# A Son at the Front/Chapter 30

XXX
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 eye-brows. "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 di​vorce? 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 above-board. He says he sees everything differently now. That's what I mean when I say that I don't under​stand 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 eye-brows, 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 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 money-bag 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.