XXIV

The gates of Paris were behind them, and they were rushing through an icy twilight between long lines of houses, factory chimneys and city-girt fields, when Campton at last roused himself and understood.

It was he, John Campton, who sat in that car—that noiseless swiftly-sliding car, so cushioned and commodious, so ingeniously fitted for all the exigencies and emergencies of travel, that it might have been a section of the Nouveau Luxe on wheels; and the figure next to him, on the extreme other side of the deeply upholstered seat, was that of Anderson Brant. This, for the moment, was as far as Campton’s dazed perceptions carried him....

The motor was among real fields and orchards, and the icy half-light which might just as well have been dusk was turning definitely to dawn, when at last, disentangling his mind from a tight coil of passport and permit problems, he thought: “But this is the road north of Paris—that must have been St. Denis.”

Among all the multiplied strangenesses of the last strange hours it had hardly struck him before that, now he was finally on his way to George, it was not to the Argonne that he was going, but in the opposite direction. The discovery held his floating mind for a moment, but for a moment only, before it drifted away again, to be caught on some other projecting strangeness.

Chief among these was Mr. Brant’s presence at his side, and the fact that the motor they were sitting in was Mr. Brant’s. But Campton felt that such enormities were not to be dealt with yet. He had neither slept nor eaten since the morning before, and whenever he tried to grasp the situation in its entirety his spirit fainted away again into outer darkness....

His companion presently coughed, and said, in a voice even more than usually colourless and expressionless: “We are at Luzarches already.”

It was the first time, Campton was sure, that Mr. Brant had spoken since they had got into the car together, hours earlier as it seemed to him, in the dark street before the studio in Montmartre; the first, at least, except to ask, as the chauffeur touched the self-starter: “Will you have the rug over you?”

The two travellers did not share a rug: a separate one, soft as fur and light as down, lay neatly folded on the grey carpet before each seat; but Campton, though the early air was biting, had left his where it lay, and had not answered.

Now he was beginning to feel that he could not decently remain silent any longer; and with an effort which seemed as mechanical and external as the movements of the chauffeur whose back he viewed through the wide single sheet of plate-glass, he brought out, like a far-off echo: “Luzarches...?”

It was not that there lingered in him any of his old sense of antipathy toward Mr. Brant. In the new world into which he had been abruptly hurled, the previous morning, by the coming of that letter which looked so exactly like any other letter—in this new world Mr. Brant was nothing more than the possessor of the motor and of the “pull” that were to get him, Campton, in the shortest possible time, to the spot of earth where his son lay dying. Once assured of this, Campton had promptly and indifferently acquiesced in Miss Anthony’s hurried suggestion that it would be only decent to let Mr. Brant go to Doullens with him.

But the exchange of speech with any one, whether Mr. Brant or another, was for the time being manifestly impossible. The effort, to Campton, to rise out of his grief, was like that of a dying person struggling back from regions too remote for his voice to reach the ears of the living. He shrank into his corner, and tried once more to fix his attention on the flying landscape.

All that he saw in it, speeding ahead of him even faster than their own flight, was the ghostly vision of another motor, carrying a figure bowed like his, mute like his: the figure of Fortin-Lescluze, as he had seen it plunge away into the winter darkness after the physician’s son had been killed. Campton remembered asking himself then, as he had asked himself so often since: “How should I bear it if it happened to me?”

He knew the answer to that now, as he knew everything else a man could know: so it had seemed to his astonished soul since the truth had flashed at him out of that fatal letter. Ever since then he had been turning about and about in a vast glare of initiation: of all the old crowded misty world which the letter had emptied at a stroke, nothing remained but a few memories of George’s boyhood, like a closet of toys in a house knocked down by an earthquake.

The vision of Fortin-Lescluze’s motor vanished, and in its place Campton suddenly saw Boylston’s screwed-up eyes staring out at him under furrows of anguish. Campton remembered, the evening before, pushing the letter over to him across the office table, and stammering: “Read it—read it to me. I can’t——” and Boylston’s sudden sobbing explosion: “But I knew, sir—I’ve known all along ...” and then the endless pause before Campton gathered himself up to falter out (like a child deciphering the words in a primer): “You knew—knew that George was wounded?”

“No, no, not that; but that he might be—oh, at any minute! Forgive me—oh, do forgive me! He wouldn’t let me tell you that he was at the front,” Boylston had faltered through his sobs.

“Let you tell me——?”

“You and his mother: he refused a citation last March so that you shouldn’t find out that he’d exchanged into an infantry regiment. He was determined to from the first. He’s been fighting for months; he’s been magnificent; he got away from the Argonne last February; but you were none of you to know.”

“But why—why—why?” Campton had flashed out; then his heart stood still, and he awaited the answer with lowered head.

“Well, you see, he was afraid: afraid you might prevent ... use your influence ... you and Mrs. Brant....”

Campton looked up again, challenging the other. “He imagined perhaps that we had—in the beginning?”

“Oh, yes”—Boylston was perfectly calm about it—“he knew all about that. And he made us swear not to speak; Miss Anthony and me. Miss Anthony knew.... If this thing happened,” Boylston ended in a stricken voice, “you were not to be unfair to her, he said.”

Over and over again that short dialogue distilled itself syllable by syllable, pang by pang, into Campton’s cowering soul. He had had to learn all this, this overwhelming unbelievable truth about his son; and at the same instant to learn that that son was grievously wounded, perhaps dying (what else, in such circumstances, did the giving of the Legion of Honour ever mean?); and to deal with it all in the wild minutes of preparation for departure, of intercession with the authorities, sittings at the photographer’s, and a crisscross of confused telephone-calls from the Embassy, the Prefecture and the War Office.

From this welter of images Miss Anthony’s face next detached itself: white and withered, yet with a look which triumphed over its own ruin, and over Campton’s wrath.

“Ah—you knew too, did you? You were his other confidant? How you all kept it up—how you all lied to us!” Campton had burst out at her.

She took it firmly. “I showed you his letters.”

“Yes: the letters he wrote to you to be shown.”

She received this in silence, and he followed it up. “It was you who drove him to the front—it was you who sent my son to his death!”

Without flinching, she gazed back at him. “Oh, John—it was you!”

“I—I? What do you mean? I never as much as lifted a finger——”

“No?” She gave him a wan smile. “Then it must have been the old man who invented the Mangle!” she cried, and cast herself on Campton’s breast. He held her there for a long moment, stroking her lank hair, and saying “Adele—Adele,” because in that rush of understanding he could not think of anything else to say. At length he stooped and laid on her lips the strangest kiss he had ever given or taken; and it was then that, drawing back, she exclaimed: “That’s for George, when you get to him. Remember!”

The image of George’s mother rose last on the whirling ground of Campton’s thoughts: an uncertain image, blurred by distance, indistinct as some wraith of Mme. Olida’s evoking.

Mrs. Brant was still at Biarritz; there had been no possibility of her getting back in time to share the journey to the front. Even Mr. Brant’s power in high places must have fallen short of such an attempt; and it was not made. Boylston, despatched in haste to bear the news of George’s wounding to the banker, had reported that the utmost Mr. Brant could do was to write at once to his wife, and arrange for her return to Paris, since telegrams to the frontier departments travelled more slowly than letters, and in nine cases out of ten were delayed indefinitely. Campton had asked no more at the time; but in the last moment before leaving Paris he remembered having said to Adele Anthony: “You’ll be there when Julia comes?” and Miss Anthony had nodded back: “At the station.”

The word, it appeared, roused the same memory in both of them; meeting her eyes, he saw there the Gare de l’Est in the summer morning, the noisily manoeuvring trains jammed with bright young heads, the flowers, the waving handkerchiefs, and everybody on the platform smiling fixedly till some particular carriage-window slid out of sight. The scene, at the time, had been a vast blur to Campton: would he ever again, he wondered, see anything as clearly as he saw it now, in all its unmerciful distinctness? He heard the sobs of the girl who had said such a blithe goodbye to the young Chasseur Alpin, he saw her going away, led by her elderly companion, and powdering her nose at the laiterie over the cup of coffee she could not swallow. And this was what her sobs had meant....

“This place,” said Mr. Brant, with his usual preliminary cough, “must be——” He bent over a motor-map, trying to decipher the name; but after fumbling for his eye-glasses, and rubbing them with a beautifully monogrammed cambric handkerchief, he folded the map up again and slipped it into one of the many pockets which honeycombed the interior of the car. Campton recalled the deathlike neatness of the banker’s private office on the day when the one spot of disorder in it had been the torn telegram announcing Benny Upsher’s disappearance.

The motor lowered its speed to make way for a long train of army lorries. Close upon them clattered a file of gun-wagons, with unshaven soldiers bestriding the gaunt horses. Torpedo-cars carrying officers slipped cleverly in and out of the tangle, and motor-cycles, incessantly rushing by, peppered the air with their explosions.

“This is the sort of thing he’s been living in—living in for months and months,” Campton mused.

He himself had seen something of the same kind when he had gone to ChÂlons in the early days to appeal to Fortin-Lescluze; but at that time the dread significance of the machinery of war had passed almost unnoticed in his preoccupation about his boy. Now he realized that for a year that machinery had been the setting of his boy’s life; for months past such sights and sounds as these had formed the whole of George’s world; and Campton’s eyes took in every detail with an agonized avidity.

“What’s that?” he exclaimed.

A huge continuous roar, seeming to fall from the low clouds above them, silenced the puny rumble and clatter of the road. On and on it went, in a slow pulsating rhythm, like the boom of waves driven by a gale on some far-distant coast.

“That? The guns——” said Mr. Brant.

“At the front?”

“Oh, sometimes they seem much nearer. Depends on the wind.”

Campton sat bewildered. Had he ever before heard that sinister roar? At ChÂlons? He could not be sure. But the sound had assuredly not been the same; now it overwhelmed him like the crash of the sea over a drowning head. He cowered back in his corner. Would it ever stop, he asked himself? Or was it always like this, day and night, in the hell of hells that they were bound for? Was that merciless thud forever in the ears of the dying?

A sentinel stopped the motor and asked for their pass. He turned it about and about, holding it upside-down in his horny hands, and wrinkling his brows in the effort to decipher the inverted characters.

“How can I tell——?” he grumbled doubtfully, looking from the faces of the two travellers to their unrecognizable photographs.

Mr. Brant was already feeling for his pocket, and furtively extracting a bank-note.

“For God’s sake—not that!” Campton cried, bringing his hand down on the banker’s. Leaning over, he spoke to the sentinel. “My son’s dying at the front. Can’t you see it when you look at me?”

The man looked, and slowly gave back the paper. “You can pass,” he said, shouldering his rifle.

The motor shot on, and the two men drew back into their corners. Mr. Brant fidgeted with his eye-glasses, and after an interval coughed again. “I must thank you,” he began, “for—for saving me just now from an inexcusable blunder. It was done mechanically ... one gets into the habit....”

“Quite so,” said Campton drily. “But there are cases——”

“Of course—of course.”

Silence fell once more. Mr. Brant sat bolt upright, his profile detached against the wintry fields. Campton, sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat grey silhouette, in which the perpendicular glint of the eye-glass nearest him was the only point of light. He said to himself that the man was no doubt suffering horribly; but he was not conscious of any impulse of compassion. He and Mr. Brant were like two strangers pinned down together in a railway-smash: the shared agony did not bring them nearer. On the contrary, Campton, as the hours passed, felt himself more and more exasperated by the mute anguish at his side. What right had this man to be suffering as he himself was suffering, what right to be here with him at all? It was simply in the exercise of what the banker called his “habit”—the habit of paying, of buying everything, people and privileges and possessions—that he had acquired this ghastly claim to share in an agony which was not his.

“I shan’t even have my boy to myself on his deathbed,” the father thought in desperation; and the mute presence at his side became once more the symbol of his own failure.

The motor, with frequent halts, continued to crawl slowly on between lorries, field-kitchens, artillery wagons, companies of haggard infantry returning to their cantonments, and more and more vanloads of troops pressing forward; it seemed to Campton that hours elapsed before Mr. Brant again spoke.

“This must be Amiens,” he said, in a voice even lower than usual.

The father roused himself and looked out. They were passing through the streets of a town swarming with troops—but he was still barely conscious of what he looked at. He perceived that he had been half-asleep, and dreaming of George as a little boy, when he used to have such bad colds. Campton remembered in particular the day he had found the lad in bed, in a scarlet sweater, in his luxurious overheated room, reading the first edition of Lavengro. It was on that day that he and his son had first really got to know each other; but what was it that had marked the date to George? The fact that Mr. Brant, learning of his joy in the book, had instantly presented it to him—with the price-label left inside the cover.

“And it’ll be worth a lot more than that by the time you’re grown up,” Mr. Brant had told his stepson; to which George was recorded to have answered sturdily: “No, it won’t, if I find other stories I like better.”

Miss Anthony had assisted at the conversation and reported it triumphantly to Campton; but the painter, who had to save up to give his boy even a simple present, could see in the incident only one more attempt to rob him of his rights. “They won’t succeed, though, they won’t succeed: they don’t know how to go about it, thank the Lord,” he had said.

But they had succeeded after all; what better proof of it was there than Mr. Brant’s tacit right to be sitting here beside him to-day; than the fact that but for Mr. Brant it might have been impossible for Campton to get to his boy’s side in time?

Oh, that pitiless incessant hammering of the guns! As the travellers advanced the noise grew louder, fiercer, more unbroken; the closely-fitted panes of the car rattled and danced like those of an old omnibus. Sentinels stopped the chauffeur more frequently; Mr. Brant had to produce the blue paper again and again. The day was wearing on—Campton began again to be aware of a sick weariness, a growing remoteness and confusion of mind. Through it he perceived that Mr. Brant, diving into deeper recesses of upholstery, had brought out a silver sandwich-box, a flask and glasses. As by magic they stood on a shiny shelf which slid out of another recess, and Mr. Brant was proffering the box. “It’s a long way yet; you’ll need all your strength,” he said.

Campton, who had half turned from the invitation, seized a sandwich and emptied one of the glasses. Mr. Brant was right; he must not let himself float away into the void, seductive as its drowsy shimmer was.

His wits returned, and with them a more intolerable sense of reality. He was all alive now. Every crash of the guns seemed to tear a piece of flesh from his body; and it was always the piece nearest the heart. The nurse’s few lines had said: “A shell wound: the right arm fractured, fear for the lungs.” And one of these awful crashes had done it: bursting in mystery from that innocent-looking sky, and rushing inoffensively over hundreds of other young men till it reached its destined prey, found George, and dug a red grave for him. Campton was convinced now that his son was dead. It was not only that he had received the Legion of Honour; it was the appalling all-destroying thunder of the shells as they went on crashing and bursting. What could they leave behind them but mismated fragments? Gathering up all his strength in the effort not to recoil from the vision, Campton saw his son’s beautiful body like a carcass tumbled out of a butcher’s cart....

---

“Doullens,” said Mr. Brant.

They were in a town, and the motor had turned into the court of a great barrack-like building. Before them stood a line of empty stretchers such as Campton had seen at ChÂlons. A young doctor in a cotton blouse was lighting a cigarette and laughing with a nurse—laughing! At regular intervals the cannonade shook the windows; it seemed the heart-beat of the place. Campton noticed that many of the window-panes had been broken, and patched with paper.

Inside they found another official, who called to another nurse as she passed by laden with fresh towels. She disappeared into a room where heaps of bloody linen were being stacked into baskets, returned, looked at Campton and nodded. He looked back at her blunt tired features and kindly eyes, and said to himself that they had perhaps been his son’s last sight on earth.

The nurse smiled.

“It’s three flights up,” she said; “he’ll be glad.”

Glad! He was not dead, then; he could even be glad! In the staggering rush of relief the father turned instinctively to Mr. Brant; he felt that there was enough joy to be shared. But Mr. Brant, though he must have heard what the nurse had said, was moving away; he did not seem to understand.

“This way——” Campton called after him, pointing to the nurse, who was already on the first step of the stairs.

Mr. Brant looked slightly puzzled; then, as the other’s meaning reached him, he coloured a little, bent his head stiffly, and waved his stick toward the door.

“Thanks,” he said, “I think I’ll take a stroll first ... stretch my legs....” and Campton, with a rush of gratitude, understood that he was to be left alone with his son.

He followed his guide up the steep flights, which seemed to become buoyant and lift him like waves. It was as if the muscle that always dragged back his lame leg had suddenly regained its elasticity. He floated up as one mounts stairs in a dream. A smell of disinfectants hung in the cold air, and once, through a half-open door, a sickening odour came: he remembered it at ChÂlons, and Fortin’s murmured: “Gangrene—ah, if only we could get them sooner!”

How soon had they got his boy, Campton wondered? The letter, mercifully sent by hand to Paris, had reached him on the third day after George’s arrival at the Doullens hospital; but he did not yet know how long before that the shell-splinter had done its work. The nurse did not know either. How could she remember? They had so many! The administrator would look up the files and tell him. Only there was no time for that now.

On a landing Campton heard a babble and scream: a nauseating scream in a queer bleached voice that might have been man, woman or monkey’s. Perhaps that was what the French meant by “a white voice”: this voice which was as featureless as some of the poor men’s obliterated faces! Campton shot an anguished look at his companion, and she understood and shook her head. “Oh, no: that’s in the big ward. It’s the way they scream after a dressing....”

She opened a door, and he was in a room with three beds in it, wooden pallets hastily knocked together and spread with rough grey blankets. In spite of the cold, flies still swarmed on the unwashed panes, and there were big holes in the fly-net over the bed nearest the window. Under the net lay a middle-aged bearded man, heavily bandaged about the chest and left arm: he was snoring, his mouth open, his gaunt cheeks drawn in with the fight for breath. Campton said to himself that if his own boy lived he should like some day to do something for this poor devil who was his roommate. Then he looked about him and saw that the two other beds were empty.

He drew back.

The nurse was bending over the bearded man. “He’ll wake presently—I’ll leave you”; and she slipped out. Campton looked again at the stranger; then his glance travelled to the scarred brown hand on the sheet, a hand with broken nails and blackened finger-tips. It was George’s hand, his son’s, swollen, disfigured but unmistakable. The father knelt down and laid his lips on it.

---

“What was the first thing you felt?” Adele Anthony asked him afterward: and he answered: “Nothing.”

“Yes—at the very first, I know: it’s always like that. But the first thing after you began to feel anything?”

He considered, and then said slowly: “The difference.”

“The difference in him?”

“In him—in life—in everything.”

Miss Anthony, who understood as a rule, was evidently puzzled. “What kind of a difference?”

“Oh, a complete difference.” With that she had to be content.

The sense of it had first come to Campton when the bearded man, raising his lids, looked at him from far off with George’s eyes, and touched him, very feebly, with George’s hand. It was in the moment of identifying his son that he felt the son he had known to be lost to him forever.

George’s lips were moving, and the father laid his ear to them; perhaps these were last words that his boy was saying.

“Old Dad—in a motor?”

Campton nodded.

The fact seemed faintly to interest George, who continued to examine him with those distant eyes.

“Uncle Andy’s?”

Campton nodded again.

“Mother——?”

“She’s coming too—very soon.”

George’s lips were screwed into a whimsical smile. “I must have a shave first,” he said, and drowsed off again, his hand in Campton’s....

---

“The other gentleman—?” the nurse questioned the next morning.

Campton had spent the night in the hospital, stretched on the floor at his son’s threshold. It was a breach of rules, but for once the major had condoned it. As for Mr. Brant, Campton had forgotten all about him, and at first did not know what the nurse meant. Then he woke with a start to the consciousness of his fellow-traveller’s nearness. Mr. Brant, the nurse explained, had come to the hospital early, and had been waiting below for the last two hours. Campton, almost as gaunt and unshorn as his son, pulled himself to his feet and went down. In the hall the banker, very white, but smooth and trim as ever, was patiently measuring the muddy flags.

“Less temperature this morning,” Campton called from the last flight.

“Oh,” stammered Mr. Brant, red and pale by turns.

Campton smiled haggardly and pulled himself together in an effort of communicativeness. “Look here—he’s asked for you; you’d better go up. Only for a few minutes, please; he’s awfully weak.”

Mr. Brant, speechless, stood stiffly waiting to be conducted. Campton noticed the mist in his eyes, and took pity on him.

“I say—where’s the hotel? Just a step away? I’ll go around, then, and get a shave and a wash while you’re with him,” the father said, with a magnanimity which he somehow felt the powers might take account of in their subsequent dealings with George. If the boy was to live Campton could afford to be generous; and he had decided to assume that the boy would live, and to order his behaviour accordingly.

“I—thank you,” said Mr. Brant, turning toward the stairs.

“Five minutes at the outside!” Campton cautioned him, and hurried out into the morning air through which the guns still crashed methodically.

When he got back to the hospital, refreshed and decent, he was surprised, and for a moment alarmed, to find that Mr. Brant had not come down.

“Sending up his temperature, of course—damn him!” Campton raged, scrambling up the stairs as fast as his stiff leg permitted. But outside of George’s door he saw a small figure patiently mounting guard.

“I stayed with him less than five minutes; I was merely waiting to thank you.”

“Oh, that’s all right.” Campton paused, and then made his supreme effort. “How does he strike you?”

“Hopefully—hopefully. He had his joke as usual,” Mr. Brant said with a twitching smile.

“Oh, that——! But his temperature’s decidedly lower. Of course they may have to take the ball out of the lung; but perhaps before they do it he can be moved from this hell.”

The two men were silent, the same passion of anxiety consuming them, and no means left of communicating it to each other.

“I’ll look in again later. Shall I have something to eat sent round to you from the hotel?” Mr. Brant suggested.

“Oh, thanks—if you would.”

Campton put out his hand and crushed Mr. Brant’s dry fingers. But for this man he might not have got to his son in time; and this man had not once made use of the fact to press his own claim on George. With pity in his heart, the father, privileged to remain at his son’s bedside, watched Mr. Brant’s small figure retreating alone. How ghastly to sit all day in that squalid hotel, his eyes on his watch, with nothing to do but to wonder and wonder about the temperature of another man’s son!

---

The next day was worse; so much worse that everything disappeared from Campton’s view but the present agony of watching, hovering, hanging helplessly on the words of nurse and doctor, and spying on the glances they exchanged behind his back.

There could be no thought yet of extracting the bullet; a great surgeon, passing through the wards on a hasty tour of inspection, had confirmed this verdict. Oh, to have kept the surgeon there—to have had him at hand to watch for the propitious moment and seize it without an instant’s delay! Suddenly the vision which to Campton had been among the most hideous of all his crowding nightmares—that of George stretched naked on an operating-table, his face hidden by a chloroform mask, and an orderly hurrying away with a pile of red towels like those perpetually carried through the passages below—this vision became to the father’s fevered mind as soothing as a glimpse of Paradise. If only George’s temperature would go down—if only the doctors would pronounce him strong enough to have the bullet taken out! What would anything else matter then? Campton would feel as safe as he used to years ago, when after the recurring months of separation the boy came back from school, and he could take him in his arms and make sure that he was the same Georgie, only bigger, browner, with thicker curlier hair, and tougher muscles under his jacket.

What if the great surgeon, on his way back from the front, were to pass through the town again that evening, reverse his verdict, and perhaps even perform the operation then and there? Was there no way of prevailing on him to stop and take another look at George on the return? The idea took immediate possession of Campton, crowding out his intolerable anguish, and bringing such relief that for a few seconds he felt as if some life-saving operation had been performed on himself. As he stood watching the great man’s retreat, followed by doctors and nurses, Mr. Brant suddenly touched his arm, and the eyes of the two met. Campton understood and gasped out: “Yes, yes; we must manage to get him back.”

Mr. Brant nodded. “At all costs.” He paused, again interrogated Campton’s eyes, and stammered: “You authorize——?”

“Oh, God—anything!”

“He’s dined at my house in Paris,” Mr. Brant threw in, as if trying to justify himself.

“Oh, go—go!” Campton almost pushed him down the stairs. Ten minutes later he reappeared, modest but exultant.

“Well?”

“He wouldn’t commit himself, before the others——”

“Oh——”

“But to me, as he was getting into the motor——”

“Well?”

“Yes: if possible. Somewhere about midnight.”

Campton turned away, choking, and stumped off toward the tall window at the end of the passage. Below him lay the court. A line of stretchers was being carried across it, not empty this time, but each one with a bloody burden. Doctors, nurses, orderlies hurried to and fro. Drub, drub, drub, went the guns, shaking the windows, rolling their fierce din along the cloudy sky, down the corridors of the hospital and the pavement of the streets, like huge bowls crashing through story above story of a kind of sky-scraping bowling alley.

“Even the dead underground must hear them!” Campton muttered.

The word made him shudder superstitiously, and he crept back to George’s door and opened it; but the nurse, within, shook her head.

“He must sleep after the examination. Better go.”

Campton turned and saw Mr. Brant waiting. A bell rang twelve. The two, in silence, walked down the stairs, crossed the court (averting their eyes from the stretchers) and went to the hotel to get something to eat.

---

Midnight came. It passed. No one in the hurried confused world of the hospital had heard of the possibility of the surgeon’s returning. When Campton mentioned it to the nurse she smiled her tired smile, and said: “He could have done nothing.”

Done nothing! How could she know? How could any one, but the surgeon himself? Would he have promised if he had not thought there was some chance? Campton, stretched out on a blanket and his rolled-up coat, lay through the long restless hours staring at the moonlit sky framed by the window of the corridor. Great clouds swept over that cold indifferent vault: they seemed like the smoke from the guns which had not once ceased through the night. At last he got up, turned his back on the window, and lay down again facing the stairs. The moonlight unrolled a white strip along the stone floor. A church-bell rang one ... two ... there were noises and movements below. Campton raised himself, his heart beating all over his body. Steps came echoing up.

“Careful!” some one called. A stretcher rounded the stair-rail; another, and then another. An orderly with a lantern preceded them, followed by one of the doctors, an old bunched-up man in a muddy uniform, who stopped furtively to take a pinch of snuff. Campton could not believe his eyes; didn’t the hospital people know that every bed on that floor was full? Every bed, that is, but the two in George’s room; and the nurse had given Campton the hope, the promise almost, that as long as his boy was so ill she would keep those empty. “I’ll manage somehow,” she had said.

For a mad moment Campton was on the point of throwing himself in the way of the tragic procession, barring the threshold with his arms. “What does this mean?” he stammered to the nurse, who had appeared from another room with her little lamp.

She gave a shrug. “More casualties—every hospital is like this.”

He stood aside, wrathful, impotent. At least if Brant had been there, perhaps by some offer of money—but how, to whom? Of what earthly use, after all, was Brant’s boasted “influence”? These people would only laugh at him—perhaps put them both out of the hospital!

He turned despairingly to the nurse. “You might as well have left him in the trenches.”

“Don’t say that, sir,” she answered; and the echo of his own words horrified him like a sacrilege.

Two of the stretchers were carried into George’s room. Campton caught a glimpse of George, muttering and tossing; the moonlight lay in the hollows of his bearded face, and again the father had the sense of utter alienation from that dark delirious man who for brief intervals suddenly became his son, and then as suddenly wandered off into strangeness.

The nurse slipped out of the room and signed to him.

“Both nearly gone ... they won’t trouble him long,” she whispered.

The man on the third stretcher was taken to a room at the other end of the corridor. Campton watched him being lifted in. He was to lie on the floor, then? For in that room there was certainly no vacancy. But presently he had the answer. The bearers did not come out empty-handed; they carried another man whom they laid on the empty stretcher. Lucky, lucky devil; going, no doubt, to a hospital at the rear! As the procession reached the stairs the lantern swung above the lucky devil’s face: his eyes stared ceilingward from black orbits. One arm, swinging loose, dangled down, the hand stealthily counting the steps as he descended—and no one troubled, for he was dead.

At dawn Campton, who must have been asleep, started up, again hearing steps. The surgeon? Oh, if this time it were the surgeon! But only Mr. Brant detached himself from the shadows accumulated in the long corridor: Mr. Brant, crumpled and unshorn, with blood-shot eyes, and gloves on his unconscious hands.

Campton glared at him resentfully.

“Well—how about your surgeon? I don’t see him!” he exclaimed.

Mr. Brant shook his head despondently. “No—I’ve been waiting all night in the court. I thought if he came back I should be the first to catch him. But he has just sent his orderly for instruments; he’s not coming. There’s been terrible fighting——”

Campton saw two tears running down Mr. Brant’s face: they did not move him.

The banker glanced toward George’s door, full of the question he dared not put.

Campton answered it. “You want to know how he is? Well, how should he be, with that bullet in him, and the fever eating him inch by inch, and two more wounded men in his room? That’s how he is!” Campton almost shouted.

Mr. Brant was trembling all over.

“Two more men—in his room?” he echoed shrilly.

“Yes—bad cases; dying.” Campton drew a deep breath. “You see there are times when your money and your influence and your knowing everybody are no more use than so much sawdust——”

The nurse opened the door and looked out. “You’re talking too loudly,” she said.

She shut the door, and the two men stood silent, abashed; finally Mr. Brant turned away. “I’ll go and try again. There must be other surgeons ... other ways ...” he whispered.

“Oh, your surgeons ... oh, your ways!” Campton sneered after him, in the same whisper.

From the room where he sat at the foot of George’s glossy white bed, Campton, through the open door, could watch the November sun slanting down a white ward where, in the lane between other white beds, pots of chrysanthemums stood on white-covered tables.

Through the window his eyes rested incredulously on a court enclosed in monastic arches of grey stone, with squares of turf bordered by box hedges, and a fountain playing. Beyond the court sloped the faded foliage of a park not yet entirely stripped by Channel gales; and on days without wind, instead of the boom of the guns, the roar of the sea came faintly over intervening heights and hollows.

Campton’s ears were even more incredulous than his eyes. He was gradually coming to believe in George’s white room, the ward beyond, the flowers between the beds, the fountain in the court; but the sound of the sea still came to him, intolerably but unescapably, as the crash of guns. When the impression was too overwhelming he would turn away from the window and cast his glance on the bed; but only to find that the smooth young face on the pillow had suddenly changed into that of the haggard bearded stranger on the wooden pallet at Doullens. And Campton would have to get up, lean over, and catch the twinkle in George’s eyes before the evil spell was broken.

Few words passed between them. George, after all these days, was still too weak for much talk; and silence had always been Campton’s escape from feeling. He never had the need to speak in times of inward stress, unless it were to vent his anger—as in that hateful scene at Doullens between himself and Mr. Brant. But he was sure that George always knew what was passing through his mind; that when the sea boomed their thoughts flew back together to that other scene, but a few miles and a few days distant, yet already as far off, as much an affair they were both rid of, as a nightmare to a wakened sleeper; and that for a moment the same vision clutched them both, mocking their attempts at indifference.

Not that the sound, to Campton at any rate, suggested any abstract conception of war. Looking back afterward at this phase of his life he perceived that at no time had he thought so little of the war. The noise of the sea was to him simply the voice of the engine which had so nearly destroyed his son: that association, deeply embedded in his half-dazed consciousness, left no room for others.

The general impression of unreality was enhanced by his not having yet been able to learn the details of George’s wounding. After a week during which the boy had hung near death, the great surgeon—returning to Doullens just as Campton had finally ceased to hope for him—had announced that, though George’s state was still grave, he might be moved to a hospital at the rear. So one day, miraculously, the perilous transfer had been made, in one of Mrs. Brant’s own motor-ambulances; and for a week now George had lain in his white bed, hung over by white-gowned Sisters, in an atmosphere of sweetness and order which almost made it seem as if he were a child recovering from illness in his own nursery, or a red-haired baby sparring with dimpled fists at a new world.

In truth, Campton found his son as hard to get at as a baby; he looked at his father with eyes as void of experience, or at least of any means of conveying it. Campton, at first, could only marvel and wait; and the isolation in which the two were enclosed by George’s weakness, and by his father’s inability to learn from others what the boy was not yet able to tell him, gave a strange remoteness to everything but the things which count in an infant’s world: food, warmth, sleep. Campton’s nearest approach to reality was his daily scrutiny of the temperature-chart. He studied it as he used to study the communiquÉs which he now no longer even thought of.

Sometimes when George was asleep Campton would sit pondering on the days at Doullens. There was an exquisite joy in silently building up, on that foundation of darkness and anguish, the walls of peace that now surrounded him, a structure so transparent that one could peer through it at the routed Furies, yet so impenetrable that he sat there in a kind of god-like aloofness. For one thing he was especially thankful—and that was the conclusion of his unseemly wrangle with Mr. Brant; thankful that, almost at once, he had hurried after the banker, caught up with him, and stammered out, clutching his hand: “I know—I know how you feel.”

Mr. Brant’s reactions were never rapid, and the events of the preceding days had called upon faculties that were almost atrophied. He had merely looked at Campton in mute distress, returned his pressure, and silently remounted the hospital stairs with him.

Campton hated himself for his ill-temper, but was glad, even at the time, that no interested motive had prompted his apology. He should have hated himself even more if he had asked the banker’s pardon because of Mr. Brant’s “pull,” and the uses to which it might be put; or even if he had associated his excuses with any past motives of gratitude, such as the fact that but for Mr. Brant he might never have reached George’s side. Instead of that, he simply felt that once more his senseless violence had got the better of him, and he was sorry that he had behaved like a brute to a man who loved George, and was suffering almost as much as he was at the thought that George might die....

After that episode, and Campton’s apology, the relations of the two men became so easy that each gradually came to take the other for granted; and Mr. Brant, relieved of a perpetual hostile scrutiny, was free to exercise his ingenuity in planning and managing. It was owing to him—Campton no longer minded admitting it—that the famous surgeon had hastened his return to Doullens, that George’s translation to the sweet monastic building near the sea had been so rapidly effected, and that the great man, appearing there soon afterward, had extracted the bullet with his own hand. But for Mr. Brant’s persistence even the leave to bring one of Mrs. Brant’s motor-ambulances to Doullens would never have been given; and it might have been fatal to George to make the journey in a slow and jolting military train. But for Mr. Brant, again, he would have been sent to a crowded military hospital instead of being brought to this white heaven of rest. “And all that just because I overtook him in time to prevent his jumping into his motor and going back to Paris in order to get out of my way!” Campton, at the thought, lowered his spirit into new depths of contrition.

---

George, who had been asleep, opened his eyes and looked at his father.

“Where’s Uncle Andy?”

“Gone to Paris to get your mother.”

“Yes. Of course. He told me——”

George smiled, and withdrew once more into his secret world.

But Campton’s state of mind was less happy. As the time of Julia’s arrival approached he began to ask himself with increasing apprehension how she would fit into the situation. Mr. Brant had fitted into it—perfectly. Campton had actually begun to feel a secret dependence on him, a fidgety uneasiness since he had left for Paris, sweet though it was to be alone with George. But Julia—what might she not do and say to unsettle things, break the spell, agitate and unnerve them all? Campton did not question her love for her son; but he was not sure what form it would take in conditions to which she was so unsuited. How could she ever penetrate into the mystery of peace which enclosed him and his boy? And if she felt them thus mysteriously shut off would she not dimly resent her exclusion? If only Adele Anthony had been coming too! Campton had urged Mr. Brant to bring her; but the banker had failed to obtain a permit for any one but the boy’s mother. He had even found it difficult to get his own leave renewed; it was only after a first trip to Paris, and repeated efforts at the War Office, that he had been allowed to go to Paris and fetch his wife, who was just arriving from Biarritz.

Well—for the moment, at any rate, Campton had the boy to himself. As he sat there, trying to picture the gradual resurrection of George’s pre-war face out of the delicately pencilled white mask on the pillow, he noted the curious change of planes produced by suffering and emaciation, and the altered relation of lights and shadows. Materially speaking, the new George looked like the old one seen in the bowl of a spoon, and through blue spectacles: peaked, narrow, livid, with elongated nose and sunken eye-sockets. But these altered proportions were not what had really changed him. There was something in the curve of the mouth that fever and emaciation could not account for. In that new line, and in the look of his eyes—the look travelling slowly outward through a long blue tunnel, like some mysterious creature rising from the depths of the sea—that was where the new George lurked, the George to be watched and lain in wait for, patiently and slowly puzzled out....

He reopened his eyes.

“Adele too?”

Campton had learned to bridge over the spaces between the questions. “No; not this time. We tried, but it couldn’t be managed. A little later, I hope——”

“She’s all right?”

“Rather! Blooming.”

“And Boylston?”

“Blooming too.”

George’s lids closed contentedly, like doors shutting him away from the world.

It was the first time since his operation that he had asked about any of his friends, or had appeared to think they might come to see him. But his mind, like his stomach, could receive very little nutriment at a time; he liked to have one mouthful given to him, and then to lie ruminating it in the lengthening intervals between his attacks of pain.

Each time he asked for news of any one his father wondered what name would next come to his lips. Even during his delirium he had mentioned no one but his parents, Mr. Brant, Adele Anthony and Boylston; yet it was not possible, Campton thought, that these formed the circumference of his life, that some contracted fold of memory did not hold a nearer image, a more secret name.... The father’s heart beat faster, half from curiosity, half from a kind of shy delicacy, at the thought that at any moment that name might wake in George and utter itself.

Campton’s thoughts again turned to his wife. With Julia there was never any knowing. Ten to one she would send the boy’s temperature up. He was thankful that, owing to the difficulty of getting the news to her, and then of bringing her back from a frontier department, so many days had had to elapse.

But when she arrived, nothing, after all, happened as he had expected. She had put on her nurse’s dress for the journey (he thought it rather theatrical of her, till he remembered how much easier it was to get about in any sort of uniform); but there was not a trace of coquetry in her appearance. As a frame for her haggard unpowdered face the white coif looked harsh and unbecoming; she reminded him, as she got out of the motor, of some mortified Jansenist nun from one of Philippe de Champaigne’s canvases.

Campton led her to George’s door, but left her there; she did not appear to notice whether or not he was following her. He whispered: “Careful about his temperature; he’s very weak,” and she bent her profile silently as she went in.

George, that evening, seemed rather better, and his temperature had not gone up: Campton had to repress a movement of jealousy at Julia’s having done her son no harm. Her experience as a nurse, disciplining a vague gift for the sickroom, had developed in her the faculty of self-command: before the war, if George had met with a dangerous accident, she would have been more encumbering than helpful.

Campton had to admit the change, but it did not draw them any nearer. Her manner of loving their son was too different. Nowadays, when he and Anderson Brant were together, he felt that they were thinking of the same things in the same way; but Julia’s face, even aged and humanized by grief, was still a mere mask to him. He could never tell what form her thoughts about George might be taking.

Mr. Brant, on his wife’s arrival, had judged it discreet to efface himself. Campton hunted for him in vain in the park, and under the cloister; he remained invisible till they met at the early dinner which they shared with the staff. But the meal did not last long, and when it was over, and nurses and doctors scattered, Mr. Brant again slipped away, leaving his wife and Campton alone.

Campton glanced after him, surprised. “Why does he go?”

Mrs. Brant pursed her lips, evidently as much surprised by his question as he by her husband’s withdrawal.

“I suppose he’s going to bed—to be ready for his early start to-morrow.”

“A start?”

She stared. “He’s going back to Paris.”

Campton was genuinely astonished. “Is he? I’m sorry.”

“Oh——” She seemed unprepared for this. “After all, you must see—we can’t very well ... all three of us ... especially with these nuns....”

“Oh, if it’s only that——”

She did not take this up, and one of their usual silences followed. Campton was thinking that it was all nonsense about the nuns, and meditating on the advisability of going in pursuit of Mr. Brant to tell him so. He dreaded the prospect of a long succession of days alone between George and George’s mother.

Mrs. Brant spoke again. “I was sorry to find that the Sisters have been kept on here. Are they much with George?”

“The Sisters? I don’t know. The upper nurses are Red Cross, as you saw. But of course the others are about a good deal. What’s wrong? They seem to me perfect.”

She hesitated and coloured a little. “I don’t want them to find out—about the Extreme Unction,” she finally said.

Campton repeated her words blankly. He began to think that anxiety and fatigue had confused her mind.

She coloured more deeply. “Oh, I forgot—you don’t know. I couldn’t think of anything but George at first ... and the whole thing is so painful to me.... Where’s my bag?”

She groped for her reticule, found it in the folds of the cloak she had kept about her shoulders, and fumbled in it with wrinkled jewelled fingers.

“Anderson hasn’t spoken to you, then—spoken about Mrs. Talkett?” she asked suddenly.

“About Mrs. Talkett? Why should he? What on earth has happened?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t see her myself ... I couldn’t ... so he had to. She had to be thanked, of course ... but it seems to me so dreadful, so very dreadful ... our boy ... that woman....”

Campton did not press her further. He sat dumbfounded, trying to take in what she was so obviously trying to communicate, and yet instinctively resisting the approach of the revelation he foresaw.

“George—Mrs. Talkett?” He forced himself to couple the two names, unnatural as their union seemed.

“I supposed you knew. Isn’t it dreadful? A woman old enough——” She drew a letter from her bag.

He interrupted her. “Is that letter what you want to show me?”

“Yes. She insisted on Anderson’s keeping it—for you. She said it belonged to us, I believe.... It seems there was a promise—made the night before he was mobilised—that if anything happened he would get word to her.... No thought of us!” She began to whimper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“And you went to thank her?”

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

“Certainly. And—what was your impression?”

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

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

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

“Poor thing!” Campton murmured.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

George laughed. “Well—rather!”

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

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

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

“Yes; I understand.”

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

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

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

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

“Portraits?”

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

“What atmosphere?”

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

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

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

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

“Yes,” Campton snapped, off his guard.

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

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

---

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

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

“Preparedness!” cried Boylston in an exultant crow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss Anthony nodded and unfolded her napkin.

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

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

“Why?”

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

“Not human?”

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

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

“He’ll come to you.”

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

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

“I wish I liked her!” she murmured.

“Mrs. Talkett?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Talkett’s glasses slanted in his direction. “Why—everything! Resistance to the herd-instinct (to borrow one of my wife’s expressions) is really innate in me. And the idea of giving in now, of sacrificing my convictions, just because of all this deafening noise about America’s danger and America’s duties—well, no,” said Mr. Talkett, straightening his glasses, “Philistinism won’t go down with me, in whatever form it tries to disguise itself.” Instinctively, he stretched a neat hand toward the teacups, as if he had been rearranging the furniture at one of his wife’s parties.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“With what?” asked Campton, startled.

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

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

“Boylston?”

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

“The cur!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My son,” said Campton with satisfaction.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

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

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

“You’re bothered?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You? Nonsense! What do you mean?”

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

“Ah, she would!” Campton agreed.

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

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

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

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

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

“Money? What money?” he echoed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No, no; but I never imagined——”

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

Campton nodded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She nodded, wiped away the tears, and in so doing stole an unconscious glance at the mirror above the divan. Then, seeing that the glance was detected, she burst into a sort of sobbing laugh. “My nose gets so dreadfully red when I cry,” she stammered.

Campton took no notice, and she went on: “A divorce? Yes. And unless I do—unless I agree to marry him—we’re never to be anything but friends.”

“That’s what he says?”

“Yes. Oh, we’ve been all in and out of it a hundred times.”

She pulled out a gold-mesh bag and furtively restored her complexion, as Mrs. Brant had once done in the same place.

Campton sat still, considering. He had let his pipe go out. Nothing could have been farther from the revelation he had expected, and his own perplexity was hardly less great than his visitor’s. Certainly it was not the way in which young men had behaved in his day—nor, evidently, had it been George’s before the war.

Finally he made up his mind to put the question: “And Talkett?”

She burst out at once: “Ah, that’s what I say—it’s not so simple!”

“What isn’t?”

“Breaking up—all one’s life.” She paused with a deepening embarrassment. “Of course Roger has made me utterly miserable—but then I know he really hasn’t meant to.”

“Have you told George that?”

“Yes. But he says we must first of all be aboveboard. He says he sees everything differently now. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t understand him. He says love’s not the same kind of feeling to him that it was. There’s something of Meredith’s that he quotes—I wish I could remember it—something about a mortal lease.”

“Good Lord,” Campton groaned, not so much at the hopelessness of the case as at the hopelessness of quoting Meredith to her. After a while he said abruptly: “You must forgive my asking: but things change sometimes—they change imperceptibly. Do you think he’s as much in love with you as ever?”

He had been half afraid of offending her: but she appeared to consider the question impartially, and without a shadow of resentment. “Sometimes I think more—because in the beginning it wasn’t meant to last. And now—if he wants to marry me? Oh, I wish I knew what to do!”

Campton continued to ponder. “There’s one more question, since we’re talking frankly: what does Talkett know of all this?”

She looked frightened. “Oh, nothing, nothing!”

“And you’ve no idea how he would take it?”

She examined the question with tortured eyebrows, and at length, to Campton’s astonishment, brought out: “Magnificently——”

“He’d be generous, you mean? But it would go hard with him?”

“Oh, dreadfully, dreadfully!” She seemed to need the assurance to restore her shaken self-approval.

Campton rose with a movement of pity and laid his hand on her shoulder. “My dear child, if your husband cares for you, give up my son.”

Her face fell, and she drew back. “Oh, but you don’t understand—not in the least! It’s not possible—it’s not moral——. You know I’m all for the new morality. First of all, we must be true to self.” She paused, and then broke out: “You tell me to give him up because you think he’s tired of me. But he’s not—I know he’s not! It’s his new ideas that you don’t understand, any more than I do. It’s the war that has changed him. He says he wants only things that last—that are permanent—things that hold a man fast. That sometimes he feels as if he were being swept away on a flood, and were trying to catch at things—at anything—as he’s rushed along under the waves.... He says he wants quiet, monotony ... to be sure the same things will happen every day. When we go out together he sometimes stands for a quarter of an hour and stares at the same building, or at the Seine under the bridges. But he’s happy, I’m sure.... I’ve never seen him happier ... only it’s in a way I can’t make out....”

“Ah, my dear, if it comes to that—I’m not sure that I can. Not sure enough to help you, I’m afraid.”

She looked at him, disappointed. “You won’t speak to him then?”

“Not unless he speaks to me.”

“Ah, he frightens you—just as he does me!”

She pulled her hat down on her troubled brow, gathered up her furs, and took another sidelong peep at the glass. Then she turned toward the door. On the threshold she paused and looked back at Campton. “Don’t you see,” she cried, “that if I were to give George up he’d get himself sent straight back to the front?”

Campton’s heart gave an angry leap; for a second he felt the impulse to strike her, to catch her by the shoulders and bundle her out of the room. With a great effort he controlled himself and opened the door.

“You don’t understand—you don’t understand!” she called back to him once again from the landing.

---

Madge Talkett had asked him to speak to his son: he had refused, and she had retaliated by planting that poisoned shaft in him. But what had retaliation to do with it? She had probably spoken the simple truth, and with the natural desire to enlighten him. If George wanted to marry her, it must be (since human nature, though it might change its vocabulary, kept its instincts), it must be that he was very much in love—and in that case her refusal would in truth go hard with him, and it would be natural that he should try to get himself sent away from Paris.... From Paris, yes; but not necessarily to the front. After such wounds and such honours he had only to choose; a staff-appointment could easily be got. Or, no doubt, with his two languages, he might, if he preferred, have himself sent on a military mission to America. With all this propaganda talk, wasn’t he the very type of officer they wanted for the neutral countries?

It was Campton’s dearest wish that George should stay where he was; he knew his peace of mind would vanish the moment his son was out of sight. But he suspected that George would soon weary of staff-work, or of any form of soldiering at the rear, and try for the trenches if he left Paris; whereas, in Paris, Madge Talkett might hold him—as she had meant his father to see.

The first thing, then, was to make sure of a job at the War Office.

Campton turned and tossed like a sick man on the hard bed of his problem. To plan, to scheme, to plot and circumvent—nothing was more hateful to him, there was nothing in which he was less skilled. If only he dared to consult Adele Anthony! But Adele was still incorrigibly warlike, and her having been in George’s secret while his parents were excluded from it left no doubt as to the side on which her influence would bear. She loved the boy, Campton sometimes thought, even more passionately than his mother did; but—how did the old song go?—she loved honour, or her queer conception of it, more. Ponder as he would, he could not picture her, even now, lifting a finger to keep George back.

Campton struggled all the morning with these questions. After lunch he pocketed Mrs. Talkett’s moneybag and carried it to the Palais Royal, where he discovered Harvey Mayhew in confabulation with Mme. Beausite, who still trailed her ineffectual beauty about the office. The painter thought he detected a faint embarrassment in the glance with which they both greeted him.

“Hallo, Campton! Looking for our good friend Boylston? He’s off duty this afternoon, Mme. Beausite tells me; as he is pretty often in these days, I’ve noticed,” Mr. Mayhew sardonically added. “In fact, the office has rather been left to run itself lately—eh? Of course our good Miss Anthony is absorbed with her refugees—gives us but a divided allegiance. And Boylston—well, young men, young men! Of course it’s been a weary pull for him. By the way, my dear fellow,” Mr. Mayhew continued, as Campton appeared about to turn away, “I called at Mrs. Talkett’s just now to ask for the money from the concert—a good round sum, I hear it is—and she told me she’d given it to you. Have you brought it with you? If so, Mme. Beausite here would take charge of it——”

Mme. Beausite turned her great resigned eyes on the painter. “Mr. Campton knows I’m very careful. I will lock it up till his friend’s return. Now that Mr. Boylston is so much away I very often have such responsibilities.”

Campton’s eyes returned her glance; but he did not waver. “Thanks so much; but as the sum is rather large it seems to me the bank’s the proper place. Will you please tell Boylston I’ve deposited it?”

Mr. Mayhew’s benevolent pink turned to an angry red. For a moment Campton thought he was about to say something foolish. But he merely bent his head stiffly, muttered a vague phrase about “irregular proceedings,” and returned to his seat by Mme. Beausite’s desk.

As for Campton, his words had decided his course: he would take the money at once to Bullard and Brant’s and seize the occasion to see the banker. Mr. Brant was the only person with whom, at this particular juncture, he cared to talk of George.

Mr. Brant’s private office was as glitteringly neat as when Campton had entered it for the first time, and seen the fatal telegram about Benny Upsher marring the order of the desk.

Now he crossed the threshold with different feelings. To have Mr. Brant look up and smile, to shake hands with him, accept one of his cigars, and sink into one of the blue leather armchairs, seemed to be in the natural order of things. He felt only the relief of finding himself with the one person likely to understand.

“About George——” he began.

“Yes?” said Mr. Brant briskly. “It’s curious—I was just thinking of looking you up. It’s his birthday next Tuesday, you know.”

“Oh——” said the father, slightly put off. He had not come to talk of birthdays; nor did he need to be reminded of his son’s by Mr. Brant. He concluded that Mr. Brant would be less easy to get on with in Paris than at the front.

“And we thought of celebrating the day by a little party—a dinner, with perhaps the smallest kind of a dance: or just bridge—yes, probably just bridge,” the banker added tentatively. “Opinions differ as to the suitability—it’s for his mother to decide. But of course no evening clothes; and we hoped perhaps to persuade you. Our only object is to amuse him—to divert his mind from this wretched entanglement.”

It was doubtful if Mr. Brant had ever before made so long a speech, except perhaps at a board meeting; and then only when he read the annual report. He turned pink and stared over Campton’s shoulder at the panelled white wall, on which a false Reynolds hung.

Campton meditated. The blush was the blush of Mr. Brant, but the voice was the voice of Julia. Still, it was probable that neither husband nor wife was aware how far matters had gone with Mrs. Talkett.

“George is more involved than you think,” Campton said.

Mr. Brant looked startled.

“In what way?”

“He means to marry her. He insists on her getting a divorce.”

“A divorce? Good gracious,” murmured Mr. Brant. He turned over a jade paper-cutter, trying its edge absently on his nail. “Does Julia——?” he began at length.

Campton shook his head. “No; I wanted to speak to you first.”

Mr. Brant gave his quick bow. He was evidently gratified, and the sentiment stimulated his faculties, as it had when he found that Campton no longer resented his presence at the hospital. His small effaced features took on a businesslike sharpness, and he readjusted his eye-glasses and straightened the paper-cutter, which he had put back on the desk a fraction of an inch out of its habitual place.

“You had this from George?” he asked.

“No; from her. She’s been to see me. She doesn’t want to divorce. She’s in love with him; in her way, that is; but she’s frightened.”

“And that makes him the more eager?”

“The more determined, at any rate.”

Mr. Brant appeared to seize the distinction. “George can be very determined.”

“Yes. I think his mother ought to be made to understand that all this talk about a wretched entanglement isn’t likely to make him any less so.”

Mr. Brant’s look seemed to say that making Julia understand had proved a no less onerous task for his maturity than for Campton’s youth.

“If you don’t object—perhaps the matter might, for the present, continue to be kept between you and me,” he suggested.

“Oh, by all means. What I want,” Campton pursued, “is to get him out of this business altogether. They wouldn’t be happy—they couldn’t be. She’s too much like——” He broke off, frightened at what he had been about to say. “Too much,” he emended, “like the usual fool of a woman that every boy of George’s age thinks he wants simply because he can’t get her.”

“And you say she came to you for advice?”

“She came to me to persuade him to give up the idea of a divorce. Apparently she’s ready for anything short of that. It’s a queer business. She seems sorry for Talkett in a way.”

Mr. Brant marked his sense of the weight of this by a succession of attentive nods. He put his hands in his pockets, leaned back, and tilted his dapper toes against the gold-trellised scrap-basket. The attitude seemed to change the pale panelling of his background into a glass-and-mahogany Wall Street office.

“Won’t he be satisfied with—er—all the rest, so to speak; since you say she offers it?”

“No; he won’t. There’s the difficulty. It seems it’s the new view. The way the young men feel since the war. He wants her for his wife. Nothing less.”

“Ah, he respects her,” murmured Mr. Brant, impressed; and Campton reflected that he had no doubt respected Julia.

“And what she wants is to get you to persuade him—to accept less?”

“Well—something of the sort.”

Mr. Brant sat up and dropped his heels to the floor. “Well, then—don’t!” he snapped.

“Don’t——?”

“Persuade her, on the contrary, to keep him hoping—to make him think she means to marry him. Don’t you see?” Mr. Brant exclaimed, almost impatiently. “Don’t you see that if she turns him down definitely he’ll be scheming to get away, to get back to the front, the minute his leave is over? Tell her that—appeal to her on that ground. Make her do it. She will if she’s in love with him. And we can’t stop him from going back—not one of us. He’s restless here already—I know that. Always talking about his men, saying he’s got to get back to them. The only way is to hold him by this girl. She’s the very influence we need!”

He threw it all out in sharp terse phrases, as a business man might try to hammer facts about an investment into the bewildered brain of an unpractical client. Campton felt the blood rising to his forehead, not so much in anger at Mr. Brant as at the sense of his own inward complicity.

“There’s no earthly reason why George should ever go back to the front,” he said.

“None whatever. We can get him any staff-job he chooses. His mother’s already got the half-promise of a post for him at the War Office. But you’ll see, you’ll see! We can’t stop him. Did we before? There’s only this woman who can do it!”

Campton looked over the banker’s head at the reflection of the false Reynolds in the mirror. That any one should have been fool enough to pay a big price for such a patent fraud seemed to him as incomprehensible as his own present obtuseness seemed to the banker.

“You do see, don’t you?” argued Mr. Brant anxiously.

“Oh, I suppose so.” Campton slowly got to his feet. The adroit brushwork of the forged picture fascinated him, and he went up to look at it more closely. Mr. Brant pursued him with a gratified glance.

“Ah, you’re admiring my Reynolds. I paid a thumping price for it—but that’s always my principle. Pay high, but get the best. It’s a better investment.”

“Just so,” Campton assented dully. Mr. Brant seemed suddenly divided from him by the whole width of the gulf between that daub on the wall and a real Reynolds. They had nothing more to say to each other—nothing whatever. “Well, goodbye.” He held out his hand.

“Think it over—think it over,” Mr. Brant called out after him as he enfiladed the sumptuous offices, a medalled veteran holding back each door.

It was not until Campton was back at Montmartre, and throwing off his coat to get into his old studio clothes, that he felt in his pocket the weight of the forgotten concert-money. It was too late in the day to take it back to the bank, even if he had had the energy to retrace his steps; and he decided to hand the bag over to Boylston, with whom he was dining that night to meet the elder Dastrey, home on a brief leave from his ambulance.

---

“Think it over!” Mr. Brant’s adjuration continued to echo in Campton’s ears. As if he needed to be told to think it over! Once again the war-worn world had vanished from his mind, and he saw only George, himself and George, George and safety, George and peace. They blamed women who were cowards about their husbands, mistresses who schemed to protect their lovers! Well—he was as bad as any one of them, if it came to that. His son had bought his freedom, had once offered his life and nearly lost it. Brant was right: at all costs they must keep him from rushing back into that hell.

That Mrs. Talkett should be the means of securing his safety was bitter enough. This trivial barren creature to be his all—it seemed the parody of Campton’s own youth! And Julia, after all, had been only a girl when he had met her, inexperienced and still malleable. A man less absorbed in his art, less oblivious of the daily material details of life, might conceivably have made something of her. But this little creature, with her farrago of false ideas, her vanity, her restlessness, her undisguised desire to keep George and yet not lose her world, had probably reached the term of her development, and would trip on through an eternal infancy of fads and frenzies.

Luckily, as Mr. Brant said, they could use her for the time; use her better, no doubt, than had she been a more finely tempered instrument. Campton was still pondering on these things as he set out for the restaurant where he had agreed to meet Boylston and Dastrey. At the foot of his own stairs he was surprised to run against Boylston under the porte-cochÈre. They gave each other a quick questioning look, as men did when they encountered each other unexpectedly in those days.

“Anything up? Oh, the money—you’ve come for the money?” Campton remembered that he had left the bag upstairs.

“The money? Haven’t you heard? Louis Dastrey’s killed,” said Boylston.

They stood side by side in the doorway, while Campton’s darkened mind struggled anew with the mystery of fate. Almost every day now the same readjustment had to be gone through: the cowering averted mind dragged upward and forced to visualize a new gap in the ranks, and summon the remaining familiar figures to fill it up and blot it out. And to-day this cruel gymnastic was to be performed for George’s best friend, the elder Dastrey’s sole stake in life! Only a few days ago the lad had passed through Paris, just back from America, and in haste to rejoin his regiment; alive and eager, throbbing with ideas, with courage, mirth and irony—the very material France needed to rebuild her ruins and beget her sons! And now, struck down as George had been—not to rise like George....

Once more the inner voice in Campton questioned distinctly: “Could you bear it?” and again he answered: “Less than ever!”

Aloud he asked: “Paul?”

“Oh, he went off at once. To break the news to Louis’ mother in the country.”

“The boy was all Paul had left.”

“Yes.”

“What difference would it have made in the war, if he’d just stayed on at his job in America?”

Boylston did not answer, and the two stood silent, looking out unseeingly at the black empty street. There was nothing left to say, nowadays, when such blows fell; hardly anything left to feel, it sometimes seemed.

“Well, I suppose we must go and eat something,” the older man said; and arm in arm they went out into the darkness.

When Campton returned home that night he sat down and, with the help of several pipes, wrote a note to Mrs. Talkett asking when she would receive him.

---

Thereafter he tried to go back to his painting and to continue his daily visits to the Palais Royal office. But for the time nothing seemed to succeed with him. He threw aside his study of Mme. Lebel—he hung about the office, confused and idle, and with the ever clearer sense that there also things were disintegrating.

George’s birthday party had been given up on account of young Dastrey’s death. Mrs. Brant evidently thought the postponement unnecessary; since George’s return she had gone over heart and soul to the “business as usual” party. But Mr. Brant quietly sided with George; and Campton was glad to be spared the necessity of celebrating the day in such a setting.

It was some time since Campton had seen his son; but the fault was not his son’s. The painter was aware of having voluntarily avoided George. He said to himself: “As long as I know he’s safe why should I bother him?” But in reality he did not feel himself to be fit company for any one, and had even shunned poor Paul Dastrey on the latter’s hurried passage through Paris, when he had come back from carrying the fatal news to young Dastrey’s mother.

“What on earth could Paul and I have found to say to each other?” Campton argued with himself. “For men of our age there’s nothing left to say nowadays. The only thing I can do is to try to work up one of my old studies of Louis. That might please him a little—later on.”

But after one or two attempts he pushed away that canvas too.

At length one afternoon George came in. They had not met for over a week, and as George’s blue uniform detached itself against the blurred tapestries of the studio, the north light modelling the fresh curves of his face, the father’s heart gave a leap of pride. His son had never seemed to him so young and strong and vivid.

George, with a sudden blush, took his hand in a long pressure.

“I say, Dad—Madge has told me. Told me that you know about us and that you’ve persuaded her to see things as I do. She hadn’t had a chance to speak to me of your visit till last night.”

Campton felt his colour rising; but though his own part in the business still embarrassed him he was glad that the barriers were down.

“I didn’t want,” George continued, still flushed and slightly constrained, “to say anything to you about all this till I could say: ‘Here’s my wife.’ And now she’s promised.”

“She’s promised?”

“Thanks to you, you know. Your visit to her did it. She told me the whole thing yesterday. How she’d come here in desperation, to ask you to help her, to have her mind cleared up for her; and how you’d thought it all over, and then gone to see her, and how wise and perfect you’d been about it all. Poor child—if you knew the difference it’s made to her!”

They were seated now, the littered table between them. Campton, his elbows on it, his chin on his hands, looked across at his son, who faced the light.

“The difference to you too?” he questioned.

George smiled: it was exactly the same detached smile which he used to shed on the little nurse who brought him his cocoa.

“Of course. Now I can go back without worrying.” He let the words fall as carelessly as if there were nothing in them to challenge attention.

“Go back?” Campton stared at him with a blank countenance. Had he heard aright? The noise of a passing lorry suddenly roared in his ears like the guns of the front.

“Did you say: go back?”

George opened his blue eyes wide. “Why, of course; as soon as ever I’m patched up. You didn’t think——?”

“I thought you had the sense to realize that you’ve done your share in one line, and that your business now is to do it in another.”

The same detached smile again brushed George’s lips. “But if I happen to have only one line?”

“Nonsense! You know they don’t think that at the War Office.”

“I don’t believe the War Office will shut down if I leave it.”

“What an argument! It sounds like——” Campton, breaking off on a sharp breath, closed his lids for a second. He had been gazing too steadily into George’s eyes, and now at last he knew what that mysterious look in them meant. It was Benny Upsher’s look, of course—inaccessible to reason, beyond reason, belonging to other spaces, other weights and measures, over the edge, somehow, of the tangible calculable world....

“A man can’t do more than his duty: you’ve done that,” he growled.

But George insisted with his gentle obstinacy: “You’ll feel differently about it when America comes in.”

Campton shook his head. “Never about your case.”

“You will—when you see how we all feel. When we’re all in it you wouldn’t have me looking on, would you? And then there are my men—I’ve got to get back to my men.”

“But you’ve no right to go now; no business,” his father broke in violently. “Persuading that poor girl to wreck her life ... and then leaving her, planting her there with her past ruined, and her future.... George, you can’t!”

George, in his long months of illness, had lost his old ruddiness of complexion. At his father’s challenge the blood again rose the more visibly to his still-gaunt cheeks and white forehead: he was evidently struck.

“You’ll kill her—and kill your mother!” Campton stormed.

“Oh, it’s not for to-morrow. Not for a long time, perhaps. My shoulder’s still too stiff. I was stupid,” the young man haltingly added, “to put it as I did. Of course I’ve got to think of Madge now,” he acknowledged, “as well as mother.”

The blood flowed slowly back to Campton’s heart. “You’ve got to think of—just the mere common-sense of the thing. That’s all I ask. You’ve done your turn; you’ve done more. But never mind that. Now it’s different. You’re barely patched up: you’re of use, immense use, for staff-work, and you know it. And you’ve asked a woman to tie up her future to yours—at what cost you know too. It’s as much your duty to keep away from the front now as it was before—well, I admit it—to go there. You’ve done just what I should have wanted my son to do, up to this minute——”

George laid a hand on his a little wistfully. “Then just go on trusting me.”

“I do—to see that I’m right! If I can’t convince you, ask Boylston—ask Adele!”

George sat staring down at the table. For the first time since they had met at Doullens Campton was conscious of reaching his son’s inner mind, and of influencing it.

“I wonder if you really love her?” he suddenly risked.

The question did not seem to offend George, scarcely to surprise him. “Of course,” he said simply. “Only—well, everything’s different nowadays, isn’t it? So many of the old ideas have come to seem such humbug. That’s what I want to drag her out of—the coils and coils of stale humbug. They were killing her.”

“Well—take care you don’t,” Campton said, thinking that everything was different indeed, as he recalled the reasons young men had had for loving and marrying in his own time.

A faint look of amusement came into George’s eyes. “Kill her? Oh, no. I’m gradually bringing her to life. But all this is hard to talk about—yet. By-and-bye you’ll understand; she’ll show you, we’ll show you together. But at present nothing’s to be said—to any one, please, not even to mother. Madge thinks this is no time for such things. There, of course, I don’t agree; but I must be patient. The secrecy, the under-handedness, are hateful to me; but for her it’s all a part of the sacred humbug.”

He rose listlessly, as if the discussion had bled all the life out of him, and took himself away.

When he had gone his father drew a deep breath. Yes—the boy would stay in Paris; he would almost certainly stay; for the present, at any rate. And people were still prophesying that in the spring there would be a big push all along the line; and after that the nightmare might be over. Campton was glad he had gone to see Madge Talkett. He was glad, above all, that if the thing had to be done it was over, and that, by Madge’s wish, no one was to know of what had passed between them. It was a distinct relief, in spite of what he had suggested to George, not to have to carry that particular problem to Adele Anthony or Boylston.

A few days later George accepted a staff-appointment in Paris.