BOOK IV

XXXII

Heavily the weeks went by.

The world continued to roar on through smoke and flame, and contrasted

with that headlong race was the slow dragging lapse of hours and days to

those who had to wait on events inactively.

When Campton met Paul Dastrey for the first time after the death of the

latter’s nephew, the two men exchanged a long hand-clasp and then sat

silent. As Campton had felt from the first, there was nothing left for

them to say to each other. If young men like Louis Dastrey must continue

to be sacrificed by hundreds of thousands to save their country, for

whom was the country being saved? Was it for the wasp-waisted youths in

sham uniforms who haunted the reawakening hotels and restaurants, in the

frequent intervals between their ambulance trips to safe distances from

the front? Or for the elderly men like Dastrey and Campton, who could

only sit facing each other with the spectre of the lost between them?

Young Dastrey, young Fortin-Lescluze, René Davril, Benny Upsher—and how

many hundreds more each day! And not even a child left by most of them,

to carry on the faith they had died for....

“If we’re giving all we care for so that those little worms can reopen

their dance-halls on the ruins, what in God’s name _is_ left?” Campton

questioned.

Dastrey sat looking at the ground, his grey head bent between his hands.

“France,” he said.

“What’s France, with no men left?”

“Well—I suppose, an Idea.”

“Yes. I suppose so.” Campton stood up heavily.

An Idea: they must cling to that. If Dastrey, from the depths of his

destitution, could still feel it and live by it, why did it not help

Campton more? An Idea: that was what France, ever since she had existed,

had always been in the story of civilization; a luminous point about

which striving visions and purposes could rally. And in that sense she

had been as much Campton’s spiritual home as Dastrey’s; to thinkers,

artists, to all creators, she had always been a second country. If

France went, western civilization went with her; and then all they had

believed in and been guided by would perish. That was what George had

felt; it was what had driven him from the Argonne to the Aisne. Campton

felt it too; but dully, through a fog. His son was safe; yes—but too

many other men’s sons were dying. There was no spot where his thoughts

could rest: there were moments when the sight of George, intact and

immaculate—his arm at last out of its sling—rose before his father like

a reproach.

The feeling was senseless; but there it was. Whenever the young man

entered the room Campton saw him attended by the invisible host of his

comrades, the fevered, the maimed and the dying. The Germans had

attacked at Verdun: horrible daily details of the struggle were pouring

in. No one at the rear had really known, except in swift fitful flashes,

about the individual suffering of the first months of the war; now such

information was systematized and distributed everywhere, daily, with a

cold impartial hand. And every night, when one laid one’s old bones on

one’s bed, there were those others, the young in their thousands, lying

down, perhaps never to rise again, in the mud and blood of the trenches.

Even Boylston’s Preparedness was beginning to get on Campton’s nerves.

He tried to picture to himself how he should exult when his country at

last fell into line; but he could realize only what his humiliation

would be if she did not. It was almost a relief, at this time, to have

his mind diverted to the dissensions among “The Friends of French Art,”

where, at a stormy meeting, Harvey Mayhew, as a member of the Finance

Committee, had asked for an accounting of the money taken in at Mrs.

Talkett’s concert. This money, Mr. Mayhew stated, had passed through a

number of hands. It should have been taken over by Mr. Boylston, as

treasurer, at the close of the performance; but he had failed to claim

it—had, in fact, been unfindable when the organizers of the concert

brought their takings to Mrs. Talkett—and the money, knocking about from

hand to hand, had finally been carried by Mrs. Talkett herself to Mr.

Campton. The latter, when asked to entrust it to Mr. Mayhew, had refused

on the ground that he had already deposited it in the bank; but a number

of days later it was known to be still in his possession. All this time

Mr. Boylston, treasurer, and chairman of the Financial Committee,

appeared to think it quite in order that the funds should have been (as

he assumed) deposited in the bank by a member who was not on that

particular committee, and who, in reality, had forgotten that they were

in his possession.

Mr. Mayhew delivered himself of this indictment amid an embarrassed

silence. To Campton it had seemed as if a burst of protest must

instantly clear the air. But after he himself had apologized for his

negligence in not depositing the money, and Boylston had disengaged his

responsibility in a few quiet words, there followed another blank

interval. Then Mr. Mayhew suddenly suggested a complete reorganization

of the work. He had something to criticize in every department. He, who

so seldom showed himself at the office, now presented a list of

omissions and commissions against which one after another of the active

members rose to enter a mild denial. It was clear that some one

belonging to the organization, and who was playing into his hands, had

provided him with a series of cleverly falsified charges against the

whole group of workers.

Presently Campton could stand it no longer, and, jumping up, suddenly

articulate, he flung into his cousin’s face a handful of home-truths

under which he expected that glossy countenance to lose its lustre. But

Mr. Mayhew bore the assault with urbanity. It did not behove him, he

said, to take up the reproaches addressed to him by the most

distinguished member of their committee—the most distinguished, he might

surely say without offence to any of the others (a murmur of assent); it

did not behove him, because one of the few occasions on which a great

artist may be said to be at a disadvantage is when he is trying to

discuss business matters with a man of business. He, Mr. Mayhew, was

only that, nothing more; but he _was_ that, and he had been trained to

answer random abuse by hard facts. In no way did he intend to reflect on

the devoted labours of certain ladies of the committee, nor on their

sympathetic treasurer’s gallant efforts to acquire, amid all his other

pressing interests, the rudiments of business habits; but Miss Anthony

had all along been dividing her time between two widely different

charities, and Mr. Boylston, like his distinguished champion, was first

of all an artist, with the habits of the studio rather than of the

office. In the circumstances——

Campton jumped to his feet again. If he stayed a moment longer he felt

he should knock Mayhew down. He jammed his hat on, shouted out “I

resign,” and limped out of the room.

It was the way in which his encounters with practical difficulties

always ended. The consciousness of his inferiority in argument, the

visionary’s bewilderment when incomprehensible facts are thrust on him

by fluent people, the helpless sense of not knowing what to answer, and

of seeing his dream-world smashed in the rough-and-tumble of shabby

motives—it all gave him the feeling that he was drowning, and must fight

his way to the surface before they had him under.

In the street he stood in a cold sweat of remorse. He knew the charges

of negligence against Miss Anthony and Boylston were trumped up. He knew

there was an answer to be made, and that he was the man to make it; and

his eyes filled with tears of rage and self-pity at his own

incompetence. But then he took heart at the thought of Boylston’s

astuteness and Miss Anthony’s courage. They would not let themselves be

beaten—probably they would fight their battle better without him. He

tried to protect his retreat with such arguments, and when he got back

to the studio he called up Mme. Lebel, and plunged again into his

charcoal study of her head. He did not remember having ever worked with

such supernatural felicity: it was as if _that_ were his victorious

answer to all their lies and intrigues....

But the Mayhew party was victorious too. How it came about a mind like

Campton’s could not grasp. Mr. Mayhew, it appeared, had let fall that a

very large gift of money from the world-renowned philanthropist, Sir

Cyril Jorgenstein (obtained through the good offices of Mmes. de

Dolmetsch and Beausite) was contingent on certain immediate changes in

the organization (“drastic changes” was Mr. Mayhew’s phrase); and

thereupon several hitherto passive members had suddenly found voice to

assert the duty of not losing this gift. After that the way was clear.

Adele Anthony and Boylston were offered ornamental posts which they

declined, and within a week the Palais Royal saw them no more, and Paris

drawing-rooms echoed with the usual rumours of committee wrangles and

dark discoveries.

The episode left Campton with a bitter taste in his soul. It seemed to

him like an ugly little allegory of Germany’s manœuvring the world into

war. The speciousness of Mr. Mayhew’s arguments, the sleight-of-hand by

which he had dislodged the real workers and replaced them by his

satellites, reminded the painter of the neutrals who were beginning to

say that there were two sides to every question, that war was always

cruel, and how about the Russian atrocities in Silesia? As the months

dragged on a breath of lukewarmness had begun to blow through the world,

damping men’s souls, confusing plain issues, casting a doubt on the

worth of everything. People were beginning to ask what one knew, after

all, of the secret motives which had impelled half-a-dozen

self-indulgent old men ensconced in Ministerial offices to plunge the

world in ruin. No one seemed to feel any longer that life is something

more than being alive; apparently the only people not tired of the

thought of death were the young men still pouring out to it in their

thousands.

Still those thousands poured; still the young died; still, wherever

Campton went, he met elderly faces, known and unknown, disfigured by

grief, shrunken with renunciation. And still the months wore on without

result.

One day in crossing the Tuileries he felt the same soft sparkle which,

just about a year earlier, had abruptly stirred the sap in him. Yes—it

was nearly a year since the day when he had noticed the first

horse-chestnut blossoms, and been reminded by Mme. Lebel that he ought

to buy some new shirts; and though to-day the horse-chestnuts were still

leafless they were already misty with buds, and the tall white clouds

above them full-uddered with spring showers. It was spring again, spring

with her deluding promises—her gilding of worn stones and chilly water,

the mystery of her distances, the finish and brilliance of her nearer

strokes. Campton, in spite of himself, drank down the life-giving

draught and felt its murmur in his veins. And just then, across the

width of the gardens he saw, beyond a stretch of turf and clipped

shrubs, two people, also motionless, who seemed to have the same cup at

their lips. He recognized his son and Mrs. Talkett.

Their backs were toward him, and they stood close together, looking with

the same eyes at the same sight: an Apollo touched with flying sunlight.

After a while they walked on again, slowly and close to each other.

George, as they moved, seemed now and then to point out some beauty of

sculpture, or the colour of a lichened urn; and once they turned and

took their fill of the great perspective tapering to the Arch—the Arch

on which Rude’s Mænad-Marseillaise still yelled her battalions on to

death.

XXXIII

Campton finished his charcoal of Mme. Lebel; then he attacked her in

oils. Now that his work at the Palais Royal was ended, painting was once

more his only refuge.

Adele Anthony had returned to her refugees; Boylston, pale and

obstinate, toiled on at Preparedness. But Campton found it impossible to

take up any new form of work; his philanthropic ardour was exhausted. He

could only shut himself up, for long solitary hours, in the empty and

echoing temple of his art.

George emphatically approved of his course: George was as insistent as

Mrs. Brant on the duty of “business as usual.” But on the young man’s

lips the phrase had a different meaning; it seemed the result of that

altered perspective which Campton was conscious of whenever, nowadays,

he tried to see things as his son saw them. George was not indifferent,

he was not callous; but he seemed to feel himself mysteriously set

apart, destined to some other task for which he was passively waiting.

Even the split among “The Friends of French Art” left him, despite of

his admiration for Boylston, curiously unperturbed. He seemed to have

taken the measure of all such ephemeral agitations, and to regard them

with an indulgent pity which was worse than coldness.

“He feels that all we do is so useless,” Campton said to Dastrey; “he’s

like a gardener watching ants rebuild their hill in the middle of a

path, and knowing all the while that hill and path are going to be wiped

out by his pick.”

“Ah, they’re all like that,” Dastrey murmured.

* * * * *

Mme. Lebel came up to the studio every afternoon. The charcoal study had

been only of her head; but for the painting Campton had seated her in

her own horsehair armchair, her smoky lamp beside her, her sewing in her

lap. More than ever he saw in the wise old face something typical of its

race and class: the obstinate French gift, as some one had put it, of

making one more effort after the last effort. The old woman could not

imagine why he wanted to paint her; but when one day he told her it was

for her grandsons, her eyes filled, and she said: “For which one, sir?

For they’re both at Verdun.”

One autumn afternoon he was late in getting back to the studio, where he

knew she was waiting for him. He pushed the door open, and there, in the

beaten-down attitude in which he had once before seen her, she lay

across the table, her cap awry, her hands clutching her sewing, and

George kneeling at her side. The young man’s arm was about her, his head

pressed against her breast; and on the floor lay the letter, the fatal

letter which was always, nowadays, the key to such scenes.

Neither George nor the old woman had heard Campton enter; and for a

moment he stood and watched them. George’s face, so fair and ruddy

against Mme. Lebel’s rusty black, wore a look of boyish compassion which

Campton had never seen on it. Mme. Lebel had sunk into his hold as if it

soothed and hushed her; and Campton said to himself: “These two are

closer to each other than George and I, because they’ve both seen the

horror face to face. He knows what to say to her ever so much better

than he knows what to say to his mother or me.”

But apparently there was no need to say much. George continued to kneel

in silence; presently he bent and kissed the old woman’s cheek; then he

got to his feet and saw his father.

“The _Chasseur Alpin_,” he merely said, picking up the letter and

handing it to Campton. “It was the grandson she counted on most.”

Mme. Lebel caught sight of Campton, smoothed herself and stood up also.

“I had found him a wife—a strong healthy girl with a good _dot_. There

go my last great-grandchildren! For the other will be killed too. I

don’t understand any more, do you?” She made an automatic attempt to

straighten the things on the table, but her hands beat the air and

George had to lead her downstairs.

It was that day that Campton said to himself: “We shan’t keep him in

Paris much longer.” But the heavy weeks of spring and summer passed, the

inconclusive conflict at the front went on with its daily toll of dead,

and George still stuck to his job. Campton, during this time, continued

to avoid the Brants as much as possible. His wife’s conversation was

intolerable to him; her obtuse optimism, now that she had got her son

back, was even harder to bear than the guiltily averted glance of Mr.

Brant, between whom and Campton their last talk had hung a lasting

shadow of complicity.

But most of all Campton dreaded to meet the Talketts; the wife with her

flushed cheek-bones and fixed eyes, the husband still affably and

continuously arguing against Philistinism. One afternoon the painter

stumbled on them, taking tea with George in Boylston’s little flat; but

he went away again, unable to bear the interminable discussion between

Talkett and Boylston, and the pacifist’s reiterated phrase: “To borrow

one of my wife’s expressions”—while George, with a closed brooding face,

sat silent, laughing drily now and then. What a different George from

the one his father had found, in silence also, kneeling beside Mme.

Lebel!

Once again Campton was vouchsafed a glimpse of that secret George. He

had walked back with his son after the funeral mass for young Lebel; and

in the porter’s lodge of the Avenue Marigny they found a soldier

waiting—a young square-built fellow, with a shock of straw-coloured hair

above his sunburnt rural face. Campton was turning from the door when

George dashed past him, caught the young man by both shoulders, and

shouted out his name. It was that of the orderly who had carried him out

of the firing-line and hunted him up the next day in the Doullens

hospital. Campton saw the look the two exchanged: it lasted only for the

taking of a breath; a moment later officer and soldier were laughing

like boys, and the orderly was being drawn forth to shake hands with

Campton. But again the glance was an illumination; it came straight from

that far country, the Benny Upsher country, which Campton so feared to

see in his son’s eyes.

The orderly had been visiting his family, fugitives from the invaded

regions who had taken shelter in one of Adele Anthony’s suburban

colonies. He had obtained permission to stop in Paris on his way back to

the front; and for two joyful days he was lodged and feasted in the

Avenue Marigny. Boylston provided him with an evening at Montmartre,

George and Mrs. Brant took him to the theatre and the cinema, and on the

last day of his leave Adele Anthony invited him to tea with Campton, Mr.

Brant and Boylston. Mr. Brant, as they left this entertainment, hung

back on the stairs to say in a whisper to Campton: “The family are

provided for—amply. I’ve asked George to mention the fact to the young

man; but not until just as he’s starting.”

Campton nodded. For George’s sake he was glad; yet he could not repress

a twinge of his dormant jealousy. Was it always to be Brant who thought

first of the things to make George happy—always Brant who would alone

have the power to carry them out?

“But he can’t prevent that poor fellow’s getting killed to-morrow,”

Campton thought almost savagely, as the young soldier beamed forth from

the taxi in which George was hurrying him to the station.

* * * * *

It was not many days afterward that George looked in at the studio early

one morning. Campton, over his breakfast, had been reading the

_communiqué_. There was heavy news from Verdun; from east to west the

air was dark with calamity; but George’s face had the look it had worn

when he greeted his orderly.

“Dad, I’m off,” he said; and sitting down at the table, he

unceremoniously poured himself some coffee into his father’s empty cup.

“The battalion’s been ordered back. I leave to-night. Let’s lunch

together somewhere presently, shall we?”

His eye was clear, his smile confident: a great weight seemed to have

fallen from him, and he looked like the little boy sitting up in bed

with his Lavengro. “After ten months of Paris——” he added, stretching

his arms over his head with a great yawn.

“Yes—the routine——” stammered Campton, not knowing what he said. Yet he

was glad too; yes, in his heart of hearts he knew he was glad; though,

as always happened, his emotion took him by the throat and silenced him.

But it did not matter, for George was talking.

“I shall have leave a good deal oftener nowadays,” he said with

animation. “And everything is ever so much better organized—letters and

all that. I shan’t seem so awfully far away. You’ll see.”

Campton still gazed at him, struggling for expression. Their hands met.

Campton said—or imagined he said: “I see—I do see, already——” though

afterward he was not even sure that he had spoken.

What he saw, with an almost blinding distinctness, was the extent to

which his own feeling, during the long months, had imperceptibly

changed, and how his inmost impulse, now that the blow had fallen, was

not of resistance to it, but of acquiescence, since it made him once

more one with his son.

He would have liked to tell that to George; but speech was impossible.

And perhaps, after all, it didn’t matter; it didn’t matter, because

George understood. Their hand-clasp had made that clear, and an hour or

two later they were lunching together almost gaily.

Boylston joined them, and the three went on together to say goodbye to

Adele Anthony. Adele, for once, was unprepared: it was almost a relief

to Campton, who had winced in advance at the thought of her warlike

attitude. The poor thing was far from warlike: her pale eyes clung to

George’s in a frightened stare, while her lips, a little stiffly,

repeated the stock phrases of good cheer. “Such a relief.... I

congratulate you ... getting out of all this _paperasserie_ and red

tape.... If I’d been you I couldn’t have stood Paris another minute....

The only hopeful people left are at the front....” It was the formula

that sped every departing soldier.

The day wore on. To Campton its hours seemed as interminable yet as

rapid as those before his son’s first departure, nearly two years

earlier. George had begged his father to come in the evening to the

Avenue Marigny, where he was dining with the Brants. It was easier for

Campton nowadays to fall in with such requests: during the months of

George’s sojourn in Paris a good many angles had had their edges rubbed

off.

Besides, at that moment he would have done anything for his son—his son

again at last! In their hand-clasp that morning the old George had come

back to him, simple, boyish, just as he used to be; and Campton’s dread

of the future was lightened by a great glow of pride.

In the Avenue Marigny dining-room the Brants and George were still

sitting together about the delicate silver and porcelain. There were no

flowers: Julia, always correct, had long since banished them as a

superfluity. But there was champagne for George’s farewell, and a

glimpse of rich fare being removed.

Mr. Brant rose to greet Campton. His concise features were drawn with

anxiety, and with the effort to hide it; but his wife appeared to

Campton curiously unperturbed, and the leave-taking was less painful and

uselessly drawn out than he had expected.

George and his father were to be sent to the station in Mr. Brant’s

motor. Campton, as he got in, remembered with a shiver the grey morning,

before daylight, when the same motor had stood at the studio door,

waiting to carry him to Doullens; between himself and his son he seemed

to see Mr. Brant’s small suffering profile.

To shake off the memory he said: “Your mother’s in wonderfully good

form. I was glad to see she wasn’t nervous.”

George laughed. “No. Madge met her this morning at the new

_clairvoyante’s_.—It does them all a lot of good,” he added, with his

all-embracing tolerance.

Campton shivered again. That universal smiling comprehension of George’s

always made him seem remoter than ever. “It makes him seem so old—a

thousand years older than I am.” But he forced an acquiescent laugh, and

presently George went on: “About Madge—you’ll be awfully good to her,

won’t you, if I get smashed?”

“My dear boy!”

There was another pause, and then Campton risked a question. “Just how

do things stand? I know so little, after all.”

For a moment George seemed to hesitate: his thick fair eyebrows were

drawn into a puzzled frown. “I know—I’ve never explained it to you

properly. I’ve tried to; but I was never sure that I could make you

see.” He paused and added quietly: “I know now that she’ll never divorce

Talkett.”

“You know——?” Campton exclaimed with a great surge of relief.

“She thinks she will; but I see that the idea still frightens her. And

I’ve kept on using the divorce argument only as a pretext.”

The words thrust Campton back into new depths of perplexity. “A

pretext?” he echoed.

“My dear old Dad—don’t you guess? She’s come to care for me awfully; if

we’d gone all the lengths she wanted, and then I’d got killed, there

would have been nothing on earth left for her. I hadn’t the right, don’t

you see? We chaps haven’t any futures to dispose of till this job we’re

in is finished. Of course, if I come back, and she can make up her mind

to break with everything she’s used to, we shall marry; but if things go

wrong I’d rather leave her as she is, safe in her little old rut. So

many people can’t live out of one—and she’s one of them, poor child,

though she’s so positive she isn’t.”

Campton sat chilled and speechless as the motor whirled them on through

the hushed streets. It paralyzed his faculties to think that in a moment

more they would be at the station.

“It’s awfully fine: your idea,” he stammered at length.

“Awfully—magnanimous.” But he still felt the chill down his spine.

“Oh, it’s only that things look to us so different—so indescribably

different—and always will, I suppose, even after this business is over.

We seem to be sealed to it for life.”

“Poor girl—poor girl!” Campton thought within himself. Aloud he said:

“My dear chap, of course you can count on my being—my doing——”

“Of course, of course, old Dad.”

They were at the station. Father and son got out and walked toward the

train. Campton put both hands on George’s shoulders.

“Look here,” George broke out, “there’s one thing more. I want to tell

you that I know what a lot I owe to you and Adele. You’ve both been

awfully fine: did you know it? You two first made me feel a lot of

things I hadn’t felt before. And you know this _is_ my job; I’ve never

been surer of it than at this minute.”

They clasped hands in silence, each looking his fill of the other; then

the crowd closed in, George exclaimed: “My kit-bag!” and somehow, in the

confusion, the parting was over, and Campton, straining blurred eyes,

saw his son’s smile—the smile of the light-hearted lad of old days—flash

out at him from the moving train. For an instant the father had the

illusion that it was the goodbye look of the boy George, going back to

school after the holidays.

* * * * *

Campton, as he came out of the station, stumbled, to his surprise, on

Mr. Brant. The little man, as they met, flushed and paled, and sought

the customary support from his eye-glasses.

“I followed you in the other motor,” he said, looking away.

“Oh, I say——” Campton murmured; then, with an effort: “Shouldn’t you

like me to drive back with you?”

Mr. Brant shook his head. “Thank you. Thank you very much. But it’s late

and you’ll want to be getting home. I’ll be glad if you’ll use my car.”

Together they strolled slowly across the station court to the place

where the private motors waited; but there Campton held out his hand.

“Much obliged; I think I’ll walk.”

Mr. Brant nodded; then he said abruptly: “This _clairvoyante_ business:

is there anything in it, do you think? You saw how calm—er—Julia was

just now: she wished me to tell you that that Spanish woman she goes

to—her name is Olida, I think—had absolutely reassured her about ...

about the future. The woman says she knows that George will come back

soon, and never be sent to the front again. Those were the exact words,

I believe. _Never be sent to the front again._ Julia put every kind of

question, and couldn’t trip her up; she wanted me to tell you so. It

does sound...? Well, at any rate, it’s a help to the mothers.”

XXXIV

The next morning Campton said to himself: “I can catch that goodbye look

if I get it down at once——” and pulled out a canvas before Mme. Lebel

came in with his coffee.

As sometimes happened to him, the violent emotions of the last

twenty-four hours had almost immediately been clarified and transmuted

into vision. He felt that he could think contentedly of George if he

could sit down at once and paint him.

The picture grew under his feverish fingers—feverish, yet how firm! He

always wondered anew at the way in which, at such hours, the inner flame

and smoke issued in a clear guiding radiance. He saw—he saw; and the

mere act of his seeing seemed to hold George safe in some pure

impenetrable medium. His boy was there, sitting to him, the old George

he knew and understood, essentially, vividly face to face with him.

He was interrupted by a ring. Mme. Lebel, tray in hand, opened the door,

and a swathed and voluminous figure, sweeping in on a wave of musk,

blotted her out. Campton, exasperated at the interruption, turned to

face Mme. Olida.

So remote were his thoughts that he would hardly have recognized her had

she not breathed, on the old familiar guttural: “Juanito!”

He was less surprised at her intrusion than annoyed at being torn from

his picture. “Didn’t you see a sign on the door? ‘No admission before

twelve’——” he growled.

“Oh, yes,” she said; “that’s how I knew you were in.”

“But I’m _not_ in; I’m working. I can’t allow——”

Her large bosom rose. “I know, my heart! I remember how stern you always

were. ‘Work—work—my work!’ It was always that, even in the first days.

But I come to you on my knees: Juanito, imagine me there!” She sketched

a plunging motion of her vast body, arrested it in time by supporting

herself on the table, and threw back her head entreatingly, so that

Campton caught a glint of the pearls in a crevasse of her quaking

throat. He saw that her eyes were red with weeping.

“What can I do? You’re in trouble?”

“Oh, such trouble, my heart—such trouble!” She leaned to him, absorbing

his hands in her plump muscular grasp. “I must have news of my son; I

must! The young man—you saw him that day you came with your wife? Yes—he

looked in at the door: beautiful as a god, was he not? That was my son

Pepito!” And with a deep breath of pride and anguish she unburdened

herself of her tale.

Two or three years after her parting with Campton she had married a

clever French barber from the Pyrenees. He had brought her to France,

and they had opened a “Beauty Shop” at Biarritz and had prospered.

Pepito was born there and soon afterward, alas, her clever husband,

declaring that he “hated grease in cooking or in woman” (“and after my

Pepito’s birth I became as you now see me”), had gone off with the

manicure and all their savings. Mme. Olida had had a struggle to bring

up her boy; but she had kept on with the Beauty Shop, had made a success

of it, and not long before the war had added fortune-telling to massage

and hair-dressing.

“And my son, Juanito; was not my son an advertisement for a Beauty Shop,

I ask you? Before he was out of petticoats he brought me customers;

before he was sixteen all the ladies who came to me were quarrelling

over him. Ah, there were moments when he crucified me ... but lately he

had grown more reasonable, had begun to see where his true interests

lay, and we had become friends again, friends and business partners.

When the war broke out I came to Paris; I knew that all the mothers

would want news of their sons. I have made a great deal of money; and I

have had wonderful results—wonderful! I could give you instances—names

that you know—where I have foretold everything! Oh, I have the gift, my

heart, I have it!”

She pressed his hands with a smile of triumph; then her face clouded

again.

“But six months ago my darling was called to his regiment—and for three

months now I’ve had no news of him, none, none!” she sobbed, the tears

making dark streaks through her purplish powder.

The upshot of it was that she had heard that Campton was “all-powerful”;

that he knew Ministers and Generals, knew great financiers like

Jorgenstein (who were so much more powerful than either Generals or

Ministers), and could, if he chose, help her to trace her boy, who, from

the day of his departure for the front, had vanished as utterly as if

the earth had swallowed him.

“Not a word, not a sign—to me, his mother, who have slaved and slaved

for him, who have made a fortune for him!”

Campton looked at her, marvelling. “But your gift as you call it ...

your powers ... you can’t use them for yourself?”

She returned his look with a tearful simplicity: she hardly seemed to

comprehend what he was saying. “But my son! I want _news_ of my son,

real news; I want a letter; I want to see some one who has seen him! To

touch a hand that has touched him! Oh, don’t you understand?”

“Yes, I understand,” he said; and she took up her desperate litany,

clinging about him with soft palms like medusa-lips, till by dint of

many promises he managed to detach himself and steer her gently to the

door.

On the threshold she turned to him once more. “And your own son,

Juanito—I know he’s at the front again. His mother came the other

day—she often comes. And I can promise you things if you’ll help me. No,

even if you don’t help me—for the old days’ sake, I will! I know secrets

... magical secrets that will protect him. There’s a Moorish salve,

infallible against bullets ... handed down from King Solomon ... I can

get it....”

Campton, guiding her across the sill, led her out and bolted the door on

her; then he went back to his easel and stood gazing at the sketch of

George. But the spell was broken: the old George was no longer there.

The war had sucked him back into its awful whirlpool—once more he was

that dark enigma, a son at the front....

* * * * *

In the heavy weeks which followed, a guarded allusion of Campton’s

showed him one day that Boylston was aware of there being “something

between” George and Madge Talkett.

“Not that he’s ever said anything—or even encouraged me to guess

anything. But she’s got a talking face, poor little thing; and not much

gift of restraint. And I suppose it’s fairly obvious to everybody—except

perhaps to Talkett—that she’s pretty hard hit.”

“Yes. And George?”

Boylston’s round face became remote and mysterious. “We don’t really

know—do we, sir?—exactly how any of them feel? Any more than if they

were——” He drew up sharply on the word, but Campton faced it.

“Dead?”

“Transfigured, say; no, trans——what’s the word in the theology books? A

new substance ... somehow....”

“Ah, you feel that too?” the father exclaimed.

“Yes. They don’t know it themselves, though—how far they are from us. At

least I don’t think they do.”

Campton nodded. “But George, in the beginning, was—frankly indifferent

to the war, wasn’t he?”

“Yes; intellectually he was. But he told me that when he saw the first

men on their way back from the front—with the first mud on them—he knew

he belonged where they’d come from. I tried hard to persuade him when he

was here that his real job was on a military mission to America—and it

_was_. Think what he might have done out there! But it was no use. His

orderly’s visit did the trick. It’s the thought of their men that pulls

them all back. Look at Louis Dastrey—they couldn’t keep him in America.

There’s something in all their eyes: I don’t know what. _Dulce et

decorum_, perhaps——”

“Yes.”

There was a pause before Campton questioned: “And Talkett?”

“Poor little ass—I don’t know. He’s here arguing with me nearly every

day. She looks over his shoulder, and just shrugs at me with her

eyebrows.”

“Can you guess what she thinks of George’s attitude?”

“Oh, something different every day. I don’t believe she’s ever really

understood. But then she loves him, and nothing else counts.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Brant continued to face life with apparent serenity. She had

returned several times to Mme. Olida’s, and had always brought away the

same reassuring formula: she thought it striking, and so did her

friends, that the _clairvoyante’s_ prediction never varied.

There was reason to believe that George’s regiment had been sent to

Verdun, and from Verdun the news was growing daily more hopeful. This

seemed to Mrs. Brant a remarkable confirmation of Olida’s prophecy.

Apparently it did not occur to her that, in the matter of human life,

victories may be as ruinous as defeats; and she triumphed in the fact—it

had grown to be a fact to her—that her boy was at Verdun, when he might

have been in the Somme, where things, though stagnant, were on the whole

going less well. Mothers prayed for “a quiet sector”—and then, she

argued, what happened? The men grew careless, the officers were oftener

away; your son was ordered out to see to the repairs of a barbed wire

entanglement, and a sharpshooter picked him off while you were sitting

reading one of his letters, and thinking: “Thank God he’s out of the

fighting.” And besides, Olida was _sure_, and all her predictions had

been so wonderful....

Campton began to dread his wife’s discovering Mme. Olida’s fears for her

own son. Every endeavour to get news of Pepito had been fruitless;

finally Campton and Boylston concluded that the young man must be a

prisoner. The painter had a second visit from Mme. Olida, in the course

of which he besought her (without naming Julia) to be careful not to

betray her private anxiety to the poor women who came to her for

consolation; and she fixed her tortured velvet eyes on him

reproachfully.

“How could you think it of me, Juanito? The money I earn is for my boy!

That gives me the strength to invent a new lie every morning.”

He took her fraudulent hand and kissed it.

The next afternoon he met Mrs. Brant walking down the Champs Elysées

with her light girlish step. She lifted a radiant face to his. “A letter

from George this morning! And, do you know, Olida prophesied it? I was

there again yesterday; and she told me that he would soon be back, and

that at that very moment she could see him writing to me. You’ll admit

it’s extraordinary? So many mothers depend on her—I couldn’t live

without her. And her messages from her own son are so beautiful——”

“From her own son?”

“Yes: didn’t I tell you? He says such perfect things to her. And she

confessed to me, poor woman, that before the war he hadn’t always been

kind: he used to take her money, and behave badly. But now every day he

sends her a thought-message—such beautiful things! She says she wouldn’t

have the courage to keep us all up if it weren’t for the way that she’s

kept up by her boy. And now,” Julia added gaily, “I’m going to order the

cakes for my bridge-tea this afternoon. You know I promised Georgie I

wouldn’t give up my bridge-teas.”

* * * * *

Now and then Campton returned to his latest portrait of his son; but in

spite of George’s frequent letters, in spite of the sudden drawing

together of father and son during their last moments at the station, the

vision of the boy George, the careless happy George who had ridiculed

the thought of war and pursued his millennial dreams of an enlightened

world—that vision was gone. Sometimes Campton fancied that the letters

themselves increased this effect of remoteness. They were necessarily

more guarded than the ones written, before George’s wounding, from an

imaginary H.Q.; but that did not wholly account for the difference.

Campton, in the last analysis, could only say that his vision of his boy

was never quite in focus. Either—as in the moment when George had

comforted Mme. Lebel, or greeted his orderly, or when he had said those

last few broken words at the station—he seemed nearer than ever, seemed

part and substance of his father; or else he became again that beautiful

distant apparition, the wingèd sentry guarding the Unknown.

* * * * *

The weeks thus punctuated by private anxieties rolled on dark with doom.

At last, in December, came the victory of Verdun. Men took it reverently

but soberly. The price paid had been too heavy for rejoicing; and the

horizon was too ominous in other quarters. Campton had hoped that the

New Year would bring his son back on leave; but still George did not

speak of coming. Meanwhile Boylston’s face grew rounder and more

beaming. At last America was stirring in her sleep. “Oh, if only George

were out there!” Boylston used to cry, as if his friend had been an

army. His faith in George’s powers of persuasion was almost mystical.

And not long afterward Campton had the surprise of a visit which seemed,

in the most unforeseen way, to confirm this belief. Returning to his

studio one afternoon he found it tenanted by Mr. Roger Talkett.

The young man, as carefully brushed and equipped as usual, but pale with

emotion, clutched the painter’s hand in a moist grasp.

“My dear Master, I had to see you—to see you alone and immediately.”

Campton looked at him with apprehension. What was the meaning of his

“alone”? Had Mrs. Talkett lost her head, and betrayed her secret—or had

she committed some act of imprudence of which the report had come back

to her husband?

“Do sit down,” said the painter weakly.

But his visitor, remaining sternly upright, shook his head and glanced

at his wrist-watch. “My moments,” he said, “are numbered—literally; all

I have time for is to implore you to look after my wife.” He drew a

handkerchief from his glossy cuff, and rubbed his eye-glasses.

“Your wife?” Campton echoed, dismayed.

“My dear sir, haven’t you guessed? It’s George’s wonderful example ...

his inspiration ... I’ve been converted! We men of culture can’t stand

by while the ignorant and illiterate are left to die for us. We must

leave that attitude to the Barbarian. Our duty is to set an example. I’m

off to-night for America—for Plattsburg.”

“Oh——” gasped Campton, wringing his hand.

* * * * *

Boylston burst into the studio the next day. “What did I tell you, sir?

George’s influence—it wakes up everybody. But Talkett—I’ll be hanged if

I should have thought it! And have you seen his wife? She’s a

war-goddess! I went to the station with them: their farewells were

harrowing. At that minute, you know, I believe she’d forgotten that

George ever existed!”

“Well, thank God for that,” Campton cried.

“Yes. Don’t you feel how we’re all being swept into it?” panted Boylston

breathlessly. His face had caught the illumination. “Sealed, as George

says—we’re sealed to the job, every one of us! Even I feel that, sitting

here at a stuffy desk....” He flushed crimson and his eyes filled.

“We’ll be in it, you know; America will—in a few weeks now, I believe!

George was as sure of it as I am. And, of course, if the war goes on,

our army will have to take short-sighted officers; won’t they, sir? As

England and France did from the first. They’ll need the men; they’ll

need us all, sir!”

“They’ll need _you_, my dear chap; and they’ll have you, to the full,

whatever your job is,” Campton smiled; and Boylston, choking back a sob,

dashed off again.

Yes, they were all being swept into it together—swept into the yawning

whirlpool. Campton felt that as clearly as all these young men; he felt

the triviality, the utter unimportance, of all their personal and

private concerns, compared with this great headlong outpouring of life

on the altar of conviction. And he understood why, for youths like

George and Boylston, nothing, however close and personal to them, would

matter till the job was over. “And not even for poor Talkett!” he

reflected whimsically.

That afternoon, curiously appeased, he returned once more to his picture

of his son. He had sketched the boy leaning out of the train window,

smiling back, signalling, saying goodbye, while his destiny rushed him

out into darkness as years ago the train used to rush him back to

school. And while Campton worked he caught the glow again; it rested on

brow and eyes, and spread in sure touches under his happy brush.

One day, as the picture progressed, he wavered over the remembrance of

some little detail of the face, and went in search of an old portfolio

into which, from time to time, he had been in the habit of thrusting his

unfinished studies of George. He plunged his hand into the heap, and

Georges of all ages looked forth at him: round baby-Georges, freckled

schoolboys, a thoughtful long-faced youth (the delicate George of St.

Moritz); but none seemed quite to serve his purpose and he rummaged on

till he came to a page torn from an old sketch-book. It was the pencil

study he had made of George as the lad lay asleep at the Crillon, the

night before his mobilisation.

Campton threw the sketch down on the table; and as he sat staring at it

he relived every phase of the emotion out of which it had been born. How

little he had known then—how little he had understood! He could bear to

look at the drawing now; could bear even to rethink the shuddering

thoughts with which he had once flung it away from him. Was it only

because the atmosphere was filled with a growing sense of hope? Because,

in spite of everything, the victory of Verdun was there to show the

inexhaustible strength of France, because people were more and more sure

that America was beginning to waken ... or just because, after too long

and fierce a strain, human nature always instinctively contrives to get

its necessary whiff of moral oxygen? Or was it that George’s influence

had really penetrated him, and that this strange renewed confidence in

life and in ideals was his son’s message of reassurance?

Certainly the old George was there, close to him, that morning; and

somewhere else—in scenes how different—he was sure that the actual

George, at that very moment, was giving out force and youth and hope to

those about him.

“I couldn’t be doing this if I didn’t understand—at last,” Campton

thought as he turned back to the easel. The little pencil sketch had

given him just the hint he needed, and he took up his palette with a

happy sigh.

* * * * *

A knock broke in on his rapt labour, and without turning he called out:

“Damn it, who are you? Can’t you read the sign? _Not in!_”

The door opened and Mr. Brant entered.

He appeared not to have heard the painter’s challenge; his eyes, from

the threshold, sprang straight to the portrait, and remained vacantly

fastened there. Campton, long afterward, remembered thinking, as he

followed the glance: “He’ll be trying to buy this one too!”

Mr. Brant moistened his lips, and his gaze, detaching itself from

George’s face, moved back in the same vacant way to Campton’s. The two

men looked at each other, and Campton jumped to his feet.

“Not—not——?”

Mr. Brant tried to speak, and the useless effort contracted his mouth in

a pitiful grimace.

“_My son?_” Campton shrieked, catching him by the arm. The little man

dropped into a chair.

“Not dead ... not dead.... Hope ... hope ...” was shaken out of him in

jerks of anguish.

The door burst open again, and Boylston dashed in beaming. He waved

aloft a handful of morning papers.

“America! You’ve seen? They’ve sacked Bernstorff! Broken off

diplomatic——”

His face turned white, and he stood staring incredulously from one of

the two bowed men to the other.

XXXV

Campton once more stood leaning in the window of a Paris hospital.

Before him, but viewed at another angle, was spread that same great

spectacle of the Place de la Concorde that he had looked down at from

the Crillon on the eve of mobilisation; behind him, in a fresh white

bed, George lay in the same attitude as when his father had stood in the

door of his room and sketched him while he slept.

All day there had run through Campton’s mind the _clairvoyante’s_

promise to Julia: “Your son will come back soon, and will never be sent

to the front again.”

Ah, this time it was true—never, never would he be sent to the front

again! They had him fast now, had him safe. That was the one certainty.

Fast how, safe how?—the answer to that had long hung in the balance. For

two weeks or more after his return the surgeons had hesitated. Then

youth had seemed to conquer, and the parents had been told to hope that

after a long period of immobility George’s shattered frame would slowly

re-knit, and he would walk again—or at least hobble. A month had gone by

since then; and Campton could at last trust himself to cast his mind

back over the intervening days, so like in their anguish to those at

Doullens, yet so different in all that material aid and organization

could give.

Evacuation from the base, now so systematically and promptly effected,

had become a matter of course in all but the gravest cases; and even the

delicate undertaking of deflecting George’s course from the hospital

near the front to which he had been destined, and bringing him to Paris,

had been accomplished by a word in the right quarter from Mr. Brant.

Campton, from the first, had been opposed to the attempt to bring George

to Paris; partly perhaps because he felt that in the quiet provincial

hospital near the front he would be able to have his son to himself. At

any rate, the journey would have been shorter; though, as against that,

Paris offered more possibilities of surgical aid. His opposition had

been violent enough to check his growing friendliness with the Brants;

and at the hours when they came to see George, Campton now most often

contrived to be absent. Well, at any rate, George was alive, he was

there under his father’s eye, he was going to live: there seemed to be

no doubt about it now. Campton could think it all over slowly and even

calmly, marvelling at the miracle and taking it in.... So at least he

had imagined till he first made the attempt; then the old sense of

unreality enveloped him again, and he struggled vainly to clutch at

something tangible amid the swimming mists. “George—George—George——” He

used to say the name over and over below his breath, as he sat and

watched at his son’s bedside; but it sounded far off and hollow, like

the voice of a ghost calling to another.

Who was “George”? What did the name represent? The father left his post

in the window and turned back to the bed, once more searching the boy’s

face for enlightenment. But George’s eyes were closed: sleep lay on him

like an impenetrable veil. The sleep of ordinary men was not like that:

the light of their daily habits continued to shine through the chinks of

their closed faces. But with these others, these who had been down into

the lower circles of the pit, it was different: sleep instantly and

completely sucked them back into the unknown. There were times when

Campton, thus watching beside his son, used to say to himself: “If he

were dead he could not be farther from me”—so deeply did George seem

plunged in secret traffic with things unutterable.

Now and then Campton, sitting beside him, seemed to see a little way

into those darknesses; but after a moment he always shuddered back to

daylight, benumbed, inadequate, weighed down with the weakness of the

flesh and the incapacity to reach beyond his habitual limit of

sensation. “No wonder they don’t talk to us,” he mused.

By-and-bye, perhaps, when George was well again, and the war over, the

father might penetrate into his son’s mind, and find some new ground of

communion with him: now the thing was not to be conceived.

He recalled again Adele Anthony’s asking him, when he had come back from

Doullens: “What was the first thing you felt?” and his answering:

“Nothing.”... Well, it was like that now: every vibration had ceased in

him. Between himself and George lay the unbridgeable abyss of his son’s

experiences.

* * * * *

As he sat there, the door was softly opened a few inches and Boylston’s

face showed through the crack: light shot from it like the rays around a

chalice. At a sign from him Campton slipped out into the corridor and

Boylston silently pushed a newspaper into his grasp. He bent over it,

trying with dazzled eyes to read sense into the staring head-lines: but

“America—America—America——” was all that he could see.

A nurse came gliding up on light feet: the tears were running down her

face. “Yes—I know, I know, I know!” she exulted. Up the tall stairs and

through the ramifying of long white passages rose an unwonted rumour of

sound, checked, subdued, invisibly rebuked, but ever again breaking out,

like the noise of ripples on a windless beach. In every direction nurses

and orderlies were speeding from one room to another of the house of

pain with the message: “America has declared war on Germany.”

Campton and Boylston stole back into George’s room. George lifted his

eyelids and smiled at them, understanding before they spoke.

“The sixth of April! Remember the date!” Boylston cried over him in a

gleeful whisper.

The wounded man, held fast in his splints, contrived to raise his head a

little. His eyes laughed back into Boylston’s. “You’ll be in uniform

within a week!” he said; and Boylston crimsoned.

Campton turned away again to the window. The day had come—had come; and

his son had lived to see it. So many of George’s comrades had gone down

to death without hope; and in a few months more George, leaning from

that same window—or perhaps well enough to be watching the spectacle

with his father from the terrace of the Tuileries—would look out on the

first brown battalions marching across the Place de la Concorde, where

father and son, in the early days of the war, had seen the young

recruits of the Foreign Legion patrolling under improvised flags.

At the thought Campton felt a loosening of the tightness about his

heart. Something which had been confused and uncertain in his relation

to the whole long anguish was abruptly lifted, giving him the same sense

of buoyancy that danced in Boylston’s glance. At last, random atoms that

they were, they seemed all to have been shaken into their places,

pressed into the huge mysterious design which was slowly curving a new

firmament over a new earth....

There was another knock; and a jubilant nurse appeared, hardly visible

above a great bunch of lilacs tied with a starred and striped ribbon.

Campton, as he passed the flowers over to his son, noticed an envelope

with Mrs. Talkett’s perpendicular scrawl. George lay smiling, the lilacs

close to his pillow, his free hand fingering the envelope; but he did

not unseal the letter, and seemed to care less than ever to talk.

After an interval the door opened again, this time to show Mr. Brant’s

guarded face. He drew back slightly at the sight of Campton; but

Boylston, jumping up, passed close to the painter to breathe: “To-day,

sir, just to-day—you must!”

Campton went to the door and signed silently to Mr. Brant to enter.

Julia Brant stood outside, flushed and tearful, carrying as many orchids

as Mrs. Talkett had sent lilacs. Campton held out his hand, and with an

embarrassed haste she stammered: “We couldn’t wait——” Behind her he saw

Adele Anthony hurriedly coming up the stairs.

For a few minutes they all stood or sat about George’s bed, while their

voices, beginning to speak low, rose uncontrollably, interrupting one

another with tears and laughter. Mr. Brant and Boylston were both

brimming with news, and George, though he listened more than he spoke,

now and then put a brief question which loosened fresh floods. Suddenly

Campton noticed that the young man’s face, which had been too flushed,

grew pale; but he continued to smile, and his eyes to move responsively

from one illuminated face to the other. Campton, seeing that the others

meant to linger, presently rose and slipping out quietly walked across

the Rue de Rivoli to the deserted terrace of the Tuileries. There he sat

for a long time, looking out on the vast glittering spaces of the Place

de la Concorde, and calling up, with his painter’s faculty of vivid and

precise visualization, a future vision of interminable lines of brown

battalions marching past.

When he returned to the hospital after dinner the night-nurse met him.

She was not quite as well satisfied with her patient that evening:

hadn’t he perhaps had too many visitors? Yes, of course—she knew it had

been a great day, a day of international rejoicing, above all a blessed

day for France. But the doctors, from the beginning, must have warned

Mr. Campton that his son ought to be kept quiet-very quiet. The last

operation had been a great strain on his heart. Yes, certainly, Mr.

Campton might go in; the patient had asked for him. Oh, there was no

danger—no need for anxiety; only he must not stay too long; his son must

try to sleep.

Campton nodded, and stole in.

George lay motionless in the shaded lamplight: his eyes were open, but

they seemed to reflect his father’s presence without any change of

expression, like mirrors rather than like eyes. The room was doubly

silent after the joyful hubbub of the afternoon. The nurse had put the

orchids and lilacs where George’s eyes could rest on them. But was it on

the flowers that his gaze so tranquilly dwelt? Or did he see in their

place the faces of their senders? Or was he again in that far country

whither no other eyes could follow him?

Campton took his usual seat by the bed. Father and son looked at each

other, and the old George glanced out for half a second between the

wounded man’s lids.

“There was too much talking to-day,” Campton grumbled.

“Was there? I didn’t notice,” his son smiled.

No—he hadn’t noticed; he didn’t notice anything. He was a million miles

away again, whirling into his place in the awful pattern of that new

firmament....

“Tired, old man?” Campton asked under his breath.

“No; just glad,” said George contentedly.

His father laid a hand on his and sat silently beside him while the

spring night blew in upon them through the open window. The quiet

streets grew quieter, the hush in their hearts seemed gradually to steal

over the extinguished city. Campton kept saying to himself: “I must be

off,” and still not moving. The nurse was sure to come back

presently—why should he not wait till she dismissed him?

After a while, seeing that George’s eyes had closed, Campton rose, and

crept across the room to darken the lamp with a newspaper. His movement

must have roused his son, for he heard a slight struggle behind him and

the low cry: “Father!”

Campton turned and reached the bed in a stride. George, ashy-white, had

managed to lift himself a little on his free elbow.

“Anything wrong?” the father cried.

“No; everything all right,” George said. He dropped back, his lids

closing again, and a single twitch ran through the hand that Campton had

seized. After that he lay stiller than ever.

XXXVI

George’s prediction had come true. At his funeral, three days afterward,

Boylston, a new-fledged member of the American Military Mission, was

already in uniform....

But through what perversity of attention did the fact strike Campton, as

he stood, a blank unfeeling automaton, in the front pew behind that

coffin draped with flags and flanked with candle-glitter? Why did one

thing rather than another reach to his deadened brain, and mostly the

trivial things, such as Boylston’s being already in uniform, and poor

Julia’s nose, under the harsh crape, looking so blue-red without its

powder, and the chaplain’s asking “O grave, where is thy victory?” in

the querulous tone of a schoolmaster reproaching a pupil who mislaid

things? It was always so with Campton: when sorrow fell it left him

insensible and dumb. Not till long afterward did he begin to feel its

birth-pangs....

* * * * *

They first came to him, those pangs, on a morning of the following July,

as he sat once more on the terrace of the Tuileries. Most of his time,

during the months since George’s death, had been spent in endless

aimless wanderings up and down the streets of Paris: and that day,

descending early from Montmartre, he had noticed in his listless way

that all the buildings on his way were fluttering with American flags.

The fact left him indifferent: Paris was always decorating nowadays for

one ally or another. Then he remembered that it must be the Fourth of

July; but the idea of the Fourth of July came to him, through the same

haze of indifference, as a mere far-off childish memory of surreptitious

explosions and burnt fingers. He strolled on toward the Tuileries, where

he had got into the way of sitting for hours at a time, looking across

the square at what had once been George’s window.

He was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his

only thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and

he began to retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a

corner he paused again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It

was not curiosity that drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be

curious about anything—but he suddenly remembered the day three months

earlier when, leaning from George’s window in the hospital, he had said

to himself “By the time our first regiments arrive he’ll be up and

looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there on the

terrace”; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt

the pressure of George’s hand on his arm.

Though it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way

through the throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to

squeeze into a corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and

leaning there, with the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.

Such a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen

on the place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who had

served Beauty all his days—how profoundly, at certain hours, it may

become the symbol of things hoped for and things died for. All those

stately spaces and raying distances, witnesses of so many memorable

scenes, might have been called together just as the setting for this one

event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over them like a

feeble trail of insects.

Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying

the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians and

soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive!

The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and

unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that

George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands

of human beings keep on mechanically living?

He became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was

trying to push a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr.

Brant’s writing: “There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the

seat I have kept next to mine?” Campton glanced down the terrace, saw

where the little man sat at its farther end, and shook his head. Then

some contradictory impulse made him decide to get up, laboriously work

his halting frame through the crowd, and insert himself into the place

next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded without shaking hands; after that

they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square. Campton noticed that

Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning band on the

left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton....

There was, as Mr. Brant had predicted, a long interval of waiting; but

at length a murmur of jubilation rose far off, and gathering depth and

volume came bellowing and spraying up to where they sat. The square, the

Champs Elysées and all the leafy distances were flooded with it: it was

as though the voice of Paris had sprung up in fountains out of her

stones. Then a military march broke shrilly on the tumult; and there

they came at last, in a scant swaying line—so few, so new, so raw; so

little, in comparison with the immense assemblages familiar to the

place, so much in meaning and in promise.

“How badly they march—there hasn’t even been time to drill them

properly!” Campton thought; and at the thought he felt a choking in his

throat, and his sorrow burst up in him in healing springs....

* * * * *

It was after that day that he first went back to his work. He had not

touched paint or pencil since George’s death; now he felt the

inspiration and the power returning, and he began to spend his days

among the young American officers and soldiers, studying them, talking

to them, going about with them, and then hurrying home to jot down his

impressions. He had not, as yet, looked at his last study of George, or

opened the portfolio with the old sketches; if any one had asked him, he

would probably have said that they no longer interested him. His whole

creative faculty was curiously, mysteriously engrossed in the recording

of the young faces for whose coming George had yearned.

“It’s their marching so badly—it’s their not even having had time to be

drilled!” he said to Boylston, half-shamefacedly, as they sat together

one August evening in the studio window.

Campton seldom saw Boylston nowadays. All the young man’s time was taken

up by his job with the understaffed and inexperienced Military Mission;

but fagged as he was by continual overwork and heavy responsibilities,

his blinking eyes had at last lost their unsatisfied look, and his whole

busy person radiated hope and encouragement.

On the day in question he had turned up unexpectedly, inviting himself

to dine with Campton and smoke a cigar afterward in the quiet window

overhanging Paris. Campton was glad to have him there; no one could tell

him more than Boylston about the American soldiers, their numbers, the

accommodations prepared for their reception, their first contact with

the other belligerents, and their own view of the business they were

about. And the two chatted quietly in the twilight till the young man,

rising, said it was time to be off.

“Back to your shop?”

“Rather! There’s a night’s work ahead. But I’m as good as new after our

talk.”

Campton looked at him wistfully. “You know I’d like to paint you some

day.”

“Oh——” cried Boylston, suffused with blushes; and added with a laugh:

“It’s my uniform, not me.”

“Well, your uniform _is_ you—it’s all of you young men.”

Boylston stood in the window twisting his cap about undecidedly. “Look

here, sir—now that you’ve got back to work again——”

“Well?” Campton interrupted suspiciously.

The young man cleared his throat and spoke with a rush. “His mother

wants most awfully that something should be decided about the monument.”

“Monument? What monument? I don’t want my son to have a monument,”

Campton exploded.

But Boylston stuck to his point. “It’ll break her heart if something

isn’t put on the grave before long. It’s five months now—and they fully

recognize your right to decide——”

“Damn what they recognize! It was they who brought him to Paris; they

made him travel when he wasn’t fit; they killed him.”

“Well—supposing they did: judge how much more they must be suffering!”

“Let ’em suffer. He’s my son—my son. He isn’t Brant’s.”

“Miss Anthony thinks——”

“And he’s not hers either, that I know of!”

Boylston seemed to hesitate. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it, sir?

You’ve had him; you have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take

it from you. Every hour of his life was yours. But they’ve never had

anything, those two others, Mr. Brant and Miss Anthony; nothing but a

reflected light. And so every outward sign means more to them. I’m

putting it badly, I know——”

Campton held out his hand. “You don’t mean to, I suppose. But better not

put it at all. Good night,” he said. And on the threshold he called out

sardonically: “And who’s going to pay for a monument, I’d like to know?”

* * * * *

A monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan

it, perhaps design it—good Lord, he didn’t know! No doubt it all seemed

simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy.... When he

couldn’t yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look

into the old portfolio even.... Suffering, suffering! What did they any

of them know about suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing

studies, recalling scenes and sayings, discussing with some sculptor or

other the shape of George’s eyelids, the spring of his chest-muscles,

the way his hair grew and his hands moved—why, it was like digging him

up again out of that peaceful corner of the Neuilly cemetery where at

last he was resting, like dragging him back to the fret and the fever,

and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.

And then: as he’d said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument?

Even if the making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to

his boy, instead of building up a marble wall between them—even if the

idea had appealed to him, he hadn’t a penny to spare for such an

undertaking. In the first place, he never intended to paint again for

money; never intended to do anything but these gaunt and serious or

round and babyish young American faces above their stiff military

collars, and when their portraits were finished to put them away, locked

up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to

be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation

centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in

the grim months to come; and partly for such of the protégés of “The

Friends of French Art” as had been deprived of aid under the new

management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to

Campton daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele

Anthony and Mlle. Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners,

were always appealing to him for help. And then, hidden behind these

more or less valid reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had

reasserted itself, he couldn’t tell how or why, unless through some dim

opposition to the Brants’ perpetual outpouring: their hospitals, their

motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—_their_

monument!

He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every

day one of the newly-opened Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Clubs. Adele Anthony

had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She

looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her

work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness

and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and

her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris

and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering

angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them “boys.”

The young men appeared to return Campton’s liking; it was as if they had

guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He

was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his

being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely “the old gentleman”

who was friendly to them; but he didn’t mind. It was enough to sit and

listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles

which confronted them, to render them such fatherly services as he

could, and in the interval to jot down notes of their faces—their

inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to talk with them was like

being on the floor in George’s nursery, among the blocks and the tin

soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a cool empty

heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among his

own, the sense he had never had since George’s death.

To think of them all as George’s brothers, to study out the secret

likeness to him in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one

passion, his sustaining task; it was at such times that his son came

back and sat among them....

Gradually, as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers

and soldiers, were dispersed throughout the training camps, and new

faces succeeded to those he had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless

line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges, schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to

be. Campton saw each one go with a fresh pang, knowing that every move

brought them so much nearer to the front, that ever-ravening and

inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that only

increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly

to one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn

of the mind like George’s; and then the parting became anguish.

One day a second lieutenant came to the studio to take leave. He had

been an early recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so

far advanced that he counted on being among the first officers sent to

the fighting line. He was a fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that

stood up in a defiant crest.

“There are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t

afford to be too particular,” he laughed.

It was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh

was like an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into

tears, and was aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay

and compassion.

“Oh, don’t, sir, _don’t_,” the young man pleaded, wringing the painter’s

hand, and making what decent haste he could to get out of the studio.

* * * * *

Campton, left alone, turned once more to his easel. He sat down before a

canvas on which he had blocked out a group of soldiers playing cards at

their club; but after a stroke or two he threw aside his brush, and

remained with his head bowed on his hands, a lonely tired old man.

He had kept a cheerful front at his son’s going; and now he could not

say goodbye to one of these young fellows without crying. Well—it was

because he had no one left of his own, he supposed. Loneliness like his

took all a man’s strength from him....

The bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; then the door was

pushed timidly open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since

the day of George’s funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a

shrunken black-veiled figure hurrying past in the meaningless line of

mourners.

In her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: “I’ve come to

say goodbye; I’m going to America.”

He looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said. “To America?”

“Yes; to join my husband.”

He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her

perplexed and fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes

wandered unseeingly about the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is

there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail to-morrow; I mean to take a house

somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The

life in camp is so unsuited to him——”

Campton still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at

length, supposing it was what she expected of him.

“Am I?” She half-smiled. “What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know

any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have

wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I _do_ know,”

she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my

life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on

the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.

After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away,

Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry

of hers kept on echoing in his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy

enough to be so unhappy!” It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of

Boylston’s that he had brushed away unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you

have him still; but those others have never had anything.”

Yes; Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was

of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had

never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close

inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only

now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater

the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened

embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by

his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be

able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always

trying——”

Julia too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such

peculiar pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body:

Campton did not see her now, as he once had in a brief moment of

compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw

her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an

unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.

What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they

make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its

taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it

communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold

stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was

beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with

the sense that it would have been George’s way too), these feelings

could never give their stern appeasement to Julia.... Her religion? Yes,

such as it was no doubt it would help; talking with the Rector would

help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers,

imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But

the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long

since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their

shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail

to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and

how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her

sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually,

stealthily, fill up the void with the old occupations, with bridge and

visits and secret consultations at the dressmaker’s about the width of

crape on her dresses; and all the while the object of life would be gone

for her. Yes; he pitied Julia most of all.

But Mr. Brant too—perhaps in a different way it was he who suffered

most. For the stellar spaces were not exactly Mr. Brant’s native

climate, and yet voices would call to him from them, and he would not

know....

There were moments when Campton looked about him with astonishment at

the richness of his own denuded life; when George was in the sunset, in

the voices of young people, or in any trivial joke that father and son

would have shared; and other moments when he was nowhere, utterly lost,

extinct and irrecoverable; and others again when the one thing which

could have vitalized the dead business of living would have been to see

him shove open the studio door, stalk in, pour out some coffee for

himself in his father’s cup, and diffuse through the air the warm sense

of his bodily presence, the fresh smell of his clothes and his flesh and

his hair. But through all these moods, Campton began to see, there ran

the life-giving power of a reality embraced and accepted. George had

been; George was; as long as his father’s consciousness lasted, George

would be as much a part of it as the closest, most actual of his

immediate sensations. He had missed nothing of George, and here was his

harvest, his golden harvest.

Such states of mind were not constant with Campton; but more and more

often, when they came, they swept him on eagle wings over the next

desert to the next oasis; and so, gradually, the meaningless days became

linked to each other in some kind of intelligible sequence.

* * * * *

Boylston, after the talk which had so agitated Campton, did not turn up

again at the studio for some time; but when he next appeared the

painter, hardly pausing to greet him, began at once, as if they had just

parted: “That monument you spoke about the other day ... you know....”

Boylston glanced at him in surprise.

“If they want me to do it, I’ll do it,” Campton went on, jerking the

words out abruptly and walking away toward the window. He had not known,

till he began, that he had meant to utter them, or how difficult they

would be to say; and he stood there a moment struggling with the

unreasoning rebellious irritability which so often lay in wait for his

better impulses. At length he turned back, his hands in his pockets,

clinking his change as he had done the first time that Boylston had come

to him for help. “But as I plan the thing,” he began again, in a queer

growling tone, “it’s going to cost a lot—everything of the sort does

nowadays, especially in marble. It’s hard enough to get any one to do

that kind of work at all. And prices have about tripled, you know.”

Boylston’s eyes filled, and he nodded, still without speaking.

“That’s just what Brant’ll like though, isn’t it?” Campton said, with an

irrepressible sneer in his voice. He saw Boylston redden and look away,

and he too flushed to the forehead and broke off ashamed. Suddenly he

had the vision of Mr. Brant effacing himself at the foot of the hospital

stairs when they had arrived at Doullens; Mr. Brant drawing forth the

copy of the orderly’s letter in the dark fog-swept cloister; Mr. Brant

always yielding, always holding back, yet always remembering to do or to

say the one thing the father’s lacerated soul could bear.

“And he’s had nothing—nothing—nothing!” Campton thought.

He turned again to Boylston, his face still flushed, his lips twitching.

“Tell them—tell Brant—that I’ll design the thing; I’ll design it, and he

shall pay for it. He’ll want to—I understand that. Only, for God’s sake,

don’t let him come here and thank me—at least not for a long time!”

Boylston again nodded silently, and turned to go.

After he had gone the painter moved back to his long table. He had

always had a fancy for modelling—had always had lumps of clay lying

about within reach. He pulled out all the sketches of his son from the

old portfolio, spread them before him on the table, and began.

PARIS, 1918—Saint Brice-Sous-Forêt, 1922.

THE END

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

1. P. 62, changed “we was surprised” to “he was surprised”.

2. Silently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.

3. Retained anachronistic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings as

printed.

4. Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.

5. Enclosed bold font in =equals=.