.

“You tried to buy his portrait once—you remember I told you it was not

for sale,” he then said.

Mr. Brant stood motionless, grasping his stick in one hand and stroking

his moustache with the other. For a while he seemed to be considering

Campton’s words without feeling their sting. “It was not the money ...”

he stammered out at length, from the depth of some unutterable plea for

understanding; then he added: “I wish you a good morning,” and walked

out with his little stiff steps.

XXIII

Campton was thoroughly ashamed of what he had said to Mr. Brant, or

rather of his manner of saying it. If he could have put the same facts

quietly, ironically, without forfeiting his dignity, and with the added

emphasis which deliberateness and composure give, he would scarcely have

regretted the opportunity. He had always secretly accused himself of a

lack of courage in accepting Mr. Brant’s heavy benefactions for George

when the boy was too young to know what they might pledge him to; and it

had been a disappointment that George, on reaching the age of

discrimination, had not appeared to find the burden heavy, or the

obligations unpleasant.

Campton, having accepted Mr. Brant’s help, could hardly reproach his son

for feeling grateful for it, and had therefore thought it “more decent”

to postpone disparagement of their common benefactor till his own

efforts had set them both free. Even then, it would be impossible to pay

off the past—but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his

own wrath had dug it up, and he had paid for the brief joy of casting

its bones in Mr. Brant’s face by a deep disgust at his own weakness.

All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight

of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs.

Talkett’s since the banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet Jorgenstein,

and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the _clairvoyante_, had

somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his

ears. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s

vaticinations; but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced

boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not

the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and

thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing and

stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room well-fed

men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.” Campton, seeking to

expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity,

announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the

office.

Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so

strange that Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”

The young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!”

he shouted. Across the page the name of the _Lusitania_ blazed out like

the writing on the wall.

The Berserker light on Boylston’s placid features transformed him into

an avenging cherub. “Ah, now we’re in it—we’re in it at last!” he

exulted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up

in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but

the older man’s first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America

was “in it”: the gross tangible proof for which her government had

forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and

cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange

belief that she was too proud to fight for others; and here she was

brutally forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining

heart for his son’s first comment on the new fact that they were “in

it.”

But his excitement and Boylston’s exultation were short-lived. Before

many days it became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up

overnight at the unproved outrage of the _Maine_ was lying supine under

the flagrant provocation of the _Lusitania_. The days which followed

were, to many Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they

seemed the ironic justification of the phase of indifference and

self-absorption through which he had just passed. He could not go back

to Mrs. Talkett and her group; but neither could he take up his work

with even his former zeal. The bitter taste of the national humiliation

was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a man dishonoured.

He wondered, as the days and the weeks passed, at having no word from

George. Had he refrained from writing because he too felt the national

humiliation too deeply either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned?

Or was he so sunk in security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that

nothing was changed? From such thoughts Campton’s soul recoiled; but

they lay close under the surface of his tenderness, and reared their

evil heads whenever they caught him alone.

As the summer dragged itself out he was more and more alone. Dastrey,

cured of his rheumatism, had left the Ministry to resume his ambulance

work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of

refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at Deauville (on the

pretext of being near her hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts’

being with her, and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the

studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that

he “needed rest,” and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brant had

suggested his spending “a quiet fortnight” with her. “I’ve _got_ to do

it, if I’m to see this thing through,” Mr. Mayhew added in a stern

voice, as if commanding himself not to waver.

A few days later, glancing over the _Herald_, Campton read that Mme. de

Dolmetsch, “the celebrated _artiste_,” was staying with Mr. and Mrs.

Anderson Brant at Deauville, where she had gone to give recitations for

the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a

tightening heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly

unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not

long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril

Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British Government) had bestowed a

gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant’s hospital. It was

rumoured, the paragraph ended, that Sir Cyril would soon receive the

Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to France.

And still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, failure there, the

menace of disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy

declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British

advance at Anzac, and from the near East news of the new landing at

Suvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the

million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude,

resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally

interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can

at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of

that, to understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight”

in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the

passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of

resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter.

The shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His

portrait of Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused

them all, and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the

war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart

and brain, into the horror he had tried to escape from. “If thou ascend

up into heaven I am there; if thou make thy bed in hell, behold I am

there,” the war said to him; and as the daily head-lines shrieked out

the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he

groaned back like the Psalmist: “Whither shall I go from thee?”

The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mlle. Davril, and all their

band of tired resolute workers—plodded ahead, their eyes on their task,

seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable

oppression. The women especially, with their gift of living in the

particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the

catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these

people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly

thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard

morning’s work, went out to lunch together, that what he called the

_Lusitania look_, suddenly darkening the younger man’s face, moved the

painter with an anguish like his own.

Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day

remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting: but the

latter had merely rejoined: “We’ve each of us got to worry through this

thing in our own way—” and the subject was not again raised between

them.

The intervals between George’s letters were growing longer. Campton, who

noted in his pocket-diary the dates of all that he received, as well as

those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to

record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to

the _Lusitania_.

“It’s queer,” he said to Boylston, one day toward the end of July; “I

don’t know yet what George thinks about the _Lusitania_.”

“Oh, yes, you do, sir!” Boylston returned, laughing; “but all the mails

from the war-zone,” he added, “have been very much delayed lately. When

there’s a big attack on anywhere they hold up everything along the line.

And besides, no end of letters are lost.”

“I suppose so,” said Campton, pocketing the diary, and trying for the

millionth time to call up a vision of his boy, seated at a desk in some

still unvisualized place, his rumpled fair head bent above columns of

figures or files of correspondence, while day after day the roof above

him shook with the roar of the attacks which held up his letters.