BOOK II (continued 2)

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

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

178But as he looked at her he saw that her face was wet with tears. “Not—bad news?” he broke out.

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

“Sit down,” said Campton.

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

Mrs. Brant began to speak.

“I came here to see you because I didn’t wish any one to know; not Adele, nor even Anderson.” Leaning toward him she went on in short breathless sentences: “I’ve just left Madge Talkett: you know her, I think? 179She’s at Mme. de Dolmetsch’s hospital. Something dreadful has happened ... too dreadful. It seems that Mme. de Dolmetsch was very much in love with Ladislas Isador; a writer, wasn’t he? I don’t know his books, but Madge tells me they’re wonderful ... and of course men like that ought not to be sent to the front....”

“Men like what?”

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

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

“I’m sorry,” he said. “But if you’ve come to ask 180me to do something more about George—take any new steps—it’s no use. I can’t do the sort of thing to keep my son safe that Mme. de Dolmetsch would do for her lover.”

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

“Good Lord—Isador?”

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

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

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

181The same thought had tightened Campton’s own heart-strings; but he had hoped she would not say it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How could he answer her? He hardly knew himself: had hardly been conscious of the change till she suddenly flung it in his face. If blind animal passion be the profoundest as well as the fiercest form of attachment, his love for his boy was at that moment as nothing 183to hers. Yet his feeling for George, in spite of all the phrases he dressed it in, had formerly in its essence been no other. That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.

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

Campton had never before, at least consciously, thought of himself and the few beings he cared for as part of a greater whole, component elements of the immense amazing spectacle. But the last four months had shown him man as a defenceless animal suddenly torn from his shell, stripped of all the interwoven tendrils 184of association, habit, background, daily ways and words, daily sights and sounds, and flung out of the human habitable world into naked ether, where nothing breathes or lives. That was what war did; that was why those who best understood it in all its farthest-reaching abomination willingly gave their lives to put an end to it.

He heard Mrs. Brant crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Campton took her old withered hand. The women ceased sobbing and a hush fell upon the stifling little room. When Campton looked up again he saw Julia Brant, pale and bewildered, hurrying toward her motor, and the vault of the porte-cochère sent back the chauffeur’s answer to her startled question: “Poor old lady—yes, her only son’s been killed at the front.”

186

XVI

Campton sat with his friend Dastrey in the latter’s pleasant little entresol full of Chinese lacquer and Venetian furniture.

Dastrey, in the last days of January, had been sent home from his ambulance with an attack of rheumatism; and when it became clear that he could no longer be of use in the mud and cold of the army zone he had reluctantly taken his place behind a desk at the Ministry of War. The friends had dined early, so that he might get back to his night shift; and they sat over coffee and liqueurs, the mist of their cigars floating across lustrous cabinet-fronts and the worn gilding of slender consoles.

On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.

“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?”

Again and again, during the days since Mrs. Brant’s visit, he had turned over in his mind the same torturing question. How was he to answer that last taunt of hers?

Not long ago, Paul Dastrey would have seemed the last person to whom he could have submitted such a 187problem. Dastrey, in the black August days, starting for the front in such a frenzy of baffled blood-lust, had remained for Campton the type of man with whom it was impossible to discuss the war. But three months of hard service in Postes de Secours and along the awful battle-edge had sent him home with a mind no longer befogged by personal problems. He had done his utmost, and knew it; and the fact gave him the professional calm which keeps surgeons and nurses steady through all the horrors they are compelled to live among. Those few months had matured and mellowed him more than a lifetime of Paris.

He leaned back with half-closed lids, quietly considering his friend’s difficulty.

“I see. Your idea is that, being unable to do even the humble kind of job that I’ve been assigned to, you’ve no right not to try to keep your boy out of it if you can?”

“Well—by any honourable means.”

Dastrey laughed faintly, and Campton reddened. “The word’s not happy, I admit.”

“I wasn’t thinking of that: I was considering how the meaning had evaporated out of lots of our old words, as if the general smash-up had broken their stoppers. So many of them, you see,” said Dastrey smiling, “we’d taken good care not to uncork for centuries. Since I’ve been on the edge of what’s going on fifty miles from here a good many of my own words have lost their 188meaning, and I’m not prepared to say where honour lies in a case like yours.” He mused a moment, and then went on: “What would George’s view be?”

Campton did not immediately reply. Not so many weeks ago he would have welcomed the chance of explaining that George’s view, thank God, had remained perfectly detached and objective, and that the cheerful acceptance of duties forcibly imposed on him had not in the least obscured his sense of the fundamental injustice of his being mixed up in the thing at all.

But how could he say this now? If George’s view were still what his father had been in the habit of saying it was, then he held that view alone: Campton himself no longer thought that any civilized man could afford to stand aside from such a conflict.

“As far as I know,” he said, “George hasn’t changed his mind.”

Boylston stirred in his armchair, knocked the ash from his cigar, and looked up at the ceiling.

“Whereas you——” Dastrey suggested.

“Yes,” said Campton. “I feel differently. You speak of the difference of having been in contact with what’s going on out there. But how can anybody not be in contact, who has any imagination, any sense of right and wrong? Do these pictures and hangings ever shut it out from you—or those books over there, when you turn to them after your day’s work? Perhaps they do, because you’ve got a real job, a job you’ve been ordered to do, 189and can’t not do. But for a useless drifting devil like me—my God, the sights and the sounds of it are always with me!”

“There are a good many people who wouldn’t call you useless, Mr. Campton,” said Boylston.

Campton shook his head. “I wish there were any healing in the kind of thing I’m doing; perhaps there is to you, to whom it appears to come naturally to love your kind.” (Boylston laughed.) “Service is of no use without conviction: that’s one of the uncomfortable truths this stir-up has brought to the surface. I was meant to paint pictures in a world at peace, and I should have more respect for myself if I could go on unconcernedly doing it, instead of pining to be in all the places where I’m not wanted, and should be of no earthly use. That’s why——” he paused, looked about him, and sought understanding in Dastrey’s friendly gaze: “That’s why I respect George’s opinion, which really consists in not having any, and simply doing without comment the work assigned to him. The whole thing is so far beyond human measure that one’s individual rage and revolt seem of no more use than a woman’s scream at an accident she isn’t in.”

Even while he spoke, Campton knew he was arguing only against himself. He did not in the least believe that any individual sentiment counted for nothing at such a time, and Dastrey really spoke for him in rejoining: “Every one can at least contribute an attitude: 190as you have, my dear fellow. Boylston’s here to confirm it.”

Boylston grunted his assent.

“An attitude—an attitude?” Campton retorted. “The word is revolting to me! Anything a man like me can do is too easy to be worth doing. And as for anything one can say: how dare one say anything, in the face of what is being done out there to keep this room and this fire, and this ragged end of life, safe for such survivals as you and me?” He crossed to the table to take another cigar. As he did so he laid an apologetic pressure on his host’s shoulder. “Men of our age are the chorus of the tragedy, Dastrey; we can’t help ourselves. As soon as I open my lips to blame or praise I see myself in white petticoats, with a long beard held on by an elastic, goading on the combatants in a cracked voice from a safe corner of the ramparts. On the whole I’d sooner be spinning among the women.”

“Well,” said Dastrey, getting up, “I’ve got to get back to my spinning at the Ministry; where, by the way, there are some very pretty young women at the distaff. It’s extraordinary how much better pretty girls type than plain ones; I see now why they get all the jobs.”

The three went out into the winter blackness. They were used by this time to the new Paris: to extinguished lamps, shuttered windows, deserted streets, the 191almost total cessation of wheeled traffic. All through the winter, life had seemed in suspense everywhere, as much on the battle-front as in the rear. Day after day, week after week, of rain and sleet and mud; day after day, week after week, of vague non-committal news from west and east; everywhere the enemy baffled but still menacing, everywhere death, suffering, destruction, without any perceptible oscillation of the scales, any compensating hope of good to come out of the long slow endless waste. The benumbed and darkened Paris of those February days seemed the visible image of a benumbed and darkened world.

Down the empty asphalt sheeted with rain the rare street lights stretched interminable reflections. The three men crossed the bridge and stood watching the rush of the Seine. Below them gloomed the vague bulk of deserted bath-houses, unlit barges, river-steamers out of commission. The Seine too had ceased to live: only a single orange gleam, low on the water’s edge, undulated on the jetty waves like a streamer of seaweed.

The two Americans left Dastrey at his Ministry, and the painter strolled on to Boylston’s lodging before descending to the underground railway. He, whom his lameness had made so heavy and indolent, now limped about for hours at a time over wet pavements and under streaming skies: these midnight tramps had become a sort of expiatory need to him. “Out there—out 192there, if they had these wet stones under them they’d think it was the floor of heaven,” he used to muse, driving on obstinately through rain and darkness.

The thought of “Out there” besieged him day and night, the phrase was always in his ears. Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly suffering and dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records were kept. Some of these histories were so heroically simple that the sense of pain was lost in beauty, as though one were looking at suffering transmuted into poetry. But others were abominable, unendurable, in their long-drawn useless horror: stories of cold and filth and hunger, of ineffectual effort, of hideous mutilation, of men perishing of thirst in a shell-hole, and half-dismembered bodies dragging themselves back to shelter only to die as they reached it. Worst of all were the perpetually recurring reports of military blunders, medical neglect, carelessness in high places: the torturing knowledge of the lives that might have been saved 193if this or that officer’s brain, this or that surgeon’s hand, had acted more promptly. An impression of waste, confusion, ignorance, obstinacy, prejudice, and the indifference of selfishness or of mortal fatigue, emanated from these narratives written home from the front, or faltered out by white lips on hospital pillows.

“The Friends of French Art,” especially since they had enlarged their range, had to do with young men accustomed to the freest exercise of thought and criticism. A nation in arms does not judge a war as simply as an army of professional soldiers. All these young intelligences were so many subtly-adjusted instruments for the testing of the machinery of which they formed a part; and not one accepted the results passively. Yet in one respect all were agreed: the “had to be” of the first day was still on every lip. The German menace must be met: chance willed that theirs should be the generation to meet it; on that point speculation was vain and discussion useless. The question that stirred them all was how the country they were defending was helping them to carry on the struggle. There the evidence was cruelly clear, the comment often scathingly explicit; and Campton, bending still lower over the abyss, caught a shuddering glimpse of what might be—must be—if political blunders, inertia, tolerance, perhaps even evil ambitions and connivances, should at last outweigh the effort of the front. There was no logical argument against such a possibility. All civilizations 194had their orbit; all societies rose and fell. Some day, no doubt, by the action of that law, everything that made the world livable to Campton and his kind would crumble in new ruins above the old. Yes—but woe to them by whom such things came; woe to the generation that bowed to such a law! The Powers of Darkness were always watching and seeking their hour; but the past was a record of their failures as well as of their triumphs. Campton, brushing up his history, remembered the great turning-points of progress, saw how the liberties of England had been born of the ruthless discipline of the Norman conquest, and how even out of the hideous welter of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had come more freedom and a wiser order. The point was to remember that the efficacy of the sacrifice was always in proportion to the worth of the victims; and there at least his faith was sure.

He could not, he felt, leave his former wife’s appeal unnoticed; after a day or two he wrote to George, telling him of Mrs. Brant’s anxiety, and asking in vague terms if George himself thought any change in his situation probable. His letter ended abruptly: “I suppose it’s hardly time yet to ask for leave——”

195

XVII

Not long after his midnight tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post brought Campton two letters. One was postmarked Paris, the other bore the military frank and was addressed in his son’s hand: he laid it aside while he glanced at the first. It contained an engraved card:

Mrs. Anderson Brant

At Home on February 20th at 4 o’clock

Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account of his captivity in Germany

Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing

For the benefit of the “Friends of French Art Committee”

Tickets 100 francs

Enclosed was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at the Front, with which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the names of Mrs. Talkett, Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and American ladies.

Campton tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he knew that Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril were getting up a series of drawing-room 196entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the card had been sent to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any reminder of the sort always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in him. He turned to George’s letter.

It was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his son’s previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.

“Dear Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on skis, the snow here is so deep.” (There had, in fact, been a heavy snow-fall in the Argonne). “Sorry mother is bothering about things again; as you’ve often reminded me, they always have a way of ‘being as they will be,’ and even war doesn’t seem to change it. Nothing to worry her in my case—but you can’t expect her to believe that, can you? Neither you nor I can help it, I suppose.

“There’s one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting her feel that you’re a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things look differently, especially this sedentary kind of war: it’s rather like going over all the old odds-and-ends in one’s cupboards. And some of them do look so foolish.

“I wish you’d see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had happened. You know you’ve got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The said I. T. is doing well, and has nothing new to communicate up to now 197except a change of address. Hereafter please write to my Base instead of directing here, as there’s some chance of a shift of H.Q. The precaution is probably just a new twist of the old red tape, signifying nothing; but Base will always reach me if we are shifted. Let mother know, and explain, please; otherwise she’ll think the unthinkable.

“Interrupted by big drive—quill-drive, of course!

“As ever

“Georgius Scriblerius.

“P.S. Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy either.

“No. 2.—I had thought of leave; but perhaps you’re right about that.”

It was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His smiling policy had always been to let things alone, and go on impartially dividing his devotion between his parents, since they refused to share even that common blessing. But war gave everything a new look; and he had evidently, as he put it, been turning over the old things in his cupboards. How was it possible, Campton wondered, that after such a turning over he was still content to write “Nothing new to communicate,” and to make jokes about another big quill-drive? Glancing at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George was sitting a few miles off, safe 198in headquarters at Sainte Menehould, with a stout roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his boots, scribbling punning letters while his comrades fell back from that bloody summit....

Suddenly Campton’s eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter for the sake of the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before it. Ah, how young the boy was to imagine that his father would not see! Yes, as he said, war made so many of the old things look foolish....

Campton set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long time past: the tone of his boy’s letter seemed to correspond with his own secret change of spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring the Brants and himself together, but was glad that George had made the suggestion. He resolved to see Julia that afternoon.

At the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an exhibition of paintings sent home from the front, and Mlle. Davril helping to catalogue them. Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing fresh tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with poverty and sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about, tragic and ineffectual. Boylston had not been able to extract a penny from Beausite for his secretary and the latter’s left-handed family; but Mme. Beausite had discovered a newly-organized charity which lent money to “temporarily 199embarrassed” war-victims; and with an artless self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain a small loan for the victim of her own thrift. “For what other purpose are such charities founded?” she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which Miss Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton came in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful white head over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.

The telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the receiver.

“Mr. Campton!”

The painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed to him charged with explosives.

“Take the message, do. The thing always snaps at me.”

There was a listening pause: then Boylston said: “It’s about Upsher——”

Campton started up. “Killed——?”

“Not sure. It’s Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you to break it to Mr. Mayhew.”

“Oh, Lord,” the painter groaned, the boy’s face suddenly rising before his blurred eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he would have turned to her; at least she might have gone with him on his quest. He could not ask Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that curious incapacity to deal 200with the raw fact of sorrow which had often given an elfin unreality to the most poignant moments of his life. It was as though experience had to enter into the very substance of his soul before he could even feel it.

“Other people,” he thought, “would know what to say, and I shan’t....”

Some one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau Luxe, though with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had grown two secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an office. One of the secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She was a competent young woman, who instantly extracted from her pocket-diary the fact that her chief was at Mrs. Anderson Brant’s, rehearsing.

“Rehearsing——?”

“Why, yes; he’s to speak at Mrs. Brant’s next week on Atrocities,” she said, surprised at Campton’s ignorance.

She suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich, where but one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as difficult as in the understaffed hotels; and after one or two vain attempts Campton decided to go to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible might still in some vague way help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he was dead. “Or else it’s just the need to rush about,” he thought, 201conscious that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like agitation.

On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter’s visions wear. “I want to be in this thing,” he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.

“If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been alive and safe to-day,” Campton mused, “like George.... The average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of years ago, and never re-examined since.” But this consideration, though drawn from George’s own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.

At the Brants’ a bewildered concierge admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter’s armchair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.

In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pâtes tendres, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his last visit.

202The maid led him to the ball-room. Through double doors of glass Mr. Mayhew’s oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano, reached Campton’s ears: he paused and looked. At the far end of the great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr. Mayhew, a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers. Beside him was a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical perfume-burner; and on it Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in an attitude of affliction.

Beneath the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord from Chopin’s Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross nurses perched on bales of blankets and listened. Under one of their coifs Campton recognized Mrs. Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to the lady nearest her; and the latter, turning, revealed the astonished eyes of Julia Brant.

Campton’s first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr. Mayhew’s rolling periods, was of his former wife’s gift of adaptation. She had made herself a nurse’s face; not a theatrical imitation of it like Mme. de Dolmetsch’s, nor yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster, like Mrs. Talkett’s. Her lovely hair smoothed away under her strict coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs. Brant looked serious, tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found her vocation?

203She gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he had not come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger on her lip and pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails were as beautifully polished as ever.

Mr. Mayhew was saying: “All that I have to give, yes, all that is most precious to me, I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one of the first Victims of that barbarism....”

He paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano filled in the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her attitude, almost without moving her lips, sang a few notes of lamentation.

“Of that hideous barbarism——” Mr. Mayhew began again. “I repeat that I stand here ready to give up everything I hold most dear——”

“Do stop him,” Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.

Little Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her, sprang up and threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed from one widowed pose into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically descending, approached Mrs. Brant.

“You agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de Dolmetsch’s beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral accompaniment—would only weaken my effect? Where the facts are so overwhelming it is enough to state them; that is,” Mr. 204Mayhew added modestly, “if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I hope they are.”

Mme. de Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn from her cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton’s.

“Dear friend, you’ve heard?... You remember our talk? I am Cassandra, cursed with the hideous gift of divination.” Tears rained down her cheeks, washing off the paint like mud swept by a shower. “My only comfort,” she added, fixing her perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, “is to help our great good friend in this crusade against the assassins of my Ladislas.”

Mrs. Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent face go to pieces as if it had been vitrioled.

“Benny—Benny——” he screamed, “Benny hurt? My Benny? It’s some mistake! What makes you think——?” His eyes met Campton’s. “Oh, my God! Why, he’s my sister’s child!” he cried, plunging his face into his soft manicured hands.

In the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the full-throated sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast for an unfindable handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately weeping it into pulp.

Campton had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped Mr. Mayhew was in too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his entreaty.

205“It was you who saw Benny last—you can’t leave me!” the poor man implored; and Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.

Their names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at the unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first time entering the banker’s private office.

Mr. Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the visitors waited, the painter’s registering eye took in the details of the room, from the Barye cire-perdue on a peach-coloured marble mantel to the blue morocco armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table was an electric lamp in a celadon vase, and just the right number of neatly folded papers lay under a paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The room was as tidy as an expensive stage-setting or the cage of a well-kept canary: the only object marring its order was a telegram lying open on the desk.

Mr. Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He shook hands with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton, gave his usual cough, and said: “This is terrible.”

And suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important and powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the desk, Campton murmured to himself: “If this thing were to happen to me I couldn’t bear it.... I simply couldn’t bear it....”

206Benny Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had been seen to fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the telegram, from his commanding officer, reported him as “wounded and missing.”

The words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months. Freezing to death between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of slow agony in German hospitals: these were the alternative visions associated with the now familiar formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of his time collecting details about the treatment of those who had fallen, alive but wounded, into German hands; and Campton guessed that as he sat there every one of these details, cruel, sanguinary, remorseless, had started to life, and that all their victims wore the face of Benny.

The wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his grief that Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the thoughts he was thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each avoiding the other’s eye lest they should betray to one another the secret of their shared exultation at George’s safety.

Finally Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to go with him to the English Military Mission in the hope of getting farther information. He went away, small and shrunken, with the deprecating smile of a man who seeks to ward off a blow; as he left the room Campton heard him say 207timidly to the clerk: “No doubt you speak French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to me.”

Campton had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held him back. He remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy,” and wished he could think of some friendly phrase to ease off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant seemed to have the same wish. He stood, erect and tightly buttoned, one small hand resting on the arm of his desk-chair, as though he were posing for a cabinet size, with the photographer telling him to look natural. His lids twitched behind his protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as straight as a ruler, detached itself by a hair’s breadth from the lower; but no word came.

Campton glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke abruptly.

“There was no reason on earth,” he said, “why poor young Upsher should ever have been in this thing.”

Mr. Brant bowed.

“This sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people’s rows,” Campton continued with rising vehemence, “is of no more use to a civilized state than any other unreasoned instinct. At bottom it’s nothing but what George calls the baseball spirit: just an ignorant passion for fisticuffs.”

Mr. Brant looked at him intently. “When did—George say that?” he asked, with his usual cough before the name.

208Campton coloured. “Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think. It was the view of most thoughtful young fellows at that time.”

“Quite so,” said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.

Campton’s eyes again wandered about the room.

“Now, of course——”

“Ah—now....”

The two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr. Brant, growing pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and they shook hands in silence.

XVIII

In the street Campton looked about him with the same confused sense as when he had watched Fortin-Lescluze driving away to Chalons, his dead son’s image in his eyes.

Each time that Campton came in contact with people on whom this calamity had fallen he grew more acutely aware of his own inadequacy. If he had been Fortin-Lescluze it would have been impossible for him to go back to Chalons and resume his task. If he had been Harvey Mayhew, still less could he have accommodated himself to the intolerable, the really inconceivable, thought that Benny Upsher had vanished into that fiery furnace like a crumpled letter tossed into a grate. Young Fortin was defending his country—but 209Upsher, in God’s name what was Benny Upsher of Connecticut doing in a war between the continental powers?

Suddenly Campton remembered that he had George’s letter in his pocket, and that he had meant to go back with it to Mrs. Brant’s. He had started out that morning full of the good intentions the letter had inspired; but now he had no heart to carry them out. Yet George had said: “Let mother know, and explain, please;” and such an injunction could not be disregarded.

He was still hesitating on a street corner when he remembered that Miss Anthony was probably on her way home for luncheon, and that if he made haste he might find her despatching her hurried meal. It was instinctive with him, in difficult hours, to turn to her, less for counsel than for shelter; her simple unperplexed view of things was as comforting as his mother’s solution of the dark riddles he used to propound in the nursery.

He found her in her little dining-room, with Delft plates askew on imitation Cordova leather, and a Death’s Head Pennon and a Prussian helmet surmounting the nymph in cast bronze on the mantelpiece. In entering he faced the relentless light of a ground-glass window opening on an air-shaft; and Miss Anthony, flinging him a look, dropped her fork and sprang up crying: “George——”

“George—why George?” Campton recovered his 210presence of mind under the shock of her agitation. “What made you think of George?”

“Your—your face,” she stammered, sitting down again. “So absurd of me.... But you looked.... A seat for monsieur, Jeanne,” she cried over her shoulder to the pantry.

“Ah—my face? Yes, I suppose so. Benny Upsher has disappeared—I’ve just had to break it to Mayhew.”

“Oh, that poor young Upsher? How dreadful!” Her own face grew instantly serene. “I’m so sorry—so very sorry.... Yes, yes, you shall lunch with me—I know there’s another cutlet,” she insisted.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t.”

“Well, then, I’ve finished.” She led the way into the drawing-room. There it was her turn to face the light, and he saw that her own features were as perturbed as she had apparently discovered his to be.

“Poor Benny, poor boy!” she repeated, in the happy voice she might have had if she had been congratulating Campton on the lad’s escape. He saw that she was still thinking not of Upsher but of George, and her inability to fit her intonation to her words betrayed the violence of her relief. But why had she imagined George to be in danger?

Campton recounted the scene at which he had just assisted, and while she continued to murmur her sympathy he asked abruptly: “Why on earth should you have been afraid for George?”

211Miss Anthony had taken her usual armchair. It was placed, as the armchairs of elderly ladies usually are, with its high back to the light, and Campton could no longer observe the discrepancy between her words and her looks. This probably gave her laugh its note of confidence. “My dear, if you were to cut me open George’s name would run out of every vein,” she said.

“But in that tone—it was your tone. You thought he’d been—that something had happened,” Campton insisted. “How could it, where he is?”

She shrugged her shoulders in the “foreign” way she had picked up in her youth. The gesture was as incongruous as her slang, but it had become part of her physical self, which lay in a loose mosaic of incongruities over the solid crystal block of her character.

“Why, indeed? I suppose there are risks everywhere, aren’t there?”

“I don’t know.” He pulled out the letter he had received that morning. A sudden light had illuminated it, and his hand shook. “I don’t even know where George is any longer.”

She seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then asked calmly: “What do you mean?”

“Here—look at this. We’re to write to his base. I’m to tell his mother of the change.” He waited, cursing the faint winter light, and the protecting back of her chair. “What can it mean,” he broke out, “except that he’s left Sainte Menehould, that he’s been sent 212elsewhere, and that he doesn’t want us to find out where?”

Miss Anthony bent her long nose over the page. Her hand held the letter steadily, and he guessed, as she perused it, that she had had one of the same kind, and had already drawn her own conclusions. What they were, that first startled “George!” seemed to say. But would she ever let Campton see as far into her thoughts again? He continued to watch her hands patiently, since nothing was to be discovered of her face. The hands folded the letter with precision, and handed it back to him.

“Yes: I see why you thought that—one might have,” she surprised him by conceding. Then, darting at his unprotected face a gaze he seemed to feel though he could not see it: “If it had meant that George had been ordered to the front, how would you have felt?” she demanded.

He had not expected the question, and though in the last weeks he had so often propounded it to himself, it caught him in the chest like a blow. A sense of humiliation, a longing to lay his weakness bare, suddenly rose in him, and he bowed his head. “I couldn’t ... I couldn’t bear it,” he stammered.

She was silent for an interval; then she stood up, and laying her hand on his shaking shoulder crossed the room to a desk in which he knew she kept her private papers. Her keys clinked, and a moment later she 213handed him a letter. It was in George’s writing, and dated on the same day as his own.

“Dearest old girl, nothing new but my address. Hereafter please write to our Base. This order has just been lowered from the empyrean at the end of an endless reel of red tape. What it means nobody knows. It does not appear to imply an immediate change of Headquarters; but even if such a change comes, my job is likely to remain the same. I’m getting used to it, and no wonder, for one day differeth not from another, and I’ve had many of them now. Take care of Dad and mother, and of your matchless self. I’m writing to father to-day. Your George the First—and Last (or I’ll know why).”

The two letters bore one another out in a way which carried conviction. Campton saw that his sudden doubts must have been produced (since he had not felt them that morning) by the agonizing experience he had undergone: the vision of Benny Upsher had unmanned him. George was safe, and asked only to remain so: that was evident from both letters. And as the certainty of his son’s acquiescence once more penetrated Campton it brought with it a fresh reaction of shame. Ashamed—yes, he had begun to be ashamed of George as well as of himself. Under the touch of Adele Anthony’s implacable honesty his last pretenses shrivelled up, and he longed to abase himself. He lifted his head and looked at her, remembering all she would be able to read in his eyes.

214“You’re satisfied?” she enquired.

“Yes. If that’s the word.” He stretched his hand toward her, and then drew it back. “But it’s not: it’s not the word any longer.” He laboured with the need of self-expression, and the opposing instinct of concealing feelings too complex for Miss Anthony’s simple gaze. How could he say: “I’m satisfied; but I wish to God that George were not”? And was he satisfied, after all? And how could he define, or even be sure that he was actually experiencing, a feeling so contradictory that it seemed to be made up of anxiety for his son’s safety, shame at that anxiety, shame at George’s own complacent acceptance of his lot, and terror of a possible change in that lot? There were hours when it seemed to Campton that the Furies were listening, and ready to fling their awful answer to him if he as much as whispered to himself: “Would to God that George were not satisfied!”

The sense of their haunting presence laid its clutch on him, and caused him, after a pause, to finish his phrase in another tone. “No; satisfied’s not the word; I’m glad George is out of it!” he exclaimed.

Miss Anthony was folding away the letter as calmly as if it had been a refugee record. She did not appear to notice the change in Campton’s voice.

“I don’t pretend to your sublime detachment: you’ve never had a child,” he sneered. (Certainly, if the Furies were listening, they would put that down to his credit!)

215“Oh, my poor John,” she said; then she locked the desk, took her hat from the lamp-chimney on which it had been hanging, jammed it down on her head like a helmet, and remarked: “We’ll go together, shall we? It’s time I got back to the office.”

On the way downstairs both were silent. Campton’s ears echoed with his stupid taunt, and he glanced at her without daring to speak. On the last landing she paused and said: “I’ll see Julia this evening about George’s change of address. She may be worried; and I can explain—I can take her my letter.”

“Oh, do,” he assented. “And tell her—tell her—if she needs me——”

It was as much of a message as he found courage for. Miss Anthony nodded.

XIX

One day Mme. Lebel said: “The first horse-chestnuts are in bloom. And monsieur must really buy himself some new shirts.”

Campton looked at her in surprise. She spoke in a different voice; he wondered if she had had good news of her grandchildren. Then he saw that the furrows in her old face were as deep as ever, and that the change in her voice was simply an unconscious response to the general stirring of sap, the spring need to go on living, through everything and in spite of everything.

On se fait une raison, as Mme. Lebel would have 216said. Life had to go on, and new shirts had to be bought. No one knew why it was necessary, but every one felt that it was; and here were the horse-chestnuts once more actively confirming it. Habit laid its compelling grasp on the wires of the poor broken marionettes with which the Furies had been playing, and they responded, though with feebler flappings, to the accustomed jerk.

In Campton the stirring of the sap had been a cold and languid process, chiefly felt in his reluctance to go on with his relief work. He had tried to close his ears to the whispers of his own lassitude, vexed, after the first impulse of self-dedication, to find that no vocation declared itself, that his task became each day more tedious as well as more painful. Theoretically, the pain ought to have stimulated him: perpetual immersion in that sea of anguish should have quickened his effort to help the poor creatures sinking under its waves. The woe of the war had had that effect on Adele Anthony, on young Boylston, on Mlle. Davril, on the greater number of his friends. But their ardour left him cold. He wanted to help, he wanted it, he was sure, as earnestly as they; but the longing was not an inspiration to him, and he felt more and more that to work listlessly was to work ineffectually.

“I give the poor devils so many boots and money-orders a day; you give them yourself, and so does Boylston,” he complained to Miss Anthony; who murmured: 217“Ah, Boylston——” as if that point of the remark were alone worth noticing.

“At his age too; it’s extraordinary, the way the boy’s got out of himself.”

“Or into himself, rather. He was a pottering boy before—now he’s a man, with a man’s sense of things.”

“Yes; but his patience, his way of getting into their minds, their prejudices, their meannesses, their miseries! He doesn’t seem to me like the kind who was meant to be a missionary.”

“Not a bit of it.... But he’s burnt up with shame at our not being in the war—as all the young Americans are.”

Campton made an impatient movement. “Benny Upsher again——! Can’t we let our government decide all that for us? What else did we elect it for, I wonder?”

“I wonder,” echoed Miss Anthony.

Talks of this kind were irritating and unprofitable, and Campton did not again raise the question. Miss Anthony’s vision was too simplifying to penetrate far into his doubts, and after nearly a year’s incessant contact with the most savage realities her mind still seemed at ease in its old formulas.

Simplicity, after all, was the best safeguard in such hours. Mrs. Brant was as absorbed in her task as Adele Anthony. Since the Brant villa at Deauville had been turned into a hospital she was always on the road, in 218a refulgent new motor emblazoned with a Red Cross, carrying supplies, rushing down with great surgeons, hurrying back to committee meetings and conferences with the Service de Santé (for she and Mr. Brant were now among the leaders in American relief work in Paris), and throwing open the Avenue Marigny drawing-rooms for concerts, lectures and such sober philanthropic gaieties as society was beginning to countenance.

On the day when Mme. Lebel told Campton that the horse-chestnuts were in blossom and he must buy some new shirts he was particularly in need of such incentives. He had made up his mind to go to see Mrs. Brant about a concert for “The Friends of French Art” which was to be held in her house. Ever since George had asked him to see something of his mother Campton had used the pretext of charitable collaboration as the best way of getting over their fundamental lack of anything to say to each other.

The appearance of the Champs Elysées confirmed Mme. Lebel’s announcement. Everywhere the punctual rosy spikes were rising above unfolding green; and Campton, looking up at them, remembered once thinking how Nature had adapted herself to the scene in overhanging with her own pink lamps and green fans the lamps and fans of the cafés chantants beneath. The latter lights had long since been extinguished, the fans folded up; and as he passed the bent and broken arches of electric light, the iron chairs and dead plants 219in paintless boxes, all heaped up like the scenery of a bankrupt theatre, he felt the pang of Nature’s obstinate renewal in a world of death. Yet he also felt the stir of the blossoming trees in the form of a more restless discontent, a duller despair, a new sense of inadequacy. How could war go on when spring had come?

Mrs. Brant, having reduced her household and given over her drawing-rooms to charity, received in her boudoir, a small room contrived by a clever upholsterer to simulate a seclusion of which she had never felt the need. Photographs strewed the low tables; and facing the door Campton saw George’s last portrait, in uniform, enclosed in an expensive frame. Campton had received the same photograph, and thrust it into a drawer; he thought a young man on a safe staff job rather ridiculous in uniform, and at the same time the sight filled him with a secret dread.

Mrs. Brant was bidding goodbye to a lady in mourning whom Campton did not know. His approach through the carpeted antechamber had been unnoticed, and as he entered the room he heard Mrs. Brant say in French, apparently in reply to a remark of her visitor: “Bridge, chère Madame? No; not yet. I confess I haven’t the courage to take up my old life. We mothers with sons at the front....”

“Ah,” exclaimed the other lady, “there I don’t agree with you. I think one owes it to them to go on as if one were as little afraid as they are. That is what 220all my sons prefer.... Even,” she added, lowering her voice but lifting her head higher, “even, I’m sure, the one who is buried by the Marne.” With a flush on her handsome face she pressed Mrs. Brant’s hand and passed out.

Mrs. Brant had caught sight of Campton as she received the rebuke. Her colour rose slightly, and she said with a smile: “So many women can’t get on without amusement.”

“No,” he agreed. There was a pause, and then he asked: “Who was it?”

“The Marquise de Tranlay—the widow.”

“Where are the sons she spoke of?”

“There are three left: one in the Chasseurs à Pied; the youngest, who volunteered at seventeen, in the artillery in the Argonne; the third, badly wounded, in hospital at Compiègne. And the eldest killed. I simply can’t understand....”

“Why,” Campton interrupted, “did you speak as if George were at the front? Do you usually speak of him in that way?”

Her silence and her deepening flush made him feel the unkindness of the question. “I didn’t mean ... forgive me,” he said. “Only sometimes, when I see women like that I’m——”

“Well?” she questioned.

He was silent in his turn, and she did not insist. They sat facing each other, each forgetting the purpose 221of their meeting. For the hundredth time he felt the uselessness of trying to carry out George’s filial injunction: between himself and George’s mother these months of fiery trial seemed to have loosed instead of tightening the links.

He wandered back to Montmartre through the bereft and beautiful city. The light lay on it in wide silvery washes, harmonizing the grey stone, the pale foliage, and a sky piled with clouds which seemed to rebuild in translucid masses the monuments below. He caught himself once more viewing the details of the scene in the terms of his trade. River, pavements, terraces heavy with trees, the whole crowded sky-line from Notre Dame to the Panthéon, instead of presenting themselves in their bare reality, were transposed into a painter’s vision. And the faces around him became again the starting-point of rapid incessant combinations of line and colour, as if the visible world were once more at its old trick of weaving itself into magic designs. The reawakening of this instinct deepened Campton’s sense of unrest, and made him feel more than ever unfitted for a life in which such things were no longer of account, in which it seemed a disloyalty even to think of them.

He returned to the studio, having promised to deal with some office work which he had carried home the night before. The papers lay on the table; but he turned to the window and looked out over his budding 222lilacs at the new strange Paris. He remembered that it was almost a year since he had leaned in the same place, gazing down on the wise and frivolous old city in her summer dishabille while he planned his journey to Africa with George; and something George had once quoted from Faust came drifting through his mind: “Take care! You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.

His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett.

She said: “May I come in?” and did so without waiting for his answer. The rapidity of her entrance surprised him less than the change in her appearance. But for the one glimpse of her dishevelled elegance, when she had rushed into Mrs. Brant’s drawing-room on the day after war was declared, he had seen her only in a nursing uniform, as absorbed in her work as if it had been a long-thwarted vocation. Now she stood before him in raiment so delicately springlike that it seemed an emanation of the day. Care had dropped 223from her with her professional garb, and she smiled as though he must guess the reason.

In ordinary times he would have thought: “She’s in love——” but that explanation was one which seemed to belong to other days. It reminded him, however, how little he knew of Mrs. Talkett, who, after René Davril’s death, had vanished from his life as abruptly as she had entered it. Allusions to “the Talketts,” picked up now and again at Adele Anthony’s, led him to conjecture an invisible husband in the background; but all he knew of Mrs. Talkett was what she had told him of her “artistic” yearnings, and what he had been able to divine from her empty questioning eyes, from certain sweet inflections when she spoke of her wounded soldiers, and from the precise and finished language with which she clothed her unfinished and imprecise thoughts. All these indications made up an image not unlike that of the fashion-plate torn from its context of which she had reminded him at their first meeting; and he looked at her with indifference, wondering why she had come.

With an abrupt gesture she pulled the pin from her heavily-plumed hat, tossed it on the divan, and said: “Dear Master, I just want to sit with you and have you talk to me.” She dropped down beside her hat, clasped her thin hands about her thin knee, and broke out, as if she had already forgotten that she wanted him to talk to her: “Do you know, I’ve made up my 224mind to begin to live again—to live my own life, I mean, to be my real me, after all these dreadful months of exile from myself. I see now that that is my real duty—just as it is yours, just as it is that of every artist and every creator. Don’t you feel as I do? Don’t you agree with me? We must save Beauty for the world; before it is too late we must save it out of this awful wreck and ruin. It sounds ridiculously presumptuous, doesn’t it, to say ‘we’ in talking of a great genius like you and a poor little speck of dust like me? But after all there is the same instinct in us, the same craving, the same desire to realize Beauty, though you do it so magnificently and so—so objectively, and I ...” she paused, unclasped her hands, and lifted her lovely bewildered eyes, “I do it only by a ribbon in my hair, a flower in a vase, a way of looping a curtain, or placing a lacquer screen in the right light. But I oughtn’t to be ashamed of my limitations, do you think I ought? Surely every one ought to be helping to save Beauty; every one is needed, even the humblest and most ignorant of us, or else the world will be all death and ugliness. And after all, ugliness is the only real death, isn’t it?” She drew a deep breath and added: “It has done me good already to sit here and listen to you.”

Campton, a few weeks previously, would have been amused, or perhaps merely irritated. But in the interval he had become aware in himself of the same 225irresistible craving to “live,” as she put it, and as he had heard it formulated, that very day, by the mourning mother who had so sharply rebuked Mrs. Brant. The spring was stirring them all in their different ways, secreting in them the sap which craved to burst into bridge-parties, or the painting of masterpieces, or a consciousness of the need for new shirts.

“But what am I in all this?” Mrs. Talkett rushed on, sparing him the trouble of a reply. “Nothing but the match that lights the flame! Sometimes I imagine that I might put what I mean into poetry ... I have scribbled a few things, you know ... but that’s not what I was going to tell you. It’s you, dear Master, who must set us the example of getting back to our work, our real work, whatever it is. What have you done in all these dreadful months—the real You? Nothing! And the world will be the poorer for it ever after. Master, you must paint again—you must begin to-day!”

Campton gave an uneasy laugh. “Oh—paint!” He waved his hand toward the office files of “The Friends of French Art.” “There’s my work.”

“Not the real you. It’s your dummy’s work—just as my nursing has been mine. Oh, one did one’s best—but all the while beauty and art and the eternal things were perishing! And what will the world be like without them?”

“I shan’t be here,” Campton growled.

226“But your son will.” She looked at him profoundly. “You know I know your son—we’re friends. And I’m sure he would feel as I feel—he would tell you to go back to your painting.”

For months past any allusion to George had put Campton on his guard, stiffening him with improvised defences. But this appeal of Mrs. Talkett’s found him unprepared, demoralized by the spring sweetness, and by his secret sense of his son’s connivance with it. What was war—any war—but an old European disease, an ancestral blood-madness seizing on the first pretext to slake its frenzy? Campton reminded himself again that he was the son of free institutions, of a country in no way responsible for the centuries of sinister diplomacy which had brought Europe to ruin, and was now trying to drag down America. George was right, the Brants were right, this young woman through whose lips Campton’s own secret instinct spoke was right.

He was silent so long that she rose with the anxious frown that appeared to be her way of blushing, and faltered out: “I’m boring you—I’d better go.”

She picked up her hat and held its cataract of feathers poised above her slanted head.

“Wait—let me do you like that!” Campton cried. It had never before occurred to him that she was paintable; but as she stood there with uplifted arm the long line flowing from her wrist to her hip suddenly wound itself about him like a net.

227“Me?” she stammered, standing motionless, as if frightened by the excess of her triumph.

“Do you mind?” he queried; and hardly hearing her faltered out: “Mind? When it was what I came for!” he dragged forth an easel, flung on it the first canvas he could lay hands on (though he knew it was the wrong shape and size), and found himself instantly transported into the lost world which was the only real one.

XX

For a month Campton painted on in transcendent bliss.

His first stroke carried him out of space and time, into a region where all that had become numbed and atrophied in him could expand and breathe. Lines, images, colours were again the sole facts: he plunged into their whirling circles like a stranded sea-creature into the sea. Once more every face was not a vague hieroglyph, a curtain drawn before an invisible aggregate of wants and woes, but a work of art, a flower in a pattern, to be dealt with on its own merits, like a bronze or a jewel. During the first day or two his hand halted; but the sense of insufficiency was a goad, and he fought with his subject till he felt a strange ease in every renovated muscle, and his model became like a musical instrument on which he played with careless mastery.

228He had transferred his easel to Mrs. Talkett’s apartment. It was an odd patchwork place, full of bold beginnings and doubtful pauses, rash surrenders to the newest fashions and abrupt insurrections against them, where Louis Philippe mahogany had entrenched itself against the aggression of art nouveau hangings, and the frail grace of eighteenth-century armchairs shed derision on lumpy modern furniture painted like hobby-horses at a fair. It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed.

At first Campton was steeped in the mere sensual joy of his art; but after a few days the play of the mirrors began to interest him. Mrs. Talkett had abandoned her hospital work, and was trying, as she said, to “recreate herself.” In this she was aided by a number of people who struck Campton as rather too young not to have found some other job, or too old to care any longer for that particular one. But all this did not trouble his newly recovered serenity. He seemed to himself, somehow, like a drowned body—but drowned 229in a toy aquarium—still staring about with living eyes, but aware of the other people only as shapes swimming by with a flash of exotic fins. They were enclosed together, all of them, in an unreal luminous sphere, mercifully screened against the reality from which a common impulse of horror had driven them; and since he was among them it was not his business to wonder at the others. So, through the cloud of his art, he looked out on them impartially.

The high priestess of the group was Mme. de Dolmetsch, with Harvey Mayhew as her acolyte. Mr. Mayhew was still in pursuit of Atrocities: he was in fact almost the only member of the group who did not rather ostentatiously disavow the obligation to “carry on.” But he had discovered that to discharge this sacred task he must vary it by frequent intervals of relaxation. He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. “You see, there’s an awful lot of money 230to be got out of it, one way and another, and I know a use for every penny—that is, Miss Anthony and I do,” the young man modestly explained; adding, in response to the painter’s puzzled stare, that Mr. Mayhew’s harrowing appeals were beginning to bring from America immense sums for the Victims, and that Mr. Mayhew, while immensely gratified by the effect of his eloquence, and the prestige it was bringing him in French social and governmental circles, had not the cloudiest notion how the funds should be used, and had begged Boylston to advise him. It was owing to this that the ex-Delegate to the Hague was able, with a light conscience, to seek the repose of Mrs. Talkett’s company and, with a smile of the widest initiation, to listen to the subversive conversation of her familiars.

“Subversive” was the motto of the group. Every one was engaged in attacking some theory of art or life or letters which nobody in particular defended. Even Mr. Talkett—a kindly young man with eye-glasses and glossy hair, who roamed about straightening the furniture, like a gentlemanly detective watching the presents at a wedding—owned to Campton that he was subversive; and on the painter’s pressing for a definition, added: “Why, I don’t believe in anything she doesn’t believe in,” while his eye-glasses shyly followed his wife’s course among the teacups.

Mme. de Dolmetsch, though obviously anxious to retain her hold on Mr. Mayhew, did not restrict herself 231to such mild fare, but exercised her matchless eyes on a troop of followers: the shock-haired pianist who accompanied her recitations, a straight-backed young American diplomatist whose collars seemed a part of his career, a lustrous South American millionaire, and a short squat Sicilian who designed the costumes for the pianist’s unproduced ballets.

All these people appeared to believe intensely in each other’s reality and importance; but it gradually came over Campton that all of them, excepting their host and hostess, knew that they were merely masquerading.

To Campton, used to the hard-working world of art, this playing at Bohemia seemed a nursery-game; but the scene acquired an unexpected solidity from the appearance in it, one day, of the banker Jorgenstein, who strolled in as naturally as if he had been dropping into Campton’s studio to enquire into the progress of his own portrait.

“I must come and look you up, Campton—get you to finish me,” he said jovially, tapping his fat boot with a malacca stick as he looked over the painter’s head at the canvas on which Mrs. Talkett’s restless image seemed to flutter like a butterfly impaled.

“You’ll owe it to me if he does you,” the sitter declared, smiling back at the leer which Campton divined behind his shoulder; and he felt a sudden pity for her innocence.

232“My wife made Campton come back to his real work—doing his bit, you know,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening a curtain and disappearing again, like a diving animal; and Mrs. Talkett turned her plaintive eyes on Campton. “That kind of idiocy is all I’ve ever had,” they seemed to say; and he nearly cried back to her: “But, you poor child, it’s the only honest thing anywhere near you!”

Absorbed in his picture, he hardly stopped to wonder at Jorgenstein’s reappearance, at his air of bloated satisfaction or his easy allusions to Cabinet Ministers and eminent statesmen. The atmosphere of the Talkett house was so mirage-like that even the big red bulk of the international financier became imponderable in it.

But one day Campton, on his way home, ran across Dastrey, and remembered that they had not met for weeks. The ministerial drudge looked worn and preoccupied, and Campton was abruptly recalled to the world he had been trying to escape from.

“You seem rather knocked-up—what’s wrong with you?”

Dastrey stared. “Wrong with me? Well—did you like the communiqué this morning?”

“I didn’t read it,” said Campton curtly. They walked along a few steps in silence.

“You see,” the painter continued, “I’ve gone back to my job—my painting. I suddenly found I had to.”

233Dastrey glanced at him with surprising kindliness. “Ah, that’s good news, my dear fellow!”

“You think so?” Campton half-sneered.

“Of course—why not? What are you painting? May I come and see?”

“Naturally.” Campton paused. “The fact is, I was bitten the other day with a desire to depict that little will-o’-the-wisp of a Mrs. Talkett. Come to her house any afternoon and I’ll show you the thing.”

“To her house?” Dastrey paused with a frown. “Then the picture’s finished?”

“No—not by a long way. I’m doing it there—in her milieu, among her crowd. It amuses me; they amuse me. When will you come?” He shot out the sentences like challenges; and his friend took them up in the same tone.

“To Mrs. Talkett’s—to meet her crowd? Thanks—I’m too much tied down by my job.”

“No; you’re not. You’re too disapproving,” said Campton quarrelsomely. “You think we’re all a lot of shirks, of drones, of international loafers—I don’t know what you call us. But I’m one of them, so whatever name you give them I must answer to. Well, I’ll tell you what they are, my dear fellow—and I’m not ashamed to be among them: they’re people who’ve resolutely, unanimously, unshakeably decided, for a certain number of hours each day, to forget the war, to ignore it, to live as if it were not and never had been, so that——”

234“So that?”

“So that beauty shall not perish from the earth!” Campton shouted, bringing his stick down with a whack on the pavement.

Dastrey broke into a laugh. “Allons donc! Decided to forget the war? Why, bless your heart, they’ve never, not one of ’em, ever been able to remember it for an hour together; no, not from the first day, except as it interfered with their plans or cut down their amusements or increased their fortunes. You’re the only one of them, my dear chap, (since you class yourself among them) of whom what you’ve just said is true; and if you can forget the war while you’re at your work, so much the better for you and for us and for posterity; and I hope you’ll paint all Mrs. Talkett’s crowd, one after another. Though I doubt if they’re as good subjects now as when you caught them last July with the war-funk on.” He held out his hand with a dry smile. “Goodbye. I’m off to meet my nephew, who’s here on leave.”

He hastened away, leaving Campton in a crumbled world. Louis Dastrey on leave? But that was because he was at the front, the real front, in the trenches, had already had a slight wound and a fine citation. Staff-officers, as George had wisely felt, were not asking for leave just yet....

The thoughts excited by this encounter left Campton more than ever resolved to drug himself with work and frivolity. It was none of his business to pry into 235the consciences of the people about him, not even into Jorgenstein’s—into which one would presumably have had to be let down in a diver’s suit, with oxygen pumping at top pressure. If the government tolerated Jorgenstein’s presence in France, probably on the ground that he could be useful—so the banker himself let it be known—it was silly of people like Adele Anthony and Dastrey to wince at the mere mention of his name. There woke in Campton all the old spirit of aimless random defiance—revolt for revolt’s sake—which had marked the first period of his life after his separation from his wife. He had long since come to regard it as a crude and juvenile phase—yet here he was reliving it.

Though he knew of the intimacy between Mrs. Talkett and the Brants he had no fear of meeting Julia: it was impossible to picture her neat head battling with the blasts of that dishevelled drawing-room. But though she did not appear there, he heard her more and more often alluded to, in terms of startling familiarity, by Mrs. Talkett’s visitors. It was clear that they all saw her, chiefly in her own house, that they thought her, according to their respective vocabularies, “a perfect dear,” “une femme exquise” or “une bonne vieille” (ah, poor Julia!); and that their sudden enthusiasm for her was not uninspired by the fact that she had got her marvellous chef demobilised, and was giving little “war-dinners” followed by a quiet turn at bridge.

236Campton remembered Mme. de Tranlay’s rebuke to Mrs. Brant on the day when he had last called in the Avenue Marigny; then he remembered also that it was on that very day that he had returned to his painting.

“After all, she held out longer than I did—poor Julia!” he mused, annoyed at the idea of her being the complacent victim of all the voracities he saw about him, and yet reflecting that she was at last living her life, as they called it at Mrs. Talkett’s. After all, the fact that George was not at the front seemed to exonerate his parents—unless, indeed, it did just the opposite.

One day, coming earlier than usual to Mrs. Talkett’s to put in a last afternoon’s work on her portrait, Campton, to his surprise, found his wife in front of it. Equally to his surprise he noticed that she was dressed with a juvenility quite new to her; and for the first time he thought she looked old-fashioned and also old. She met him with her usual embarrassment.

“I didn’t know you came as early as this. Madge told me I might just run in——” She waved her hand toward the portrait.

“I hope you like it,” he said, suddenly finding that he didn’t.

“It’s marvellous—marvellous.” She looked at him timidly. “It’s extraordinary, how you’ve caught her rhythm, her tempo,” she ventured in the jargon of the place. Campton, to hide a smile, turned away to get 237his brushes. “I’m so glad,” she continued hastily, “that you’ve begun to paint again. We all need to ... to....”

“Oh, not you and I, do we?” he rejoined with a scornful laugh.

She evidently caught the allusion, for she blushed all over her uncovered neck, up through the faintly wrinkled cheeks to the roots of her newly dyed hair; then he saw her eyes fill.

“What’s she crying for? Because George is not in danger?” he wondered, busying himself with his palette.

Mrs. Talkett hurried in with surprise and apologies; and one by one the habitués followed, with cheery greetings for Mrs. Brant and a moment of constraint as they noted Campton’s presence, and the relation between the two was mutely passed about. Then the bridge-tables were brought, Mr. Talkett began to straighten the cards nervously, and the guests broke up into groups, forgetting everything but their own affairs. As Campton turned back to his work he was aware of a last surprise in the sight of Mrs. Brant serene and almost sparkling, waving her adieux to the bridge-tables, and going out followed by Jorgenstein, with whom she seemed on terms of playful friendliness. Of all strange war promiscuities, Campton thought this the strangest.

238

XXI

The next time Campton saw Mrs. Brant was in his own studio.

He was preparing, one morning, to leave the melancholy place, when the bell rang and his bonne let her in. Her dress was less frivolous than at Mrs. Talkett’s, and she wore a densely patterned veil, like the ladies in cinema plays when they visit their seducers or their accomplices.

Through the veil she looked at him agitatedly, and said: “George is not at Sainte Menehould.”

He stared.

“No. Anderson was there the day before yesterday.”

“Brant? At Sainte Menehould?” Campton felt the blood rush to his temples. What! He, the boy’s father, had not so much as dared to ask for the almost unattainable permission to go into the war-zone; and this other man, who was nothing to George, absolutely nothing, who had no right whatever to ask for leave to visit him, had somehow obtained the priceless favour, and instead of passing it on, instead of offering at least to share it with the boy’s father, had sneaked off secretly to feast on the other’s lawful privilege!

“How the devil——?” Campton burst out.

“Oh, he got a Red Cross mission; it was arranged very suddenly—through a friend....”

“Yes—well?” Campton stammered, sitting down lest 239his legs should fail him, and signing to her to take a chair.

“Well—he was not there!” she repeated excitedly. “It’s what we might have known—since he’s changed his address.”

“Then he didn’t see him?” Campton interrupted, the ferocious joy of the discovery crowding out his wrath and wonder.

“Anderson didn’t? No. He wasn’t there, I tell you!”

“The H.Q. has been moved?”

“No, it hasn’t. Anderson saw one of the officers. He said George had been sent on a mission.”

“To another H.Q.?”

“That’s what they said. I don’t believe it.”

“What do you believe?”

“I don’t know. Anderson’s sure they told him the truth. The officer he saw is a friend of George’s, and he said George was expected back that very evening.”

Campton sat looking at her uncertainly. Did she dread, or did she rather wish, to disbelieve the officer’s statement? Where did she hope or fear that George had gone? And what were Campton’s own emotions? As confused, no doubt, as hers—as undefinable. The insecurity of his feelings moved him to a momentary compassion for hers, which were surely pitiable, whatever else they were. Then a savage impulse swept away every other, and he said: “Wherever George was, Brant’s visit will have done him no good.”

240She grew pale. “What do you mean?”

“I wonder it never occurred to you—or to your husband, since he’s so solicitous,” Campton went on, prolonging her distress.

“Please tell me what you mean,” she pleaded with frightened eyes.

“Why, in God’s name, couldn’t you both let well enough alone? Didn’t you guess why George never asked for leave—why I’ve always advised him not to? Don’t you know that nothing is as likely to get a young fellow into trouble as having his family force their way through to see him, use influence, seem to ask favours? I dare say that’s how that fool of a Dolmetsch woman got Isador killed. No one would have noticed where he was if she hadn’t gone on so about him. They had to send him to the front finally. And now the chances are——”

“Oh, no, no, no—don’t say it!” She held her hands before her face as if he had flung something flaming at her. “It was I who made Anderson go!”

“Well—Brant ought to have thought of that—I did,” he pursued sardonically.

Her answer disarmed him. “You’re his father.”

“I don’t mean,” he went on hastily, “that Brant’s not right: of course there’s nothing to be afraid of. I can’t imagine why you thought there was.”

She hung her head. “Sometimes when I hear the other women—other mothers—I feel as if our turn 241must come too. Even at Sainte Menehould a shell might hit the house. Anderson said the artillery fire seemed so near.”

He made no answer, and she sat silent, without apparent thought of leaving. Finally he said: “I was just going out——”

She stood up. “Oh, yes—that reminds me. I came to ask you to come with me.”

“With you——?”

“The motor’s waiting—you must.” She laid her hand on his arm. “To see Olida, the new clairvoyante. Everybody goes to her—everybody who’s anxious about anyone. Even the scientific people believe in her. She’s told people the most extraordinary things—it seems she warned Daisy de Dolmetsch.... Well, I’d rather know!” she burst out passionately.

Campton smiled. “She’ll tell you that George is back at his desk.”

“Well, then—isn’t that worth it? Please don’t refuse me!”

He disengaged himself gently. “My poor Julia, go by all means if it will reassure you.”

“Ah, but you’ve got to come too. You can’t say no: Madge Talkett tells me that if the two nearest go together Olida sees so much more clearly—especially a father and mother,” she added hastily, as if conscious of the inopportune “nearest.” After a moment she went on: “Even Mme. de Tranlay’s been; Daisy de 242Dolmetsch met her on the stairs. Olida told her that her youngest boy, from whom she’d had no news for weeks, was all right, and coming home on leave. Mme. de Tranlay didn’t know Daisy, except by sight, but she stopped her to tell her. Only fancy—the last person she would have spoken to in ordinary times! But she was so excited and happy! And two days afterward the boy turned up safe and sound. You must come!” she insisted.

Campton was seized with a sudden deep compassion for all these women groping for a ray of light in the blackness. It moved him to think of Mme. de Tranlay’s proud figure climbing a clairvoyante’s stairs.

“I’ll come if you want me to,” he said.

They drove to the Batignolles quarter. Mrs. Brant’s lips were twitching under her veil, and as the motor stopped she said childishly: “I’ve never been to this kind of place before.”

“I should hope not,” Campton rejoined. He himself, during the Russian lady’s rule, had served an apprenticeship among the soothsayers, and come away disgusted with the hours wasted in their company. He suddenly remembered the Spanish girl in the little white house near the railway, who had told his fortune in the hot afternoons with cards and olive-stones, and had found, by irrefutable signs, that he and she would “come together” again. “Well, it was better than this pseudo-scientific humbug,” he mused, “because it was 243picturesque—and so was she—and she believed in it.”

Mrs. Brant rang, and Campton followed her into a narrow hall. A servant-woman showed them into a salon which was as commonplace as a doctor’s waiting-room. On the mantelpiece were vases of Pampas grass, and a stuffed monkey swung from the electrolier. Evidently Mme. Olida was superior to the class of fortune-tellers who prepare a special stage-setting, and no astrologer’s robe or witch’s kitchen was to be feared.

The maid led them across a plain dining-room into an inner room. The shutters were partly closed, and the blinds down. A voluminous woman in loose black rose from a sofa. Gold earrings gleamed under her oiled black hair—and suddenly, through the billows of flesh, and behind the large pale mask, Campton recognized the Spanish girl who used to read his fortune in the house by the railway. Her eyes rested a moment on Mrs. Brant; then they met his with the same heavy stare. But he noticed that her hands, which were small and fat, trembled a little as she pointed to two chairs.

“Sit down, please,” she said in a low rough voice, speaking in French. The door opened again, and a young man with Levantine eyes and a showy necktie looked in. She said sharply: “No,” and he disappeared. Campton noticed that a large emerald flashed on his 244manicured hand. Mme. Olida continued to look at her visitors.

Mrs. Brant wiped her dry lips and stammered: “We’re his parents—a son at the front....”

Mme. Olida fell back in a trance-like attitude, let her lips droop over her magnificent eyes, and rested her head against a soiled sofa-pillow. Presently she held out both hands.

“You are his parents? Yes? Give me each a hand, please.” As her cushioned palm touched Campton’s he thought he felt a tremor of recognition, and saw, in the half-light, the tremor communicate itself to her lids. He grasped her hand firmly, and she lifted her eyes, looked straight into his with her heavy velvety stare, and said: “You should hold my hand more loosely; the currents must not be compressed.” She turned her palm upward, so that his finger-tips rested on it as if on a keyboard; he noticed that she did not do the same with the hand she had placed in Mrs. Brant’s.

Suddenly he remembered that one sultry noon, lying under the olives, she had taught him, by signals tapped on his own knee, how to say what he chose to her without her brothers’ knowing it. He looked at the huge woman, seeking the curve of the bowed upper lip on which what used to be a faint blue shadow had now become a line as thick as her eyebrows, and recalling how her laugh used to lift the lip above her little round 245teeth while she threw back her head, showing the Agnus Dei in her neck. Now her mouth was like a withered flower, and in a crease of her neck a string of pearls was embedded.

“Take hands, please,” she commanded. Julia gave Campton her ungloved hand, and he sat between the two women.

“You are the parents? You want news of your son—ah, like so many!” Mme. Olida closed her eyes again.

“To know where he is—whereabouts—that is what we want,” Mrs. Brant whispered.

Mme. Olida sat as if labouring with difficult visions. The noises of the street came faintly through the closed windows and a smell of garlic and cheap scent oppressed Campton’s lungs and awakened old associations. With a final effort of memory he fixed his eyes on the clairvoyante’s darkened mask, and tapped her palm once or twice. She neither stirred nor looked at him.

“I see—I see——” she began in the consecrated phrase. “A veil—a thick veil of smoke between me and a face which is young and fair, with a short nose and reddish hair: thick, thick, thick hair, exactly like this gentleman’s when he was young....”