Chapter II: Book I: A Son at the Front (2)

The only other girls he had known well were his sisters—earnest eye-glassed young women, whose one answer to all his problems was that he ought to come home. The idea of Europe had always been terrifying to them, and indeed to his whole family, since the extraordinary misadventure whereby, as the result of a protracted diligence journey over bad roads, of a violent thunderstorm, and a delayed steamer, Campton had been born in Paris instead of Utica. Mrs. Campton the elder had taken the warning to heart, and never again left her native soil; but the sisters, safely and properly brought into the world in their own city and State, had always felt that Campton’s persistent yearnings for Europe, and his inexplicable detachment from Utica and the Mangle, were mysteriously due to the accident of their mother’s premature confinement.

Compared with the admonitions of these domestic censors, Miss Ambrose’s innocent conversation was as seductive as the tangles of Neæra’s hair, and it used to be a joke between them (one of the few he had ever been able to make her see) that he, the raw up-Stater, was Parisian born, while she, the glass and pattern of worldly knowledge, had seen the light in the pure atmosphere of Madison Avenue.

Through her, in due course, he came to know another girl, a queer abrupt young American, already an old maid at twenty-two, and in open revolt against her family for reasons not unlike his own. Adele Anthony had come abroad to keep house for a worthless “artistic” brother, who was preparing to be a sculptor by prolonged sessions in Anglo-American bars and the lobbies of music-halls. When he finally went under, and was shipped home, Miss Anthony stayed on in Paris, ashamed, as she told Campton, to go back and face the righteous triumph of a family connection who had unanimously disbelieved in the possibility of making Bill Anthony into a sculptor, and in the wisdom of his sister’s staking her small means on the venture.

“Somehow, behind it all, I was right, and they were wrong; but to do anything with poor Bill I ought to have been able to begin two or three generations back,” she confessed.

Miss Anthony had many friends in Paris, of whom Julia Ambrose was the most admired; and she had assisted sympathizingly (if not enthusiastically) at Campton’s wooing of Julia, and their hasty marriage. Her only note of warning had been the reminder that Julia had always been poor, and had always lived as if she were rich; and that was silenced by Campton’s rejoinder that the Magic Mangle, to which the Campton prosperity was due, was some day going to make him rich, though he had always lived as if he were poor.

“Well—you’d better not, any longer,” Adele sharply advised; and he laughed, and promised to go out and buy a new hat. In truth, careless of comfort as he was, he adored luxury in women, and was resolved to let his wife ruin him if she did it handsomely enough. Doubtless she might have, had fate given her time; but soon after their marriage old Mr. Campton died, and it was found that a trusted manager had so invested the profits of the Mangle that the heirs inherited only a series of law-suits.

John Campton, henceforth, was merely the unsuccessful son of a ruined manufacturer; painting became a luxury he could no longer afford, and his mother and sisters besought him to come back and take over what was left of the business. It seemed so clearly his duty that, with anguish of soul, he prepared to go; but Julia, on being consulted, developed a sudden passion for art and poverty.

“We’d have to live in Utica—for some years at any rate?”

“Well, yes, no doubt——” They faced the fact desolately.

“They’d much better look out for another manager. What do you know about business? Since you’ve taken up painting you’d better try to make a success of that,” she advised him; and he was too much of the same mind not to agree.

It was not long before George’s birth, and they were fully resolved to go home for the event, and thus spare their hoped for heir the inconvenience of coming into the world, like his father, in a foreign country. But now this was not to be thought of, and the eventual inconvenience to George was lost sight of by his progenitors in the contemplation of nearer problems.

For a few years their life dragged along shabbily and depressingly. Now that Campton’s painting was no longer an amateur’s hobby but a domestic obligation, Julia thought it her duty to interest herself in it; and her only idea of doing so was by means of what she called “relations,” using the word in its French and diplomatic sense.

She was convinced that her husband’s lack of success was due to Beausite’s blighting epigram, and to Campton’s subsequent resolve to strike out for himself. “It’s a great mistake to try to be original till people have got used to you,” she said, with the shrewdness that sometimes startled him. “If you’d only been civil to Beausite he would have ended by taking you up, and then you could have painted as queerly as you liked.”

Beausite, by this time, had succumbed to the honours which lie in wait for such talents, and in his starred and titled maturity his earlier dread of rivals had given way to a prudent benevolence. Young artists were always welcome at the receptions he gave in his sumptuous hotel of the Avenue du Bois. Those who threatened to be rivals were even invited to dine; and Julia was justified in triumphing when such an invitation finally rewarded her efforts.

Campton, with a laugh, threw the card into the stove.

“If you’d only understand that that’s not the way,” he said.

“What is, then?”

“Why, letting all that lot see what unutterable rubbish one thinks them!”

“I should have thought you’d tried that long enough,” she said with pale lips; but he answered jovially that it never palled on him.

She was bitterly offended; but she knew Campton by this time, and was not a woman to waste herself in vain resentment. She simply suggested that since he would not profit by Beausite’s advance the only alternative was to try to get orders for portraits; and though at that stage he was not in the mood for portrait-painting, he made an honest attempt to satisfy her. She began, of course, by sitting for him. She sat again and again; but, lovely as she was, he was not inspired, and one day, in sheer self-defence, he blurted out that she was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet, and it loomed large in their subsequent recriminations.

Adele Anthony—it was just like her—gave him his first order, and she did prove paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face; but she didn’t perceive it (she had wanted something oval, with tulle, and a rose in a taper hand), and after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it away in an attic, whence, a year or so before the date of the artist’s present musings, it had been fished out as an “early Campton,” to be exhibited half a dozen times, and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews.

Adele’s picture acted as an awful warning to intending patrons, and after one or two attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his muse, and no more was said of portrait-painting. But life in Paris was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia to try Spain, and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding, she did not complain, but she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and unsalable.

Finally they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz. And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turban-wise above two folds of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips, laughing at a little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a dog.

The vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.

The next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”

She said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that either.... He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back to Paris, leaving a letter to say that the matter was in the hands of her lawyers.

“What did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could not explain.

It was a year or two later that he met the first person who _did_ understand: a Russian lady who had heard the story, was curious to know him, and asked, one day, when their friendship had progressed, to see the sketches he had brought back from his _fugue_.

“_Comme je vous comprends!_” she had murmured, her grey eyes deep in his; but perceiving that she did not allude to the sketches, but to his sentimental adventure, Campton pushed the drawings out of sight, vexed with himself for having shown them.

He forgave the Russian lady her artistic obtuseness for the sake of her human comprehension. They had met at the loneliest moment of his life, when his art seemed to have failed him like everything else, and when the struggle to get possession of his son, which had been going on in the courts ever since the break with Julia, had finally been decided against him. His Russian friend consoled, amused and agitated him, and after a few years drifted out of his life as irresponsibly as she had drifted into it; and he found himself, at forty-five, a lonely thwarted man, as full as ever of faith in his own powers, but with little left in human nature or in opportunity. It was about this time that he heard that Julia was to marry again, and that his boy would have a stepfather.

He knew that even his own family thought it “the best thing that could happen.” They were tired of clubbing together to pay Julia’s alimony, and heaved a united sigh of relief when they learned that her second choice had fallen, not on the bankrupt “foreign Count” they had always dreaded, but on the Paris partner of the famous bank of Bullard and Brant. Mr. Brant’s request that his wife’s alimony should be discontinued gave him a moral superiority which even Campton’s recent successes could not shake. It was felt that the request expressed the contempt of an income easily counted in seven figures for a pittance painfully screwed up to four; and the Camptons admired Mr. Brant much more for not needing their money than for refusing it.

Their attitude left John Campton without support in his struggle to keep a hold on his boy. His family sincerely thought George safer with the Brants than with his own father, and the father could advance to the contrary no arguments they would have understood. All the forces of order seemed leagued against him; and it was perhaps this fact that suddenly drove him into conformity with them. At any rate, from the day of Julia’s remarriage no other woman shared her former husband’s life. Campton settled down to the solitude of his dusty studio at Montmartre, and painted doggedly, all his thoughts on George.

* * * * *

At this point in his reminiscences the bells of Sainte Clotilde rang out the half-hour after midnight, and Campton rose and went into the darkened sitting-room.

The door into George’s room was open, and in the silence the father heard the boy’s calm breathing. A light from the bathroom cast its ray on the dressing-table, which was scattered with the contents of George’s pockets. Campton, dwelling with a new tenderness on everything that belonged to his son, noticed a smart antelope card-case (George had his mother’s weakness for Bond Street novelties), a wrist-watch, his studs, a bundle of bank-notes; and beside these a thumbed and dirty red book, the size of a large pocket-diary.

The father wondered what it was; then of a sudden he knew. He had once seen Mme. Lebel’s grandson pull just such a red book from his pocket as he was leaving for his “twenty-eight days” of military service; it was the _livret militaire_ that every French citizen under forty-eight carries about with him.

Campton had never paid much attention to French military regulations: George’s service over, he had dismissed the matter from his mind, forgetting that his son was still a member of the French army, and as closely linked to the fortunes of France as the grandson of the concierge of Montmartre. Now it occurred to him that that little red book would answer the questions he had not dared to put; and stealing in, he possessed himself of it and carried it back to the sitting-room. There he sat down by the lamp and read.

First George’s name, his domicile, his rank as a _maréchal des logis_ of dragoons, the number of his regiment and its base: all that was already familiar. But what was this on the next page?

“In case of general mobilisation announced to the populations of France by public proclamations, or by notices posted in the streets, the bearer of this order is to rejoin his regiment at ——.

“He is to take with him provisions for one day.

“He is to present himself at the station of —— on the third day of mobilisation at 6 o’clock, and to take the train indicated by the station-master.

“The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.”

Campton dropped the book and pressed his hands to his temples. “The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.” Then, if France mobilised that day, George would start the second day after, at six in the morning. George might be going to leave him within forty-eight hours from that very moment!

Campton had always vaguely supposed that, some day or other, if war came, a telegram would call George to his base; it had never occurred to him that every detail of the boy’s military life had long since been regulated by the dread power which had him in its grasp.

He read the next paragraph: “The bearer will travel free of charge——” and thought with a grin how it would annoy Anderson Brant that the French government should presume to treat his stepson as if he could not pay his way. The plump bundle of bank-notes on the dressing-table seemed to look with ineffectual scorn at the red book that sojourned so democratically in the same pocket. And Campton, picturing George jammed into an overcrowded military train, on the plebeian wooden seat of a third-class compartment, grinned again, forgetful of his own anxiety in the vision of Brant’s exasperation.

Ah, well, it wasn’t war yet, whatever they said!

He carried the red book back to the dressing-table. The light falling across the bed drew his eye to the young face on the pillow. George lay on his side, one arm above his head, the other laxly stretched along the bed. He had thrown off the blankets, and the sheet, clinging to his body, modelled his slim flank and legs as he lay in dreamless rest.

For a long time Campton stood gazing; then he stole back to the sitting-room, picked up a sketch-book and pencil and returned. He knew there was no danger of waking George, and he began to draw, eagerly but deliberately, fascinated by the happy accident of the lighting, and of the boy’s position.

“Like a statue of a young knight I’ve seen somewhere,” he said to himself, vexed and surprised that he, whose plastic memories were always so precise, should not remember where; and then his pencil stopped. What he had really thought was: “Like the _effigy_ of a young knight”—though he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself. He leaned in the doorway, the sketch-book in hand, and continued to gaze at his son. It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look ... and the white glare of the electric burner.

If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battle-field-or afterward in a hospital bed. Not _his_ boy, thank heaven; but very probably his boy’s friends: hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy, the age of his boy, with a laugh like his boy’s.... The wicked waste of it! Well, that was what war meant ... what to-morrow might bring to millions of parents like himself.

He stiffened his shoulders, and opened the sketch-book again. What watery stuff was he made of, he wondered? Just because the boy lay as if he were posing for a tombstone!... What of Signorelli, who had sat at his dead son’s side and drawn him, tenderly, minutely, while the coffin waited?

Well, damn Signorelli—that was all! Campton threw down his book, turned out the sitting-room lights, and limped away to bed.

V

The next morning he said to George, over coffee on the terrace: “I think I’ll drop in at Cook’s about our tickets.”

George nodded, munching his golden roll.

“Right. I’ll run up to see mother, then.”

His father was silent. Inwardly he was saying to himself: “The chances are she’ll be going back to Deauville this afternoon.”

There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their feet. Austria had ordered general mobilisation; but while the tone of the despatches was nervous and contradictory that of the leading articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the reassurance without heeding its quality: it was a drug he had to have at any price.

He expected the Javanese dancer to sit to him that afternoon, but he had not proposed to George to be present. On the chance that things might eventually take a wrong turn he meant to say a word to Fortin-Lescluze; and the presence of his son would have been embarrassing.

“You’ll be back for lunch?” he called to George, who still lounged on the terrace in pyjamas.

“Rather.—That is, unless mother makes a point ... in case she’s leaving.”

“Oh, of course,” said Campton with grim cordiality.

“You see, dear old boy, I’ve got to see Uncle Andy some time....” It was the grotesque name that George, in his babyhood, had given to Mr. Brant, and when he grew up it had been difficult to substitute another. “Especially now——” George added, pulling himself up out of his chair.

“Now?”

They looked at each other in silence, irritation in the father’s eye, indulgent amusement in the son’s.

“Why, if you and I are really off on this long trek——”

“Oh, of course,” agreed Campton, relieved. “You’d much better lunch with them. I always want you to do what’s decent.” He paused on the threshold to add: “By the way, don’t forget Adele.”

“Well, rather not,” his son responded. “And we’ll keep the evening free for something awful.”

As he left the room he heard George rapping on the telephone and calling out Miss Anthony’s number.

Campton had to have reassurance at any price; and he got it, as usual, irrationally but irresistibly, through his eyes. The mere fact that the midsummer sun lay so tenderly on Paris, that the bronze dolphins of the fountains in the square were spraying the Nereids’ Louis Philippe chignons as playfully as ever; that the sleepy Cities of France dozed as heavily on their thrones, and the Horses of Marly pranced as fractiously on their pedestals; that the glorious central setting of the city lay there in its usual mellow pomp—all this gave him a sense of security that no crisscrossing of Reuters and Havases could shake.

Nevertheless, he reflected that there was no use in battling with the silly hysterical crowd he would be sure to encounter at Cook’s; and having left word with the hotel-porter to secure two “sleepings” on the Naples express, he drove to the studio.

On the way, as his habit was, he thought hard of his model: everything else disappeared like a rolled-up curtain, and his inner vision centred itself on the little yellow face he was to paint.

Peering through her cobwebby window, he saw old Mme. Lebel on the watch. He knew she wanted to pounce out and ask if there would be war; and composing his most taciturn countenance he gave her a preoccupied nod and hurried by.

The studio looked grimy and disordered, and he remembered that he had intended, the evening before, to come back and set it to rights. In pursuance of this plan, he got out a canvas, fussed with his brushes and colours, and then tried once more to make the place tidy. But his attempts at order always resulted in worse confusion; the fact had been one of Julia’s grievances against him, and he had often thought that a reaction from his ways probably explained the lifeless neatness of the Anderson Brant drawing-room.

Campton had fled to Montmartre to escape a number of things: first of all, the possibility of meeting people who would want to talk about the European situation, then of being called up by Mrs. Brant, and lastly of having to lunch alone in a fashionable restaurant. In his morbid dread of seeing people he would have preferred an omelette in the studio, if only Mariette had been at hand to make it; and he decided, after a vain struggle with his muddled “properties,” to cross over to the Luxembourg quarter and pick up a meal in a wine-shop.

He did not own to himself his secret reason for this decision; but it caused him, after a glance at his watch, to hasten his steps down the rue Montmartre and bribe a passing taxi to carry him to the Museum of the Luxembourg. He reached it ten minutes before the midday closing, and hastening past the serried statues, turned into a room half-way down the gallery. Whistler’s Mother and the Carmencita of Sargent wondered at each other from its walls; and on the same wall with the Whistler hung the picture Campton had come for: his portrait of his son. He had given it to the Luxembourg the day after Mr. Brant had tried to buy it, with the object of inflicting the most cruel slight he could think of on the banker.

In the generous summer light the picture shone out on him with a communicative warmth: never had he seen so far into its depths. “No wonder,” he thought, “it opened people’s eyes to what I was trying for.”

He stood and stared his own eyes full, mentally comparing the features before him with those of the firmer harder George he had left on the terrace of the Crillon, and noting how time, while fulfilling the rich promise of the younger face, had yet taken something from its brightness.

Campton, at that moment, found more satisfaction than ever in thinking how it must have humiliated Brant to have the picture given to France. “He could have understood my keeping it myself—or holding it for a bigger price—but _giving it_——!” The satisfaction was worth the sacrifice of the best record he would ever have of that phase of his son’s youth. At various times afterward he had tried for the same George, but not one of his later studies had that magic light on it. Still, he was glad he had given the picture. It was safe, safer than it would have been with him. His great dread had always been that if his will were mislaid (and his things were always getting mislaid) the picture might be sold, and fall into Brant’s hands after his death.

The closing signal drove him out of the Museum, and he turned into the first wine-shop. He had advised George to lunch with the Brants, but there was disappointment in his heart. Seeing the turn things were taking, he had hoped the boy would feel the impulse to remain with him. But, after all, at such a time a son could not refuse to go to his mother. Campton pictured the little party of three grouped about the luncheon-table in the high cool dining-room of the Avenue Marigny, with the famous Hubert Robert panels, and the Louis XV silver and Sèvres; while he, the father, George’s father, sat alone at the soiled table of a frowsy wine-shop.

Well—it was he who had so willed it. Life was too crazy a muddle—and who could have foreseen that he might have been repaid for twenty-six years with such a wife by keeping an undivided claim on such a son?

His meal over, he hastened back to the studio, hoping to find the dancer there. Fortin-Lescluze had sworn to bring her at two, and Campton was known to exact absolute punctuality. He had put the final touch to his fame by refusing to paint the mad young Duchesse de la Tour Crenelée—who was exceptionally paintable—because she had kept him waiting three-quarters of an hour. But now, though it was nearly three, and the dancer and her friend had not come, Campton dared not move, lest he should miss Fortin-Lescluze.

“Sent for by a rich patient in a war-funk; or else hanging about in the girl’s dressing-room while she polishes her toe-nails,” Campton reflected; and sulkily sat down to wait.

He had never been willing to have a telephone. To him it was a live thing, a kind of Laocoon-serpent that caught one in its coils and dragged one struggling to the receiver. His friends had spent all their logic in trying to argue away this belief; but he answered obstinately: “Every one would be sure to call me up when Mariette was out.” Even the Russian lady, during her brief reign, had pleaded in vain on this point.

He would have given a good deal now if he had listened to her. The terror of having to cope with small material difficulties, always strongest in him in moments of artistic inspiration—when the hushed universe seemed hardly big enough to hold him and his model—this dread anchored him to his seat while he tried to make up his mind to send Mme. Lebel to the nearest telephone-station.

If he called to her, she would instantly begin: “And the war, sir?” And he would have to settle that first. Besides, if he did not telephone himself he could not make sure of another appointment with Fortin-Lescluze. But the idea of battling alone with the telephone in a public place covered his large body with a damp distress. If only George had been in reach!

He waited till four, and then, furious, locked the studio and went down. Mme. Lebel still sat in her spidery den. She looked at him gravely, their eyes met, they exchanged a bow, but she did not move or speak. She was busy as usual with some rusty sewing—he thought it odd that she should not rush out to waylay him. Everything that day was odd.

He found all the telephone-booths besieged. The people waiting were certainly bad cases of war-funk, to judge from their looks; after scrutinizing them for a while he decided to return to his hotel, and try to communicate with Fortin-Lescluze from there.

To his annoyance there was not a taxi to be seen. He limped down the slope of Montmartre to the nearest métro-station, and just as he was preparing to force his lame bulk into a crowded train, caught sight of a solitary horse-cab: a vehicle he had not risked himself in for years.

The cab-driver, for gastronomic reasons, declined to take him farther than the Madeleine; and getting out there, Campton walked along the rue Royale. Everything still looked wonderfully as usual; and the fountains in the Place sparkled gloriously.

Comparatively few people were about: he was surprised to see how few. A small group of them, he noticed, had paused near the doorway of the Ministry of Marine, and were looking—without visible excitement—at a white paper pasted on the wall.

He crossed the street and looked too. In the middle of the paper, in queer Gothic-looking characters, he saw the words

=“Les Armees De Terre et De Mer....”=

War had come——

He knew now that he had never for an instant believed it possible. Even when he had had that white-lipped interview with the Brants, even when he had planned to take Fortin-Lescluze by his senile infatuation, and secure a medical certificate for George; even then, he had simply been obeying the superstitious impulse which makes a man carry his umbrella when he goes out on a cloudless morning.

War had come.

He stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and tried to think—now that it was here—what it really meant: that is, what it meant to him. Beyond that he had no intention of venturing. “This is not our job anyhow,” he muttered, repeating the phrase with which he had bolstered up his talk with Julia.

But abstract thinking was impossible: his confused mind could only snatch at a few drifting scraps of purpose. “Let’s be practical,” he said to himself.

The first thing to do was to get back to the hotel and call up the physician. He strode along at his fastest limp, suddenly contemptuous of the people who got in his way.

“War—and they’ve nothing to do but dawdle and gape! How like the French!” He found himself hating the French.

He remembered that he had asked to have his sleepings engaged for the following night. But even if he managed to secure his son’s discharge, there could be no thought, now, of George’s leaving the country; and he stopped at the desk to cancel the order.

There was no one behind the desk: one would have said that confusion prevailed in the hall, if its emptiness had not made the word incongruous. At last a waiter with rumpled hair strayed out of the restaurant, and of him, imperiously, Campton demanded the concierge.

“The concierge? He’s gone.”

“To get my places for Naples?”

The waiter looked blank. “Gone: mobilised—to join his regiment. It’s the war.”

“But look here, some one must have attended to getting my places, I suppose,” cried Campton wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable travellers, but who explained to him, patiently, that his sleepings had certainly not been engaged, as no trains were leaving Paris for the present. “Not for civilian travel,” he added, still more patiently.

Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris “for the present”? But then people like himself—people who had nothing on earth to do with the war—had been caught like rats in a trap! He reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brant would not be able to return to Deauville, and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day. He asked: “How long is this preposterous state of things to last?”—but no one answered, and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried upstairs.

He was confident that George would be there waiting; but the sitting-room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island, with the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world.

After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin’s house, and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left Paris.

“Left—for where? For how long?”

And then the eternal answer: “The doctor is mobilised. _It’s the war._”

Mobilised—already? Within the first twenty-four hours? A man of Fortin’s age and authority? Campton was terrified by the uncanny rapidity with which events were moving, he whom haste had always confused and disconcerted, as if there were a secret link between his lameness and the movements of his will. He rang up Dastrey, but no one answered. Evidently his friend was out, and his friend’s _bonne_ also. “I suppose _she’s_ mobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.”

At last, from sheer over-agitation, his fatigued mind began to move more deliberately: he collected his wits, laboured with his more immediate difficulties, and decided that he would go to Fortin-Lescluze’s house, on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started.

“Ten to one he won’t go till to-morrow,” Campton reasoned.

The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever, and no taxi was in sight down the whole length of the rue Royale, or the rue Boissy d’Anglas, or the rue de Rivoli: not even a horse-cab showed against the deserted distances. He crossed to the métro, and painfully descended its many stairs.

VI

Campton, proffering twenty francs to an astonished maid-servant, learned that, yes, to his intimates—and of course Monsieur was one?—the doctor _was_ in, was in fact dining, and did not leave till the next morning.

“Dining—at six o’clock?”

“Monsieur’s son, Monsieur Jean, is starting at once for his depot. That’s the reason.”

Campton sent in his card. He expected to be received in the so-called “studio,” a lofty room with Chinese hangings, Renaissance choir-stalls, organ, grand piano, and post-impressionist paintings, where Fortin-Lescluze received the celebrities of the hour. Mme. Fortin never appeared there, and Campton associated the studio with amusing talk, hot-house flowers, and ladies lolling on black velvet divans. He supposed that the physician was separated from his wife, and that she had a home of her own.

When the maid reappeared she did not lead him to the studio, but into a small dining-room with the traditional Henri II sideboard of waxed walnut, a hanging table-lamp under a beaded shade, an India-rubber plant on a plush pedestal, and napkins that were just being restored to their bone rings by the four persons seated about the red-and-white checkered table-cloth.

These were: the great man himself, a tall large woman with grey hair, a tiny old lady, her face framed in a peasant’s fluted cap, and a plain young man wearing a private’s uniform, who had a nose like the doctor’s and simple light blue eyes.

The two ladies and the young man—so much more interesting to the painter’s eye than the sprawling beauties of the studio—were introduced by Fortin-Lescluze as his wife, his mother and his son. Mme. Fortin said, in a deep alto, a word or two about the privilege of meeting the famous painter who had portrayed her husband, and the old mother, in a piping voice, exclaimed: “Monsieur, I was at Sedan in 1870. I saw the Germans. I saw the Emperor sitting on a bench. He was crying.”

“My mother’s heard everything, she’s seen everything. There’s no one in the world like my mother!” the physician said, laying his hand on hers.

“You won’t see the Germans again, _ma bonne mère_!” her daughter-in-law added, smiling.

Campton took coffee with them, bore with a little inevitable talk about the war, and then eagerly questioned the son. The young man was a chemist, a _préparateur_ in the laboratory of the Institut Pasteur. He was also, it appeared, given to prehistoric archæology, and had written a “thesis” on the painted caves of the Dordogne. He seemed extremely serious, and absorbed in questions of science and letters. But it appeared to him perfectly simple to be leaving it all in a few hours to join his regiment. “The war had to come. This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.

He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.

Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician.

In the consulting-room he explained: “It’s about my son——”

He had not been able to bring the phrase out in the presence of the young man who must have been just George’s age, and who was leaving in an hour for his regiment. But between Campton and the father there were complicities, and there might therefore be accommodations. In the consulting-room one breathed a lower air.

It was not that Campton wanted to do anything underhand. He was genuinely anxious about George’s health. After all, tuberculosis did not disappear in a month or even a year: his anxiety was justified. And then George, but for the stupid accident of his birth, would never have been mixed up in the war. Campton felt that he could make his request with his head high.

Fortin-Lescluze seemed to think so too; at any rate he expressed no surprise. But could anything on earth have surprised him, after thirty years in that confessional of a room?

The difficulty was that he did not see his way to doing anything—not immediately, at any rate.

“You must let the boy join his base. He leaves to-morrow? Give me the number of his regiment and the name of the town, and trust me to do what I can.”

“But you’re off yourself?”

“Yes: I’m being sent to a hospital at Lyons. But I’ll leave you my address.”

Campton lingered, unable to take this as final. He looked about him uneasily, and then, for a moment, straight into the physician’s eyes.

“You must know how I feel; your boy is an only son, too.”

“Yes, yes,” the father assented, in the absent-minded tone of professional sympathy. But Campton felt that he felt the deep difference.

“Well, goodbye—and thanks.”

As Campton turned to go the physician laid a hand on his shoulder and spoke with sudden fierce emotion. “Yes: Jean is an only son—an only child. For his mother and myself it’s not a trifle—having our only son in the war.”

There was no allusion to the dancer, no hint that Fortin remembered her; it was Campton who lowered his gaze before the look in the other father’s eyes.

VII

“A son in the war——”

The words followed Campton down the stairs. What did it mean, and what must it feel like, for parents in this safe denationalized modern world to be suddenly saying to each other with white lips: A son in the war?

He stood on the kerbstone, staring ahead of him and forgetting whither he was bound. The world seemed to lie under a spell, and its weight was on his limbs and brain. Usually any deep inward trouble made him more than ever alive to the outward aspect of things; but this new world in which people talked glibly of sons in the war had suddenly become invisible to him, and he did not know where he was, or what he was staring at. He noted the fact, and remembered a story of St. Bernard—he thought it was—walking beside a beautiful lake in supersensual ecstasy, and saying afterward: “Was there a lake? I didn’t see it.”

On the way back to the hotel he passed the American Embassy, and had a vague idea of trying to see the Ambassador and find out if the United States were not going to devise some way of evading the tyrannous regulation that bound young Americans to France. “And they call this a free country!” he heard himself exclaiming.

The remark sounded exactly like one of Julia’s, and this reminded him that the Ambassador frequently dined at the Brants’. They had certainly not left his door untried; and since, to the Brant circles, Campton was still a shaggy Bohemian, his appeal was not likely to fortify theirs.

His mind turned to Jorgenstein, and the vast web of the speculator’s financial relations. But, after all, France was on the verge of war, if not in it; and following up the threads of the Jorgenstein web was likely to land one in Frankfort or Vienna.

At the hotel he found his sitting-room empty; but presently the door opened and George came in laden with books, fresh yellow and grey ones in Flammarion wrappers.

“Hullo, Dad,” he said; and added: “So the silly show is on.”

“Mobilisation is not war——,” said Campton.

“No——”

“What on earth are all those books?”

“Provender. It appears we may rot at the depot for weeks. I’ve just seen a chap who’s in my regiment.”

Campton felt a sudden relief. The purchase of the books proved that George was fairly sure he would not be sent to the front. His father went up to him and tapped him on the chest.

“How about this——?” He wanted to add: “I’ve just seen Fortin, who says he’ll get you off”; but though George’s eye was cool and unenthusiastic it did not encourage such confidences.

“Oh—lungs? I imagine I’m sound again.” He paused, and stooped to turn over the books. Carelessly, he added: “But then the stethoscope may think differently. Nothing to do but wait and see.”

“Of course,” Campton agreed.

It was clear that the boy hated what was ahead of him; and what more could his father ask? Of course he was not going to confess to a desire to shirk his duty; but it was easy to see that his whole lucid intelligence repudiated any sympathy with the ruinous adventure.

“Have you seen Adele?” Campton enquired, and George replied that he had dropped in for five minutes, and that Miss Anthony wanted to see his father.

“Is she—nervous?”

“Old Adele? I should say not: she’s fighting mad. _La Revanche_ and all the rest of it. She doesn’t realize—_sancta simplicitas!_”

“Oh, I can see Adele throwing on the faggots!”

Father and son were silent, both busy lighting cigarettes. When George’s was lit he remarked: “Well, if we’re not called at once it’ll be a good chance to read ‘The Golden Bough’ right through.”

Campton stared, not knowing the book even by name. What a queer changeling the boy was! But George’s composure, his deep and genuine indifference to the whole political turmoil, once more fortified his father.

“Have they any news—?” he ventured. “They,” in their private language, meant the Brants.

“Oh, yes, lots: Uncle Andy was stiff with it. But not really amounting to anything. Of course there’s no doubt there’ll be war.”

“How about England?”

“Nobody knows; but the bankers seem to think England’s all right.” George paused, and finally added: “Look here, dear old boy—before she leaves I think mother wants to see you.”

Campton hardened instantly. “She _has_ seen me—yesterday.”

“I know; she told me.”

The son began to cut the pages of one of his books with a visiting-card he had picked up, and the father stood looking out on the Place de la Concorde through the leafy curtain of the terrace.

Campton knew that he could not refuse his son’s request; in his heart of hearts he was glad it had been made, since it might mean that “they” had found a way—perhaps through the Ambassador.

But he could never prevent a stiffening of his whole self at any summons or suggestion from the Brants. He thought of the seeming unity of the Fortin-Lescluze couple, and of the background of peaceful family life revealed by the scene about the checkered table-cloth. Perhaps that was one of the advantages of a social organization which still, as a whole, ignored divorce, and thought any private condonation better than the open breaking up of the family.

“All right; I’ll go——” he agreed. “Where are we dining?”

“Oh, I forgot—an awful orgy. Dastrey wants us at the Union. Louis Dastrey is dining with him, and he let me ask Boylston——”

“Boylston——?”

“You don’t know him. A chap who was at Harvard with me. He’s out here studying painting at the Beaux Arts. He’s an awfully good sort, and he wanted to see me before I go.”

The father’s heart sank. Only one whole day more with his boy, and this last evening but one was to be spent with poor embittered Dastrey, and two youths, one unknown to Campton, who would drown them in stupid war-chatter! But it was what George wanted; and there must not be a shade, for George, on these last hours.

“All right! You promised me something awful for to-night,” Campton grinned sardonically.

“Do you mind? I’m sorry.”

“It’s only Dastrey’s damned chauvinism that I mind. Why don’t you ask Adele to join the chorus?”

“Well—you’ll like Boylston,” said George.

* * * * *

Dastrey, after all, turned out less tragic and aggressive than Campton had feared. His irritability had vanished, and though he was very grave he seemed preoccupied only with the fate of Europe, and not with his personal stake in the affair.

But the older men said little. The youngsters had the floor, and Campton, as he listened to George and young Louis Dastrey, was overcome by a sense of such dizzy unreality that he had to grasp the arms of his ponderous leather armchair to assure himself that he was really in the flesh and in the world.

What! Two days ago they were still in the old easy Europe, a Europe in which one could make plans, engage passages on trains and steamers, argue about pictures, books, theatres, ideas, draw as much money as one chose out of the bank, and say: “The day after to-morrow I’ll be in Berlin or Vienna or Belgrade.” And here they sat in their same evening clothes, about the same shining mahogany writing-table, apparently the same group of free and independent youths and elderly men, and in reality prisoners, every one of them, hand-cuffed to this hideous masked bully of “War”!

The young men were sure that the conflict was inevitable—the evening papers left no doubt of it—and there was much animated discussion between young Dastrey and George.

Already their views diverged; the French youth, theoretically at one with his friend as to the senselessness of war in general, had at once resolutely disengaged from the mist of doctrine the fatal necessity of this particular war.

“It’s the old festering wound of Alsace-Lorraine: Bismarck foresaw it and feared it—or perhaps planned it and welcomed it: who knows? But as long as the wound was there, Germany believed that France would try to avenge it, and as long as Germany believed that, she had to keep up her own war-strength; and she’s kept it up to the toppling-over point, ruining herself and us. That’s the whole thing, as I see it. War’s rot; but to get rid of war forever we’ve got to fight this one first.”

It was wonderful to Campton that this slender learned youth should already have grasped the necessity of the conflict and its deep causes. While his own head was still spinning with wrath and bewilderment at the bottomless perversity of mankind, Louis Dastrey had analyzed and accepted the situation and his own part in it. And he was not simply resigned; he was trembling with eagerness to get the thing over. “If only England is with us we’re safe—it’s a matter of weeks,” he declared.

“Wait a bit—wait a bit; I want to know more about a whole lot of things before I fix a date for the fall of Berlin,” his uncle interposed; but Louis flung him a radiant look. “We’ve been there before, my uncle!”

“But there’s Russia too——” said Boylston explosively. He had not spoken before.

“‘_Nous l’avons eu, votre Rhin allemand_,’” quoted George, as he poured a golden Hock into his glass.

He was keenly interested, that was evident; but interested as a looker-on, a dilettante. He had neither Valmy nor Sedan in his blood, and it was as a sympathizing spectator that he ought by rights to have been sharing his friend’s enthusiasm, not as a combatant compelled to obey the same summons. Campton, glancing from one to another of their brilliant faces, felt his determination harden to save George from the consequences of his parents’ stupid blunder.

After dinner young Dastrey proposed a music-hall. The audience would be a curious sight: there would be wild enthusiasm, and singing of the Marseillaise. The other young men agreed, but their elders, after a tacitly exchanged glance, decided to remain at the club, on the plea that some one at the Ministry of War had promised to telephone if there were fresh news.

Campton and Dastrey, left alone, stood on the balcony watching the Boulevards. The streets, so deserted during the day, had become suddenly and densely populated. Hardly any vehicles were in sight: the motor omnibuses were already carrying troops to the stations, there was a report abroad that private motors were to be requisitioned, and only a few taxis and horse-cabs, packed to the driver’s box with young men in spick-and-span uniforms, broke through the mass of pedestrians which filled the whole width of the Boulevards. This mass moved slowly and vaguely, swaying this way and that, as though it awaited a portent from the heavens. In the glare of electric lamps and glittering theatre-fronts the innumerable faces stood out vividly, grave, intent, slightly bewildered. Except when the soldiers passed no cries or songs came from the crowd, but only the deep inarticulate rumour which any vast body of people gives forth.

“Queer——! How silent they are: how do you think they’re taking it?” Campton questioned.

But Dastrey had grown belligerent again. He saw the throngs before him bounding toward the frontier like the unchained furies of Rude’s “Marseillaise”; whereas to Campton they seemed full of the dumb wrath of an orderly and laborious people upon whom an unrighteous quarrel has been forced. He knew that the thought of Alsace-Lorraine still stirred in French hearts; but all Dastrey’s eloquence could not convince him that these people wanted war, or would have sought it had it not been thrust on them. The whole monstrous injustice seemed to take shape before him, and to brood like a huge sky-filling dragon of the northern darknesses over his light-loving, pleasure-loving, labour-loving France.

* * * * *

George came home late.

It was two in the morning of his last day with his boy when Campton heard the door open, and saw a flash of turned on light.

All night he had lain staring into the darkness, and thinking, thinking: thinking of George’s future, George’s friends, George and women, of that unknown side of his boy’s life which, in this great upheaval of things, had suddenly lifted its face to the surface. If war came, if George were not discharged, if George were sent to the front, if George were killed, how strange to think that things the father did not know of might turn out to have been the central things of his son’s life!

The young man came in, and Campton looked at him as though he were a stranger.

“Hullo, Dad—any news from the Ministry?” George, tossing aside his hat and stick, sat down on the bed. He had a crumpled rose in his button-hole, and looked gay and fresh, with the indestructible freshness of youth.

“What do I really know of him?” the father asked himself.

Yes: Dastrey had had news. Germany had already committed acts of overt hostility on the frontier: telegraph and telephone communications had been cut, French locomotives seized, troops massed along the border on the specious pretext of the “_Kriegsgefahr-zustand_.” It was war.

“Oh, well,” George shrugged. He lit a cigarette, and asked: “What did you think of Boylston?”

“Boylston——?”

“The fat brown chap at dinner.”