# A Son at the Front/Chapter 5

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, puffing 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 central ​setting 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 num​ber of 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—but giving 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 the ​luncheon-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 young Duchesse 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 in ​trying 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 nearest métro-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: we was 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 whitelipped interview with the Brants, even when he had ​planned 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 have ​said 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 up-stairs.
He was confident that George would be there wait​ing; 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's bonne also. "I suppose she's mobilised: 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 no ​taxi 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 the metro, and painfully descended its many stairs.