Chapter V: Book II: X (2)

What could Campton do? No one was less visited by happy inspirations; the “little acts of kindness” recommended to his pious infancy had always seemed to him far harder to think of than to perform. But now some instinct carried him straight to the corner of his studio where he remembered having shoved out of sight a half-finished study for George’s portrait. He found it, examined it critically, scribbled his signature in one corner, and set out with it for the hospital. On the way he had to stop at the Ministry of War on Mayhew’s tiresome business, and was delayed there till too late to proceed with his errand before luncheon. But in the afternoon he passed in again through the revolving plate glass, and sent up his name. Mrs. Talkett was not there, but a nurse came down, to whom, with embarrassment, he explained himself.

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

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

The nurse promised it should be given. She looked at Campton with a vague benevolence, having evidently never heard his name; and the painter turned away with a cowardly sense that he ought to have taken the picture up himself. But to see the death-change on a face so like his son’s, and its look reflected in other anguished faces, was more than he could endure. He turned away.

The next morning Mrs. Talkett wrote that René Davril was better, that the fever had dropped, and that he was lying quietly looking at the sketch. “The only thing that troubles him is that he realizes now that you have not seen his pictures. But he is very happy, and blesses you for your goodness.”

His goodness! Campton, staring at the letter, could only curse himself for his stupidity. He saw now that the one thing which might have comforted the poor lad would have been to have his own pictures seen and judged; and that one thing, he, Campton, so many years vainly athirst for the approbation of the men he revered—that one thing he had never thought of doing! The only way of atoning for his negligence was instantly to go out to the suburb where the Davril family lived. Campton, without a scruple, abandoned Mr. Mayhew, with whom he had an appointment at the Embassy and another at the War Office, and devoted the rest of the day to the expedition. It was after six when he reached the hospital again; and when Mrs. Talkett came down he went up to her impetuously.

“Well—I’ve seen them; I’ve seen his pictures, and he’s right. They’re astonishing! Awkward, still, and hesitating; but with such a sense of air and mass. He’ll do things—May I go up and tell him?”

He broke off and looked at her.

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

XIII

The killing of René Davril seemed to Campton one of the most senseless crimes the war had yet perpetrated. It brought home to him, far more vividly than the distant death of poor Jean Fortin, what an incalculable sum of gifts and virtues went to make up the monster’s daily meal.

“Ah, you want genius, do you? Mere youth’s not enough ... and health and gaiety and courage; you want brains in the bud, imagination and poetry, ideas all folded up in their sheath! It takes that, does it, to tempt your jaded appetite?” He was reminded of the rich vulgarians who will eat only things out of season. “That’s what war is like,” he muttered savagely to himself.

The next morning he went to the funeral with Mrs. Talkett—between whom and himself the tragic episode had created a sort of improvised intimacy—walking at her side through the November rain, behind the poor hearse with the tricolour over it.

At the church, while the few mourners shivered in a damp side chapel, he had time to study the family: a poor sobbing mother, two anæmic little girls, and the lame sister who was musical—a piteous group, smelling of poverty and tears. Behind them, to his surprise, he saw the curly brown head and short-sighted eyes of Boylston. Campton wondered at the latter’s presence; then he remembered “The Friends of French Art,” and concluded that the association had probably been interested in poor Davril.

With some difficulty he escaped from the thanks of the mother and sisters, and picked up a taxi to take Mrs. Talkett home.

“No—back to the hospital,” she said. “A lot of bad cases have come in, and I’m on duty again all day.” She spoke as if it were the most natural thing in the world; and he shuddered at the serenity with which women endure the unendurable.

At the hospital he followed her in. The Davril family, she told him, had insisted that they had no claim on his picture, and that it must be returned to him. Mrs. Talkett went up to fetch it; and Campton waited in one of the drawing-rooms. A step sounded behind him, and another nurse came in—but was it a nurse, or some haloed nun from a Umbrian triptych, her pure oval framed in white, her long fingers clasping a book and lily?

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

She seized his hands.

“I heard from dear Madge Talkett that you were here, and I’ve asked her to leave us together.” She looked at him with ravaged eyes, as if just risen from a penitential vigil.

“Come, please, into my little office: you didn’t know that I was the _Infirmière-Major_? My dear friend, what upheavals, what cataclysms! I see no one now: all my days and nights are given to my soldiers.”

She glided ahead on noiseless sandals to a little room where a bowl of jade filled with gardenias, and a tortoise-shell box of gold-tipped cigarettes, stood on a desk among torn and discoloured _livrets militaires_. The room was empty, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, closing the door, drew Campton to a seat at her side. So close to her, he saw that the perfect lines of her face were flawed by marks of suffering. “The woman really has a heart,” he thought, “or the war couldn’t have made her so much handsomer.”

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

“I know why you came,” she continued; “you were good to that poor little Davril.” She clutched Campton suddenly with a blue-veined hand. “My dear friend, can anything justify such horrors? Isn’t it abominable that boys like that should be murdered? That some senile old beast of a diplomatist should decree, after a good dinner, that all we love best must be offered up?” She caught his hands again, her liturgical scent enveloping him. “Campton, I know you feel as I do.” She paused, pressing his fingers hard, her beautiful mouth trembling. “For God’s sake tell me,” she implored, “how you’ve managed to keep your son from the front!”

Campton drew away, red and inarticulate. “I—my son? Those things depend on the authorities. My boy’s health....” he stammered.

“Yes, yes; I know. Your George is delicate. But so is my Ladislas—dreadfully. The lungs too. I’ve trembled for him for so long; and now, at any moment....” Two tears gathered on her long lashes and rolled down ... “at any moment he may be taken from the War Office, where he’s doing invaluable work, and forced into all that blood and horror; he may be brought back to me like those poor creatures upstairs, who are hardly men any longer ... mere vivisected animals, without eyes, without faces.” She lowered her voice and drew her lids together, so that her very eyes seemed to be whispering. “Ladislas has enemies who are jealous of him (I could give you their names); at this moment someone who ought to be at the front is intriguing to turn him out and get his place. Oh, Campton, you’ve known this terror—you know what one’s nights are like! Have pity—tell me how you managed!”

He had no idea of what he answered, or how he finally got away. Everything that was dearest to him, the thought of George, the vision of the lad dying upstairs, was defiled by this monstrous coupling of their names with that of the supple middle-aged adventurer safe in his spotless uniform at the War Office. And beneath the boiling-up of Campton’s disgust a new fear lifted its head. How did Mme. de Dolmetsch know about George? And what did she know? Evidently there had been foolish talk somewhere. Perhaps it was Mrs. Brant—or perhaps Fortin himself. All these great doctors forgot the professional secret with some one woman, if not with many. Had not Fortin revealed to his own wife the reason of Campton’s precipitate visit? The painter escaped from Mme. de Dolmetsch’s scented lair, and from the sights and sounds of the hospital, in a state of such perturbation that for a while he stood in the street wondering where he had meant to go next.

He had his own reasons for agreeing to the Davrils’ suggestion that the picture should be returned to him; and presently these reasons came back. “They’d never dare to sell it themselves; but why shouldn’t I sell it for them?” he had thought, remembering their denuded rooms, and the rusty smell of the women’s mourning. It cost him a pang to part with a study of his boy; but he was in a superstitious and expiatory mood, and eager to act on it.

He remembered having been told by Boylston that “The Friends of French Art” had their office in the Palais Royal, and he made his way through the deserted arcades to the door of a once-famous restaurant.

Behind the plate-glass windows young women with rolled-up sleeves and straw in their hair were delving in packing-cases, while, divided from them by an improvised partition, another group were busy piling on the cloak-room shelves garments such as had never before dishonoured them.

Campton stood fascinated by the sight of the things these young women were sorting: pink silk combinations, sporting ulsters in glaring black and white checks, straw hats wreathed with last summer’s sunburnt flowers, high-heeled satin shoes split on the instep, and fringed and bugled garments that suggested obsolete names like “dolman” and “mantle,” and looked like the costumes dug out of a country-house attic by amateurs preparing to play “Caste.” Was it possible that “The Friends of French Art” proposed to clothe the families of fallen artists in these prehistoric properties?

Boylston appeared, flushed and delighted (and with straw in his hair also), and led his visitor up a corkscrew stair. They passed a room where a row of people in shabby mourning like that of the Davril family sat on restaurant chairs before a _caissière’s_ desk; and at the desk Campton saw Miss Anthony, her veil pushed back and a card-catalogue at her elbow, listening to a young woman who was dramatically stating her case.

Boylston saw Campton’s surprise, and said: “Yes, we’re desperately short-handed, and Miss Anthony has deserted her refugees for a day or two to help me to straighten things out.”

His own office was in a faded _cabinet particulier_ where the dinner-table had been turned into a desk, and the weak-springed divan was weighed down under suits of ready-made clothes bearing the label of a wholesale clothier.

“These are the things we really give them; but they cost a lot of money to buy,” Boylston explained. On the divan sat a handsomely dressed elderly lady with a long emaciated face and red eyes, who rose as they entered. Boylston spoke to her in an undertone and led her into another _cabinet_, where Campton saw her tragic figure sink down on the sofa, under a glass scrawled with amorous couplets.

“That was Mme. Beausite.... You didn’t recognize her? Poor thing! Her youngest boy is blind: his eyes were put out by a shell. She is very unhappy, and she comes here and helps now and then. Beausite? Oh no, we never see _him_. He’s only our Honorary President.”

Boylston obviously spoke without afterthought; but Campton felt the sting. He too was on the honorary committee.

“Poor woman! What? The young fellow who did Cubist things? I hadn’t heard....” He remembered the cruel rumour that Beausite, when his glory began to wane, had encouraged his three sons in three different lines of art, so that there might always be a Beausite in the fashion.... “You must have to listen to pretty ghastly stories here,” he said.

The young man nodded, and Campton, with less embarrassment than he had expected, set forth his errand. In that atmosphere it seemed natural to be planning ways of relieving misery, and Boylston at once put him at his ease by looking pleased but not surprised.

“You mean to sell the sketch, sir? That will put the Davrils out of anxiety for a long time; and they’re in a bad way, as you saw.” Boylston undid the parcel, with a respectful: “May I?” and put the canvas on a chair. He gazed at it for a few moments, the blood rising sensitively over his face till it reached his tight ridge of hair. Campton remembered what George had said of his friend’s silent admirations; he was glad the young man did not speak.

When he did, it was to say with a businesslike accent: “We’re trying to get up an auction of pictures and sketches—and if we could lead off with this....”

It was Campton’s turn to redden. The possibility was one he had not thought of. If the picture were sold at auction, Anderson Brant would be sure to buy it! But he could not say this to Boylston. He hesitated, and the other, who seemed quick at feeling his way, added at once: “But perhaps you’d rather sell it privately? In that case we should get the money sooner.”

It was just the right thing to say: and Campton thanked him and picked up his sketch. At the door he hesitated, feeling that it became a member of the honorary committee to add something more.

“How are you getting on? Getting all the help you need?”

Boylston smiled. “We need such a lot. People have been very generous: we’ve had several big sums. But look at those ridiculous clothes downstairs—we get boxes and boxes of such rubbish! And there are so many applicants, and such hard cases. Take those poor Davrils, for instance. The lame Davril girl has a talent for music: plays the violin. Well, what good does it do her now? The artists are having an awful time. If this war goes on much longer, it won’t be only at the front that they’ll die.”

“Ah——” said Campton. “Well, I’ll take this to a dealer——”

On the way down he turned in to greet Miss Anthony. She looked up in surprise, her tired face haloed in tumbling hairpins; but she was too busy to do more than nod across the group about her desk.

At his offer to take her home she shook her head. “I’m here till after seven. Mr. Boylston and I are nearly snowed under. We’ve got to go down presently and help unpack; and after that I’m due at my refugee canteen at the Nord. It’s my night shift.”

Campton, on the way back to Montmartre, fell to wondering if such excesses of altruism were necessary, or a mere vain overflow of energy. He was terrified by his first close glimpse of the ravages of war, and the efforts of the little band struggling to heal them seemed pitifully ineffectual. No doubt they did good here and there, made a few lives less intolerable; but how the insatiable monster must laugh at them as he spread his red havoc wider!

On reaching home, Campton forgot everything at sight of a letter from George. He had not had one for two weeks, and this interruption, just as the military mails were growing more regular, had made him anxious. But it was the usual letter: brief, cheerful, inexpressive. Apparently there was no change in George’s situation, nor any wish on his part that there should be. He grumbled humorously at the dulness of his work and the monotony of life in a war-zone town; and wondered whether, if this sort of thing went on, there might not soon be some talk of leave. And just at the end of his affectionate and unsatisfactory two pages, Campton lit on a name that roused him.

“I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher yesterday on his way to the English front. The young lunatic looked very fit. You know he volunteered in the English army when he found he couldn’t get into the French. He’s likely to get all the fighting he wants.” It was a relief to know that someone had seen Benny Upsher lately. The letter was but four days old, and he was then on his way to the front. Probably he was not yet in the fighting he wanted, and one could, without remorse, call up an unmutilated face and clear blue eyes.

Campton, re-reading the postscript, was struck by a small thing. George had originally written: “I saw Benny Upsher yesterday,” and had then altered the phrase to: “I saw a fellow who’d seen Benny Upsher.” There was nothing out of the way in that: it simply showed that he had written in haste and revised the sentence. But he added: “The young lunatic looked very fit.” Well: that too was natural. It was “the fellow” who reported Benny as looking fit; the phrase was rather elliptic, but Campton could hardly have said why it gave him the impression that it was George himself who had seen Upsher. The idea was manifestly absurd, since there was the length of the front between George’s staff-town and the fiery pit yawning for his cousin. Campton laid aside the letter with the distinct wish that his son had not called Benny Upsher a young lunatic.

XIV

When Campton took his sketch of George to Léonce Black, the dealer who specialized in “Camptons,” he was surprised at the magnitude of the sum which the great picture-broker, lounging in a glossy War Office uniform among his Gauguins and Vuillards, immediately offered.

Léonce Black noted his surprise and smiled. “You think there’s nothing doing nowadays? Don’t you believe it, Mr. Campton. Now that the big men have stopped painting, the collectors are all the keener to snap up what’s left in their portfolios.” He placed the cheque in Campton’s hand, and drew back to study the effect of the sketch, which he had slipped into a frame against a velvet curtain. “Ah——” he said, as if he were tasting an old wine.

As Campton turned to go the dealer’s enthusiasm bubbled over. “Haven’t you got anything more? Remember me if you have.”

“I don’t sell my sketches,” said Campton. “This was exceptional—for a charity....”

“I know, I know. Well, you’re likely to have a good many more calls of the same sort before we get this war over,” the dealer remarked philosophically. “Anyhow, remember I can place anything you’ll give me. When people want a Campton it’s to me they come. I’ve got standing orders from two clients ... both given before the war, and both good to-day.”

Campton paused in the doorway, seized by his old fear of the painting’s passing into Anderson Brant’s possession.

“Look here: where is this one going?”

The dealer cocked his handsome grey head and glanced archly through plump eyelids. “Violation of professional secrecy? Well.... Well ... under constraint I’ll confess it’s to a young lady: great admirer, artist herself. Had her order by cable from New York a year ago. Been on the lookout ever since.”

“Oh, all right,” Campton answered, repocketing the money.

He set out at once for “The Friends of French Art,” and Léonce Black, bound for the Ministry of War, walked by his side, regaling him alternately with the gossip of the Ministry and with racy anecdotes of the dealers’ world. In M. Black’s opinion the war was an inexcusable blunder, since Germany was getting to be the best market for the kind of freak painters out of whom the dealers who “know how to make a man ‘foam’” can make a big turn over. “I don’t know what on earth will become of all those poor devils now: Paris cared for them only because she knew Germany would give any money for their things. Personally, as you know, I’ve always preferred sounder goods: I’m a classic, my dear Campton, and I can feel only classic art,” said the dealer, swelling out his uniformed breast and stroking his Assyrian nose as though its handsome curve followed the pure Delphic line. “But, as long as things go on as they are at present in _my_ department of the administration, the war’s not going to end in a hurry,” he continued. “And now we’re in for it, we’ve got to see the thing through.”

Campton found Boylston, as usual, in his melancholy _cabinet particulier_. He was listening to the tale of a young woman with streaming eyes and an extravagant hat. She was so absorbed in her trouble that she did not notice Campton’s entrance, and behind her back the painter made a sign to say that she was not to be interrupted.

He was as much interested in the suppliant’s tale as in watching Boylston’s way of listening. That modest and commonplace-looking young man was beginning to excite a lively curiosity in Campton. It was not only that he remembered George’s commendation, for he knew that the generous enthusiasms of youth may be inspired by trifles imperceptible to the older. It was Boylston himself who interested the painter. He knew no more of the young man than the scant details Miss Anthony could give. Boylston, it appeared, was the oldest hope of a well-to-do Connecticut family. On his leaving college a place had been reserved for him in the paternal business; but he had announced good-humouredly that he did not mean to spend his life in an office, and one day, after a ten minutes’ conversation with his father, as to which details were lacking, he had packed a suitcase and sailed for France. There he had lived ever since, in shabby rooms in the rue de Verneuil, on the scant allowance remitted by an irate parent: apparently never running into debt, yet always ready to help a friend.

All the American art-students in Paris knew Boylston; and though he was still in the early thirties, they all looked up to him. For Boylston had one quality which always impresses youth: Boylston knew everybody. Whether you went with him to a smart restaurant in the rue Royale, or to a wine-shop of the Left Bank, the _patron_ welcomed him with the same cordiality, and sent the same emphatic instructions to the cook. The first fresh peas and the tenderest spring chicken were always for this quiet youth, who, when he was alone, dined cheerfully on veal and _vin ordinaire_. If you wanted to know where to get the best Burgundy, Boylston could tell you; he could also tell you where to buy an engagement ring for your girl, a Ford runabout going at half-price, or the _papier timbré_ on which to address a summons to a recalcitrant laundress.

If you got into a row with your landlady you found that Boylston knew her, and that at sight of him she melted and withdrew her claim; or, failing this, he knew the solicitor in whose office her son was a clerk, or had other means of reducing her to reason. Boylston also knew a man who could make old clocks go, another who could clean flannels without their shrinking, and a third who could get you old picture-frames for a song; and, best of all, when any inexperienced American youth was caught in the dark Parisian cobweb (and the people at home were on no account to hear about it) Boylston was found to be the friend and familiar of certain occult authorities who, with a smile and a word of warning, could break the mesh and free the victim.

The mystery was, how and why all these people did what Boylston wanted; but the reason began to dawn on Campton as he watched the young woman in the foolish hat deliver herself of her grievance. Boylston was simply a perfect listener—and most of his life was spent in listening. Everything about him listened: his round forehead and peering screwed-up eyes, his lips twitching responsively under the close-clipped moustache, and every crease and dimple of his sagacious and humorous young countenance; even the attitude of his short fat body, with elbows comfortably bedded in heaped up papers, and fingers plunged into his crinkled hair. There was never a hint of hurry or impatience about him: having once asserted his right to do what he liked with his life, he was apparently content to let all his friends prey on it. You never caught his eye on the clock, or his lips shaping an answer before you had turned the last corner of your story. Yet when the story was told, and he had surveyed it in all its bearings, you could be sure he would do what he could for you, and do it before the day was over.

“Very well, Mademoiselle,” he said, when the young woman had finished. “I promise you I’ll see Mme. Beausite, and try to get her to recognize your claim.”

“Mind you, I don’t ask charity—I won’t _take_ charity from your committee!” the young lady hissed, gathering up a tawdry hand-bag.

“Oh, we’re not forcing it on any one,” smiled Boylston, opening the door for her.

When he turned back to Campton his face was flushed and frowning. “Poor thing! She’s a nuisance, but I’ll fight to the last ditch for her. The chap she lives with was Beausite’s secretary and understudy, and devilled for him before the war. The poor fellow has come back from the front a complete wreck, and can’t even collect the salary Beausite owes him for the last three months before the war. Beausite’s plea is that he’s too poor, and that the war lets him out of paying. Of course he counts on our doing it for him.”

“And you’re not going to?”

“Well,” said Boylston humorously, “I shouldn’t wonder if he beat us in the long run. But I’ll have a try first; and anyhow the poor girl needn’t know. She used to earn a little money doing fashion-articles, but of course there’s no market for that now, and I don’t see how the pair can live. They have a little boy, and there’s an infirm mother, and they’re waiting to get married till the girl can find a job.”

“Good Lord!” Campton groaned, with a sudden vision of the countless little trades and traffics arrested by the war, and all the industrious thousands reduced to querulous pauperism or slow death.

“How _do_ they live—all these people?”

“They don’t—always. I could tell you——”

“Don’t, for God’s sake; I can’t stand it.” Campton drew out the cheque. “Here: this is what I’ve got for the Davrils.”

“Good Lord!” said Boylston, staring with round eyes.

“It will pull them through, anyhow, won’t it?” Campton triumphed.

“Well——” said Boylston. “It will if you’ll endorse it,” he added, smiling. Campton laughed and took up a pen.

* * * * *

A day or two later Campton, returning home one afternoon, overtook a small black-veiled figure with a limp like his own. He guessed at once that it was the lame Davril girl, come to thank him; and his dislike of such ceremonies caused him to glance about for a way of escape. But as he did so the girl turned with a smile that put him to shame. He remembered Adele Anthony’s saying, one day when he had found her in her refugee office patiently undergoing a like ordeal: “We’ve no right to refuse the only coin they can repay us in.”

The Davril girl was a plain likeness of her brother, with the same hungry flame in her eyes. She wore the nondescript black that Campton had remarked at the funeral; and knowing the importance which the French attach to every detail of conventional mourning, he wondered that mother and daughter had not laid out part of his gift in crape. But doubtless the equally strong instinct of thrift had caused Mme. Davril to put away the whole sum.

Mlle. Davril greeted Campton pleasantly, and assured him that she had not found the long way from Villejuif to Montmartre too difficult.

“I would have gone to you,” the painter protested; but she answered that she wanted to see with her own eyes where her brother’s friend lived.

In the studio she looked about her with a quick searching glance, said “Oh, a piano——” as if the fact were connected with the object of her errand—and then, settling herself in an armchair, unclasped her shabby hand-bag.

“Monsieur, there has been a misunderstanding; this money is not ours.” She laid Campton’s cheque on the table.

A flush of annoyance rose to the painter’s face. What on earth had Boylston let him in for? If the Davrils were as proud as all that it was not worth while to have sold a sketch it had cost him such a pang to part with. He felt the exasperation of the would be philanthropist when he first discovers that nothing complicates life as much as doing good.

“But, Mademoiselle——”

“This money is not ours. If René had lived he would never have sold your picture; and we would starve rather than betray his trust.”

When stout ladies in velvet declare that they would starve rather than sacrifice this or that principle, the statement has only the cold beauty of rhetoric; but on the drawn lips of a thinly-clad young woman evidently acquainted with the process, it becomes a fiery reality.

“Starve—nonsense! My dear young lady, you betray him when you talk like that,” said Campton, moved.

She shook her head. “It depends, Monsieur, which things matter most to one. We shall never—my mother and I—do anything that René would not have done. The picture was not ours: we brought it back to you——”

“But if the picture’s not yours it’s mine,” Campton interrupted; “and I’d a right to sell it, and a right to do what I choose with the money.”

His visitor smiled. “That’s what we feel; it was what I was coming to.” And clasping her threadbare glove-tips about the arms of the chair Mlle. Davril set forth with extreme precision the object of her visit.

It was to propose that Campton should hand over the cheque to “The Friends of French Art,” devoting one-third to the aid of the families of combatant painters, the rest to young musicians and authors. “It doesn’t seem right that only the painters’ families should benefit by what your committee are doing. And René would have thought so too. He knew so many young men of letters and journalists who, before the war, just managed to keep their families alive; and in my profession I could tell you of poor music-teachers and accompanists whose work stopped the day war broke out, and who have been living ever since on the crusts their luckier comrades could spare them. René would have let us accept from you help that was shared with others: he would have been so glad, often, of a few francs to relieve the misery we see about us. And this great sum might be the beginning of a co-operative work for artists ruined by the war.”

She went on to explain that in the families of almost all the young artists at the front there was at least one member at home who practised one of the arts, or who was capable of doing some kind of useful work. The value of Campton’s gift, Mlle. Davril argued, would be tripled if it were so employed as to give the artists and their families occupation: producing at least the illusion that those who could were earning their living, or helping their less fortunate comrades. “It’s not only a question of saving their dignity: I don’t believe much in that. You have dignity or you haven’t—and if you have, it doesn’t need any saving,” this clear-toned young woman remarked. “The real question, for all of us artists, is that of keeping our hands in, and our interest in our work alive; sometimes, too, of giving a new talent its first chance. At any rate, it would mean work and not stagnation; which is all that most charity produces.”

She developed her plan: for the musicians, concerts in private houses (hence her glance at the piano); for the painters, small exhibitions in the rooms of the committee, where their pictures would be sold with the deduction of a percentage, to be returned to the general fund; and for the writers—well, their lot was perhaps the hardest to deal with; but an employment agency might be opened, where those who chose could put their names down and take such work as was offered. Above all, Mlle. Davril again insisted, the fund created by Campton’s gift was to be spent only in giving employment, not for mere relief.

Campton listened with growing attention. Nothing hitherto had been less in the line of his interests than the large schemes of general amelioration which were coming to be classed under the transatlantic term of “Social Welfare.” If questioned on the subject a few months earlier he would probably have concealed his fundamental indifference under the profession of an extreme individualism, and the assertion of every man’s right to suffer and starve in his own way. Even since René Davril’s death had brought home to him the boundless havoc of the war, he had felt no more than the impulse to ease his own pain by putting his hand in his pocket when a particular case was too poignant to be ignored.

Yet here were people who had already offered their dearest to France, and were now pleading to be allowed to give all the rest; and who had had the courage and wisdom to think out in advance the form in which their gift would do most good. Campton had the awe of the unpractical man for anyone who knows how to apply his ideas. He felt that there was no use in disputing Mlle. Davril’s plan: he must either agree to it or repocket his cheque.

“I’ll do as you want, of course; but I’m not much good about details. Hadn’t you better consult some one else?” he suggested.

Oh, that was already done: she had outlined her project to Miss Anthony and Mr. Boylston, who approved. All she wanted was Campton’s consent; and this he gave the more cordially when he learned that, for the present at least, nothing more was expected of him. First steps in beneficence, he felt, were unspeakably terrifying; yet he was already aware that, resist as he might, he would never be able to keep his footing on the brink of that abyss.

Into it, as the days went by, his gaze was oftener and oftener plunged. He had begun to feel that pity was his only remaining link with his kind, the one barrier between himself and the dreadful solitude which awaited him when he returned to his studio. What would there have been to think of there, alone among his unfinished pictures and his broken memories, if not the wants and woes of people more bereft than himself? His own future was not a thing to dwell on. George was safe: but what George and he were likely to make of each other after the ordeal was over was a question he preferred to put aside. He was more and more taking George and his safety for granted, as a solid standing-ground from which to reach out a hand to the thousands struggling in the depths. As long as the world’s fate was in the balance it was every man’s duty to throw into that balance his last ounce of brain and muscle. Campton wondered how he had ever thought that an accident of birth, a remoteness merely geographical, could justify, or even make possible, an attitude of moral aloofness. Harvey Mayhew’s reasons for wishing to annihilate Germany began to seem less grotesque than his own for standing aside.

In the heat of his conversion he no longer grudged the hours given to Mr. Mayhew. He patiently led his truculent relative from one government office to another, everywhere laying stress on Mr. Mayhew’s sympathy with France and his desire to advocate her cause in the United States, and trying to curtail his enumeration of his grievances by a glance at the clock, and the reminder that they had another Minister to see. Mr. Mayhew was not very manageable. His adventure had grown with repetition, and he was increasingly disposed to feel that the retaliation he called down on Germany could best be justified by telling every one what he had suffered from her. Intensely aware of the value of time in Utica, he was less sensible of it in Paris, and seemed to think that, since he had left a flourishing business to preach the Holy War, other people ought to leave their affairs to give him a hearing. But his zeal and persistence were irresistible, and doors which Campton had seen barred against the most reasonable appeals flew open at the sound of Mr. Mayhew’s trumpet. His pink face and silvery hair gave him an apostolic air, and circles to which America had hitherto been a mere speck in space suddenly discovered that he represented that legendary character, the Typical American.

The keen Boylston, prompt to note and utilize the fact, urged Campton to interest Mr. Mayhew in “The Friends of French Art,” and with considerable flourish the former Peace Delegate was produced at a committee meeting and given his head. But his interest flagged when he found that the “Friends” concerned themselves with Atrocities only in so far as any act of war is one, and that their immediate task was the humdrum one of feeding and clothing the families of the combatants and sending “comforts” to the trenches. He served up, with a somewhat dog-eared eloquence, the usual account of his own experiences, and pressed a modest gift upon the treasurer; but when he departed, after wringing everybody’s hands, and leaving the French members bedewed with emotion, Campton had the conviction that their quiet weekly meetings would not often be fluttered by his presence.

Campton was spending an increasing amount of time in the Palais Royal restaurant, where he performed any drudgery for which no initiative was required. Once or twice, when Miss Anthony was submerged by a fresh influx of refugees, he lent her a hand too; and on most days he dropped in late at her office, waited for her to sift and dismiss the last applicants, and saw her home through the incessant rain. It interested him to note that the altruism she had so long wasted on pampered friends was developing into a wise and orderly beneficence. He had always thought of her as an eternal schoolgirl; now she had grown into a woman. Sometimes he fancied the change dated from the moment when their eyes had met across the station, the day they had seen George off. He wondered whether it might not be interesting to paint her new face, if ever painting became again thinkable.

“Passion—I suppose the great thing is a capacity for passion,” he mused.

In himself he imagined the capacity to be quite dead. He loved his son: yes—but he was beginning to see that he loved him for certain qualities he had read into him, and that perhaps after all——. Well, perhaps after all the sin for which he was now atoning in loneliness was that of having been too exclusively an artist, of having cherished George too egotistically and self-indulgently, too much as his own most beautiful creation. If he had loved him more humanly, more tenderly and recklessly, might he have not put into his son the tenderness and recklessness which were beginning to seem to him the qualities most supremely human?

XV

A week or two later, coming home late from a long day’s work at the office, Campton saw Mme. Lebel awaiting him.

He always stopped for a word now; fearing each time that there was bad news of Jules Lebel, but not wishing to seem to avoid her.

To-day, however, Mme. Lebel, though mysterious, was not anxious.

“Monsieur will find the studio open. There’s a lady: she insisted on going up.”

“A lady? Why did you let her in? What kind of a lady?”

“A lady—well, a lady with such magnificent furs that one couldn’t keep her out in the cold,” Mme. Lebel answered with simplicity.

Campton went up apprehensively. The idea of unknown persons in possession of his studio always made him nervous. Whoever they were, whatever errands they came on, they always—especially women—disturbed the tranquil course of things, faced him with unexpected problems, unsettled him in one way or another. Bouncing in on people suddenly was like dynamiting fish: it left him with his mind full of fragments of dismembered thoughts.

As he entered he perceived from the temperate atmosphere that Mme. Lebel had not only opened the studio but made up the fire. The lady’s furs must indeed be magnificent.

She sat at the farther end of the room, in a high-backed chair near the stove, and when she rose he recognized his former wife. The long sable cloak, which had slipped back over the chair, justified Mme. Lebel’s description, but the dress beneath it appeared to Campton simpler than Mrs. Brant’s habitual raiment. The lamplight, striking up into her powdered face, puffed out her under-lids and made harsh hollows in her cheeks. She looked frightened, ill and yet determined.

“John——” she began, laying her hand on his sleeve.

It was the first time she had ever set foot in his shabby quarters, and in his astonishment he could only stammer out: “Julia——”

But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears. “Not—bad news?” he broke out.

She shook her head and, drawing a handkerchief from a diamond-monogrammed bag, wiped away the tears and the powder. Then she pressed the handkerchief to her lips, gazing at him with eyes as helpless as a child’s.

“Sit down,” said Campton.

As they faced each other across the long table, with papers and paint-rags and writing materials pushed aside to make room for the threadbare napkin on which his plate and glass, and bottle of _vin ordinaire_, were set out, he wondered if the scene woke in her any memory of their first days of gaiety and poverty, or if she merely pitied him for still living in such squalor. And suddenly it occurred to him that when the war was over, and George came back, it would be pleasant to hunt out a little apartment in an old house in the Faubourg St. Germain, put some good furniture in it, and oppose the discreeter charm of such an interior to the heavy splendours of the Avenue Marigny. How could he expect to hold a luxury-loving youth if he had only this dingy studio to receive him in?

Mrs. Brant began to speak.

“I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I think? She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has happened ... too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful ... and of course men like that ought not to be sent to the front....”

“Men like what?”

“Geniuses,” said Mrs. Brant. “He was dreadfully delicate besides, and was doing admirable work on some military commission in Paris; I believe he knew any number of languages. And poor Mme. de Dolmetsch—you know I’ve never approved of her; but things are so changed nowadays, and at any rate she was madly attached to him, and had done everything to keep him in Paris: medical certificates, people at Headquarters working for her, and all the rest. But it seems there are no end of officers always intriguing to get staff-jobs: strong able-bodied young men who ought to be in the trenches, and are fit for nothing else, but who are jealous of the others. And last week, in spite of all she could do, poor Isador was ordered to the front.”

Campton made an impatient movement. It was even more distasteful to him to be appealed to by Mrs. Brant in Isador’s name than by Mme. de Dolmetsch in George’s. His gorge rose at the thought that people should associate in their minds cases as different as those of his son and Mme. de Dolmetsch’s lover.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”

Mrs. Brant stared. “Safe? He was killed the day after he got to the front.”

“Good Lord—Isador?”

Ladislas Isador killed at the front! The words remained unmeaning; by no effort could Campton relate them to the fat middle-aged philanderer with his Jewish eyes, his Slav eloquence, his Levantine gift for getting on, and for getting out from under. Campton tried to picture the clever contriving devil drawn in his turn into that merciless red eddy, and gulped down the Monster’s throat with the rest. What a mad world it was, in which the same horrible and magnificent doom awaited the coward and the hero!

“Poor Mme. de Dolmetsch!” he muttered, remembering with a sense of remorse her desperate appeal and his curt rebuff. Once again the poor creature’s love had enlightened her, and she had foreseen what no one else in the world would have believed: that her lover was to die like a hero.

“Isador was nearly forty, and had a weak heart; and she’d left nothing, literally nothing, undone to save him.” Campton read in his wife’s eyes what was coming. “It’s impossible _now_ that George should not be taken,” Mrs. Brant went on.

The same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she would not say it.

“It may be George’s turn any day,” she insisted.

They sat and looked at each other without speaking; then she began again imploringly: “I tell you there’s not a moment to be lost!”

Campton picked up a palette-knife and began absently to rub it with an oily rag. Mrs. Brant’s anguished voice still sounded on. “Unless something is done immediately.... It appears there’s a regular hunt for _embusqués_, as they’re called. As if it was everybody’s business to be killed! How’s the staff-work to be carried on if they’re all taken? But it’s certain that if we don’t act at once ... act energetically....”

He fixed his eyes on hers. “Why do you come to _me_?” he asked.

Her lids opened wide. “But he’s our child.”

“Your husband knows more people—he has ways, you’ve often told me——”

She reddened faintly and seemed about to speak; but the reply died on her lips.

“Why did you say,” Campton pursued, “that you had come here because you wanted to see me without Brant’s knowing it?”

She lowered her eyes and fixed them on the knife he was still automatically rubbing.

“Because Anderson thinks.... Anderson won’t.... He says he’s done all he can.”

“Ah——” cried Campton, drawing a deep breath. He threw back his shoulders, as if to shake off a weight. “I—feel exactly as Brant does,” he declared.

“You—you feel as he does? You, George’s father? But a father has never done all he can for his son! There’s always something more that he can do!”

The words, breaking from her in a cry, seemed suddenly to change her from an ageing doll into a living and agonized woman. Campton had never before felt as near to her, as moved to the depths by her. For the length of a heart-beat he saw her again with a red-haired baby in her arms, the light of morning on her face.

“My dear—I’m sorry.” He laid his hand on hers.

“Sorry—sorry? I don’t want you to be sorry. I want you to do something—I want you to save him!”

He faced her with bent head, gazing absently at their interwoven fingers: each hand had forgotten to release the other.

“I can’t do anything more,” he repeated.

She started up with a despairing exclamation. “What’s happened to you? Who has influenced you? What has changed you?”

How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly in its essence been no other. That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.

In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige anybody. Even now, the automatic obedience of the millions of the untaught and the unthinking, though it had its deep pathetic significance, did not move Campton like the clear-eyed sacrifice of the few who knew why they were dying. Jean Fortin, René Davril, and such lads as young Louis Dastrey, with his reasoned horror of butchery and waste in general, and his instant grasp of the necessity of this particular sacrifice: it was they who had first shed light on the dark problem.

Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils of association, habit, background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.

He heard Mrs. Brant crying.

“Julia,” he said, “Julia, I wish you’d try to see....”

She dashed away her tears. “See what? All I see is _you_, sitting here safe and saying you can do nothing to save him! But to have the right to say that you ought to be in the trenches yourself! What do you suppose those young men out there think of their fathers, safe at home, who are too high-minded and conscientious to protect them?”

He looked at her compassionately. “Yes,” he said, “that’s the bitterest part of it. But for that, there would hardly be anything in the worst war for us old people to lie awake about.”

Mrs. Brant had stood up and was feverishly pulling on her gloves: he saw that she no longer heard him. He helped her to draw her furs about her, and stood waiting while she straightened her veil and tapped the waves of hair into place, her eyes blindly seeking for a mirror. There was nothing more that either could say.

He lifted the lamp, and went out of the door ahead of her.

“You needn’t come down,” she said in a sob; but leaning over the rail into the darkness he answered: “I’ll give you a light: the concierge has forgotten the lamp on the stairs.”

He went ahead of her down the long greasy flights, and as they reached the ground floor he heard a noise of feet coming and going, and frightened voices exclaiming. In the doorway of the porter’s lodge Mrs. Brant’s splendid chauffeur stood looking on compassionately at a group of women gathered about Mme. Lebel.

The old woman sat in her den, her arms stretched across the table, her sewing fallen at her feet. On the table lay an open letter. The grocer’s wife from the corner stood by, sobbing.

Mrs. Brant stopped, and Campton, sure now of what was coming, pushed his way through the neighbours about the door. Mme. Lebel’s eyes met his with the mute reproach of a tortured animal. “Jules,” she said, “last Wednesday ... through the heart.”