George was gone.
When, with a last whistle and scream, his train had ploughed its way out of the clanging station; when the last young figures clinging to the rear of the last carriage had vanished, and the bare rails again glittered up from the cindery tracks, Campton turned and looked about him.
All the platforms of the station were crowded as he had seldom seen any place crowded, and to his surprise he found himself taking in every detail of the scene with a morbid accuracy of observation. He had discovered, during these last days, that his artist’s vision had been strangely unsettled. Sometimes, as when he had left Fortin’s house, he saw nothing: the material world, which had always tugged at him with a thousand hands, vanished and left him in the void. Then again, as at present, he saw everything, saw it too clearly, in all its superfluous and negligible reality, instead of instinctively selecting, and disregarding what was not to his purpose.
Faces, faces—they swarmed about him, and his overwrought vision registered them one by one. Especially he noticed the faces of the women, women of all ages, all classes. These were the wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, mistresses of all those heavily laden trainfuls of French youth. He was struck with the same strong cheerfulness in all: some pale, some flushed, some serious, but all firmly and calmly smiling.
One young woman in particular his look dwelt on—a dark girl in a becoming dress—both because she was so pleasant to see, and because there was such assurance in her serenity that she did not have to constrain her lips and eyes, but could trust them to be what she wished. Yet he saw by the way she clung to the young artilleryman from whom she was parting that hers were no sisterly farewells.
An immense hum of voices filled the vast glazed enclosure. Campton caught the phrases flung up to the young faces piled one above another in the windows—words of motherly admonishment, little jokes, tender names, mirthful allusions, last callings out: “Write often! Don’t forget to wrap up your throat… Remember to send a line to Annette… Bring home a Prussian helmet for the children! On les aura, pas, mon vieux?” It was all bright, brave and confident. “If Berlin could only see it!” Campton thought.
He tried to remember what his own last words to George had been, but could not; yet his throat felt dry and thirsty, as if he had talked a great deal. The train vanished in a roar, and he leaned against a pier to let the crowd flood by, not daring to risk his lameness in such a turmoil.
Suddenly he heard loud sobs behind him. He turned, and recognized the hat and hair of the girl whose eyes had struck him. He could not see them now, for they were buried in her hands and her whole body shook with woe. An elderly man was trying to draw her away—her father, probably.
“Come, come, my child——”
“Oh—oh—oh,” she hiccoughed, following blindly.
The people nearest stared at her, and the faces of other women grew pale. Campton saw tears on the cheeks of an old body in a black bonnet who might have been his own Mme. Lebel. A pale lad went away weeping.
But they were all afraid, then, all in immediate deadly fear for the lives of their beloved! The same fear grasped Campton’s heart, a very present terror, such as he had hardly before imagined. Compared to it, all that he had felt hitherto seemed as faint as the sensations of a looker-on. His knees failed him, and he grasped a transverse bar of the pier.
People were leaving the station in groups of two or three who seemed to belong to each other; only he was alone. George’s mother had not come to bid her son goodbye; she had declared that she would rather take leave of him quietly in her own house than in a crowd of dirty people at the station. But then it was impossible to conceive of her being up and dressed and at the Gare de l’Est at five in the morning—and how could she have got there without her motor? So Campton was alone, in that crowd which seemed all made up of families.
But no—not all. Ahead of him he saw one woman moving away alone, and recognized, across the welter of heads, Adele Anthony’s adamantine hat and tight knob of hair.
Poor Adele! So she had come too—and had evidently failed in her quest, not been able to fend a way through the crowd, and perhaps not even had a glimpse of her hero. The thought smote Campton with compunction: he regretted his sneering words when they had last met, regretted refusing to dine with her. He wished the barrier of people between them had been less impenetrable; but for the moment it was useless to try to force a way through it. He had to wait till the crowd shifted to other platforms, whence other trains were starting, and by that time she was lost to sight.
At last he was able to make his way through the throng, and as he came out of a side entrance he saw her. She appeared to be looking for a taxi—she waved her sunshade aimlessly. But no one who knew the Gare de l’Est would have gone around that corner to look for a taxi; least of all the practical Adele. Besides, Adele never took taxis: she travelled in the bowels of the earth or on the dizziest omnibus tops.
Campton knew at once that she was waiting for him. He went up to her and a guilty pink suffused her nose.
“You missed him after all——?” he said.
“I—oh, no, I didn’t.”
“You didn’t? But I was with him all the time. We didn’t see you——”
“No, but I saw—distinctly. That was all I went for,” she jerked back.
He slipped his arm through hers. “This crowd terrifies me. I’m glad you waited for me,” he said.
He saw her pleasure, but she merely answered: “I’m dying of thirst, aren’t you?”
“Yes—or hunger, or something. Could we find a laiterie?”
They found one, and sat down among early clerks and shop-girls, and a few dishevelled women with swollen faces whom Campton had noticed in the station. One of them, who sat opposite an elderly man, had drawn out a pocket mirror and was powdering her nose.
Campton hated to see women powder their noses—one of the few merits with which he credited Julia Brant was that of never having adopted these dirty modern fashions, of continuing to make her toilet in private “like a lady,” as people used to say when he was young. But now the gesture charmed him, for he had recognized the girl who had been sobbing in the station.
“How game she is! I like that. But why is she so frightened?” he wondered. For he saw that her chocolate was untouched, and that the smile had stiffened on her lips.
Since his talk with Adamson he could not bring himself to be seriously alarmed. Fear had taken him by the throat for a moment in the station, at the sound of the girl’s sobs; but already he had thrown it off. Everybody agreed that the war was sure to be over in a few weeks; even Dastrey had come round to that view; and with Fortin’s protection, and the influences Anderson Brant could put in motion, George was surely safe—as safe at his depot as anywhere else in this precarious world. Campton poured out Adele’s coffee, and drank off his own as if it had been champagne.
“Do you know anything about the people George was dining with last night?” he enquired abruptly.
Miss Anthony knew everything and everybody in the American circle in Paris; she was a clearing-house of Franco-American gossip, and it was likely enough that if George had special reasons for wishing to spend his last evening away from his family she would know why. But the chance of her knowing what had been kept from him made Campton’s question, as soon as it was put, seem indiscreet, and he added hastily: “Not that I want——”
She looked surprised. “No: he didn’t tell me. Some young man’s affair, I suppose…” She smirked absurdly, her lashless eyes blinking under the pushed-back veil.
Campton’s mind had already strayed from the question. Nothing bored him more than Adele doing the “sad dog,” and he was vexed at having given her such a chance to be silly. What he wanted to know was whether George had spoken to his old friend about his future—about his own idea of his situation, and his intentions and wishes in view of the grim chance which people, with propitiatory vagueness, call “anything happening.” Had the boy left any word, any message with her for any one? But it was useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot that one could not imagine any one’s having trusted a secret to her.
Campton had no wish to surprise George’s secrets, if the boy had any. But their parting had been so hopelessly Anglo-Saxon, so curt and casual, that he would have liked to think his son had left, somewhere, a message for him, a word, a letter, in case … in case there was anything premonitory in the sobbing of that girl at the next table.
But Adele’s pink nose confronted him, as guileless as a rabbit’s, and he went out with her unsatisfied. They parted at the door of the restaurant, and Campton went to the studio to see if there were any news of his maid-servant Mariette. He meant to return to sleep there that night, and even his simple house-keeping was likely to be troublesome if Mariette should not arrive.
On the way it occurred to him that he had not yet seen the morning papers, and he stopped and bought a handful.
Negotiations, hopes, fears, conjectures—but nothing new or definite, except the insolent fact of Germany’s aggression, and the almost-certainty of England’s intervention. When he reached the studio he found Mme. Lebel in her usual place, paler than usual, but with firm lips and bright eyes. Her three grandsons had left for their depots the day before: one was in the Chasseurs Alpins, and probably already on his way to Alsace, another in the infantry, the third in the heavy artillery; she did not know where the two latter were likely to be sent. Her eldest son, their father, was dead; the second, a man of fifty, and a cabinetmaker by trade, was in the territorials, and was not to report for another week. He hoped, before leaving, to see the return of his wife and little girl, who were in the Ardennes with the wife’s people. Mme. Lebel’s mind was made up and her philosophy ready for immediate application.
“It’s terribly hard for the younger people; but it had to be. I come from Nancy, Monsieur: I remember the German occupation. I understand better than my daughter-in-law…”
There was no news of Mariette, and small chance of having any for some days, much less of seeing her. No one could tell how long civilian travel would be interrupted. Mme. Lebel, moved by her lodger’s plight, promised to “find some one”; and Campton mounted to the studio.
He had left it only two days before, on the day when he had vainly waited for Fortin and his dancer; and an abyss already divided him from that vanished time. Then his little world still hung like a straw above an eddy; now it was spinning about in the central vortex.
The pictures stood about untidily, and he looked curiously at all those faces which belonged to the other life. Each bore the mark of its own immediate passions and interests; not one betrayed the least consciousness of coming disaster except the face of poor Madame de Dolmetsch, whose love had enlightened her. Campton began to think of the future from the painter’s point of view. What a modeller of faces a great war must be! What would the people who came through it look like, he wondered.
His bell tinkled, and he turned to answer it. Dastrey, he supposed … he had caught a glimpse of his friend across the crowd at the Gare de l’Est, seeing off his nephew, but had purposely made no sign. He still wanted to be alone, and above all not to hear war-talk. Mme. Lebel, however, had no doubt revealed his presence in the studio, and he could not risk offending Dastrey.
When he opened the door it was a surprise to see there, instead of Dastrey’s anxious face, the round rosy countenance of a well-dressed youth with a shock of fair hair above eyes of childish candour.
“Oh—come in,” Campton said, surprised, but divining a compatriot in a difficulty.
The youth obeyed, blushing his apologies.
“I’m Benny Upsher, sir,” he said, in a tone modest yet confident, as if the name were an introduction.
“Oh——” Campton stammered, cursing his absent-mindedness and his unfailing faculty for forgetting names.
“You’re a friend of George’s, aren’t you?” he risked.
“Yes—tremendous. We were at Harvard together—he was two years ahead of me.”
“Ah—then you’re still there?”
Mr. Upsher’s blush became a mask of crimson. “Well—I thought I was, till this thing happened.”
“What thing?”
The youth stared at the older man with a look of celestial wonder.
“This war.—George has started already, hasn’t he?”
“Yes. Two hours ago.”
“So they said—I looked him up at the Crillon. I wanted most awfully to see him; if I had, of course I shouldn’t have bothered you.”
“My dear young man, you’re not bothering me. But what can I do?”
Mr. Upsher’s composure seemed to be returning as the necessary preliminaries were cleared away. “Thanks a lot,” he said. “Of course what I’d like best is to join his regiment.”
“Join his regiment—you!” Campton exclaimed.
“Oh, I know it’s difficult; I raced up from Biarritz quick as I could to catch him.” He seemed still to be panting with the effort. “I want to be in this,” he concluded.
Campton contemplated him with helpless perplexity. “But I don’t understand—there’s no reason, in your case. With George it was obligatory—on account of his being born here. But I suppose you were born in America?”
“Well, I guess so: in Utica. My mother was Madeline Mayhew. I think we’re a sort of cousins, sir, aren’t we?”
“Of course—of course. Excuse my not recalling it—just at first. But, my dear boy, I still don’t see——”
Mr. Upsher’s powers of stating his case were plainly limited. He pushed back his rumpled hair, looked hard again at his cousin, and repeated doggedly: “I want to be in this.”
“This war?”
He nodded.
Campton groaned. What did the boy mean, and why come to him with such tomfoolery? At that moment he felt even more unfitted than usual to deal with practical problems, and in spite of the forgotten cousinship it was no affair of his what Madeline Mayhew’s son wanted to be in.
But there was the boy himself, stolid, immovable, impenetrable to hints, and with something in his wide blue eyes like George—and yet so childishly different.
“Sit down—have a cigarette, won’t you?—You know, of course,” Campton began, “that what you propose is almost insuperably difficult?”
“Getting into George’s regiment?”
“Getting into the French army at all—for a foreigner, a neutral… I’m afraid there’s really nothing I can do.”
Benny Upsher smiled indulgently. “I can fix that up all right; getting into the army, I mean. The only thing that might be hard would be getting into his regiment.”
“Oh, as to that—out of the question, I should think.” Campton was conscious of speaking curtly: the boy’s bland determination was beginning to get on his nerves.
“Thank you no end,” said Benny Upsher, getting up. “Sorry to have butted in,” he added, holding out a large brown hand.
Campton followed him to the door perplexedly. He knew that something ought to be done—but what? On the threshold he laid his hand impulsively on the youth’s shoulder. “Look here, my boy, we’re cousins, as you say, and if you’re Madeline Mayhew’s boy you’re an only son. Moreover you’re George’s friend—which matters still more to me. I can’t let you go like this. Just let me say a word to you before——”
A gleam of shrewdness flashed through Benny Upsher’s inarticulate blue eyes. “A word or two against, you mean? Why, it’s awfully kind, but not the least earthly use. I guess I’ve heard all the arguments. But all I see is that hulking bully trying to do Belgium in. England’s coming in, ain’t she? Well, then why ain’t we?”
“England? Why—why, there’s no analogy——”
The young man groped for the right word. “I don’t know. Maybe not. Only in tight places we always do seem to stand together.”
“You’re mad—this is not our war. Do you really want to go out and butcher people?”
“Yes—this kind of people,” said Benny Upsher cheerfully. “You see, I’ve had all this talk from Uncle Harvey Mayhew a good many times on the way over. We came out on the same boat: he wanted me to be his private secretary at the Hague Congress. But I was pretty sure I’d have a job of my own to attend to.”
Campton still contemplated him hopelessly. “Where is your uncle?” he wondered.
Benny grinned. “On his way to the Hague, I suppose.”
“He ought to be here to look after you—some one ought to!”
“Then you don’t see your way to getting me into George’s regiment?” Benny simply replied.
An hour later Campton still seemed to see him standing there, with obstinate soft eyes repeating the same senseless question. It cost him an effort to shake off the vision.
He returned to the Crillon to collect his possessions. On his table was a telegram, and he seized it eagerly, wondering if by some mad chance George’s plans were changed, if he were being sent back, if Fortin had already arranged something…
He tore open the message, and read: “Utica July thirty-first. No news from Benny please do all you can to facilitate his immediate return to America dreadfully anxious your cousin Madeline Upsher.”
“Good Lord!” Campton groaned—“and I never even asked the boy’s address!”
Campton was thoroughly ashamed of what he had said to Mr. Brant, or rather of his manner of saying it. If he could have put the same facts quietly, ironically, without forfeiting his dignity, and with the added emphasis which deliberateness and composure give, he would scarcely have regretted the opportunity. He had always secretly accused himself of a lack of courage in accepting Mr. Brant’s heavy benefactions for George when the boy was too young to know what they might pledge him to; and it had been a disappointment that George, on reaching the age of discrimination, had not appeared to find the burden heavy, or the obligations unpleasant.
Campton, having accepted Mr. Brant’s help, could hardly reproach his son for feeling grateful for it, and had therefore thought it “more decent” to postpone disparagement of their common benefactor till his own efforts had set them both free. Even then, it would be impossible to pay off the past—but the past might have been left to bury itself. Now his own wrath had dug it up, and he had paid for the brief joy of casting its bones in Mr. Brant’s face by a deep disgust at his own weakness.
All these things would have weighed on him even more if the outer weight of events had not been so much heavier. He had not returned to Mrs. Talkett’s since the banker’s visit; he did not wish to meet Jorgenstein, and his talk with the banker, and his visit to the clairvoyante, had somehow combined to send that whole factitious world tumbling about his ears. It was absurd to attach any importance to poor Olida’s vaticinations; but the vividness of her description of the baby-faced boy dying in a German hospital haunted Campton’s nights. If it were not the portrait of Benny Upsher it was at least that of hundreds and thousands of lads like him, who were thus groping and agonizing and stretching out vain hands, while in Mrs. Talkett’s drawing-room well-fed men and expensive women heroically “forgot the war.” Campton, seeking to expiate his own brief forgetfulness by a passion of renewed activity, announced to Boylston the next afternoon that he was coming back to the office.
Boylston hardly responded: he looked up from his desk with a face so strange that Campton broke off to cry out: “What’s happened?”
The young man held out a newspaper. “They’ve done it—they’ve done it!” he shouted. Across the page the name of the Lusitania blazed out like the writing on the wall.
The Berserker light on Boylston’s placid features transformed him into an avenging cherub. “Ah, now we’re in it—we’re in it at last!” he exulted, as if the horror of the catastrophe were already swallowed up in its result. The two looked at each other without further words; but the older man’s first thought had been for his son. Now, indeed, America was “in it”: the gross tangible proof for which her government had forced her to wait was there in all its unimagined horror. Cant and cowardice in high places had drugged and stupefied her into the strange belief that she was too proud to fight for others; and here she was brutally forced to fight for herself. Campton waited with a straining heart for his son’s first comment on the new fact that they were “in it.”
But his excitement and Boylston’s exultation were short-lived. Before many days it became apparent that the proud nation which had flamed up overnight at the unproved outrage of the Maine was lying supine under the flagrant provocation of the Lusitania. The days which followed were, to many Americans, the bitterest of the war: to Campton they seemed the ironic justification of the phase of indifference and self-absorption through which he had just passed. He could not go back to Mrs. Talkett and her group; but neither could he take up his work with even his former zeal. The bitter taste of the national humiliation was perpetually on his lips: he went about like a man dishonoured.
He wondered, as the days and the weeks passed, at having no word from George. Had he refrained from writing because he too felt the national humiliation too deeply either to speak of it or to leave it unmentioned? Or was he so sunk in security that he felt only a mean thankfulness that nothing was changed? From such thoughts Campton’s soul recoiled; but they lay close under the surface of his tenderness, and reared their evil heads whenever they caught him alone.
As the summer dragged itself out he was more and more alone. Dastrey, cured of his rheumatism, had left the Ministry to resume his ambulance work. Miss Anthony was submerged under the ever-mounting tide of refugees. Mrs. Brant had taken a small house at Deauville (on the pretext of being near her hospital), and Campton heard of the Talketts’ being with her, and others of their set. Mr. Mayhew appeared at the studio one day, in tennis flannels and a new straw hat, announcing that he “needed rest,” and rather sheepishly adding that Mrs. Brant had suggested his spending “a quiet fortnight” with her. “I’ve got to do it, if I’m to see this thing through,” Mr. Mayhew added in a stern voice, as if commanding himself not to waver.
A few days later, glancing over the Herald, Campton read that Mme. de Dolmetsch, “the celebrated artiste,” was staying with Mr. and Mrs. Anderson Brant at Deauville, where she had gone to give recitations for the wounded in hospital. Campton smiled, and then thought with a tightening heart of Benny Upsher and Ladislas Isador, so incredibly unlike in their lives, so strangely one in their death. Finally, not long afterward, he read that the celebrated financier, Sir Cyril Jorgenstein (recently knighted by the British Government) had bestowed a gift of a hundred thousand francs upon Mrs. Brant’s hospital. It was rumoured, the paragraph ended, that Sir Cyril would soon receive the Legion of Honour for his magnificent liberalities to France.
And still the flood of war rolled on. Success here, failure there, the menace of disaster elsewhere—Russia retreating to the San, Italy declaring war on Austria and preparing to cross the Isonzo, the British advance at Anzac, and from the near East news of the new landing at Suvla. Through all this alternating of tragedy and triumph ran the million and million individual threads of hope, fear, fortitude, resolve, with which the fortune of the war was obscurely but fatally interwoven. Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight” in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter.
The shabby office of the Palais Royal again became his only haven. His portrait of Mrs. Talkett had brought him many new orders; but he refused them all, and declined even to finish the pictures interrupted by the war. One of his abrupt revulsions of feeling had flung him back, heart and brain, into the horror he had tried to escape from. “If thou ascend up into heaven I am there; if thou make thy bed in hell, behold I am there,” the war said to him; and as the daily head-lines shrieked out the names of new battle-fields, from the Arctic shore to the Pacific, he groaned back like the Psalmist: “Whither shall I go from thee?”
The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mile. Davril, and all their band of tired resolute workers—plodded ahead, their eyes on their task, seeming to find in its fulfillment a partial escape from the intolerable oppression. The women especially, with their gift of living in the particular, appeared hardly aware of the appalling development of the catastrophe; and Campton felt himself almost as lonely among these people who thought of nothing but the war as among those who hardly thought of it at all. It was only when he and Boylston, after a hard morning’s work, went out to lunch together, that what he called the Lusitania look, suddenly darkening the younger man’s face, moved the painter with an anguish like his own.
Boylston, breaking through his habitual shyness, had one day remonstrated with Campton for not going on with his painting: but the latter had merely rejoined: “We’ve each of us got to worry through this thing in our own way—” and the subject was not again raised between them.
The intervals between George’s letters were growing longer. Campton, who noted in his pocket-diary the dates of all that he received, as well as those addressed to Mrs. Brant and Miss Anthony, had not had one to record since the middle of June. And in that there was no allusion to the Lusitania.
“It’s queer,” he said to Boylston, one day toward the end of July; “I don’t know yet what George thinks about the Lusitania.”
“Oh, yes, you do, sir!” Boylston returned, laughing; “but all the mails from the war-zone,” he added, “have been very much delayed lately. When there’s a big attack on anywhere they hold up everything along the line. And besides, no end of letters are lost.”
“I suppose so,” said Campton, pocketing the diary, and trying for the millionth time to call up a vision of his boy, seated at a desk in some still unvisualized place, his rumpled fair head bent above columns of figures or files of correspondence, while day after day the roof above him shook with the roar of the attacks which held up his letters.
George’s prediction had come true. At his funeral, three days afterward, Boylston, a new-fledged member of the American Military Mission, was already in uniform…
But through what perversity of attention did the fact strike Campton, as he stood, a blank unfeeling automaton, in the front pew behind that coffin draped with flags and flanked with candle-glitter? Why did one thing rather than another reach to his deadened brain, and mostly the trivial things, such as Boylston’s being already in uniform, and poor Julia’s nose, under the harsh crape, looking so blue-red without its powder, and the chaplain’s asking “O grave, where is thy victory?” in the querulous tone of a schoolmaster reproaching a pupil who mislaid things? It was always so with Campton: when sorrow fell it left him insensible and dumb. Not till long afterward did he begin to feel its birth-pangs…
They first came to him, those pangs, on a morning of the following July, as he sat once more on the terrace of the Tuileries. Most of his time, during the months since George’s death, had been spent in endless aimless wanderings up and down the streets of Paris: and that day, descending early from Montmartre, he had noticed in his listless way that all the buildings on his way were fluttering with American flags. The fact left him indifferent: Paris was always decorating nowadays for one ally or another. Then he remembered that it must be the Fourth of July; but the idea of the Fourth of July came to him, through the same haze of indifference, as a mere far-off childish memory of surreptitious explosions and burnt fingers. He strolled on toward the Tuileries, where he had got into the way of sitting for hours at a time, looking across the square at what had once been George’s window.
He was surprised to find the Rue de Rivoli packed with people; but his only thought was the instinctive one of turning away to avoid them, and he began to retrace his steps in the direction of the Louvre. Then at a corner he paused again and looked back at the Place de la Concorde. It was not curiosity that drew him, heaven knew—he would never again be curious about anything—but he suddenly remembered the day three months earlier when, leaning from George’s window in the hospital, he had said to himself “By the time our first regiments arrive he’ll be up and looking at them from here, or sitting with me over there on the terrace”; and that decided him to turn back. It was as if he had felt the pressure of George’s hand on his arm.
Though it was still so early he had some difficulty in pushing his way through the throng. No seats were left on the terrace, but he managed to squeeze into a corner near one of the great vases of the balustrade; and leaning there, with the happy hubbub about him, he watched and waited.
Such a summer morning it was—and such a strange grave beauty had fallen on the place! He seemed to understand for the first time—he who had served Beauty all his days—how profoundly, at certain hours, it may become the symbol of things hoped for and things died for. All those stately spaces and raying distances, witnesses of so many memorable scenes, might have been called together just as the setting for this one event—the sight of a few brown battalions passing over them like a feeble trail of insects.
Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians and soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living?
He became aware that a boy, leaning over intervening shoulders, was trying to push a folded paper into his hand. On it was pencilled, in Mr. Brant’s writing: “There will be a long time to wait. Will you take the seat I have kept next to mine?” Campton glanced down the terrace, saw where the little man sat at its farther end, and shook his head. Then some contradictory impulse made him decide to get up, laboriously work his halting frame through the crowd, and insert himself into the place next to Mr. Brant. The two men nodded without shaking hands; after that they sat silent, their eyes on the empty square. Campton noticed that Mr. Brant wore his usual gray clothes, but with a mourning band on the left sleeve. The sight of that little band irritated Campton…
There was, as Mr. Brant had predicted, a long interval of waiting; but at length a murmur of jubilation rose far off, and gathering depth and volume came bellowing and spraying up to where they sat. The square, the Champs Elysées and all the leafy distances were flooded with it: it was as though the voice of Paris had sprung up in fountains out of her stones. Then a military march broke shrilly on the tumult; and there they came at last, in a scant swaying line—so few, so new, so raw; so little, in comparison with the immense assemblages familiar to the place, so much in meaning and in promise.
“How badly they march—there hasn’t even been time to drill them properly!” Campton thought; and at the thought he felt a choking in his throat, and his sorrow burst up in him in healing springs…
It was after that day that he first went back to his work. He had not touched paint or pencil since George’s death; now he felt the inspiration and the power returning, and he began to spend his days among the young American officers and soldiers, studying them, talking to them, going about with them, and then hurrying home to jot down his impressions. He had not, as yet, looked at his last study of George, or opened the portfolio with the old sketches; if any one had asked him, he would probably have said that they no longer interested him. His whole creative faculty was curiously, mysteriously engrossed in the recording of the young faces for whose coming George had yearned.
“It’s their marching so badly—it’s their not even having had time to be drilled!” he said to Boylston, half-shamefacedly, as they sat together one August evening in the studio window.
Campton seldom saw Boylston nowadays. All the young man’s time was taken up by his job with the understaffed and inexperienced Military Mission; but fagged as he was by continual overwork and heavy responsibilities, his blinking eyes had at last lost their unsatisfied look, and his whole busy person radiated hope and encouragement.
On the day in question he had turned up unexpectedly, inviting himself to dine with Campton and smoke a cigar afterward in the quiet window overhanging Paris. Campton was glad to have him there; no one could tell him more than Boylston about the American soldiers, their numbers, the accommodations prepared for their reception, their first contact with the other belligerents, and their own view of the business they were about. And the two chatted quietly in the twilight till the young man, rising, said it was time to be off.
“Back to your shop?”
“Rather! There’s a night’s work ahead. But I’m as good as new after our talk.”
Campton looked at him wistfully. “You know I’d like to paint you some day.”
“Oh——” cried Boylston, suffused with blushes; and added with a laugh: “It’s my uniform, not me.”
“Well, your uniform is you—it’s all of you young men.”
Boylston stood in the window twisting his cap about undecidedly. “Look here, sir—now that you’ve got back to work again——”
“Well?” Campton interrupted suspiciously.
The young man cleared his throat and spoke with a rush. “His mother wants most awfully that something should be decided about the monument.”
“Monument? What monument? I don’t want my son to have a monument,” Campton exploded.
But Boylston stuck to his point. “It’ll break her heart if something isn’t put on the grave before long. It’s five months now—and they fully recognize your right to decide——”
“Damn what they recognize! It was they who brought him to Paris; they made him travel when he wasn’t fit; they killed him.”
“Well—supposing they did: judge how much more they must be suffering!”
“Let ’em suffer. He’s my son—my son. He isn’t Brant’s.”
“Miss Anthony thinks——”
“And he’s not hers either, that I know of!”
Boylston seemed to hesitate. “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it, sir? You’ve had him; you have him still. Nobody can touch that fact, or take it from you. Every hour of his life was yours. But they’ve never had anything, those two others, Mr. Brant and Miss Anthony; nothing but a reflected light. And so every outward sign means more to them. I’m putting it badly, I know——”
Campton held out his hand. “You don’t mean to, I suppose. But better not put it at all. Good night,” he said. And on the threshold he called out sardonically: “And who’s going to pay for a monument, I’d like to know?”
A monument—they wanted a monument! Wanted him to decide about it, plan it, perhaps design it—good Lord, he didn’t know! No doubt it all seemed simple enough to them: anything did, that money could buy… When he couldn’t yet bear to turn that last canvas out from the wall, or look into the old portfolio even… Suffering, suffering! What did they any of them know about suffering? Going over old photographs, comparing studies, recalling scenes and sayings, discussing with some sculptor or other the shape of George’s eyelids, the spring of his chest-muscles, the way his hair grew and his hands moved—why, it was like digging him up again out of that peaceful corner of the Neuilly cemetery where at last he was resting, like dragging him back to the fret and the fever, and the senseless roar of the guns that still went on.
And then: as he’d said to Boylston, who was to pay for their monument? Even if the making of it had struck him as a way of getting nearer to his boy, instead of building up a marble wall between them—even if the idea had appealed to him, he hadn’t a penny to spare for such an undertaking. In the first place, he never intended to paint again for money; never intended to do anything but these gaunt and serious or round and babyish young American faces above their stiff military collars, and when their portraits were finished to put them away, locked up for his own pleasure; and what he had earned in the last years was to be partly for these young men—for their reading-rooms, clubs, recreation centres, whatever was likely to give them temporary rest and solace in the grim months to come; and partly for such of the protégés of “The Friends of French Art” as had been deprived of aid under the new management. Tales of private jealousy and petty retaliation came to Campton daily, now that Mme. Beausite administered the funds; Adele Anthony and Mile. Davril, bursting with the wrongs of their pensioners, were always appealing to him for help. And then, hidden behind these more or less valid reasons, the old instinctive dread of spending had reasserted itself, he couldn’t tell how or why, unless through some dim opposition to the Brants’ perpetual outpouring: their hospitals, their motors, their bribes, their orchids, and now their monument—their monument!
He sought refuge from it all with his soldiers, haunting for hours every day one of the newly-opened Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Clubs. Adele Anthony had already found a job there, and was making a success of it. She looked twenty years older since George was gone, but she stuck to her work with the same humorous pertinacity; and with her mingled heartiness and ceremony, her funny resuscitation of obsolete American slang, and her ability to answer all their most disconcerting questions about Paris and France (Montmartre included), she easily eclipsed the ministering angels who twanged the home-town chord and called them “boys.”
The young men appeared to return Campton’s liking; it was as if they had guessed that he needed them, and wanted to offer him their shy help. He was conscious of something rather protecting in their attitude, of his being to them a vague unidentified figure, merely “the old gentleman” who was friendly to them; but he didn’t mind. It was enough to sit and listen to their talk, to try and clear up a few of the countless puzzles which confronted them, to render them such fatherly services as he could, and in the interval to jot down notes of their faces—their inexhaustibly inspiring faces. Sometimes to talk with them was like being on the floor in George’s nursery, among the blocks and the tin soldiers; sometimes like walking with young archangels in a cool empty heaven; but wherever he was he always had the sense of being among his own, the sense he had never had since George’s death.
To think of them all as George’s brothers, to study out the secret likeness to him in their young dedicated faces: that was now his one passion, his sustaining task; it was at such times that his son came back and sat among them…
Gradually, as the weeks passed, the first of his new friends, officers and soldiers, were dispersed throughout the training camps, and new faces succeeded to those he had tried to fix on his canvas; an endless line of Benny Upshers, baby-Georges, schoolboy Boylstons, they seemed to be. Campton saw each one go with a fresh pang, knowing that every move brought them so much nearer to the front, that ever-ravening and inexorable front. They were always happy to be gone; and that only increased his pain. Now and then he attached himself more particularly to one of the young men, because of some look of the eyes or some turn of the mind like George’s; and then the parting became anguish.
One day a second lieutenant came to the studio to take leave. He had been an early recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so far advanced that he counted on being among the first officers sent to the fighting line. He was a fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that stood up in a defiant crest.
“There are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t afford to be too particular,” he laughed.
It was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh was like an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into tears, and was aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay and compassion.
“Oh, don’t, sir, don’t,” the young man pleaded, wringing the painter’s hand, and making what decent haste he could to get out of the studio.
Campton, left alone, turned once more to his easel. He sat down before a canvas on which he had blocked out a group of soldiers playing cards at their club; but after a stroke or two he threw aside his brush, and remained with his head bowed on his hands, a lonely tired old man.
He had kept a cheerful front at his son’s going; and now he could not say goodbye to one of these young fellows without crying. Well—it was because he had no one left of his own, he supposed. Loneliness like his took all a man’s strength from him…
The bell rang, but he did not move. It rang again; then the door was pushed timidly open, and Mrs. Talkett came in. He had not seen her since the day of George’s funeral, when he had fancied he detected her in a shrunken black-veiled figure hurrying past in the meaningless line of mourners.
In her usual abrupt fashion she began, without a greeting: “I’ve come to say goodbye; I’m going to America.”
He looked at her remotely, hardly hearing what she said. “To America?”
“Yes; to join my husband.”
He continued to consider her in silence, and she frowned in her perplexed and fretful way. “He’s at Plattsburg, you know.” Her eyes wandered unseeingly about the studio. “There’s nothing else to do, is there—now—here or anywhere? So I sail to-morrow; I mean to take a house somewhere near him. He’s not well, and he writes that he misses me. The life in camp is so unsuited to him——”
Campton still listened absently. “Oh, you’re right to go,” he agreed at length, supposing it was what she expected of him.
“Am I?” She half-smiled. “What’s right and what’s wrong? I don’t know any longer. I’m only trying to do what I suppose George would have wanted.” She stood uncertainly in front of Campton. “All I do know,” she cried, with a sharp break in her voice, “is that I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” And she threw herself down on the divan in a storm of desolate sobbing.
After he had comforted her as best he could, and she had gone away, Campton continued to wander up and down the studio forlornly. That cry of hers kept on echoing in his ears: “I’ve never in my life been happy enough to be so unhappy!” It associated itself suddenly with a phrase of Boylston’s that he had brushed away unheeding: “You’ve had your son—you have him still; but those others have never had anything.”
Yes; Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. I suppose that’s why Brant’s always trying——”
Julia too: it was strange that his thoughts should turn to her with such peculiar pity. It was not because the boy had been born of her body: Campton did not see her now, as he once had in a brief moment of compassion, as the young mother bending illumined above her baby. He saw her as an old empty-hearted woman, and asked himself how such an unmanageable monster as grief was to fill the room up of her absent son.
What did such people as Julia do with grief, he wondered, how did they make room for it in their lives, get up and lie down every day with its taste on their lips? Its elemental quality, that awful sense it communicated of a whirling earth, a crumbling Time, and all the cold stellar spaces yawning to receive us—these feelings which he was beginning to discern and to come to terms with in his own way (and with the sense that it would have been George’s way too), these feelings could never give their stern appeasement to Julia… Her religion? Yes, such as it was no doubt it would help; talking with the Rector would help; giving more time to her church-charities, her wounded soldiers, imagining that she was paying some kind of tax on her affliction. But the vacant evenings, at home, face to face with Brant! Campton had long since seen that the one thing which had held the two together was their shared love of George; and if Julia discovered, as she could hardly fail to do, how much more deeply Brant had loved her son than she had, and how much more inconsolably he mourned him, that would only increase her sense of isolation. And so, in sheer self-defence, she would gradually, stealthily, fill up the void with the old occupations, with bridge and visits and secret consultations at the dressmaker’s about the width of crape on her dresses; and all the while the object of life would be gone for her. Yes; he pitied Julia most of all.
But Mr. Brant too—perhaps in a different way it was he who suffered most. For the stellar spaces were not exactly Mr. Brant’s native climate, and yet voices would call to him from them, and he would not know…
There were moments when Campton looked about him with astonishment at the richness of his own denuded life; when George was in the sunset, in the voices of young people, or in any trivial joke that father and son would have shared; and other moments when he was nowhere, utterly lost, extinct and irrecoverable; and others again when the one thing which could have vitalized the dead business of living would have been to see him shove open the studio door, stalk in, pour out some coffee for himself in his father’s cup, and diffuse through the air the warm sense of his bodily presence, the fresh smell of his clothes and his flesh and his hair. But through all these moods, Campton began to see, there ran the life-giving power of a reality embraced and accepted. George had been; George was; as long as his father’s consciousness lasted, George would be as much a part of it as the closest, most actual of his immediate sensations. He had missed nothing of George, and here was his harvest, his golden harvest.
Such states of mind were not constant with Campton; but more and more often, when they came, they swept him on eagle wings over the next desert to the next oasis; and so, gradually, the meaningless days became linked to each other in some kind of intelligible sequence.
Boylston, after the talk which had so agitated Campton, did not turn up again at the studio for some time; but when he next appeared the painter, hardly pausing to greet him, began at once, as if they had just parted: “That monument you spoke about the other day … you know…”
Boylston glanced at him in surprise.