# A Son at the Front/Chapter 31

XXXI
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 arm-chairs, 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 business-like sharpness, and he re-adjusted 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 brush-work 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, good-bye." 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 re-adjustment 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 today 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.