# A Son at the Front/Chapter 3

III
The night was so lovely that, though the Boulogne express arrived late, George at once proposed dining in the Bois.
His luggage, of which, as usual, there was a good deal, was dropped at the Crillon, and they shot up the Champs Elysées as the summer dusk began to be pricked by lamps.
"How jolly the old place smells!" George cried, breathing in the scent of sun-warmed asphalt, of flowerbeds and freshly-watered dust. He seemed as much alive to such impressions as if his first word at the station had not been: "Well, this time I suppose we're in for it." In for it they might be; but meanwhile he meant to enjoy the scents and scenes of Paris as acutely and unconcernedly as ever.
Campton had hoped that he would pick out one of the humble cyclists' restaurants near the Seine; but not he. "Madrid, is it?" he said gaily, as the taxi turned into the Bois; and there they sat under the illuminated trees, in the general glitter and expensiveness, with the Tziganes playing down their talk, and all around them the painted faces that seemed to the father so old and obvious, and to the son, no doubt, so full of novelty and mystery.
The music made conversation difficult; but Campton did not care. It was enough to sit and watch the face ​in which, after each absence, he noted a new and richer vivacity. He had often tried to make up his mind if his boy were handsome. Not that the father's eye influenced the painter's; but George's young head, with its thick blond thatch, the complexion ruddy to the golden eyebrows, and then abruptly white on the forehead, the short amused nose, the inquisitive eyes, the ears lying back flat to the skull against curly edges of fair hair, defied all rules and escaped all classifications by a mixture of romantic gaiety and shrewd plainness like that in certain eighteenth-century portraits.
As father and son faced each other over the piled-up peaches, while the last sparkle of champagne died down in their glasses, Campton's thoughts went back to the day when he had first discovered his son. George was a schoolboy of twelve, at home for the Christmas holidays. At home meant at the Brants', since it was always there he stayed: his father saw him only on certain days. Usually Mariette fetched him to the studio on one afternoon in the week; but this particular week George was ill, and it had been arranged that in case of illness his father was to visit him at his mother's. He had one of his frequent bad colds, and Campton recalled him, propped up in bed in his luxurious overheated room, a scarlet sweater over his nightshirt, a book on his thin knees, and his ugly little fever-flushed face bent over it in profound absorption. Till that moment George had never seemed to care ​for books: his father had resigned himself to the probability of seeing him grow up into the ordinary pleasant young fellow, with his mother's worldly tastes. But the boy was reading as only a bookworm reads—reading with his very finger-tips, and his inquisitive nose, and the perpetual dart ahead of a gaze that seemed to guess each phrase from its last word. He looked up with a smile, and said: "Oh, Dad. . . " but it was clear that he regarded the visit as an interruption. Campton, leaning over, saw that the book was a first edition of Lavengro.
"Where the deuce did you get that?"
George looked at him with shining eyes. "Didn't you know? Mr. Brant has started collecting first editions. There's a chap who comes over from London with things for him. He lets me have them to look at when I'm seedy. I say, isn't this topping? Do you remember the fight?" And, marvelling once more at the ways of Providence, Campton perceived that the millionaire's taste for owning books had awakened in his stepson a taste for reading them. "I couldn't have done that for him," the father had reflected with secret bitterness. It was not that a bibliophile's library was necessary to develop a taste for letters; but that Campton himself, being a small reader, had few books about him, and usually borrowed those few. If George had lived with him he might never have guessed the boy's latent hunger, for the need of books as part of one's ​daily food would scarcely have presented itself to him.
From that day he and George had understood each other. Initiation had come to them in different ways, but their ardour for beauty had the same root. The visible world, and its transposition in terms of one art or another, were thereafter the subject of their interminable talks; and Campton, with a passionate interest, watched his son absorbing through books what had mysteriously reached him through his paintbrush.
They had been parted often, and for long periods; first by George's schooling in England, next by his French military service, begun at eighteen to facilitate his entry into Harvard; finally, by his sojourn at the University. But whenever they were together they seemed to make up in the first ten minutes for the longest separation; and since George had come of age, and been his own master, he had given his father every moment he could spare.
His career at Harvard had been interrupted, after two years, by the symptoms of tuberculosis which had necessitated his being hurried off to the Engadine. He had returned completely cured, and at his own wish had gone back to Harvard; and having finished his course and taken his degree, he had now come out to join his father on a long holiday before entering the New York banking-house of Bullard and Brant.
​Campton, looking at the boy's bright head across the lights and flowers, thought how incredibly stupid it was to sacrifice an hour of such a life to the routine of money-getting; but he had had that question out with himself once for all, and was not going to return to it. His own success, if it lasted, would eventually help him to make George independent; but meanwhile he had no right to interfere with the boy's business training. He had hoped that George would develop some marked talent, some irresistible tendency which would decide his future too definitely for interference; but George was twenty-five, and no such call had come to him. Apparently he was fated to be only a delighted spectator and commentator; to enjoy and interpret, not to create. And Campton knew that this absence of a special bent, with the strain and absorption it implies, gave the boy his peculiar charm. The trouble was that it made him the prey of other people's plans for him. And now all these plans—Campton's dreams for the future as well as the business arrangements which were Mr. Brant's contribution—might be wrecked by to-morrow's news from Berlin. The possibility still seemed unthinkable; but in spite of his incredulity the evil shadow hung on him as he and his son chatted of political issues.
George made no allusion to his own case: his whole attitude was so dispassionate that his father began to wonder if he had not solved the question by con​cluding that he would not pass the medical examination. The tone he took was that the whole affair, from the point of view of twentieth-century civilization, was too monstrous an incongruity for something not to put a stop to it at the eleventh hour. His easy optimism at first stimulated his father, and then began to jar on him.
"Dastrey doesn't think it can be stopped," Campton said at length.
The boy smiled.
"Dear old Dastrey! No, I suppose not. That after-Sedan generation have got the inevitability of war in their bones. They've never been able to get beyond it. Our whole view is different: we're internationals, whether we want to be or not."
"To begin with, if by 'our' view you mean yours and mine, you and I haven't a drop of French blood in us," his father interposed, "and we can never really know what the French feel on such matters."
George looked at him affectionately. "Oh, but I didn't—I meant 'we' in the sense of my generation, of whatever nationality. I know French chaps who feel as I do—Louis Dastrey, Paul's nephew, for one; and lots of English ones. They don't believe the world will ever stand for another war. It's too stupidly uneconomic, to begin with: I suppose you've read Angell? Then life's worth too much, and nowadays too many millions of people know it. That's the way we all feel. ​Think of everything that counts—art and science and poetry, and all the rest—going to smash at the nod of some doddering diplomatist! It was different in old times, when the best of life, for the immense majority, was never anything but plague, pestilence and famine. People are too healthy and well-fed now; they're not going off to die in a ditch to oblige anybody."
Campton looked away, and his eye, straying over the crowd, lit on the long heavy face of Fortin-Lescluze, seated with a group of men on the other side of the garden.
Why had it never occurred to him before that if there was one being in the world who could get George discharged it was the great specialist under whose care he had been?
"Suppose war does come," the father thought, "what if I were to go over and tell him I'll paint his dancer?" He stood up and made his way between the tables.
Fortin-Lescluze was dining with a party of jaded-looking politicians and journalists. To reach him Campton had to squeeze past another table, at which a fair worn-looking lady sat beside a handsome old man with a dazzling mane of white hair and a Grand Officer's rosette of the Legion of Honour. Campton bowed, and the lady whispered something to her companion, who returned a stately vacant salute. Poor old Beausite, dining alone with his much-wronged and ​all-forgiving wife, bowing to the people she told him to bow to, and placidly murmuring: "War—war," as he stuck his fork into the peach she had peeled!
At Fortin's table the faces were less placid. The men greeted Campton with a deference which was not lost on Mme. Beausite, and the painter bent close over Fortin, embarrassed at the idea that she might overhear him. "If I can make time for a sketch—will you bring your dancing lady to-morrow?"
The physician's eyes lit up under their puffy lids.
"My dear friend—will I? She's simply set her heart on it!" He drew out his watch and added: "But why not tell her the good news yourself? You told me, I think, you'd never seen her? This is her last night at the 'Posada,' and if you'll jump into my motor we shall be just in time to see her come on."
Campton beckoned to George, and father and son followed Fortin-Lescluze. None of the three men, on the way back to Paris, made any reference to the war. The physician asked George a few medical questions, and complimented him on his look of recovered health; then the talk strayed to studios and threatres, where Fortin-Lescluze firmly kept it.
The last faint rumours of the conflict died out on the threshold of the "Posada." It would have been hard to discern, in the crowded audience, any appearance but that of ordinary pleasure-seekers momentarily stirred by a new sensation. Collectively, fashionable ​Paris was already away, at the seashore or in the mountains, but not a few of its chief ornaments still lingered, as the procession through Campton's studio had proved; and others had returned drawn back by doubts about the future, the desire to be nearer the source of news, the irresistible French craving for the forum and the market when messengers are foaming in. The public of the "Posada," therefore, was still Parisian enough to flatter the new dancer; and on all the pleasure-tired faces, belonging to every type of money-getters and amusement-seekers, Campton saw only the old familiar music-hall look: the look of a house with lights blazing and windows wide, but nobody and nothing within.
The usualness of it all gave him a sense of ease which his boy's enjoyment confirmed. George, lounging on the edge of their box, and watching the yellow dancer with a clear-eyed interest refreshingly different from Fortin's tarnished gaze, George so fresh and cool and unafraid, seemed to prove that a world which could produce such youths would never again settle its differences by the bloody madness of war.
Gradually Campton became absorbed in the dancer and began to observe her with the concentration he brought to bear on any subject that attracted his brush. He saw that she was more paintable than he could have hoped, though not in the extravagant dress and attitude he was sure her eminent admirer would pre​fer; but rather as a little crouching animal against a sun-baked wall. He smiled at the struggle he should have when the question of costume came up.
"Well, I'll do her, if you like," he turned to say; and two tears of senile triumph glittered on the physician's cheeks.
"To-morrow, then—at two—may I bring her? She leaves as soon as possible for the south. She lives on sun, heat, radiance. . ."
"To-morrow—yes," Campton nodded.
His decision once reached, the whole subject bored him, and in spite of Fortin's entreaties he got up and signalled to George.
As they strolled home through the brilliant midnight streets, the boy said: "Did I hear you tell old Fortin you were going to do his dancer?"
"Yes—why not? She's very paintable," said Campton, abruptly shaken out of his security.
"Beginning to-morrow?"
"Why not?"
"Come, you know—to-morrow!" George laughed.
"We'll see," his father rejoined, with an obscure sense that if he went on steadily enough doing his usual job it might somehow divert the current of events.
On the threshold of the hotel they were waylaid by an elderly man with a round face and round eyes behind gold eye-glasses. His grey hair was cut in a fringe over his guileless forehead, and he was dressed in ex​pensive evening clothes, and shone with soap and shaving; but the anxiety of a frightened child puckered his innocent brow and twitching cheeks.
"My dear Campton—the very man I've been hunting for! You remember me—your cousin Harvey Mayhew of Utica?"
Campton, with an effort, remembered, and asked what he could do, inwardly hoping it was not a portrait.
"Oh, the simplest thing in the world. You see, I'm here as a Delegate-" At Campton's look of enquiry, Mr. Mayhew interrupted himself to explain: "To the Peace Congress at The Hague———why, yes: naturally. I landed only this morning, and find myself in the middle of all this rather foolish excitement, and unable to make out just how I can reach my destination. My time is—er—valuable, and it is very unfortunate that all this commotion should be allowed to interfere with our work. It would be most annoying if, after having made the effort to break away from Utica, I should arrive too late for the opening of the Congress."
Campton looked at him wonderingly. "Then you're going anyhow?"
"Going? Why not? You surely don't think———?" Mr. Mayhew threw back his shoulders, pink and impressive. "I shouldn't, in any case, allow anything so opposed to my convictions as war to interfere with my carrying out my mandate. All I want is to find out the ​route least likely to be closed if—if this monstrous thing should happen."
Camp ton considered. "Well, if I were you, I should go round by Luxembourg—it's longer, but you'll be out of the way of trouble." He gave a nod of encouragement, and the Peace Delegate thanked him profusely.
Father and son were lodged on the top floor of the Crillon, in the little apartment which opens on the broad terraced roof. Campton had wanted to put before his boy one of the city's most perfect scenes; and when they reached their sitting-room George went straight out onto the terrace, and leaning on the parapet, called back: "Oh, don't go to bed yet—it's too jolly."
Campton followed, and the two stood looking down on the festal expanse of the Place de la Concorde strown with great flower-clusters of lights between its pearly distances. The sky was full of stars, pale, remote, half-drowned in the city's vast illumination; and the foliage of the Champs Elysees and the Tuileries made masses of mysterious darkness behind the statues and the flashing fountains.
For a long time neither father nor son spoke; then Campton said: "Are you game to start the day after to-morrow?"
George waited a moment. "For Africa?"
"Well—my idea would be to push straight through ​to the south—as far as Palermo, say. All this cloudy watery loveliness gives me a furious appetite for violent red earth and white houses crackling in the glare."
George again pondered; then he said: "It sounds first-rate. But if you're so sure we're going to start why did you tell Fortin to bring that girl to-morrow?"
Campton, reddening in the darkness, felt as if his son's clear eyes were following the motions of his blood. Had George suspected why he had wanted to ingratiate himself with the physician?
"It was stupid—I'll put her off," he muttered. He dropped into an armchair, and sat there, in his clumsy infirm attitude, his arms folded behind his head, while George continued to lean on the parapet.
The boy's question had put an end to their talk by baring the throbbing nerve of his father's anxiety. If war were declared the next day, what did George mean to do? There was every hope of his obtaining his discharge; but would he lend himself to the attempt? The deadly fear of crystallizing his son's refusal by forcing him to put it into words kept Campton from asking the question.