Campton

“ Campton, with a vague awakening of interest, glanced about him, studying the faces of the crowd. Old and young, infirm and healthy, civilians and soldiers—ah, the soldiers!—all were exultant, confident, alive. Alive! The word meant something new to him now—something so strange and unnatural that his mind still hung and brooded over it. For now that George was dead, by what mere blind propulsion did all these thousands of human beings keep on mechanically living? ”

“ 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. ”

“ This sort of thing couldn’t go on,” he said, in the words of Mme. Lebel.
He was to start in an hour, and Campton excused himself for intruding on the family, who seemed as happily united, as harmonious in their deeper interests, as if no musical studio-parties and exotic dancers had ever absorbed the master of the house.
Campton, looking at the group, felt a pang of envy, and thought, for the thousandth time, how frail a screen of activity divided him from depths of loneliness he dared not sound. “‘For every man hath business and desire,’” he muttered as he followed the physician. ”

“ The reassurance that Campton brought from Fortin-Lescluze, vague though it was, came to her as a miraculous promise, and raised Campton suddenly in her estimation. She looked at him with a new confidence, and he could almost hear her saying to Brant, as he had so often heard her say to himself: “You never seem able to get anything done. I don’t know how other people manage.” ”

“ Campton saw now that it was true of poor Madge Talkett, as it was of Adele Anthony and Mr. Brant, and even in a measure of Julia. They had never—no, not even George’s mother—had anything, in the close inextricable sense in which Campton had had his son. And it was only now, in his own hour of destitution, that he understood how much greater the depth of their poverty had been. He recalled the frightened embarrassed look of the young lieutenant whom he had discountenanced by his tears; and he said to himself: “The only thing that helps is to be able to do things for people. ”

“ Campton remembered his sneer at Dastrey’s phrase: “One can at least contribute an attitude.” He had begun to feel the force of that, to understand the need of every human being’s “pulling his weight” in the struggle, had begun to scan every face in the street in the passionate effort to distinguish between the stones in the wall of resistance and the cracks through which discouragement might filter. ”

“ For my part, I understand Julia and Anderson better. They don’t care a fig for national issues; they’re just animals defending their cub.”
“Their—thank you!” Campton exclaimed.
“Well, poor Anderson really was a dry-nurse to the boy. Who else was there to look after him? You were painting Spanish beauties at the time.” She frowned. “Life’s a puzzle. I see perfectly that if you’d let everything else go to keep George you’d never have become the great John Campton: the real John Campton you were meant to be. And it wouldn’t have been half as satisfactory for you—or for George either. ”

“ He had been an early recruit of Plattsburg, and his military training was so far advanced that he counted on being among the first officers sent to the fighting line. He was a fresh-coloured lad, with fair hair that stood up in a defiant crest.
“There are so few of us, and there’s so little time to lose; they can’t afford to be too particular,” he laughed.
It was just the sort of thing that George would have said, and the laugh was like an echo of George’s. At the sound Campton suddenly burst into tears, and was aware of his visitor’s looking at him with eyes of dismay and compassion. ”

“ It amused Campton to do Mrs. Talkett against such a background: her thin personality needed to be filled out by the visible results of its many quests and cravings. There were people one could sit down before a blank wall, and all their world was there, in the curves of their faces and the way their hands lay in their laps; others, like Mrs. Talkett, seemed to be made out of the reflection of what surrounded them, as if they had been born of a tricky grouping of looking-glasses, and would vanish if it were changed. ”

“ XIV When Campton took his sketch of George to Léonce Black, the dealer who specialized in “Camptons,” he was surprised at the magnitude of the sum which the great picture-broker, lounging in a glossy War Office uniform among his Gauguins and Vuillards, immediately offered.
Léonce Black noted his surprise and smiled. “You think there’s nothing doing nowadays? Don’t you believe it, Mr. Campton. Now that the big men have stopped painting, the collectors are all the keener to snap up what’s left in their portfolios.” ”

“ A man of Fortin’s age and authority? Campton was terrified by the uncanny rapidity with which events were moving, he whom haste had always confused and disconcerted, as if there were a secret link between his lameness and the movements of his will. He rang up Dastrey, but no one answered. Evidently his friend was out, and his friend’s bonne also. “I suppose she’s mobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.” ”

“ He went away, small and shrunken, with the deprecating smile of a man who seeks to ward off a blow; as he left the room Campton heard him say 207timidly to the clerk: “No doubt you speak French, sir? The words I want don’t seem to come to me.”
Campton had meant to leave at the same time; but some vague impulse held him back. He remembered George’s postscript: “Don’t be too savage to Uncle Andy,” and wished he could think of some friendly phrase to ease off his leave-taking. Mr. Brant seemed to have the same wish. ”

“ Wherever he went he was pursued by visions of that land of doom: visions of fathomless mud, rat-haunted trenches, freezing nights under the sleety sky, men dying in the barbed wire between the lines or crawling out to save a comrade and being shattered to death on the return. His collaboration with Boylston had brought Campton into close contact with these things. He knew by heart the history of scores and scores of young men of George’s age who were doggedly suffering and dying a few hours away from the Palais Royal office where their records were kept. ”

“ Campton, sunk into his corner, glanced now and then at the neat grey silhouette, in which the perpendicular glint 273of 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ He explained to Campton that he had found it to be “his duty to rest”; and he was indefatigable in the performance of duty. He had therefore, with an expenditure of eloquence which Campton thought surprisingly slight, persuaded Boylston to become his understudy, and devote several hours a day to the whirling activities of the shrimp-pink Bureau of Atrocities at the Nouveau Luxe. Campton, at first, could not understand how the astute Boylston had allowed himself to be drawn into the eddy; but it turned out that Boylston’s astuteness had drawn him in. ”

“ Campton mused, “like George.... The average person is always just obeying impulses stored up thousands of years ago, and never re-examined since.” But this consideration, though drawn from George’s own philosophy, did not greatly comfort his father.
At the Brants’ a bewildered concierge admitted him and rang a bell which no one answered. The vestibule and the stairs were piled with bales of sheeting, bulging jute-bags, stacked-up hospital supplies. A boy in scout’s uniform swung inadequate legs from the lofty porter’s armchair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. ”

“ The upshot of it was that she had heard that Campton was “all-powerful”; that he knew Ministers and Generals, knew great financiers like Jorgenstein (who were so much more powerful than either Generals or Ministers) , and could, if he chose, help her to trace 389her boy, who, from the day of his departure for the front, had vanished as utterly as if the earth had swallowed him. ”

“ But it was useless to speculate, for if he had, the old goose, true as steel, would never betray it by as much as a twitch of her lids. She could look, when it was a question of keeping a secret, like such an impenetrable idiot that one could not imagine any one’s having trusted a secret to her.
Campton had no wish to surprise George’s secrets, if the boy had any. ”

“ On the other side of the hearth young Boylston, sunk in an armchair, smoked and listened.
“It always comes back to the same thing,” Campton was saying nervously. “What right have useless old men like me, sitting here with my cigar by this good fire, to preach blood and butchery to boys like George and your nephew?” ”

“ If Dastrey, from the depths of his destitution, could still feel it and live by it, why did it not help Campton more? An Idea: that was what France, ever since she had existed, had always been in the story of civilization; a luminous point about which striving visions and purposes could rally. And in that sense she had been as much Campton’s spiritual home as Dastrey’s; to thinkers, artists, to all creators, she had always been a second country. If France went, western civilization went with her; and then all they had believed in and been guided by would perish. That was what George had felt ”

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

“ That his boy should survive—survive at any price—that had been all he cared for or sought to achieve. It had been convenient to justify himself by arguing that George was not bound to fight for France; but Campton now knew that he would have made the same effort to protect his son if the country engaged had been his own.
In the careless pre-war world, as George himself had once said, it had seemed unbelievable that people should ever again go off and die in a ditch to oblige anybody. ”

“ Sometimes when George was asleep Campton would 293sit 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 ”

“ HARVEY MAYHEW
Déléguê des Etats Unis au Congrès de la Paix with a pen-stroke through the lower line. Beneath was written an imperative “p.t.o.”; and reversing the card, Campton read, in an agitated hand: “Must see you at once. Call up Nouveau Luxe”; and, lower down: “Excuse ridiculous card. Impossible get others under six weeks.”
So Mayhew had turned up! Well, it was a good thing: perhaps he might bring news of that mad Benny Upsher whose doings had caused Campton so much trouble in the early days that he could never recall the boy’s obstinate rosy face without a stir of irritation. ”

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

“ You’ve broken my beautiful world! There’ll be splinters....” Ah, yes, splinters, splinters ... everybody’s hands were red with them! What retribution devised by man could be commensurate with the crime of destroying his beautiful world? Campton sat down to the task of collating office files.
His bell rang, and he started up, as much surprised as if the simplest events had become unusual. It would be natural enough that Dastrey or Boylston should drop in—or even Adele Anthony—but his heart beat as if it might be George. He limped to the door, and found Mrs. Talkett. ”