The evening was too beautiful, and too full of the sense of fate, for sleep to be possible, and long after George had finally said “All the same, I think I’ll turn in,” his father sat on, listening to thegradual subsidence of the traffic, and watching the night widen above Paris.
As he sat there, discouragement overcame him. His last plan, his plan for getting George finally and completely over to his side, was going to fail as all his other plans had failed. If there were war there would be no more portraits to paint, and his vision of wealth would vanish as visions of love and happiness and comradeship had one by one faded away. Nothing had ever succeeded with him but the thing he had in some moods set least store by, the dogged achievement of his brush; and just as that was about to assure his happiness, here was this horrible world-catastrophe threatening to fall across his path.
His misfortune had been that he could neither get on easily with people nor live without them; could never wholly isolate himself in his art, nor yet resign himself to any permanent human communion that left it out, or, worse still, dragged it in irrelevantly. He had tried both kinds, and on the whole preferred the first. His marriage, his stupid ill-fated marriage, had after all not been the most disenchanting of his adventures, because Julia Ambrose, when she married him, had made no pretense of espousing his art.
He had seen her first in the tumble-down Venetian palace where she lived with her bachelor uncle, old Horace Ambrose, who dabbled in bric-a-brac and cultivated a guileless Bohemianism. Campton, lookingback, could still understand why, to a youth fresh from Utica, at odds with his father, unwilling to go into the family business, and strangling with violent unexpressed ideas on art and the universe, marriage with Julia Ambrose had seemed so perfect a solution. She had been brought up abroad by her parents, a drifting and impecunious American couple; and after their deaths, within a few months of each other, her education had been completed, at her uncle’s expense, in a fashionable Parisian convent. Thence she had been transplanted at nineteen to his Venetian household, and all the ideas that most terrified and scandalized Campton’s family were part of the only air she had breathed. She had never intentionally feigned an exaggerated interest in his ambitions. But her bringing-up made her regard them as natural; she knew what he was aiming at, though she had never understood his reasons for trying. The jargon of art was merely one of her many languages; but she talked it so fluently that he had taken it for her mother-tongue.
The only other girls he had known well were his sisters—earnest eye-glassed young women, whose one answer to all his problems was that he ought to come home. The idea of Europe had always been terrifying to them, and indeed to his whole family, since the extraordinary misadventure whereby, as the result of a protracted diligence journey over bad roads, of a violent thunderstorm, and a delayed steamer, Camptonhad been born in Paris instead of Utica. Mrs. Campton the elder had taken the warning to heart, and never again left her native soil; but the sisters, safely and properly brought into the world in their own city and State, had always felt that Campton’s persistent yearnings for Europe, and his inexplicable detachment from Utica and the Mangle, were mysteriously due to the accident of their mother’s premature confinement.
Compared with the admonitions of these domestic censors, Miss Ambrose’s innocent conversation was as seductive as the tangles of Neæra’s hair, and it used to be a joke between them (one of the few he had ever been able to make her see) that he, the raw up-Stater, was Parisian born, while she, the glass and pattern of worldly knowledge, had seen the light in the pure atmosphere of Madison Avenue.
Through her, in due course, he came to know another girl, a queer abrupt young American, already an old maid at twenty-two, and in open revolt against her family for reasons not unlike his own. Adele Anthony had come abroad to keep house for a worthless “artistic” brother, who was preparing to be a sculptor by prolonged sessions in Anglo-American bars and the lobbies of music-halls. When he finally went under, and was shipped home, Miss Anthony stayed on in Paris, ashamed, as she told Campton, to go back and face the righteous triumph of a family connection who had unanimously disbelieved in the possibility of makingBill Anthony into a sculptor, and in the wisdom of his sister’s staking her small means on the venture.
“Somehow, behind it all, I was right, and they were wrong; but to do anything with poor Bill I ought to have been able to begin two or three generations back,” she confessed.
Miss Anthony had many friends in Paris, of whom Julia Ambrose was the most admired; and she had assisted sympathizingly (if not enthusiastically) at Campton’s wooing of Julia, and their hasty marriage. Her only note of warning had been the reminder that Julia had always been poor, and had always lived as if she were rich; and that was silenced by Campton’s rejoinder that the Magic Mangle, to which the Campton prosperity was due, was some day going to make him rich, though he had always lived as if he were poor.
“Well—you’d better not, any longer,” Adele sharply advised; and he laughed, and promised to go out and buy a new hat. In truth, careless of comfort as he was, he adored luxury in women, and was resolved to let his wife ruin him if she did it handsomely enough. Doubtless she might have, had fate given her time; but soon after their marriage old Mr. Campton died, and it was found that a trusted manager had so invested the profits of the Mangle that the heirs inherited only a series of law-suits.
John Campton, henceforth, was merely the unsuccessfulson of a ruined manufacturer; painting became a luxury he could no longer afford, and his mother and sisters besought him to come back and take over what was left of the business. It seemed so clearly his duty that, with anguish of soul, he prepared to go; but Julia, on being consulted, developed a sudden passion for art and poverty.
“We’d have to live in Utica—for some years at any rate?”
“Well, yes, no doubt——” They faced the fact desolately.
“They’d much better look out for another manager. What do you know about business? Since you’ve taken up painting you’d better try to make a success of that,” she advised him; and he was too much of the same mind not to agree.
It was not long before George’s birth, and they were fully resolved to go home for the event, and thus spare their hoped for heir the inconvenience of coming into the world, like his father, in a foreign country. But now this was not to be thought of, and the eventual inconvenience to George was lost sight of by his progenitors in the contemplation of nearer problems.
For a few years their life dragged along shabbily and depressingly. Now that Campton’s painting was no longer an amateur’s hobby but a domestic obligation, Julia thought it her duty to interest herself init; and her only idea of doing so was by means of what she called “relations,” using the word in its French and diplomatic sense.
She was convinced that her husband’s lack of success was due to Beausite’s blighting epigram, and to Campton’s subsequent resolve to strike out for himself. “It’s a great mistake to try to be original till people have got used to you,” she said, with the shrewdness that sometimes startled him. “If you’d only been civil to Beausite he would have ended by taking you up, and then you could have painted as queerly as you liked.”
Beausite, by this time, had succumbed to the honours which lie in wait for such talents, and in his starred and titled maturity his earlier dread of rivals had given way to a prudent benevolence. Young artists were always welcome at the receptions he gave in his sumptuous hotel of the Avenue du Bois. Those who threatened to be rivals were even invited to dine; and Julia was justified in triumphing when such an invitation finally rewarded her efforts.
Campton, with a laugh, threw the card into the stove.
“If you’d only understand that that’s not the way,” he said.
“What is, then?”
“Why, letting all that lot see what unutterable rubbish one thinks them!”
“I should have thought you’d tried that long enough,” she said with pale lips; but he answered jovially that it never palled on him.
She was bitterly offended; but she knew Campton by this time, and was not a woman to waste herself in vain resentment. She simply suggested that since he would not profit by Beausite’s advance the only alternative was to try to get orders for portraits; and though at that stage he was not in the mood for portrait-painting, he made an honest attempt to satisfy her. She began, of course, by sitting for him. She sat again and again; but, lovely as she was, he was not inspired, and one day, in sheer self-defence, he blurted out that she was not paintable. She never forgot the epithet, and it loomed large in their subsequent recriminations.
Adele Anthony—it was just like her—gave him his first order, and she did prove paintable. Campton made a success of her long crooked pink-nosed face; but she didn’t perceive it (she had wanted something oval, with tulle, and a rose in a taper hand), and after heroically facing the picture for six months she hid it away in an attic, whence, a year or so before the date of the artist’s present musings, it had been fished out as an “early Campton,” to be exhibited half a dozen times, and have articles written about it in the leading art reviews.
Adele’s picture acted as an awful warning to intendingpatrons, and after one or two attempts at depicting mistrustful friends Campton refused to constrain his muse, and no more was said of portrait-painting. But life in Paris was growing too expensive. He persuaded Julia to try Spain, and they wandered about there for a year. She was not fault-finding, she did not complain, but she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and unsalable.
Finally they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz. And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turban-wise above two folds of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips, laughing ata little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a dog.
The vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.
The next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”
She said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that either.... He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back to Paris, leaving a letter to say that the matter was in the hands of her lawyers.
“What did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could not explain.
It was a year or two later that he met the first person whodidunderstand: a Russian lady who had heardthe story, was curious to know him, and asked, one day, when their friendship had progressed, to see the sketches he had brought back from hisfugue.
“Comme je vous comprends!” she had murmured, her grey eyes deep in his; but perceiving that she did not allude to the sketches, but to his sentimental adventure, Campton pushed the drawings out of sight, vexed with himself for having shown them.
He forgave the Russian lady her artistic obtuseness for the sake of her human comprehension. They had met at the loneliest moment of his life, when his art seemed to have failed him like everything else, and when the struggle to get possession of his son, which had been going on in the courts ever since the break with Julia, had finally been decided against him. His Russian friend consoled, amused and agitated him, and after a few years drifted out of his life as irresponsibly as she had drifted into it; and he found himself, at forty-five, a lonely thwarted man, as full as ever of faith in his own powers, but with little left in human nature or in opportunity. It was about this time that he heard that Julia was to marry again, and that his boy would have a stepfather.
He knew that even his own family thought it “the best thing that could happen.” They were tired of clubbing together to pay Julia’s alimony, and heaved a united sigh of relief when they learned that her second choice had fallen, not on the bankrupt “foreign Count”they had always dreaded, but on the Paris partner of the famous bank of Bullard and Brant. Mr. Brant’s request that his wife’s alimony should be discontinued gave him a moral superiority which even Campton’s recent successes could not shake. It was felt that the request expressed the contempt of an income easily counted in seven figures for a pittance painfully screwed up to four; and the Camptons admired Mr. Brant much more for not needing their money than for refusing it.
Their attitude left John Campton without support in his struggle to keep a hold on his boy. His family sincerely thought George safer with the Brants than with his own father, and the father could advance to the contrary no arguments they would have understood. All the forces of order seemed leagued against him; and it was perhaps this fact that suddenly drove him into conformity with them. At any rate, from the day of Julia’s remarriage no other woman shared her former husband’s life. Campton settled down to the solitude of his dusty studio at Montmartre, and painted doggedly, all his thoughts on George.
At this point in his reminiscences the bells of Sainte Clotilde rang out the half-hour after midnight, and Campton rose and went into the darkened sitting-room.
The door into George’s room was open, and in the silence the father heard the boy’s calm breathing. Alight from the bathroom cast its ray on the dressing-table, which was scattered with the contents of George’s pockets. Campton, dwelling with a new tenderness on everything that belonged to his son, noticed a smart antelope card-case (George had his mother’s weakness for Bond Street novelties), a wrist-watch, his studs, a bundle of bank-notes; and beside these a thumbed and dirty red book, the size of a large pocket-diary.
The father wondered what it was; then of a sudden he knew. He had once seen Mme. Lebel’s grandson pull just such a red book from his pocket as he was leaving for his “twenty-eight days” of military service; it was thelivret militairethat every French citizen under forty-eight carries about with him.
Campton had never paid much attention to French military regulations: George’s service over, he had dismissed the matter from his mind, forgetting that his son was still a member of the French army, and as closely linked to the fortunes of France as the grandson of the concierge of Montmartre. Now it occurred to him that that little red book would answer the questions he had not dared to put; and stealing in, he possessed himself of it and carried it back to the sitting-room. There he sat down by the lamp and read.
First George’s name, his domicile, his rank as amaréchal des logisof dragoons, the number of his regiment and its base: all that was already familiar. But what was this on the next page?
“In case of general mobilisation announced to the populations of France by public proclamations, or by notices posted in the streets, the bearer of this order is to rejoin his regiment at ——.
“He is to take with him provisions for one day.
“He is to present himself at the station of —— on the third day of mobilisation at 6 o’clock, and to take the train indicated by the station-master.
“The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.”
Campton dropped the book and pressed his hands to his temples. “The days of mobilisation are counted from 0 o’clock to 24 o’clock. The first day is that on which the order of mobilisation is published.” Then, if France mobilised that day, George would start the second day after, at six in the morning. George might be going to leave him within forty-eight hours from that very moment!
Campton had always vaguely supposed that, some day or other, if war came, a telegram would call George to his base; it had never occurred to him that every detail of the boy’s military life had long since been regulated by the dread power which had him in its grasp.
He read the next paragraph: “The bearer will travel free of charge——” and thought with a grin how it would annoy Anderson Brant that the French governmentshould presume to treat his stepson as if he could not pay his way. The plump bundle of bank-notes on the dressing-table seemed to look with ineffectual scorn at the red book that sojourned so democratically in the same pocket. And Campton, picturing George jammed into an overcrowded military train, on the plebeian wooden seat of a third-class compartment, grinned again, forgetful of his own anxiety in the vision of Brant’s exasperation.
Ah, well, it wasn’t war yet, whatever they said!
He carried the red book back to the dressing-table. The light falling across the bed drew his eye to the young face on the pillow. George lay on his side, one arm above his head, the other laxly stretched along the bed. He had thrown off the blankets, and the sheet, clinging to his body, modelled his slim flank and legs as he lay in dreamless rest.
For a long time Campton stood gazing; then he stole back to the sitting-room, picked up a sketch-book and pencil and returned. He knew there was no danger of waking George, and he began to draw, eagerly but deliberately, fascinated by the happy accident of the lighting, and of the boy’s position.
“Like a statue of a young knight I’ve seen somewhere,” he said to himself, vexed and surprised that he, whose plastic memories were always so precise, should not remember where; and then his pencil stopped. What he had really thought was: “Like theeffigyof a young knight”—though he had instinctively changed the word as it formed itself. He leaned in the doorway, the sketch-book in hand, and continued to gaze at his son. It was the clinging sheet, no doubt, that gave him that look ... and the white glare of the electric burner.
If war came, that was just the way a boy might lie on a battle-field-or afterward in a hospital bed. Nothisboy, thank heaven; but very probably his boy’s friends: hundreds and thousands of boys like his boy, the age of his boy, with a laugh like his boy’s.... The wicked waste of it! Well, that was what war meant ... what to-morrow might bring to millions of parents like himself.
He stiffened his shoulders, and opened the sketch-book again. What watery stuff was he made of, he wondered? Just because the boy lay as if he were posing for a tombstone!... What of Signorelli, who had sat at his dead son’s side and drawn him, tenderly, minutely, while the coffin waited?
Well, damn Signorelli—that was all! Campton threw down his book, turned out the sitting-room lights, and limped away to bed.
V
The next morning he said to George, over coffee on the terrace: “I think I’ll drop in at Cook’s about our tickets.”
George nodded, munching his golden roll.
“Right. I’ll run up to see mother, then.”
His father was silent. Inwardly he was saying to himself: “The chances are she’ll be going back to Deauville this afternoon.”
There had not been much to gather from the newspapers heaped at their feet. Austria had ordered general mobilisation; but while the tone of the despatches was nervous and contradictory that of the leading articles remained almost ominously reassuring. Campton absorbed the reassurance without heeding its quality: it was a drug he had to have at any price.
He expected the Javanese dancer to sit to him that afternoon, but he had not proposed to George to be present. On the chance that things might eventually take a wrong turn he meant to say a word to Fortin-Lescluze; and the presence of his son would have been embarrassing.
“You’ll be back for lunch?” he called to George, who still lounged on the terrace in pyjamas.
“Rather.—That is, unless mother makes a point ... in case she’s leaving.”
“Oh, of course,” said Campton with grim cordiality.
“You see, dear old boy, I’ve got to see Uncle Andy some time....” It was the grotesque name that George, in his babyhood, had given to Mr. Brant, and when he grew up it had been difficult to substitute another. “Especially now——” George added, pulling himself up out of his chair.
“Now?”
They looked at each other in silence, irritation in the father’s eye, indulgent amusement in the son’s.
“Why, if you and I are really off on this long trek——”
“Oh, of course,” agreed Campton, relieved. “You’d much better lunch with them. I always want you to do what’s decent.” He paused on the threshold to add: “By the way, don’t forget Adele.”
“Well, rather not,” his son responded. “And we’ll keep the evening free for something awful.”
As he left the room he heard George rapping on the telephone and calling out Miss Anthony’s number.
Campton had to have reassurance at any price; and he got it, as usual, irrationally but irresistibly, through his eyes. The mere fact that the midsummer sun lay so tenderly on Paris, that the bronze dolphins of the fountains in the square were spraying the Nereids’ Louis Philippe chignons as playfully as ever; that the sleepy Cities of France dozed as heavily on their thrones, and the Horses of Marly pranced as fractiously on their pedestals; that the glorious centralsetting of the city lay there in its usual mellow pomp—all this gave him a sense of security that no crisscrossing of Reuters and Havases could shake.
Nevertheless, he reflected that there was no use in battling with the silly hysterical crowd he would be sure to encounter at Cook’s; and having left word with the hotel-porter to secure two “sleepings” on the Naples express, he drove to the studio.
On the way, as his habit was, he thought hard of his model: everything else disappeared like a rolled-up curtain, and his inner vision centred itself on the little yellow face he was to paint.
Peering through her cobwebby window, he saw old Mme. Lebel on the watch. He knew she wanted to pounce out and ask if there would be war; and composing his most taciturn countenance he gave her a preoccupied nod and hurried by.
The studio looked grimy and disordered, and he remembered that he had intended, the evening before, to come back and set it to rights. In pursuance of this plan, he got out a canvas, fussed with his brushes and colours, and then tried once more to make the place tidy. But his attempts at order always resulted in worse confusion; the fact had been one of Julia’s grievances against him, and he had often thought that a reaction from his ways probably explained the lifeless neatness of the Anderson Brant drawing-room.
Campton had fled to Montmartre to escape a numberof things: first of all, the possibility of meeting people who would want to talk about the European situation, then of being called up by Mrs. Brant, and lastly of having to lunch alone in a fashionable restaurant. In his morbid dread of seeing people he would have preferred an omelette in the studio, if only Mariette had been at hand to make it; and he decided, after a vain struggle with his muddled “properties,” to cross over to the Luxembourg quarter and pick up a meal in a wine-shop.
He did not own to himself his secret reason for this decision; but it caused him, after a glance at his watch, to hasten his steps down the rue Montmartre and bribe a passing taxi to carry him to the Museum of the Luxembourg. He reached it ten minutes before the midday closing, and hastening past the serried statues, turned into a room half-way down the gallery. Whistler’s Mother and the Carmencita of Sargent wondered at each other from its walls; and on the same wall with the Whistler hung the picture Campton had come for: his portrait of his son. He had given it to the Luxembourg the day after Mr. Brant had tried to buy it, with the object of inflicting the most cruel slight he could think of on the banker.
In the generous summer light the picture shone out on him with a communicative warmth: never had he seen so far into its depths. “No wonder,” he thought, “it opened people’s eyes to what I was trying for.”
He stood and stared his own eyes full, mentally comparing the features before him with those of the firmer harder George he had left on the terrace of the Crillon, and noting how time, while fulfilling the rich promise of the younger face, had yet taken something from its brightness.
Campton, at that moment, found more satisfaction than ever in thinking how it must have humiliated Brant to have the picture given to France. “He could have understood my keeping it myself—or holding it for a bigger price—butgiving it——!” The satisfaction was worth the sacrifice of the best record he would ever have of that phase of his son’s youth. At various times afterward he had tried for the same George, but not one of his later studies had that magic light on it. Still, he was glad he had given the picture. It was safe, safer than it would have been with him. His great dread had always been that if his will were mislaid (and his things were always getting mislaid) the picture might be sold, and fall into Brant’s hands after his death.
The closing signal drove him out of the Museum, and he turned into the first wine-shop. He had advised George to lunch with the Brants, but there was disappointment in his heart. Seeing the turn things were taking, he had hoped the boy would feel the impulse to remain with him. But, after all, at such a time a son could not refuse to go to his mother. Campton pictured the little party of three grouped about theluncheon-table in the high cool dining-room of the Avenue Marigny, with the famous Hubert Robert panels, and the Louis XV silver and Sèvres; while he, the father, George’s father, sat alone at the soiled table of a frowsy wine-shop.
Well—it was he who had so willed it. Life was too crazy a muddle—and who could have foreseen that he might have been repaid for twenty-six years with such a wife by keeping an undivided claim on such a son?
His meal over, he hastened back to the studio, hoping to find the dancer there. Fortin-Lescluze had sworn to bring her at two, and Campton was known to exact absolute punctuality. He had put the final touch to his fame by refusing to paint the mad youngDuchesse de la Tour Crenelée—who was exceptionally paintable—because she had kept him waiting three-quarters of an hour. But now, though it was nearly three, and the dancer and her friend had not come, Campton dared not move, lest he should miss Fortin-Lescluze.
“Sent for by a rich patient in a war-funk; or else hanging about in the girl’s dressing-room while she polishes her toe-nails,” Campton reflected; and sulkily sat down to wait.
He had never been willing to have a telephone. To him it was a live thing, a kind of Laocoon-serpent that caught one in its coils and dragged one struggling to the receiver. His friends had spent all their logic intrying to argue away this belief; but he answered obstinately: “Every one would be sure to call me up when Mariette was out.” Even the Russian lady, during her brief reign, had pleaded in vain on this point.
He would have given a good deal now if he had listened to her. The terror of having to cope with small material difficulties, always strongest in him in moments of artistic inspiration—when the hushed universe seemed hardly big enough to hold him and his model—this dread anchored him to his seat while he tried to make up his mind to send Mme. Lebel to the nearest telephone-station.
If he called to her, she would instantly begin: “And the war, sir?” And he would have to settle that first. Besides, if he did not telephone himself he could not make sure of another appointment with Fortin-Lescluze. But the idea of battling alone with the telephone in a public place covered his large body with a damp distress. If only George had been in reach!
He waited till four, and then, furious, locked the studio and went down. Mme. Lebel still sat in her spidery den. She looked at him gravely, their eyes met, they exchanged a bow, but she did not move or speak. She was busy as usual with some rusty sewing—he thought it odd that she should not rush out to waylay him. Everything that day was odd.
He found all the telephone-booths besieged. The people waiting were certainly bad cases of war-funk,to judge from their looks; after scrutinizing them for a while he decided to return to his hotel, and try to communicate with Fortin-Lescluze from there.
To his annoyance there was not a taxi to be seen. He limped down the slope of Montmartre to the nearestmétro-station, and just as he was preparing to force his lame bulk into a crowded train, caught sight of a solitary horse-cab: a vehicle he had not risked himself in for years.
The cab-driver, for gastronomic reasons, declined to take him farther than the Madeleine; and getting out there, Campton walked along the rue Royale. Everything still looked wonderfully as usual; and the fountains in the Place sparkled gloriously.
Comparatively few people were about: hewas surprised to see how few. A small group of them, he noticed, had paused near the doorway of the Ministry of Marine, and were looking—without visible excitement—at a white paper pasted on the wall.
He crossed the street and looked too. In the middle of the paper, in queer Gothic-looking characters, he saw the words
“Les Armees De Terre et De Mer....”
War had come——
He knew now that he had never for an instant believed it possible. Even when he had had that white-lipped interview with the Brants, even when he hadplanned to take Fortin-Lescluze by his senile infatuation, and secure a medical certificate for George; even then, he had simply been obeying the superstitious impulse which makes a man carry his umbrella when he goes out on a cloudless morning.
War had come.
He stood on the edge of the sidewalk, and tried to think—now that it was here—what it really meant: that is, what it meant to him. Beyond that he had no intention of venturing. “This is not our job anyhow,” he muttered, repeating the phrase with which he had bolstered up his talk with Julia.
But abstract thinking was impossible: his confused mind could only snatch at a few drifting scraps of purpose. “Let’s be practical,” he said to himself.
The first thing to do was to get back to the hotel and call up the physician. He strode along at his fastest limp, suddenly contemptuous of the people who got in his way.
“War—and they’ve nothing to do but dawdle and gape! How like the French!” He found himself hating the French.
He remembered that he had asked to have his sleepings engaged for the following night. But even if he managed to secure his son’s discharge, there could be no thought, now, of George’s leaving the country; and he stopped at the desk to cancel the order.
There was no one behind the desk: one would havesaid that confusion prevailed in the hall, if its emptiness had not made the word incongruous. At last a waiter with rumpled hair strayed out of the restaurant, and of him, imperiously, Campton demanded the concierge.
“The concierge? He’s gone.”
“To get my places for Naples?”
The waiter looked blank. “Gone: mobilised—to join his regiment. It’s the war.”
“But look here, some one must have attended to getting my places, I suppose,” cried Campton wrathfully. He invaded the inner office and challenged a secretary who was trying to deal with several unmanageable travellers, but who explained to him, patiently, that his sleepings had certainly not been engaged, as no trains were leaving Paris for the present. “Not for civilian travel,” he added, still more patiently.
Campton had a sudden sense of suffocation. No trains leaving Paris “for the present”? But then people like himself—people who had nothing on earth to do with the war—had been caught like rats in a trap! He reflected with a shiver that Mrs. Brant would not be able to return to Deauville, and would probably insist on his coming to see her every day. He asked: “How long is this preposterous state of things to last?”—but no one answered, and he stalked to the lift and had himself carried upstairs.
He was confident that George would be there waiting;but the sitting-room was empty. He felt as if he were on a desert island, with the last sail disappearing over the dark rim of the world.
After much vain ringing he got into communication with Fortin’s house, and heard a confused voice saying that the physician had already left Paris.
“Left—for where? For how long?”
And then the eternal answer: “The doctor is mobilised.It’s the war.”
Mobilised—already? Within the first twenty-four hours? 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’sbonnealso. “I supposeshe’smobilised: they’ll be mobilising the women next.”
At last, from sheer over-agitation, his fatigued mind began to move more deliberately: he collected his wits, laboured with his more immediate difficulties, and decided that he would go to Fortin-Lescluze’s house, on the chance that the physician had not, after all, really started.
“Ten to one he won’t go till to-morrow,” Campton reasoned.
The hall of the hotel was emptier than ever, and notaxi was in sight down the whole length of the rue Royale, or the rue Boissy d’Anglas, or the rue de Rivoli: not even a horse-cab showed against the deserted distances. He crossed to themétro, and painfully descended its many stairs.