Chapter IX: Book III: XXIV (2)

Campton reached out for the letter. Mrs. Talkett—Madge Talkett and George! That was where the boy had gone then, that last night when his father, left alone at the Crillon, had been so hurt by his desertion! That was the name which, in his hours of vigil in the little white room, Campton had watched for on his son’s lips, the name which, one day, sooner or later, he would have to hear them pronounce.... How little he had thought, as he sat studying the mysterious beauty of George’s face, what a commonplace secret it concealed!

The writing was not George’s, but that of an unlettered French soldier. Campton, glancing at the signature, recalled it as that of his son’s orderly, who had been slightly wounded in the same attack as George, and sent for twenty-four hours to the same hospital at Doullens. He had been at George’s side when he fell, and with the simple directness often natural to his class in France he told the tale of his lieutenant’s wounding, in circumstances which appeared to have given George great glory in the eyes of his men. They thought the wound mortal; but the orderly and a stretcher-bearer had managed to get the young man into the shelter of a little wood. The stretcher-bearer, it turned out, was a priest. He had at once applied the consecrated oil, and George, still conscious, had received it “with a beautiful smile”; then the orderly, thinking all was over, had hurried back to the fighting, and been wounded. The next day he too had been carried to Doullens; and there, after many enquiries, he had found his lieutenant in the same hospital, alive, but too ill to see him.

He had contrived, however, to see the nurse, and had learned from her that the doctors had not given up hope. With that he had to be content; but before returning to his base he had hastened to fulfill his lieutenant’s instructions (given “many months earlier”) by writing to tell “his lady” that he was severely wounded, but still alive—“which is a good deal in itself,” the orderly hopefully ended, “not to mention his receiving the Legion of Honour.”

Campton laid the letter down. There was too much to be taken in all at once; and, as usual in moments of deep disturbance, he wanted to be alone, above all wanted to be away from Julia. But Julia held him with insistent eyes.

“Do you want this?” he asked finally, pushing the letter toward her.

She recoiled. “Want it? A letter written to that woman? No! I should have returned it at once—but Anderson wouldn’t let me.... Think of her forcing herself upon me as she did—and making you paint her portrait! I see it all now. Had you any idea this was going on?”

Campton shook his head, and perceived by her look of relief that what she had resented above all was the thought of his being in a secret of George’s from which she herself was excluded.

“Adele didn’t know either,” she said, with evident satisfaction. Campton remembered that he had been struck by Miss Anthony’s look of sincerity when he had asked her if she had any idea where George had spent his last evening, and she had answered negatively. This recollection made him understand Mrs. Brant’s feeling of relief.

“Perhaps, after all, it’s only a flirtation—a mere sentimental friendship,” he hazarded.

“A flirtation?” Mrs. Brant’s Mater Dolorosa face suddenly sharpened to worldly astuteness. “A sentimental friendship? Have you ever heard George mention her name—or make any sort of allusion to such a friendship?”

Campton considered. “No. I don’t remember his ever speaking of her.”

“Well, then——” Her eyes had the irritated look he had seen on the far-off day when he had thrown Beausite’s dinner invitation into the fire. Once more, they seemed to say, she had taken the measure of his worldly wisdom.

George’s silence—his care not even to mention that the Talketts were so much as known to him—certainly made it look as though the matter went deep with him. Campton, recalling the tone of the Talkett drawing-room and its familiars, had an even stronger recoil of indignation than Julia’s; but he was silenced by a dread of tampering with his son’s privacy, a sense of the sacredness of everything pertaining to that still-mysterious figure in the white bed upstairs.

Mrs. Brant’s face had clouded again. “It’s all so dreadful—and this Extreme Unction too! What is it exactly, do you know? A sort of baptism? Will the Roman Church try to get hold of him on the strength of it?”

Campton remembered with a faint inward amusement that, in spite of her foreign bringing-up, and all her continental affinities, Julia had remained as implacably and incuriously Protestant as if all her life she had heard the Scarlet Woman denounced from Presbyterian pulpits. At another time it would have amused him to ponder on this one streak in her of the ancestral iron; but now he wanted only to console her.

“Oh, no—it was just the accident of the priest’s being there. One of our chaplains would have done the same kind of thing.”

She looked at him mistrustfully. “The same kind of thing? It’s never the same with them! Whatever they do reaches ahead. I’ve seen such advantage taken of the wounded when they were too weak to resist ... didn’t know what they were saying or doing....” Her eyes filled with tears. “A priest and a woman—I feel as if I’d lost my boy!”

The words went through Campton like a sword, and he sprang to his feet. “Oh, for God’s sake be quiet—don’t say it! What does anything matter but that he’s alive?”

“Of course, of course ... I didn’t mean.... But that he should think only of _her_, and not of us ... that he should have deceived us ... about everything ... everything....”

“Ah, don’t say that either! Don’t tempt Providence! If he deceived us, as you call it, we’ve no one but ourselves to blame; you and I, and—well, and Brant. Didn’t we all do our best to make him deceive us—with our intriguing and our wire-pulling and our cowardice? How he despised us for it—yes, thank God, how he despised us from the first! He didn’t hide the truth from Boylston or Adele, because they were the only two on a level with him. And _they_ knew why he’d deceived us; they understood him, they abetted him from the first.” He stopped, checked by Mrs. Brant’s pale bewildered face, and the eyes imploringly lifted, as if to ward off unintelligible words.

“Ah, well, all this is no use,” he said; “we’ve got him safe, and it’s more than we deserve.” He laid his hand on her shoulder. “Go to bed; you’re dead-beat. Only don’t say things—things that might wake up the Furies....”

He pocketed the letter and went out in search of Mr. Brant, followed by her gaze of perplexity.

The latter was smoking a last cigar as he paced up and down the cloister with upturned coat-collar. Silence lay on the carefully darkened building, crouching low under an icy sea-fog; at intervals, through the hush, the waves continued to mimic the booming of the guns.

Campton drew out the orderly’s letter. “I hear you’re leaving to-morrow early, and I suppose I’d better give this back,” he said.

Mr. Brant had evidently expected him. “Oh, thanks. But Mrs. Talkett says she has no right to it.”

“No right to it? That’s a queer thing to say.”

“So I thought. I suppose she meant, till you’d seen it. She was dreadfully upset ... till she saw me she’d supposed he was dead.”

Campton shivered. “She sent this to your house?”

“Yes; the moment she got it. It was waiting there when my—when Julia arrived.”

“And you went to thank her?”

“Yes.” Mr. Brant hesitated. “Julia disliked to keep the letter. And I thought it only proper to take it back myself.”

“Certainly. And—what was your impression?”

Mr. Brant hesitated again. He had already, Campton felt, reached the utmost limit of his power of communicativeness. It was against all his habits to “commit himself.” Finally he said, in an unsteady voice: “It was impossible not to feel sorry for her.”

“Did she say—er—anything special? Anything about herself and——”

“No; not a word. She was—well, all broken up, as they say.”

“Poor thing!” Campton murmured.

“Yes—oh, yes!” Mr. Brant held the letter, turning it thoughtfully about. “It’s a great thing,” he began abruptly, as if the words were beyond his control, “to have such a beautiful account of the affair. George himself, of course, would never——”

“No, never.” Campton considered. “You must take it back to her, naturally. But I should like to have a copy first.”

Mr. Brant put a hand in his pocket. “I supposed you would. And I took the liberty of making two—oh, privately, of course. I hope you’ll find my writing fairly legible.” He drew two folded sheets from his note-case, and offered one to Campton.

“Oh, thank you.” The two men grasped hands through the fog.

Mr. Brant turned to continue his round, and Campton went up to the whitewashed cell in which he was lodged. Screening his candle to keep the least light from leaking through the shutters, he re-read the story of George’s wounding, copied out in the cramped tremulous writing of a man who never took pen in hand but to sign a daily batch of typed letters. The “hand-made” copy of a letter by Mr. Brant represented something like the pious toil expended by a monkish scribe on the page of a missal; and Campton was moved by the little man’s devotion.

As for the letter, Campton had no sooner begun to re-read it than he entirely forgot that it was a message of love, addressed at George’s request to Mrs. Talkett, and saw in it only the record of his son’s bravery. And for the first time he understood that from the moment of George’s wounding until now he had never really thought of him in relation to the war, never thought of his judgment on the war, of all the unknown emotions, resolves and actions which had drawn him so many months ago from his safe shelter in the Argonne.

These things Campton, unconsciously, had put out of his mind, or rather had lost out of his mind, from the moment when he had heard of George’s wounding. By-and-bye, he knew, the sense of them, and of the questions they raised, would come back and possess him; but meanwhile, emptied of all else, he brimmed with the mere fact of George’s bodily presence, with the physical signs of him, his weakness, his temperature, the pain in his arm, the oppression on his lung, all the daily insistent details involved in coaxing him slowly back to life.

The father could bear no more; he put the letter away, as a man might put away something of which his heart was too full to measure it. Later—yes; now, all he knew was that his son was alive.

* * * * *

But the hour of Campton’s entering into glory came when, two or three days later, George asked with a sudden smile: “When I exchanged regiments I did what you’d always hoped I would, eh, Dad?”

It was the first allusion, on the part of either, to the mystery of George’s transit from the Argonne to the front. At Doullens he had been too weak to be questioned, and as he grew stronger, and entered upon the successive stages of his convalescence, he gave the impression of having travelled far beyond such matters, and of living his real life in some inconceivable region from which, with that new smile of his, he continued to look down unseeingly on his parents. “It’s exactly as if he were dead,” the father thought. “And if he were, he might go on watching us with just such a smile.”

And then, one morning as they were taking a few steps on a sunny terrace, Campton had felt the pressure of the boy’s sound arm, and caught the old George in his look.

“I ... good Lord ... at any rate I’m glad you felt sure of me,” Campton could only stammer in reply.

George laughed. “Well—rather!”

There was a long silence full of sea-murmurs, too drowsy and indolent, for once, to simulate the horror of the guns.

“I—I only wish you’d felt you could trust me about it from the first, as you did Adele and Boylston,” the father continued.

“But, my dear fellow, I did feel it! I swear I did! Only, you see, there was mother. I thought it all over, and decided it would be easier for you both if I said nothing. And, after all, I’m glad now that I didn’t—that is, if you really do understand.”

“Yes; I understand.”

“That’s jolly.” George’s eyes turned from his and rested with a joyful gravity on the little round-faced Sister who hurried up to say that he’d been out long enough. Campton often caught him fixing this look of serene benevolence on the people who were gradually repeopling his world, a look which seemed to say that they were new to him, yet dimly familiar. He was like a traveller returning after incommunicable adventures to the place where he had lived as a child; and, as happens with such wanderers, the trivial and insignificant things, the things a newcomer would not have noticed, seemed often to interest him most of all.

He said nothing more about himself, but with the look of recovered humanness which made him more lovable if less remotely beautiful, began to question his father.

“Boylston wrote that you’d begun to paint again. I’m glad.”

“Oh, I only took it up for a while last spring.”

“Portraits?”

“A few. But I chucked it. I couldn’t stand the atmosphere.”

“What atmosphere?”

“Of people who could want to be painted at such a time. People who wanted to ‘secure a Campton.’ Oh, and then the dealers—God!”

George seemed unimpressed. “After all, life’s got to go on.”

“Yes—that’s what they say! And the only result is to make me doubt if _theirs_ has.”

His son laughed, and then threw off: “You did Mrs. Talkett?”

“Yes,” Campton snapped, off his guard.

“She’s a pretty creature,” said George; and at that moment his eyes, resting again on the little nurse, who was waiting at his door with a cup of cocoa, lit up with celestial gratitude.

“The _communiqué’s_ good to-day,” she cried; and he smiled at her boyishly. The war was beginning to interest him again: Campton was sure that every moment he could spare from that unimaginable region which his blue eyes guarded like a sword was spent among his comrades at the front.

* * * * *

As the day approached for the return to Paris, Campton began to penetrate more deeply into the meaning of George’s remoteness. He himself, he discovered, had been all unawares in a far country, a country guarded by a wingèd sentry, as the old hymn had it: the region of silent incessant communion with his son. Just they two: everything else effaced; not discarded, destroyed, not disregarded even, but blotted out by a soft silver haze, as the brown slopes and distances were, on certain days, from the windows of the seaward-gazing hospital.

It was not that Campton had been unconscious of the presence of other suffering about them. As George grew stronger, and took his first steps in the wards, he and his father were inevitably brought into contact with the life of the hospital. George had even found a few friends, and two or three regimental comrades, among the officers perpetually coming and going, or enduring the long weeks of agony which led up to the end. But that was only toward the close of their sojourn, when George was about to yield his place to others, and be taken to Paris for the re-education of his shattered arm. And by that time the weeks of solitary communion had left such an imprint on Campton that, once the hospital was behind him, and no more than a phase of memory, it became to him as one of its own sea-mists, in which he and his son might have been peacefully shut away together from all the rest of the world.

XXVIII

“Preparedness!” cried Boylston in an exultant crow.

His round brown face with its curly crest and peering half-blind eyes beamed at Campton in the old way across the desk of the Palais Royal office; and from the corner where she had sunk down on one of the broken-springed divans, Adele Anthony echoed: “Preparedness!”

It was the first time that Campton had heard the word; but the sense of it had been in the air ever since he and George had got back to Paris. He remembered, on the very day of their arrival, noticing something different in both Boylston and Miss Anthony; and the change had shown itself in the same way: both seemed more vivid yet more remote. It had struck Campton in the moment of first meeting them, in the Paris hospital near the Bois de Boulogne—Fortin-Lescluze’s old Nursing-Home transformed into a House of Re-education—to which George had been taken. In the little cell crowded with flowers—almost too many flowers, his father thought, for the patient’s aching head and tired eyes—Campton, watching the entrance of the two visitors, the first to be admitted after Julia and Mr. Brant, had instantly remarked the air they had of sharing something so secret and important that their joy at seeing George seemed only the overflow of another deeper joy.

Their look had just such a vividness as George’s own; as their glances crossed, Campton saw the same light in the eyes of all three. And now, a few weeks later, the clue to it came to him in Boylston’s new word. _Preparedness!_ America, it appeared, had caught it up from east to west, in that sudden incalculable way she had of flinging herself on a new idea; from a little group of discerning spirits the contagion had spread like a prairie fire, sweeping away all the other catchwords of the hour, devouring them in one great blaze of wrath and enthusiasm. America meant to be prepared! First had come the creation of the training camp at Plattsburg, for which, after long delays and much difficulty, permission had been wrung from a reluctant government; then, as candidates flocked to it, as the whole young manhood of the Eastern States rose to the call, other camps, rapidly planned, were springing up at Fort Oglethorpe in Georgia, at Fort Sheridan in Illinois, at The Presidio in California; for the idea was spreading through the West, and the torch kindled beside the Atlantic seaboard already flashed its light on the Pacific.

For hours at a time Campton heard Boylston talking about these training camps with the young Americans who helped him in his work, or dropped in to seek his counsel. More than ever, now, he was an authority and an oracle to these stray youths who were expending their enthusiasm for France in the humblest of philanthropic drudgery: students of the Beaux Arts or the University, or young men of leisure discouraged by the indifference of their country and the dilatoriness of their government, and fired by the desire to take part in a struggle in which they had instantly felt their own country to be involved in spite of geographical distance.

None of these young men had heard Benny Upsher’s imperious call to be “in it” from the first, no matter how or at what cost. They were of the kind to wait for a lead—and now Boylston was giving it to them with his passionate variations on the great theme of Preparedness. George, meanwhile, lay there in his bed and smiled; and now and then Boylston brought one or two of the more privileged candidates to see him. One day Campton found young Louis Dastrey there, worn and haggard after a bad wound, and preparing to leave for America as instructor in one of the new camps. That seemed to bring the movement closer than ever, to bring it into their very lives. The thought flashed through Campton: “When George is up, we’ll get him sent out too”; and once again a delicious sense of security crept through him.

George, as yet, was only sitting up for a few hours a day; the wound in the lung was slow in healing, and his fractured arm in recovering its flexibility. But in another fortnight he was to leave the hospital and complete his convalescence at his mother’s.

The thought was bitter to Campton; he had had all kinds of wild plans—of taking George to the Crillon, or hiring an apartment for him, or even camping with him at the studio. But George had smiled all this away. He meant to return to the Avenue Marigny, where he always stayed when he came to Paris, and where it was natural that his mother should want him now. Adele Anthony pointed out to Campton how natural it was, one day as he and she left the Palais Royal together. They were going to lunch at a near-by restaurant, as they often did on leaving the office, and Campton had begun to speak of George’s future arrangements. He would be well enough to leave the hospital in another week, and then no doubt a staff-job could be obtained for him in Paris—“with Brant’s pull, you know,” Campton concluded, hardly aware that he had uttered the detested phrase without even a tinge of irony. But Adele was aware, as he saw by the faint pucker of her thin lips.

He shrugged her smile away indifferently. “Oh, well—hang it, yes! Everything’s changed now, isn’t it? After what the boy’s been through I consider that we’re more than justified in using Brant’s pull in his favour—or anybody else’s.”

Miss Anthony nodded and unfolded her napkin.

“Well, then,” Campton continued his argument, “as he’s likely to be in Paris now till the war is over—which means some time next year, they all say—why shouldn’t I take a jolly apartment somewhere for the two of us? Those pictures I did last spring brought me in a lot of money, and there’s no reason——” His face lit up. “Servants, you say? Why, my poor Mariette may be back from Lille any time now. They tell me there’s sure to be a big push in the spring. They’re saving up for that all along the line. Ask Dastrey ... ask....”

“You’d better let George go to his mother,” said Miss Anthony concisely.

“Why?”

“Because it’s natural—it’s human. _You’re_ not always, you know,” she added with another pucker.

“Not human?”

“I don’t mean that you’re inhuman. But you see things differently.”

“I don’t want to see anything but one; and that’s my own son. How shall I ever see George if he’s at the Avenue Marigny?”

“He’ll come to you.”

“Yes—when he’s not at Mrs. Talkett’s!”

Miss Anthony frowned. The subject had been touched upon between them soon after Campton’s return, but Miss Anthony had little light to throw on it: George had been as mute with her as with every one else, and she knew Mrs. Talkett but slightly, and seldom saw her. Yet Campton perceived that she could not hear the young woman named without an involuntary contraction of her brows.

“I wish I liked her!” she murmured.

“Mrs. Talkett?”

“Yes—I should think better of myself if I did. And it might be useful. But I can’t—I can’t!”

Campton said within himself: “Oh, women——!”

For his own resentment had died out long ago. He could think of the affair now as one of hundreds such as happen to young men; he was even conscious of regarding it, in some unlit secret fold of himself, as a probable guarantee of George’s wanting to remain in Paris, another subterranean way of keeping him, should such be needed. Perhaps that was what Miss Anthony meant by saying that her liking Mrs. Talkett might be “useful.”

“Why shouldn’t he be with me?” the father persisted. “He and I were going off together when the war begun. I was defrauded of that—why shouldn’t I have him now?”

Miss Anthony smiled. “Well, for one thing, because of that very ‘pull’ you were speaking of.”

“Oh, the Brants, the Brants!” Campton glanced impatiently at the bill-of-fare, grumbled: “_Déjeuner du jour_, I suppose?” and went on: “Yes; I might have known it—he belongs to them. From the minute we got back, and I saw them at the station, with their motor waiting, and everything arranged as only money can arrange it, I knew I’d lost my boy again.” He stared moodily before him. “And yet if the war hadn’t come I should have got him back—I almost had.”

His companion still smiled, a little wistfully. She leaned over and laid her hand on his, under cover of the bill-of-fare. “You did get him back, John, forever and always, the day he exchanged into the infantry. Isn’t that enough?”

Campton answered her smile. “You gallant old chap, you!” he said; and they began to lunch.

* * * * *

George was able to be up now, able to drive out, and to see more people; and Campton was not surprised, on approaching his door a day or two later, to hear several voices in animated argument.

The voices (and this did surprise him) were all men’s. In one he recognized Boylston’s deep round notes; but the answering voice, flat, toneless and yet eager, puzzled him with a sense of something familiar but forgotten. He opened the door, and saw, at the tea-tray between George and Boylston, the smoothly-brushed figure of Roger Talkett.

Campton had not seen Mrs. Talkett’s husband for months, and in the interval so much had happened that the young man, always somewhat faintly-drawn, had become as dim as a daguerreotype held at the wrong angle.

The painter hung back, slightly embarrassed; but Mr. Talkett did not seem in the least disturbed by his appearance, or by the fact of himself being where he was. It was evident that, on whatever terms George might be with his wife, Mr. Talkett was determined to shed on him the same impartial beam as on all her other visitors.

His eye-glasses glinted blandly up at Campton. “Now I daresay I _am_ subversive,” he began, going on with what he had been saying, but in a tone intended to include the newcomer. “I don’t say I’m not. We _are_ a subversive lot at home, all of us—you must have noticed that, haven’t you, Mr. Campton?”

Boylston emitted a faint growl. “What’s that got to do with it?” he asked.

Mr. Talkett’s glasses slanted in his direction. “Why—everything! Resistance to the herd-instinct (to borrow one of my wife’s expressions) is really innate in me. And the idea of giving in now, of sacrificing my convictions, just because of all this deafening noise about America’s danger and America’s duties—well, _no_,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening his glasses, “Philistinism won’t go down with me, in whatever form it tries to disguise itself.” Instinctively, he stretched a neat hand toward the teacups, as if he had been rearranging the furniture at one of his wife’s parties.

“But—but—but——” Boylston stuttered, red with rage.

George burst into a laugh. He seemed to take a boyish amusement in the dispute. “Tea, father?” he suggested, reaching across the tray for a cigarette.

Talkett jerked himself to his feet. “Take my chair, now do, Mr. Campton. You’ll be more comfortable. Here, let me shake up this cushion for you——” (“_Cushion!_” Boylston interjected scornfully.) “A light, George? Now don’t move!—I don’t say, of course, old chap,” Talkett continued, as he held the match deferentially to George’s cigarette, “that this sort of talk would be safe—or advisable—just now in public; subversive talk never is. But when two or three of the Elect are gathered together—well, your father sees my point, I know. The Hero,” he nodded at George, “has his job, and the Artist,” with a slant at Campton, “his. In Germany, for instance, as we’re beginning to find out, the creative minds, the Intelligentsia (to use another of my wife’s expressions), have been carefully protected from the beginning, given jobs, vitally important jobs of course, but where their lives were not exposed. The country needs them too much in other ways; they would probably be wretched fighters, and they’re of colossal service in their own line. Whereas in France and England——” he suddenly seemed to see his chance——“Well, look here, Mr. Campton, I appeal to you, I appeal to the great creative Artist: in any country but France and England, would a fellow of George’s brains have been _allowed_, even at this stage of the war, to chuck an important staff job, requiring intellect, tact and _savoir faire_, and try to get himself killed like any unbaked boy—like your poor cousin Benny Upsher, for instance? Would he?”

“Yes—in America!” shouted Boylston; and Mr. Talkett’s tallowy cheeks turned pink.

“George knows how I feel about these things,” he stammered.

George still laughed in his remote impartial way, and Boylston asked with a grin: “Why don’t you get yourself naturalized—a neutral?”

Mr. Talkett’s pinkness deepened. “I have lived too much among Artists——” he began; and George interrupted gaily: “There’s a lot to be said on Talkett’s side too. Going, Roger? Well, I shall be able to look in on you now in a few days. Remember me to Madge. Goodbye.”

Boylston rose also, and Campton remained alone with his son.

“Remember me to Madge!” That was the way in which the modern young man spoke of his beloved to his beloved’s proprietor. There had not been a shadow of constraint in George’s tone; and now, glancing at the door which had closed on Mr. Talkett, he merely said, as if apostrophizing the latter’s neat back: “Poor devil! He’s torn to pieces with it.”

“With what?” asked Campton, startled.

“Why, with Boylston’s Preparedness. Wanting to do the proper thing—and never before having had to decide between anything more vital than straight or turned-down collars. It’s playing the very deuce with him.”

His eyes grew thoughtful. Was he going to pronounce Mrs. Talkett’s name—at last? But no; he wandered back to her husband. “Poor little ass! Of course he’ll decide against.” He shrugged his shoulders. “And Boylston’s just as badly torn in the other direction.”

“Boylston?”

“Yes. Knowing that he wouldn’t be taken himself, on account of his bad heart and his blind eyes, and wondering if, in spite of his disabilities, he’s got the right to preach to all these young chaps here who hang on his words like the gospel. One of them taunted him with it the other day.”

“The cur!”

“Yes. And ever since, of course, Boylston’s been twice as fierce, and overworking himself to calm his frenzy. The men who can’t go are all like that, when they know it’s their proper work. It isn’t everybody’s billet out there—I’ve learnt that since I’ve had a look at it—but it would be Boylston’s if he had the health, and he knows it, and that’s what drives him wild.” George looked at his father with a smile. “You don’t know how I thank my stars that there weren’t any ‘problems’ for me, but just a plain job that picked me up by the collar, and dropped me down where I belonged.” He reached for another cigarette. “Old Adele’s coming presently. Do you suppose we could rake up some fresh tea?” he asked.

XXIX

Coming out of the unlit rainy March night, it was agreeable but almost startling to Campton to enter Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room. In the softness of shaded lamplight, against curtains closely drawn, young women dressed with extravagant elegance chatted with much-decorated officers in the new “horizon” uniform, with here and there among them an elderly civilian head, such as Harvey Mayhew’s silvery thatch and the square rapacious skull of the newly-knighted patriot, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein.

Campton had gone to Mrs. Talkett’s that afternoon because she had lent her apartment to “The Friends of French Art,” who were giving a concert organized by Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril, with Mme. de Dolmetsch’s pianist as their leading performer. It would have been ungracious to deprive the indefatigable group of the lustre they fancied Campton’s presence would confer; and he was not altogether sorry to be there. He knew that George had promised Miss Anthony to come; and he wanted to see his son with Mrs. Talkett.

An abyss seemed to divide this careless throng of people, so obviously assembled for their own pleasure, the women to show their clothes, the men to admire them, from the worn preoccupied audiences of the first war-charity entertainments. The war still raged; wild hopes had given way to dogged resignation; each day added to the sum of public anguish and private woe. But the strain had been too long, the tragedy too awful. The idle and the useless had reached their emotional limit, and once more they dressed and painted, smiled, gossiped, flirted as though the long agony were over.

On a sofa stacked with orange-velvet cushions Mme. de Dolmetsch reclined in a sort of serpent-coil of flexible grey-green hung with strange amulets. Her eyes, in which fabulous islands seemed to dream, were fixed on the bushy-haired young man at the piano. Close by, upright and tight-waisted, sat the Marquise de Tranlay, her mourning veil thrown back from a helmetlike hat. She had planted herself in a Louis Philippe armchair, as if appealing to its sturdy frame to protect her from the anarchy of Mrs. Talkett’s furniture; and beside her was the daughter for whose sake she had doubtless come—a frowning beauty who, in spite of her dowdy dress and ugly boots, somehow declared herself as having already broken away from the maternal tradition.

Mme. de Tranlay’s presence in that drawing-room was characteristic enough. It meant—how often one heard it nowadays!—that mothers had to take their daughters wherever there was a chance of their meeting young men, and that such chances were found only in the few “foreign” houses where, discreetly, almost clandestinely, entertaining had been resumed. You had to take them there, Mme. de Tranlay’s look seemed to say, because they had to be married (the sooner the better in these wild times, with all the old barriers down), and because the young men were growing so tragically few, and the competition was so fierce, and because in such emergencies a French mother, whose first thought is always for her children, must learn to accept, even to seek, propinquities from which her inmost soul, and all the ancestral souls within her, would normally recoil.

Campton remembered her gallant attitude on the day when, under her fresh crape, she had rebuked Mrs. Brant’s despondency. “But how she hates it here—how she must loathe sitting next to that woman!” he thought; and just then he saw her turn toward Mme. de Dolmetsch with a stiff bend from the waist, and heard her say in her most conciliatory tone: “Your great friend, the rich American, _chère Madame_, the benefactor of France—we should so like to thank him, Claire and I, for all he is doing for our country.”

Beckoned to by Mme. de Dolmetsch, Mr. Mayhew, all pink and silver and prominent pearl scarf-pin, bowed before the Tranlay ladies, while the Marquise deeply murmured: “We are grateful—we shall not forget—” and Mademoiselle de Tranlay, holding him with her rich gaze, added in fluent English: “Mamma hopes you’ll come to tea on Sunday—with no one but my uncle the Duc de Montlhéry—so that we may thank you better than we can here.”

“Great women—great women!” Campton mused. He was still watching Mme. de Tranlay’s dauntless mask when her glance deserted the gratified Mayhew to seize on a younger figure. It was that of George, who had just entered. Mme. de Tranlay, with a quick turn, caught Campton’s eye, greeted him with her trenchant cordiality, and asked, in a voice like the pounce of talons: “The young officer who has the Legion of Honour—the one you just nodded to—with reddish hair and his left arm in a sling? French, I suppose, from his uniform; and yet——? Yes, talking to Mrs. Talkett. Can you tell me——?”

“My son,” said Campton with satisfaction.

The effect was instantaneous, though Mme. de Tranlay kept her radiant steadiness. “How charming—charming—charming!” And, after a proper interval: “But, Claire, my child, we’ve not yet spoken to Mrs. Brant, whom I see over there.” And she steered her daughter swiftly toward Julia.

Campton’s eyes returned to his son. George was still with Mrs. Talkett, but they had only had time for a word or two before she was called away to seat an important dowager. In that moment, however, the father noted many things. George, as usual nowadays, kept his air of guarded kindliness, though the blue of his eyes grew deeper; but Mrs. Talkett seemed bathed in light. It was such a self-revelation that Campton’s curiosity was lost in the artist’s abstract joy. “If I could have painted her like that!” he thought, reminded of having caught Mme. de Dolmetsch transfigured by fear for her lover; but an instant later he remembered. “Poor little thing!” he murmured. Mrs. Talkett turned her head, as if his thought had reached her. “Oh, yes—oh, yes; come and let me tell you all about it,” her eyes entreated him. But Mayhew and Sir Cyril Jorgenstein were between them.

“George!” Mrs. Brant called; and across the intervening groups Campton saw his son bowing to the Marquise de Tranlay.

Mme. de Dolmetsch jumped up, her bracelets jangling like a prompter’s call. “Silence!” she cried. The ladies squeezed into their seats, the men resigned themselves to door-posts and window-embrasures, and the pianist attacked Stravinsky....

“Dancing?” Campton heard his hostess answering some one. “N—no: not _quite_ yet, I think. Though in London, already ... oh, just for the officers on leave, of course. Poor darlings—why shouldn’t they? But to-day, you see, it’s for a charity.” Her smile appealed to her hearer to acknowledge the distinction.

The music was over, and scanning the groups at the tea-tables, Campton saw Adele and Mlle. Davril squeezed away in the remotest corner of the room. He took a chair at their table, and Boylston presently blinked his way to them through the crowd.

They seemed, all four, more like unauthorized intruders on the brilliant scene than its laborious organizers. The entertainment, escaping from their control, had speedily reverted to its true purpose of feeding and amusing a crowd of bored and restless people; and the little group recognized the fact, and joked over it in their different ways. But Mlle. Davril was happy at the sale of tickets, which must have been immense to judge from the crowd (spying about the entrance, she had seen furious fine ladies turn away ticketless); and Adele Anthony was exhilarated by the nearness of people she did not know, or wish to know, but with whose names and private histories she was minutely and passionately familiar.

“That’s the old Duchesse de Murols with Mrs. Talkett—there, she’s put her at the Beausite’s table! Well, of all places! Ah, but you’re all too young to know about Beausite’s early history. And now, of course, it makes no earthly difference to anybody. But there must be times when Mme. Beausite remembers, and grins. Now that she’s begun to rouge again she looks twenty years younger than the Duchess.——Ah,” she broke off, abruptly signing to Campton.

He followed her glance to a table at which Julia Brant was seating herself with the Tranlay ladies and George. Mayhew joined them, nobly deferential, and the elder ladies lent him their intensest attention, isolating George with the young girl.

“H’m,” Adele murmured, “not such a bad thing! They say the girl will have half of old Montlhéry’s money—he’s her mother’s uncle. And she’s heaps handsomer than the other—not that _that_ seems to count any more!”

Campton shrugged the subject away. Yes; it would be a good thing if George could be drawn from what his mother (with a retrospective pinching of the lips) called his “wretched infatuation.” But the idea that the boy might be coaxed into a marriage—and a rich marriage—by the Brants, was even more distasteful to Campton. If he really loved Madge Talkett better stick to her than let himself be cajoled away for such reasons.

* * * * *

As the second part of the programme began, Campton and Boylston slipped out together. Campton was oppressed and disturbed. “It’s queer,” he said, taking Boylston’s arm to steer him through the dense darkness of the streets; “all these people who’ve forgotten the war have suddenly made me remember it.”

Boylston laughed. “Yes, I know.” He seemed preoccupied and communicative, and the painter fancied he was going to lead the talk, as usual, to Preparedness and America’s intervention; but after a pause he said: “You haven’t been much at the office lately——”

“No,” Campton interrupted. “I’ve shirked abominably since George got back. But now that he’s gone to the Brants’ you’ll see——”

“Oh, I didn’t mean it as a reproach, sir! How could you think it? We’re running smoothly enough, as far as organization goes. That’s not what bothers me——”

“You’re bothered?”

Yes; he was—and so, he added, was Miss Anthony. The trouble was, he went on to explain, that Mr. Mayhew, after months of total indifference (except when asked to “represent” them on official platforms) had developed a disquieting interest in “The Friends of French Art.” He had brought them, in the beginning, a certain amount of money (none of which came out of his own pocket), and in consequence had been imprudently put on the Financial Committee, so that he had a voice in the disposal of funds, though till lately he had never made it heard. But now, apparently, “Atrocities” were losing their novelty, and he was disposed to transfer his whole attention to “The Friends of French Art,” with results which seemed incomprehensibly disturbing to Boylston, until he let drop the name of Mme. de Dolmetsch. Campton exclaimed at it.

“Well—yes. You must have noticed that she and Mr. Mayhew have been getting pretty chummy. You see, he’s done such a lot of talking that people think he’s at least an Oil King; and Mme. de Dolmetsch is dazzled. But she’s got her musical prodigy to provide for——” and Boylston outlined the situation which his astuteness had detected while it developed unperceived under Campton’s dreaming eyes. Mr. Mayhew was attending all their meetings now, finding fault, criticizing, asking to have the accounts investigated, though they had always been audited at regular intervals by expert accountants; and all this zeal originated in the desire to put Mme. de Dolmetsch in Miss Anthony’s place, on the plea that her greater social experience, her gift of attracting and interesting, would bring in immense sums of money—whereas, Boylston grimly hinted, they already had a large balance in the bank, and it was with an eye to that balance that Mme. de Dolmetsch was forcing Mayhew to press her claim.

“You see, sir, Mr. Mayhew never turns out to be as liberal as they expect when they first hear him talk; and though Mme. de Dolmetsch has him in her noose she’s not getting what she wants—by a long way. And so they’ve cooked this up between them—she and Mme. Beausite—without his actually knowing what they’re after.”

Campton stopped short, releasing Boylston’s arm. “But what you suggest is abominable,” he exclaimed.

“Yes. I know it.” But the young man’s voice remained steady. “Well, I wish you’d come to our meetings, now you’re back.”

“I will—I will! But I’m no earthly use on financial questions. You’re much stronger there.”

He felt Boylston’s grin through the darkness. “Oh, they’ll have me out too before long.”

“You? Nonsense! What do you mean?”

“I mean that lots of people are beginning to speculate in war charities—oh, in all sorts of ways. Sometimes I’m sick to the point of chucking it all. But Miss Anthony keeps me going.”

“Ah, she would!” Campton agreed.

As he walked home his mind was burdened with Boylston’s warning. It was not merely the affair itself, but all it symbolized, that made his gorge rise, made him, as Boylston said, sick to the point of wanting to chuck it all—to chuck everything connected with this hideous world that was dancing and flirting and money-making on the great red mounds of dead. He grinned at the thought that he had once believed in the regenerative power of war—the salutary shock of great moral and social upheavals. Yet he _had_ believed in it, and never more intensely than at George’s bedside at Doullens, in that air so cleansed by passion and pain that mere living seemed a meaningless gesture compared to the chosen surrender of life. But in the Paris to which he had returned after barely four months of absence the instinct of self-preservation seemed to have wiped all meaning from such words. Poor fatuous Mayhew dancing to Mme. de Dolmetsch’s piping, Jorgenstein sinking under the weight of his international honours, Mme. de Tranlay intriguing to push her daughter in such society, and Julia placidly abetting her—Campton hardly knew from which of these sorry visions he turned with a completer loathing....

There were still the others, to be sure, the huge obscure majority; out there in the night, the millions giving their lives for this handful of trivial puppets, and here in Paris, and everywhere, in every country, men and women toiling unweariedly to help and heal; but in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room both fighters and toilers seemed to count as little in relation to the merrymakers as Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril in relation to the brilliant people who had crowded their table into the obscurest corner of the room.

XXX

These thoughts continued to weigh on Campton; to shake them off he decided, with one of his habitual quick jerks of resolution, to get back to work. He knew that George would approve, and would perhaps be oftener with him if he had something interesting on his easel. Sir Cyril Jorgenstein had suggested that he would like to have his portrait finished—with the Legion of Honour added to his lapel, no doubt. And Harvey Mayhew, rosy and embarrassed, had dropped in to hint that, if Campton could find time to do a charcoal head—oh, just one of those brilliant sketches of his—of the young musical genius in whose career their friend Mme. de Dolmetsch was so much interested.... But Campton had cut them both short. He was not working—he had no plans for the present. And in truth he had not thought even of attempting a portrait of George. The impulse had come to him, once, as he sat by the boy’s bed; but the face was too incomprehensible. He should have to learn and unlearn too many things first——

At last, one day, it occurred to him to make a study of Mme. Lebel. He saw _her_ in charcoal: her simple unquestioning anguish had turned her old face to sculpture. Campton set his canvas on the easel, and started to shout for her down the stairs; but as he opened the door he found himself face to face with Mrs. Talkett.

“Oh,” she began at once, in her breathless way, “you’re here? The old woman downstairs wasn’t sure—and I couldn’t leave all this money with her, could I?”

“Money? What money?” he echoed.

She was very simply dressed, and a veil, drooping low from her hat-brim, gave to her over-eager face a shadowy youthful calm.

“I _may_ come in?” she questioned, almost timidly; and as Campton let her pass she added: “The money from the concert, of course—heaps and heaps of it! I’d no idea we’d made so much. And I wanted to give it to you myself.”

She shook a bulging bag out of her immense muff, while Campton continued to stare at her.

“I didn’t know you went out so early,” he finally stammered, trying to push a newspaper over the disordered remains of his breakfast.

She lifted interrogative eyebrows. “That means that I’m in the way?”

“No. But why did you bring that money here?”

She looked surprised. “Why not? Aren’t you the head—the real head of the committee? And wasn’t the concert given in my house?” Her eyes rested on him with renewed timidity. “Is it—disagreeable to you to see me?” she asked.

“Disagreeable? My dear child, no.” He paused, increasingly embarrassed. What did she expect him to say next? To thank her for having sent him the orderly’s letter? It seemed to him impossible to plunge into the subject uninvited. Surely it was for her to give him the opening, if she wished to.

“Well, no!” she broke out. “I’ve never once pretended to you, have I? The money’s a pretext. I wanted to see you—here, alone, with no one to disturb us.”

Campton felt a confused stirring of relief and fear. All his old dread of scenes, commotions, disturbing emergencies—of anything that should upset his perpetually vibrating balance—was blent with the passionate desire to hear what his visitor had to say.

“You—it was good of you to think of sending us that letter,” he faltered.

She frowned in her anxious way and looked away from him. “Afterward I was afraid you’d be angry.”

“Angry? How could I?” He groped for a word. “Surprised—yes. I knew nothing ... nothing about you and....”

“Not even that it was I who bought the sketch of him—the one that Léonce Black sold for you last year?”

The blood rushed to Campton’s face. Suddenly he felt himself trapped and betrayed. “You—_you_? You’ve got that sketch?” The thought was somehow intolerable to him.

“Ah, now you _are_ angry,” Mrs. Talkett murmured.

“No, no; but I never imagined——”

“I know. That was what frightened me—your suspecting nothing.” She glanced about her, dropped to a corner of the divan, and tossed off her hat with the old familiar gesture. “Oh, can I talk to you?” she pleaded.

Campton nodded.

“I wish you’d light your pipe, then, and sit down too.” He reached for his pipe, struck a match, and slowly seated himself. “You always smoke a pipe in the morning, don’t you? _He_ told me that,” she went on; then she paused again and drew a long anxious breath. “Oh, he’s so changed! I feel as if I didn’t know him any longer—do _you_?”

Campton looked at her with deepening wonder. This was more surprising than discovering her to be the possessor of the picture; he had not expected deep to call unto deep in their talk. “I’m not sure that I do,” he confessed.

Her fidgeting eyes deepened and grew quieter. “Your saying so makes me feel less lonely,” she sighed, half to herself. “But has he told you nothing since he came back—really nothing?”

“Nothing. After all—how could he? I mean, without indiscretion?”

“Indiscretion? Oh——” She shrugged the word away with half a smile, as though such considerations belonged to a prehistoric order of things. “Then he hasn’t even told you that he wants me to get a divorce?”

“A divorce?” Campton exclaimed. He sat staring at her as if the weight of his gaze might pin her down, keep her from fluttering away and breaking up into luminous splinters. George wanted her to get a divorce—wanted, therefore, to marry her! His passion went as deep for her as that—too deep, Campton conjectured, for the poor little ephemeral creature, who struck him as wriggling on it like a butterfly impaled.

“Please tell me,” he said at length; and suddenly, in short inconsequent sentences, the confession poured from her.

George, it seemed, during the previous winter in New York, when they had seen so much of each other, had been deeply attracted, had wanted “everything,” and at once—and there had been moments of tension and estrangement, when she had been held back by scruples she confessed she no longer understood (inherited prejudices, she supposed), and when her reluctance must have made her appear to be trifling, whereas, really it was just that she couldn’t ... couldn’t.... So they had gone on for several months, with the usual emotional ups-and-downs, till he had left for Europe to join his father; and when they had parted she had given him the half-promise that if they met abroad during the summer she would perhaps ... after all....

Then came the war. George had been with her during those few last hours in Paris, and had dined with her and her husband (had Campton forgiven her?) the night before he was mobilised. And then, when he was gone, she had understood that only timidity, vanity, the phantom barriers of old terrors and traditions, had prevented her being to him all that he wanted....

She broke off abruptly, put in a few conventional words about an ill-assorted marriage, and never having been “really understood,” and then, as if guessing that she was on the wrong tack, jumped up, walked to the other end of the studio, and turned back to Campton with the tears running down her ravaged face.

“And now—and now—he says he won’t have me!” she lamented.

“Won’t have you? But you tell me he wants you to be divorced.”