BOOK II (continued 3)

Mrs. Brant’s hand trembled in Campton’s. “It’s true,” she whispered, “before your hair turned grey it used to be as red as Georgie’s.”

“The veil grows denser—there are awful noises; 246there’s a face with blood—but not that first face. This is a very young man, as innocent as when he was born, with blue eyes like flax-flowers, but blood, blood ... why do I see that face? Ah, now it is on a hospital pillow—not your son’s face, the other; there is no one near, no one but some German soldiers laughing and drinking; the lips move, the hands are stretched out in agony; but no one notices. It is a face that has something to say to the gentleman; not to you, Madame. The uniform is different—is it an English uniform?... Ah, now the face turns grey; the eyes shut, there is foam on the lips. Now it is gone—there’s another man’s head on the pillow.... Now, now your son’s face comes back; but not near those others. The smoke has cleared ... I see a desk and papers; your son is writing....”

“Oh,” gasped Mrs. Brant.

“If you squeeze my hands you arrest the current,” Mme. Olida reminded her. There was another interval; Campton felt his wife’s fingers beating between his like trapped birds. The heat and darkness oppressed him; beads of sweat came out on his forehead. Did the woman really see things, and was that face with the blood on it Benny Upsher’s?

Mme. Olida droned on. “It is your son who is writing—the young man with the very thick hair. He is writing to you—trying to explain something. Perhaps you have hoped to see him lately? That is it; he is telling 247you why it could not be. He is sitting quietly in a room. There is no smoke.” She released Mrs. Brant’s hand and Campton’s. “Go home, Madame. You are fortunate. Perhaps his letter will reach you to-morrow.”

Mrs. Brant stood up sobbing. She found her gold bag and pushed it toward Campton. He had been feeling in his own pocket for money; but as he drew it forth Mme. Olida put back his hand. “No. I am superstitious; it’s so seldom that I can give good news. Bonjour, madame, bonjour, monsieur. I commend your son to the blessed Virgin and to all the saints and angels.”

Campton put Julia into the motor. She was still crying, but her tears were radiant. “Isn’t she wonderful? Didn’t you see how she seemed to recognize George? There’s no mistaking his hair! How could she have known what it was like? Don’t think me foolish—I feel so comforted!”

“Of course; you’ll hear from him to-morrow,” Campton said. He was touched by her maternal passion, and ashamed of having allowed her so small a share in his jealous worship of his son. He walked away, thinking of the young man dying in a German hospital, and of the other man’s face succeeding his on the pillow.

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XXII

Two days later, to Campton’s surprise, Anderson Brant appeared in the morning at the studio.

Campton, finishing a late breakfast in careless studio-garb, saw his visitor peer cautiously about, as though fearing undressed models behind the screens or empty beer-bottles under the tables. It was the first time that Mr. Brant had entered the studio since his attempt to buy George’s portrait, and Campton guessed at once that he had come again about George.

He looked at the painter shyly, as if oppressed by the indiscretion of intruding at that hour.

“It was my—Mrs. Brant who insisted—when she got this letter,” he brought out between precautionary coughs.

Campton looked at him tolerantly: a barrier seemed to have fallen between them since their brief exchange of words about Benny Upsher. The letter, as Campton had expected, was a line from George to his mother, written two days after Mr. Brant’s visit to Sainte Menehould. It expressed, in George’s usual staccato style, his regret at having been away. “Hard luck, when one is riveted to the same square yard of earth for weeks on end, to have just happened to be somewhere else the day Uncle Andy broke through.” It was always the same tone of fluent banter, in which Campton fancied he detected a lurking stridency, like the scrape 249of an overworked gramophone containing only comic disks.

“Ah, well—his mother must be satisfied,” Campton said as he gave the letter back.

“Oh, completely. So much so that I’ve induced her to go off for a while to Biarritz. The doctor finds her overdone; she’d got it into her head that George had been sent to the front; I couldn’t convince her to the contrary.”

Campton looked at him. “You yourself never believed it?”

Mr. Brant, who had half risen, as though feeling that his errand was done, slid back into his seat and clasped his small hands on his agate-headed stick.

“Oh, never.”

“It was not,” Campton pursued, “with that idea that you went to Sainte Menehould?”

Mr. Brant glanced at him in surprise. “No. On the contrary——”

“On the contrary?”

“I understood from—from his mother that, in the circumstances, you were opposed to his asking for leave; thought it unadvisable, that is. So, as it was such a long time since we’d seen him——” The “we,” pulling him up short, spread a brick-red blush over his baldness.

“Not longer than since I have—but then I’ve not your opportunities,” Campton retorted, the sneer 250breaking out in spite of him. Though he had grown kindly disposed toward Mr. Brant when they were apart, the old resentments still broke out in his presence.

Mr. Brant clasped and unclasped the knob of his stick. “I took the first chance that offered; I had his mother to think of.” Campton made no answer, and he continued: “I was sorry to hear you thought I’d perhaps been imprudent.”

“There’s no perhaps about it,” Campton retorted. “Since you say you were not anxious about the boy I can’t imagine why you made the attempt.”

Mr. Brant was silent. He seemed overwhelmed by the other’s disapprobation, and unable to find any argument in his own defence. “I never dreamed it could cause any trouble,” he said at length.

“That’s the ground you’ve always taken in your interference with my son!” Campton had risen, pushing back his chair, and Mr. Brant stood up also. They faced each other without speaking.

“I’m sorry,” Mr. Brant began, “that you should take such a view. It seemed to me natural ..., when Mr. Jorgenstein gave me the chance——”

“Jorgenstein! It was Jorgenstein who took you to the front? Took you to see my son?” Campton threw his head back and laughed. “That’s complete—that’s really complete!”

Mr. Brant reddened as if the laugh had been a blow. 251He stood very erect, his lips as tightly closed as a shut penknife. He had the attitude of a civilian under fire, considerably perturbed, but obliged to set the example of fortitude.

Campton looked at him. At last he had Mr. Brant at a disadvantage. Their respective situations were reversed, and he saw that the banker was aware of it, and oppressed by the fear that he might have done harm to George. He evidently wanted to say all this and did not know how.

His distress moved Campton, in whose ears the sound of his own outburst still echoed unpleasantly. If only Mr. Brant would have kept out of his way he would have found it so easy to be fair to him!

“I’m sorry,” he began in a quieter tone. “I dare say I’m unjust—perhaps it’s in the nature of our relation. Can’t you understand how I’ve felt, looking on helplessly all these years, while you’ve done for the boy everything I wanted to do for him myself? Haven’t you guessed why I jumped at my first success, and nursed my celebrity till I’d got half the fools in Europe lining up to be painted?” His excitement was mastering him again, and he went on hurriedly: “Do you suppose I’d have wasted all these precious years over their stupid faces if I hadn’t wanted to make my son independent of you? And he would have been, if the war hadn’t come; been my own son again and nobody else’s, leading his own life, whatever he chose it to be, 252instead of having to waste his youth in your bank, learning how to multiply your millions.”

The futility of this retrospect, and the inconsistency of his whole attitude, exasperated Campton more than anything his visitor could do or say, and he stopped, embarrassed by the sound of his own words, yet seeing no escape save to bury them under more and more. But Mr. Brant had opened his lips.

“They’ll be his, you know: the millions,” he said.

Campton’s anger dropped: he felt Mr. Brant at last too completely at his mercy. He waited for a moment before speaking.

“You tried to buy his portrait once—you remember I told you it was not for sale,” he then said.

Mr. Brant stood motionless, grasping his stick in one hand and stroking his moustache with the other. For a while he seemed to be considering Campton’s words without feeling their sting. “It was not the money ...” he stammered out at length, from the depth of some unutterable plea for understanding; then he added: “I wish you a good morning,” and walked out with his little stiff steps.

XXIII

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 253added 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 254the 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 255proud 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 256left 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, 257failure 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?”

258The people about him—Miss Anthony, Boylston, Mlle. 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 259the 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.

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