# A Son at the Front/Chapter 17

XVII
Not long after his midnight tramp with Boylston and Dastrey the post brought Campton two letters. One was postmarked Paris, the other bore the military frank and was addressed in his son's hand: he laid it aside while he glanced at the first. It contained an engraved card:
Mrs. Anderson Brant
At Home on February 20th at 4 o'clock
Mr. Harvey Mayhew will give an account of his captivity in Germany
Mme. de Dolmetsch will sing
For the benefit of the "Friends of French Art Committee"
Tickets 100 francs
Enclosed was the circular of the sub-committee in aid of Musicians at the Front, with which Campton was not directly associated. It bore the names of Mrs. Talkett, Mme. Beausite and a number of other French and American ladies.
Campton tossed the card away. He was not annoyed by the invitation: he knew that Miss Anthony and Mlle. Davril were getting up a series of drawing-room ​entertainments for that branch of the charity, and that the card had been sent to him as a member of the Honorary Committee. But any reminder of the sort always gave a sharp twitch to the Brant nerve in him. He turned to George's letter.
It was no longer than usual; but in other respects it was unlike his son's previous communications. Campton read it over two or three times.
"Dear Dad, thanks for yours of the tenth, which must have come to me on skis, the snow here is so deep." (There had, in fact, been a heavy snow-fall in the Argonne). "Sorry mother is bothering about things again; as you've often reminded me, they always have a way of 'being as they will be,' and even war doesn't seem to change it. Nothing to worry her in my case—but you can't expect her to believe that, can you? Neither you nor I can help it, I suppose.
"There's one thing that might help, though; and that is, your letting her feel that you're a little nearer to her. War makes a lot of things look differently, especially this sedentary kind of war: it's rather like going over all the old odds-and-ends in one's cupboards. And some of them do look so foolish.
"I wish you'd see her now and then—just naturally, as if it had happened. You know you've got one Inexhaustible Topic between you. The said I. T. is doing well, and has nothing new to communicate up to now ​except a change of address. Hereafter please write to my Base instead of directing here, as there's some chance of a shift of H. Q. The precaution is probably just a new twist of the old red tape, signifying nothing; but Base will always reach me if we are shifted. Let mother know, and explain, please; otherwise she'll think the unthinkable.
    "Interrupted by big drive—quill-drive, of course!
          "As ever
"Georgius Scriblerius.
    "P. S. Don't be too savage to Uncle Andy either.
    "No. 2.—I had thought of leave; but perhaps you're right about that."
It was the first time George had written in that way of his mother. His smiling policy had always been to let things alone, and go on impartially dividing his devotion between his parents, since they refused to share even that common blessing. But war gave everything a new look; and he had evidently, as he put it, been turning over the old things in his cupboards. How was it possible, Campton wondered, that after such a turning-over he was still content to write "Nothing new to communicate," and to make jokes about another big quill-drive? Glancing at the date of the letter, Campton saw that it had been written on the day after the first ineffectual infantry assault on Vauquois. And George was sitting a few miles off, safe ​in headquarters at Sainte Menehould, with a stout roof over his head and a beautiful brown gloss on his boots, scribbling punning letters while his comrades fell back from that bloody summit. . .
Suddenly Campton's eyes filled. No; George had not written that letter for the sake of the joke: the joke was meant to cover what went before it. Ah, how young the boy was to imagine that his father would not see! Yes, as he said, war made so many of the old things look foolish. . .
Campton set out for the Palais Royal. He felt happier than for a long time past: the tone of his boy's letter seemed to correspond with his own secret change of spirit. He knew the futility of attempting to bring the Brants and himself together, but was glad that George had made the suggestion. He resolved to see Julia that afternoon.
At the Palais Royal he found the indefatigable Boylston busy with an exhibition of paintings sent home from the front, and Mlle. Davril helping to catalogue them. Lamentable pensioners came and went, bringing fresh tales of death, fresh details of savagery; the air was dark with poverty and sorrow. In the background Mme. Beausite flitted about, tragic and ineffectual. Boylston had not been able to extract a penny from Beausite for his secretary and the latter's left-handed family; but Mme. Beausite had discovered a newly-organized charity which lent money to "temporarily ​embarrassed" war-victims; and with an artless self-satisfaction she had contrived to obtain a small loan for the victim of her own thrift. "For what other purpose are such charities founded?" she said, gently disclaiming in advance the praise which Miss Anthony and Boylston had no thought of offering her. Whenever Campton came in she effaced herself behind a desk, where she bent her beautiful white head over a card-catalogue without any perceptible results.
The telephone rang. Boylston, after a moment, looked up from the receiver.
"Mr. Campton!"
The painter glanced apprehensively at the instrument, which still seemed to him charged with explosives.
"Take the message, do. The thing always snaps at me."
There was a listening pause: then Boylston said: "It's about Upsher———"
Campton started up. "Killed———?"
"Not sure. It's Mr. Brant. The news was wired to the bank; they want you to break it to Mr. Mayhew."
"Oh, Lord," the painter groaned, the boy's face suddenly rising before his blurred eyes. Miss Anthony was not at the office that morning, or he would have turned to her; at least she might have gone with him on his quest. He could not ask Boylston to leave the office, and he felt that curious incapacity to deal ​with the raw fact of sorrow which had often given an elfin unreality to the most poignant moments of his life. It was as though experience had to enter into the very substance of his soul before he could even feel it.
"Other people," he thought, "would know what to say, and I shan't. . ."
Some one, meanwhile, had fetched a cab, and he drove to the Nouveau Luxe, though with little hope of finding Mr. Mayhew. But Mr. Mayhew had grown two secretaries, and turned the shrimp-pink drawing-room into an office. One of the secretaries was there, hammering at a typewriter. She was a competent young woman, who instantly extracted from her pocket-diary the fact that her chief was at Mrs. Anderson Brant's, rehearsing.
"Rehearsing———?"
"Why, yes; he's to speak at Mrs. Brant's next week on Atrocities," she said, surprised at Campton's ignorance.
She suggested telephoning; but in the shrunken households of the rich, where but one or two servants remained, telephoning had become as difficult as in the under-staffed hotels; and after one or two vain attempts Campton decided to go to the Avenue Marigny. He felt that to get hold of Mayhew as soon as possible might still in some vague way help poor Benny—since it was not yet sure that he was dead. "Or else it's just the need to rush about," he thought, ​conscious that the only way he had yet found of dealing with calamity was a kind of ant-like agitation.
On the way the round pink face of Benny Upsher continued to float before him in its very substance, with the tangibility that only a painter's visions wear. "I want to be in this thing," he heard the boy repeating, as if impelled by some blind instinct flowing down through centuries and centuries of persistent childish minds.
"If he or his forebears had ever thought things out he probably would have been alive and safe to-day," 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 arm-chair beside the table with its monumental bronze inkstand. Finally, from above, a maid called to Campton to ascend.
In the drawing-room pictures and tapestries, bronzes and pâtes tendres, had vanished, and a plain moquette replaced the priceless Savonnerie across whose pompous garlands Campton had walked on the day of his last visit.
​The maid led him to the ball-room. Through double doors of glass Mr. Mayhew's oratorical accents, accompanied by faint chords on the piano, reached Campton's ears: he paused and looked. At the far end of the great gilded room, on a platform backed by velvet draperies, stood Mr. Mayhew, a perfect pearl in his tie and a perfect crease in his trousers. Beside him was a stage-property tripod surmounted by a classical perfume-burner; and on it Mme. de Dolmetsch, swathed in black, leaned in an attitude of affliction.
Beneath the platform a bushy-headed pianist struck an occasional chord from Chopin's Dead March; and near the door three or four Red Cross nurses perched on bales of blankets and listened. Under one of their coifs Campton recognized Mrs. Talkett. She saw him and made a sign to the lady nearest her; and the latter, turning, revealed the astonished eyes of Julia Brant.
Campton's first impression, while they shook hands under cover of Mr. Mayhew's rolling periods, was of his former wife's gift of adaptation. She had made herself a nurse's face; not a theatrical imitation of it like Mme. de Dolmetsch's, nor yet the face of a nurse on a war-poster, like Mrs. Talkett's. Her lovely hair smoothed away under her strict coif, her chin devoutly framed in linen, Mrs. Brant looked serious, tender and efficient. Was it possible that she had found her vocation?
​She gave him a glance of alarm, but his eyes must have told her that he had not come about George, for with a reassured smile she laid a finger on her lip and pointed to the platform; Campton noticed that her nails were as beautifully polished as ever.
Mr. Mayhew was saying: "All that I have to give, yes, all that is most precious to me, I am ready to surrender, to offer up, to lay down in the Great Struggle which is to save the world from barbarism. I, who was one of the first Victims of that barbarism. . ."
He paused and looked impressively at the bales of blankets. The piano filled in the pause, and Mme. de Dolmetsch, without changing her attitude, almost without moving her lips, sang a few notes of lamentation.
"Of that hideous barbarism———" Mr. Mayhew began again. "I repeat that I stand here ready to give up everything I hold most dear———"
"Do stop him," Campton whispered to Mrs. Brant.
Little Mrs. Talkett, with the quick intuition he had noted in her, sprang up and threaded her way to the stage. Mme. de Dolmetsch flowed from one widowed pose into another, and Mr. Mayhew, majestically descending, approached Mrs. Brant.
"You agree with me, I hope? You feel that anything more than Mme. de Dolmetsch's beautiful voice—anything in the way of a choral accompaniment—would only weaken my effect? Where the facts are so overwhelming it is enough to state them; that is," Mr. ​Mayhew added modestly, "if they are stated vigorously and tersely—as I hope they are."
Mme. de Dolmetsch, with the gesture of a marble mourner torn from her cenotaph, glided up behind him and laid her hand in Campton's.
"Dear friend, you've heard? . . . You remember our talk? I am Cassandra, cursed with the hideous gift of divination." Tears rained down her cheeks, washing off the paint like mud swept by a shower. "My only comfort," she added, fixing her perfect eyes on Mr. Mayhew, "is to help our great good friend in this crusade against the assassins of my Ladislas."
Mrs. Talkett had said a word to Mr. Mayhew. Campton saw his complacent face go to pieces as if it had been vitrioled.
"Benny—Benny———" he screamed, "Benny hurt? My Benny? It's some mistake! What makes you think———?" His eyes met Campton's. "Oh, my God! Why, he's my sister's child!" he cried, plunging his face into his soft manicured hands.
In the cab to which Campton led him, he continued to sob with the full-throated sobs of a large invertebrate distress, beating his breast for an unfindable handkerchief, and, when he found it, immediately weeping it into pulp.
Campton had meant to leave him at the bank; but when the taxi stopped Mr. Mayhew was in too pitiful a plight for the painter to resist his entreaty.
​"It was you who saw Benny last—you can't leave me!" the poor man implored; and Campton followed him up the majestic stairway.
Their names were taken in to Mr. Brant, and with a motion of wonder at the unaccountable humours of fate, Campton found himself for the first time entering the banker's private office.
Mr. Brant was elsewhere in the great glazed labyrinth, and while the visitors waited, the painter's registering eye took in the details of the room, from the Barye cire-perdue on a peach-coloured marble mantel to the blue morocco armchairs about a giant writing-table. On the table was an electric lamp in a celadon vase, and just the right number of neatly folded papers lay under a paper-weight of Chinese crystal. The room was as tidy as an expensive stage-setting or the cage of a well-kept canary: the only object marring its order was a telegram lying open on the desk.
Mr. Brant, grey and glossy, slipped in on noiseless patent leather. He shook hands with Mr. Mayhew, bowed stiffly but deprecatingly to Campton, gave his usual cough, and said: "This is terrible."
And suddenly, as the three men sat there, so impressive and important and powerless, with that fatal telegram marring the tidiness of the desk, Campton murmured to himself: "If this thing were to happen to me I couldn't bear it. . . I simply couldn't bear it. . ."
​Benny Upsher was not dead—at least his death was not certain. He had been seen to fall in a surprise attack near Neuve Chapelle; the telegram, from his commanding officer, reported him as "wounded and missing."
The words had taken on a hideous significance in the last months. Freezing to death between the lines, mutilation and torture, or weeks of slow agony in German hospitals: these were the alternative visions associated with the now familiar formula. Mr. Mayhew had spent a part of his time collecting details about the treatment of those who had fallen, alive but wounded, into German hands; and Campton guessed that as he sat there every one of these details, cruel, sanguinary, remorseless, had started to life, and that all their victims wore the face of Benny.
The wretched man sat speechless, so unhinged and swinging loose in his grief that Mr. Brant and Campton could only look on, following the thoughts he was thinking, seeing the sights he was seeing, and each avoiding the other's eye lest they should betray to one another the secret of their shared exultation at George's safety.
Finally Mr. Mayhew was put in charge of a confidential clerk, who was to go with him to the English Military Mission in the hope of getting farther information. 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 ​timidly 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. He stood, erect and tightly buttoned, one small hand resting on the arm of his desk-chair, as though he were posing for a cabinet size, with the photographer telling him to look natural. His lids twitched behind his protective glasses, and his upper lip, which was as straight as a ruler, detached itself by a hair's breadth from the lower; but no word came.
Campton glanced up and down the white-panelled walls, and spoke abruptly.
"There was no reason on earth," he said, "why poor young Upsher should ever have been in this thing."
Mr. Brant bowed.
"This sort of crazy impulse to rush into other people's rows," Campton continued with rising vehemence, "is of no more use to a civilized state than any other unreasoned instinct. At bottom it's nothing but what George calls the baseball spirit: just an ignorant passion for fisticuffs."
Mr. Brant looked at him intently. "When did—George say that? " he asked, with his usual cough before the name.
​Campton coloured. "Oh—er—some time ago: in the very beginning, I think. It was the view of most thoughtful young fellows at that time."
"Quite so," said Mr. Brant, cautiously stroking his moustache.
Campton's eyes again wandered about the room.
"Now, of course———"
"Ah—now. . ."
The two men looked at each other, and Campton held out his hand. Mr. Brant, growing pink about the forehead, extended his dry fingers, and they shook hands in silence.